The further degradation of Our ABC
Taking the theatre out of ABC criticism
The ABC's new policies will give audiences a full range of views, writes Mark Scott. The Age, 18/10/06IN MY early weeks as managing director, I have called on some of the ABC's harshest public critics. And almost to a man and woman, they have been at pains to point out how much they love the ABC.
Then comes the but - and as my father-in-law has often warned me, ignore everything before the but. There is a sense that the organisation has issues with balance and fairness, particularly through its news and current affairs content, although some critics would suggest across its entire content. We need to address the criticism carefully and comprehensively. To ignore it or reflexively dismiss it only serves to limit ourselves, and is at odds with the ethos of open debate and discourse that is central to our reason for being.
Instead of facing up to these criticisms, it is easy to take comfort in the market research that suggests the ABC is remarkably popular with its owners: the public. A recent Newspoll indicated 90 per cent of the public believed the ABC provided a valuable or very valuable service. And there is comfort in recent research by Young and Rubicam that said the only brand more popular in Australia than the ABC is Vegemite.
Within the ABC, it is easy to say that people like us, the ratings are reasonable and the critics are the ones who really don't get it. At times it does appear that criticism of the ABC takes the form of set-piece theatre: everyone knowing their lines and going through well-known rituals. But such an approach is unwise and misses the real point: is there substance in the criticism? Does the ABC have a problem with editorial values? It is an important question. It is very clear to me that this pattern of critique and reflexive defence needs to be challenged.
What I am outlining represents the ABC taking the lead to break this ritual. It is a challenge to both ourselves and our critics to learn some new steps and think afresh about how we deliver balance, diversity, impartiality. It is only reasonable, that as the public broadcaster using public money, the ABC set high standards for itself; higher standards than anyone else in the Australian media.
The public invests its trust in all ABC content, regardless of its source within the ABC. The new policies reflect this reality. The policies will ensure that ABC audiences can see and hear a broad range of viewpoints on matters of importance. The policies are contained in a document that runs to some 50 pages. It says upfront that as a creator, broadcaster and publisher of news and current affairs content, there is a requirement for impartiality. Each news and current affairs story and program must be impartial. For opinion programs or programs of topical and factual content, individual items of content can take a particular perspective, but the ABC must be able to demonstrate that it has provided audiences with a range of different perspectives on the subject under consideration on each platform, be it radio, television or online.
On contentious matters, we need to hear the full range of voices. We have taken another look at fairness and what it means to be impartial. Impartiality is a long-held expectation of our news coverage. Being a responsible public broadcaster is not synonymous with universal public popularity. The editorial policies now require the ABC to be impartial as a broadcaster and generator of content. As we assess the output of each of our platforms - ABC TV, Radio National, local stations such as 702 ABC Sydney - there is now the expectation that there is impartiality. That there is a demonstrated plurality of opinion and perspective.
The new category of opinion will be content presented from a partisan point of view about a matter of public contention. This content will be signposted as opinion and the impartiality test will be: has the ABC presented a plurality of views? And the ABC will expect staff to operate in a way that is reflecting key values of honesty, fairness, independence and respect.
We are looking to have three mechanisms for quality assurance around the implementation of our editorial policies. The first is regular program and performance review. Second, we have our established mechanism for dealing with public complaints.
A new mechanism is through the director of editorial policies, who will be able to commission research to provide better insight into whether we are meeting our own expectations. And when staff are dealing with a difficult decision in light of interpreting editorial policies, or I am concerned about a matter before broadcast or publication, the director of editorial policies will be able to provide independent advice.
Our journalists need to be able to undertake courageous journalism. Our radio broadcasters need to be lively and engaging and provocative at times to win and keep an audience. So, too, with television and online. Our policies promote the spirit of inquiry, not dampen it. As I have explained to our newsrooms, I want them to practise great journalism. To find the big stories and to hold those who seek to lead us to account for the promises they have made and the truths they espouse. But to achieve great journalism, you need to practise good journalism. Journalism that is fair, accurate, balanced and objective.
