ABC forced to fund witch-hunt against itself
Peter Mac The management of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been directed to commission a private firm to monitor so-called political bias in ABC broadcasts. The project has all the hallmarks of a witch-hunt. The firm in question will be assessing not only the words used in news and current affairs broadcasts until the coming federal elections, but also their mood, emphasis and intonation, in order to determine which side of politics benefits from the coverage. And funding for this gross and dangerous waste of public money will, of course, be drawn from the ever-diminishing resources of the national broadcaster itself. The object of the exercise is clearly to ensure that the ABC offers no criticism of the Howard Government, its policies or its political alliances. It is also aimed at providing the Liberals with material to mount further attacks on the independence and even future of the public broadcaster, particularly if it were re-elected. Until now an ABC "in house" team has monitored the ABC's performance with regard to allegations of bias. This arrangement was criticised by the former Minister for Communications, Richard Alston, after he twice failed to prove that the ABC had been guilty of bias in its coverage of events leading up to the beginning of the war in Iraq last year. Alston has since left parliamentary politics, but his obsession with muzzling and destroying the public broadcaster continues — as the ABC's Media Watch program described it — "beyond the political grave". It was Alston who originally proposed the monitoring of the ABC by private consultants. His former chief of staff, David Quilty, revived the idea in conversations with an ABC Board member, Maurice Newman. Newman raised it with the other conservative Board members, including the government's latest appointee, Ron Brunton, and persuaded the Board as a whole to accept the idea. The Board then directed the ABC management to hire a private media monitoring company to do the job. It has been estimated that the exercise will cost the Australian taxpayers $200,000. Privatisation by stealth Mind you, the government seems intent on making other areas of the ABC turn a handsome profit, even if it means ditching some fundamental principles of the national broadcaster's charter of operations. One such commitment is children's television. The ABC's children's TV department was originally set up with the specific intention of developing quality children's programs. In this it has been highly successful, having won awards for its work in this field, such as the popular series Playschool and the internationally famous Bananas in Pyjamas. But this, it seems, is not good enough for the Howard Government or the ABC Board. What is needed is commercial success, not quality broadcasting, they say! From now on ABC children's programs are to be provided by outside contractors, and decisions about program selection are to be made not by the children's TV department on the basis of quality programming, but by the ABC's commercial arm, ABC Enterprises on the basis of profitability. ABC Enterprises was originally set up as an adjunct to the other ABC departments in order to provide supplementary funding for ABC projects. However, it now appears to be calling the tune for children's TV, and the dominant principle of commercial profitability will undoubtedly be extended to other areas of ABC broadcasting as well. And just to help them on their way, the government has allocated ABC Enterprises a fat $5 million for the purchase of children's programs this year. The president of the community group Young Media Australia, Jane Roberts commented bitterly, "It is very worrying that ABC Enterprises now appears to be in charge of what is coming on to our screens for children and not the children's TV department, which has a wealth of experience and a proven track record when it comes to high quality, educational, and appropriate programs that parents and educators in this country have come to trust and love".