Opinion
A familiar sound is again echoing through the media ecosystem – the sound of the ABC kicking an own goal.
Content crimes and misdemeanours creating uproar and taking skin off the national broadcaster are nothing new, but the latest screeching carry-on over failings at both the flagship Four Corners and reality-TV-contest-but-make-it-artistic Race Around the World mask something much more significant – an executive plan to fundamentally remake the national broadcaster.
The big strategy reveal – spearheaded by ABC managing director Hugh Marks – is provisionally set down for October 20, previously best known as the International Day of the Air Traffic Controller. The timing is tricky, given new ABC director of news Simon Robinson, hired from Reuters and starting mid-September, will want his say.
Nevertheless, expect big things. Because there is one thing about the ABC upon which its fervent supporters, ageing grandees, beleaguered staff, political paymasters, Chris Kenny and I can all agree on – things can’t carry on as they are.
And after October 20 they won’t. What we do know is that the ABC has grown like topsy since the 1980s, when it consisted solely of one ABC TV channel, a local radio network, ABC Classic, Triple J and Radio National. While the platforms and services and content have all expanded, the budget hasn’t, down 12.1 per cent from 2013/14, $147 million in real terms.
Marks has said the budget is spread too thin and needs to refocus on core services. The buzzwords that will shape what gets made in the future are: distinctive, live and local. Does that mean platforms such as the ABC News Channel survive? If it is deemed a core service, then yes.
But before all that, it is worth unpacking the significance – and non-significance – of the current controversies.
Firstly, a little primer on how modern media works. Content that clips into bite-sized content chunks and flows across social media platforms to grab everyone’s attention is the new hot thing. The more incendiary the better. Doesn’t matter about the context.
Secondly, random happenstance – two buses arriving at the same time – is never an explanation for anything. It’s always a trend. Thus, one instance of anything anywhere is a concern, two instances is a column, three a feature. Four is a podcast series.
Which brings us to the Race Around the World Gina Rinehart video and the removal of three stories by sacked Four Corners reporter Mahmood Fazal.
Race Around the World sent visual artist Kate McGuinness to Scotland, where she filmed a satirical take on wellness, which ended with the now infamous line denigrating mining billionaire Gina Rinehart by fantasising about poking a stick up her “butthole” and turning her “guts” into a “big sausage roll”.
The joke fell flat, it was criticised on the show by guest judge Leigh Sales, and eight people complained. After News Corporation fired up, complaints rocketed to 988.
If you chose to paint on the biggest canvas in Australia, which costs taxpayers $1.3 billion a year, expect scrutiny. And feedback. Rinehart complained and made legal threats. Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young was critical. McGuinness apologised.
No breach of standards, the ABC ombudsman ruled, citing the program’s context. Marks apologised, promised to amend editorial policies around violence and acknowledged the episode had “fallen short of community expectations”.
Tasteless, offensive satirical threats against prominent figures are now viewed through a different lens after the Bondi massacre.
Then there was the issue of the slow ABC apology. “You are going to burn your capital on that? Those own goals they have got to hurt,” a former board member said, amazed.
The chorus of News Corp disapproval was as voluminous as it was predictable: It’s a disgrace the ABC hasn’t apologised, it’s a disgrace the ABC hasn’t apologised, now the ABC has apologised, it’s a disgrace the ABC took so long to apologise.
Former ABC 7.30 Report host and former staff-elected director Quentin Dempster defends the delay. “Now Hugh Marks is accused of unnecessarily delaying a formal apology for that unfunny Rinehart video. What we learnt from the Lattouf case was the need for procedural fairness for staff whose work is the subject of complaint,” he says.
No doubt ABC managers are still haunted by the arbitrary sacking of casual radio broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf and her subsequent victory in her unlawful termination case, which cost the ABC $220,000 in damages and fines, and about $2.5 million in legal fees.
We live in a deeply unfunny age, shown by the case of the prime ministerial melons. But there’s a simple truth here: jokey threats of violence against people should never really be served up as entertainment.