If there is a deference in these policies, it is to the primacy of ideas, to the intelligence of an audience, to the right of audience members to make up their own minds.
Mark Scott is managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This is an edited version of his speech to the Sydney Institute last night.
The critics that Mark Scott speaks of are, invariably, right-wing, conservative supporters of the Howard government - people like Andrew Bolt, Gerard Henderson (who is the executive director of the Sydney Institute - who happened to host the speech) and Piers Ackerman - people who support Australia being part of the invading forces in Iraq, the locking up of asylum-seekers in detention centres, the denial of climate change and the refusal to sign the Kyoto agreement, the new "work choices" industrial relations legislation that reduces the pay and conditions of Australian workers and the reduction in public funding for the ABC.
And the reason why they are loud, bully-boy critics of the ABC is because the ABC hasn't played the part of a cheer squad on each of these issues as they've arisen and they don't like being challenged. Mark Scott's new policy simply panders to these thugs and gives them more air time than they already have to spout their lies and to proselytise for their church of the far right... not to mention the more extreme groups of the right who will be compulsorily included so that we "hear the full range of voices" "on contentious matters".
For example, this means that if there's a program that deals in evolution - say Walking With Dinosaurs - which some claim is a contentious matter, the ABC would have to give air time to creationists to argue their case for creationism or, as they've repackaged it, Intelligent Design. A similar thing has happened in various states in the US in the schools' curricula with 'Intelligent Design' being taught in SCIENCE classes, in order to refute Darwin's theory of evolution and consolidate the belief that the Genesis book of the bible is a literal document of how God created all life.
Already, even without any new policy, 774 radio in Melbourne has filled their afternoon and drive programs with Richard Stubbs and Lindy Burns - two presenters that distinctly lack the intelligence of their predecessors who present programs that waste two and three hours every day covering crap like world massage day and whether footballers should be held up to greater accountability because they're role models.
Already we've got Helen Razer cutting off guests because they say that newly appointed, conservative ABC board member, Keith Windshuttle's denial of the Aboriginal stolen generation is akin to holocaust deniers - because she'll lose her job.
The new ABC policy marks the beginning of the end of the ABC being anything but an excuse for dead air that acts merely as an exercise in covering its own ass, lest the vocal, far-right, conservatives be offended.
Now let's take a look at who's at the controls of the ABC: Mark Scott is the Managing Director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He was previously the senior political adviser to former NSW Liberal education minister, Terry Metherell.
According to a report by Crikey.com.au, while editor-in-chief of metropolitan newspapers at Fairfax, Scott overturned a decision by the editorial staff at The Age newspaper's to call for a change of government at the 2004 federal election. Accoding to Crikey, "a decision was taken to call for a change of government. That decision was then overturned by Mark Scott, Fairfax's head of metropolitan newspapers, who apparently made the rather extraordinary claim that backing [Opposition Leader Mark] Latham wasn't in the commercial interests of the company."
Uh… John…? Where are we heading?
After seeing a contemporary dance piece last week, based around the stories from people who lived through the war in Bosnia, I was part of a conversation with the director and someone who had come from the same area the story-tellers were from. One of the things that the piece was wanting to explore was asking how it had happened... how had normal human beings been drawn into such a mash of factions warring against each other - with different alliances between the factions depending on which villiage you were in.
There wasn't a single definitive answer to the question but some of the factors that were brought up drew some parallels in Australian society with the conservative government. It's something incremental that people don't notice through any individual piece of change that happens but if you step back and look at the bigger picture, you can see the trend and add things together. Such as all this going on about Australian "Values" and the suggestion to require anyone who enters the country to undertake an oath to live by and defend these self same 'values'.
