The ABC's centre of gravity

An expert suggests that radicalisation occurs because of “young people feeling under siege from police and wider public. His fear is this could morph into an agenda for violent change”, Four Corners asserts. And finally, Four Corners suggests, “defeating terrorism presents not just a policing issue but also a challenge to core community values of pluralism and tolerance”.

No mention of Sydney Muslim cleric Taj Din al-Hilali and those more extreme than him or the impact of Muslim fundamentalism and propaganda, or the role played by police and security forces in protecting us from Muslim extremism. The only actors of any consequence for Four Corners are those who buy the narrative that the causes of Muslim extremism lie in the west. It is a problem of criminality, law-enforcement, poverty, and racist behaviour towards suspects of Middle Eastern appearance.

Of course there are legitimate issues here to debate but I am pointing to the one-sided narrative that suffuses this program and others, which does not take Muslim extremism seriously in its own right, but mainly as due to its exacerbation by us.

The ABC is not unique here. Consider the following comments about the BBC:

The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias, Andrew Marr, political pundit and BBC Political Editor 2000-2005, The Daily Mail, October 21, 2006.

It's not a conspiracy. It's visceral. They think they are on the middle ground, Jeff Randall, former BBC Business Editor, in The Observer, January 15, 2006.

Randall further commented on this in The Guardian (September 15, 2007), Randall said:

I think there's a streak of hypocrisy at the BBC. I said it when I was there: its definition of impartiality or the middle ground is not how many of us see it. That's why I'm contemptuous.

There is a liberal consensus. The BBC denies this but Andy Marr - who most people think is part of that liberal consensus - came out and said it. So it's not just right-of-centre people. When you're there, you can feel it, you can smell it, you can almost touch it.

In June 2007, a report commissioned by the BBC concluded that it failed to promote proper debate on major political issues, particularly single-issue causes, such as climate change and poverty, because of its staff’s inherent liberal culture. The report concludes that they should be more willing to challenge their beliefs, concluding, “There is a tendency to ‘group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone”. Executives admitted at a 2006 staff impartiality seminar that “they would broadcast images of the Bible being thrown away but not the Koran, in case Muslims were offended” (“BBC Report finds bias within corporation”, The Telegraph, June 18, 2007).

Former New Statesman editor, John Lloyd observed, “The reflexes of the BBC, and of most broadcasters, are culturally and politically on the liberal-left, reflecting the leanings of the humanities-educated intelligensia in most states” (cited in, “Can We Trust the BBC?” by Robin Aitken, Contiunuum, 2007, p194).

One could easily substitute “ABC” for “BBC” in all this. It all goes to the issue of culture. That the Labor Party and the Liberal Party receive similar treatment on the ABC only demonstrates that there may not be cultural bias towards one mainstream party rather than the other. It is true that the ABC has criticised both sides over the years, but that may be because they are cultural liberals who are to the left of both the major parties, in the direction of the Greens.

The ALP has been the victim of the ABC while in government. During the first Gulf War in 1991, the ABC employed Dr Robert Springborg, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Macquarie University, as its expert commentator for The Gulf Report. In an article in the Melbourne Sun, Springborg had equated the modes of government of Saddam Hussein and Bob Hawke. Hawke’s decision to send ships to the Gulf was “every bit as much of a one-man show as is the country we may be fighting”. Hawke denounced the ABC’s coverage of the Gulf War as “loaded, biased and disgraceful” (Ken Inglis, Whose ABC?, p229).

Eleven years of the Howard government, a basically bipartisan Estimates critique in the Senate, and an ABC Board comprising conservative and centrist members has made some difference to all this. The much-mooted number of ideologically conservative members have not translated into a conservative agenda for the ABC. Nor has it impacted on the visceral culture of many among the staff. But the Board and the Senate Estimates hearings have made for more accountability for the public corporation to adhere to its charter and be more fair and balanced and not advocate for politically correct causes. These necessary changes have had to come from the top leadership down, so entrenched has the institutional culture been.