Compare and contrast what happened in 2011 after Radio 2GB breakfast host Alan Jones said on air that the prime minister Julia Gillard should be “put in a chaff bag” and thrown out to sea.
The outrage was acute. Jones conceded the remark was better left unsaid. But he was cleared by regulator ACMA, which said the comments were not “incitement within the terms of the act”.
“It was disrespectful, it was disparaging, but that is a broadcaster’s prerogative,” the regulator said.
Like all ABC editorial failures, this will fade. Remember when acquitted terrorism suspect Zaky Mallah quizzed a Howard government minister on Q&A? Or when Elle McFeast had notorious violent criminal Chopper Read on her live TV chat show and he joked about feeding a man into a cement mixer?
ABC comedy At Home with Julia (again, satire!) depicted a post-coital prime minister and her spouse draped in an Australian flag. The ABC Chaser comedy troupe on their show The Hamster Wheel superimposed the head of ABC critic Chris Kenny over a man having sex with a dog.
Or when an activist threw a shoe at John Howard on Q&A? Host Tony Jones was shocked, Howard seemed unperturbed, said “forget it, forget it”, and gave Jones a consoling pat on the arm.
Now we live in a grumpier, but more polarised age. One Nation has banned the ABC from its press conferences, an attack on journalistic scrutiny.
But even this is nothing new. The ABC has made heavy weather of political storms for decades. Steele Hall, South Australian premier in the late 1960s, once banned ABC journalists from government buildings. He accused Clive Hale, the local host of nightly current affairs show This Day Tonight, of outrageous editorialising for telling viewers that a minister had declined to appear on the show – while raising his eyebrow at the same time.
The problems besetting Four Corners are much more serious. Soon the ombudsman and ABC standards division deliver their reports into sacked reporter and former bikie Mahmood Fazal, the son of Afghan refugees.
The number of times the ABC has taken down content is vanishingly small. I can only think of the 2013 Catalyst programs that claimed cholesterol-lowering statins were overprescribed, and a 2018 news story and analysis on businesses not paying corporate tax that enraged the prime minister Malcolm Turnbull were taken down and re-edited.
Most managers involved with producing Fazal’s programs have now left, for whatever reason, and a new executive producer has commenced a knockdown rebuild of the program’s editorial structure.
Sami Shah, a former ABC Melbourne radio host and lecturer in journalism at the University of Melbourne, wrote a scorching piece about the situation for the website Crikey, referring to Fazal as an “allegedly fabulist journalist” and noted his strong denials that he had fabricated or knowingly published false information.
Shah said Fazal’s non-journalistic history and access to criminals were some of the reasons the ABC hired him and reports that staff who raised concerns over his sourcing felt ignored.
“It’s tempting to blame this story on the quest for diversity resulting in lowered standards. It should, instead, be blamed on management declining to do its job, then allowing diversity to become the reason everybody felt too awkward to mention it,” Shah wrote.
He wrote that real diversity was hard. “It means widening recruitment, removing inherited barriers, training people properly, supervising difficult work, listening to internal warnings and applying standards consistently. Scrutiny is not the enemy of diversity. Scrutiny is what stops diverse employees from being turned into mascots first and scapegoats later.”
I have watched the ABC ever since Play School, and from time to time, appear as commentator on TV and radio, but it is a surprise to hear former staff privately attack the broadcaster for its anti-intellectualism and cult of mediocrity.
Clearly, budget cuts have resulted in experienced operators being replaced by more junior staff. “What concerns me most is that over the past decade, the depth of experience and mentorship once a hallmark of the ABC has been stripped out of the joint by the defunding redundancy plank,” Dempster says.
Despite the content scandal, the future of Four Corners is assured. But what of Race Around the World?
Will it be distinctive, live and local enough for the new ABC?
The program was a genuine public broadcasting success: thousands applied, families watched together, audiences welcomed the return of John Safran and Margaret Pomeranz. The program inserted itself into the national conversation and even generated a think piece in academic publication The Conversation. The decision to make a second series hangs in the balance and rests with managing director Marks.
Given the program’s share of the noise, I have little doubt it will return. Mark my words.
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