Here's a piece of commentary from a former County Court judge from last Saturday's Age:
Nothing concrete in PM's 'values'
By Peter Gebhardt
September 23, 2006Australian rules football has been an evolving game and sometimes the evolution offends those who look for certainty. The pursuit of certainty is an understandable, but hopeless, chase.
It is in the context of the pursuit of certainty that the current debate - or debacle - about Australian "values" has arisen. I had a good friend, a valued theologian, who used to shudder when people resorted to "values". He would, were he alive today, be shuddering in a convulsive way. Of course, the current Prime Minister and, latterly, the Opposition Leader, have sought to capture the populist imagination, limited as it is, by trying to codify the values in a way that will satisfy the fears, prejudices and intolerances that the electorate has been fed unashamedly for the past decade. First, you create insecurities. Then you feed them to such a point that reason is displaced by unwarranted irrationality. And only this week Andrew Robb said that the Australian value-based regime is designed to give the community a sense of security. "In a sense we have become more tribal as we have become more global."
Last week, I saw The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the film about the Irish civil war over which the English right-wing press was apoplectic and director Ken Loach was deemed unworthy to be a citizen of England. What the film does demonstrate is the need to keep alive the historical memory and imagination so we are not driven into a kind of present-centred amnesia where we have forgotten what our pasts were about and how, like Australian rules, there is a continuum of change.
Respect for dissent used to be appreciated, now it is usurped by sedition, mostly practised by "the chattering classes" and "the cultural elites", whoever or whatever they may be.
It is the absence of conversation that is most destructive of the present. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott (and he's no soft leftie) in a marvellous essay, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, says: "As civilised human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves."
What he says is that there is a multiplicity of voices and they all need to be heard, to be a part of the public discourse.
"Multiculturalism" was an unfortunate linguistic appellation to use to reflect what was a growing concept to demonstrate that, after the end of the White Australia policy and the demise of the language test, we were able to accommodate a stream of migrants to help us build our society and to enrich the diversity of it. Consider eating.
I live in an area where many Greeks came. Many of them still do not speak English, but who would ever begrudge their contribution to the expanding nature of our society? Do we forget our name-calling of and our attitudes to wogs? Reliance upon "mateship" and "a fair go" is a brutal contradiction of the spiritual and democratic underpinning of those now beleaguered and battered war cries, mantras.
Respect for the law, respect for diversity and variety, respect for divergent views, respect for the environment and the future we bequeath, and respect for the rights and responsibilities citizen-to-citizen - the mutuality of relationships: none of these is the breeding ground of dull conformity as now would be imposed upon us in a none-too-subtle form of slavery.
If governments pre-eminently espouse policies and practices that appeal to the baser motives - greed, fear and prejudice - then there can be no doubt that the engendered outcomes will lead to civil disengagement and the growth of self-centred and aggressive individualism which cuts neighbour off from neighbour. Trust is usurped by distrust, love by hate.
I can understand that individuals may have moral or immoral dispositions, they may hold to certain beliefs. How a "country" can have "values" is beyond my comprehension and I suspect it is a jingoistic and/or xenophobic nonsense. We are told about "the American way of life" but, having lived there for three years of my adult life, neither I nor any American I met understood anything of the abstraction.
In an address to the National Press Club in January this year, the Prime Minister talked of social cohesion, which in my view cannot exist if there is no reciprocity. He also said: "A sense of shared values is our social cement." Pretty fluid sort of cement, where lying is now part of its make-up and, worse, that it is lying that doesn't worry anyone. So much for witnesses of truth!
Peter Gebhardt is a writer and former County Court judge.
I get the feeling that our politicians see a certain political expediency, at this moment, in being just a little racist to pick up what I guess is a big enough slab of the electorate to make a difference. The sad thing is they may be right and the sadder thing is what that says about our society.
Are you listening to any of this John?
Here's another thing from The Age. Some of these things are important and it's a pity that the searchable archive on the paper's site only runs to 8 days.
