On Aunty by Jonathan Holmes

Author:Jonathan Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522875454
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

To which the standard ABC response is ‘no, no and no—the ABC has no editorial position’. But anyone who works there knows this is disingenuous. Line up any hundred ABC staffers and ask them those questions, substituting ‘you’ for ‘it’. ‘Don’t you have a strong preference for same-sex marriage? Aren’t you critical of border protection measures?’—and so on down the list. If they’re honest, at least eighty will answer ‘yes, yes, yes and yes’.

It’s a problem more easily identified than solved. The fact is that the sort of bright young people who want to work at the ABC are going to incline to the left, just as those who line up to be investment bankers or market traders are more likely to incline to the right.

ABC staffers have also, until very recently, been overwhelmingly white and middle class. The whiteness can legitimately be addressed by conscious policies to recruit for ethnic diversity—one of Michelle Guthrie’s priorities. But surely the ABC can’t make political inclination a selection criterion for recruitment? That’s to embark on a perilous path.

Of course, none of this would be a problem, if the ABC were a commercial media organisation. As Paul Kelly pointed out:

These days every media organisation has an editorial culture—just think of CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fox News, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the Macquarie radio network, Breitbart, The Australian and Sky News, to list names at random. Which one is politically impartial? None. This leads to the obvious question: in a time when politics defines the market position of a media organisation, how can the ABC be impartial, and how long can it continue the pretence that it is?

This is the real dilemma of the public broadcaster under a legislated charter purporting to be free of bias. You cannot square the circle. It doesn’t fit any more. The hoax becomes more and more absurd. Knowing your audience means knowing their demographics and their politics. It’s about being professional.24

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