Learning the difficult lessons of global warming
By Tracee Hutchison
September 23, 2006The inconvenient truth just isn't cricket . . .
Hello, class. Today we have a special guest coming to show us a very important film. But before we meet him, let's go over last night's homework. Howard! Macfarlane! Put down your Biggles books, and eyes to the front. Johnny, can you come up to the blackboard and spell carbon-neutral please?
Sorry, Miss, I had cricket practice. I can't spell it.
Seems like an early start to the season. Do you have a note from your parents?
Well, they said they'd never heard of carbo-nuisance. And they think what you teach isn't factual, and I've got a better future as a spinner, anyway.
That's disappointing, Johnny. There was a whole section about the school's carbon-neutral ambitions in last month's parent-teacher newsletter, after we all got inspired by the Melbourne City Council's new ecologically sustainable green building. Carbon-neutral is the new black. Everyone's talking about it. That's why we're having the tree-planting day. Aren't they coming?
I'm not sure, Miss. I think Mum has carbo-ambitions, but I thought it was about Tim Tams. But she likes black. She says it makes her look thinner.
That's a different concept, Johnny. What about you, Ian? Can you spell carbon-neutral?
No, Miss. I was at cricket too.
What about geothermal?
Is that like geo-sequestration? I think our dog had that when he was a puppy.
No, Ian, that's a different concept again. How about global warming? Will either of you tackle that?
I'll have a go at the first part, Miss. G.L.O.W.B.A.L.L
No, Ian, that's actually a concept related to the factual question.
I don't understand, Miss.
Well, it's about the shape of the Earth, Ian, and it's round, just like a cricket ball. And the early start to the hot weather might be great for a snarling pitch at the Boxing Day Test, but the groundsmen will be watering with recycled sewage because it doesn't rain enough anymore.
What! You're lying to us again, Miss! No one in their right mind would think of putting recycled wee and poo on the 'G. It's sacrilege. I'm going home to tell Mum on you.
Johnny, please, sit down. Our guest will be here soon. This is what we call a big-picture discussion. It's very exciting and it's all about your future. Its about changing the way we think about power and energy sources and water, and taking control of how much we use and when. And it's a scary thought because some governments like to keep all the power themselves, but this is about everyone being responsible for our future by starting with the little things, even if they seem inconvenient.
My Dad says we don't do things by halves in our family.
Well, little things make a difference over time, John. Little things, such as changing the flow-control on our taps and choosing renewable energy sources from the electricity company. It's about having rainwater tanks on all our buildings and grey-water reticulation and solar panels like the ones the school is saving for from our annual snowball drive.
I hate snowballs.
Ian, please, snowballs are important! And many of them are disappearing faster than we can make them. And if the ones at the bottom and the top of the world keep disappearing at the current rate, then the famous pitch in Galle will be completely underwater before Murali's kids are old enough to play.
That could be good for the game, Miss.
That's not very sporting, Johnny. Of course it's not good for the game. The pitch at Galle is part of cricket heritage and it's only just recovering from the tsunami. But let's talk more about it after we've watched the movie.
Class, can you bring your permission slips to see the film up the front? Ian? Johnny? Do you have your permission slips?
No, Miss. Our parents don't want us to see that film. They said it's just misleading entertainment and it says bad things about our Uncle George in America.
But really important Americans like the Murdochs, and even the Terminator, are on board with carbon-neutral. Have your parents seen the film?
No, Miss. They said that the guy who made it is a loser. And that he is just inventing stuff to make us scared.
What kind of stuff?
That one day the world will get so hot it will turn into an ice block and there wont be any central heating. Besides, Mum says people who talk about the weather are boring.
Well, it might be boring now, John, but wait until it's too hot for cricket and the players want to call off the Ashes.
No! Stop! Youre lying again! I'm really telling on you now. Nothing will stop the cricket on Boxing Day. Nothing! N !
Tracee Hutchison is a Melbourne writer and broadcaster.