Who Needs the ABC? by Matthew Ricketson;Patrick Mullins;

Author:Matthew Ricketson;Patrick Mullins; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC052000, HIS054000, POL065000, BUS070060, POL046000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2022-03-28T21:00:00+00:00

ABC, everyday

But for Q&A, one might say the establishment of ABC Life in 2018 was one of the most controversial decisions made by the ABC in recent times. Pitched during Michelle Guthrie’s era, ABC Life was launched, in part, to focus on younger Australians and to boost the ABC’s digital storytelling capacity ahead of a time when the ABC’s main efforts would be concentrated online. But it was embattled from the beginning. To the commercial networks, ABC Life was an encroachment on territory they thought they owned, and which they thought was beyond the bounds of the ABC’s charter. ‘The ABC should be asked to explain how its lifestyle initiative fits [with its charter],’ said Free TV chief executive Bridget Fair.22

To which the ABC might merely have pointed Fair to the charter. For while the ABC’s reach is wide, there were pockets of the community who did not necessarily regard the ABC as a part of everyday life. Younger audiences were only one missing piece. Others, as ABC Life deputy editor Osman Faruqi noted, included people living outside the inner cities and people from migrant backgrounds. Due to a lack of content that was appealing or relevant to them, they were far less likely to engage with the ABC than older, wealthier, and white audiences. It was a problem the ABC was obliged to confront, as Faruqi argued: ‘Young Indian-Australian couples in Parramatta pay tax and deserve relevant ABC content as much as white retirees in Balmain.’23

Thus the establishment of ABC Life, and the production of content that might broadly be termed ‘lifestyle journalism’ — content that would reach and interest such young couples in Parramatta: articles, news segments, TV documentaries, and online packages about everything from sexual health to the nature of freelance work to quick dinner recipes to life with chronic pain. Critics ridiculed much of this. ‘It’s a vegan recipe, of course,’ wrote Gerard Henderson, about an article on easy-to-make recipes in lockdown. ‘Without ABC Life — who would have known how to cook chickpeas in rich tomato sauce?’24 ‘Only one in every four women is masturbating regularly, and our national broadcaster has hang-ups about that,’ wrote Chris Kenny, after surveying the results of a survey of sexual health.25

Henderson and Kenny were doing exactly what they abhor in ABC presenters — sneering. But their sneers were given greater credence because of a long-running and gendered condescension about ‘lifestyle journalism’ that, in the case of ABC Life, was both misplaced and ignorant. For this kind of work was distinct and useful. As Mumbrella’s Brittney Rigby noted, part of ABC Life’s appeal lay in the unique content it provided — advice on talking to children about racism, on giving up alcohol, on coping with unemployment, on personal finance planning — and, critically, the lack of a commercial edge: the ABC did all of this ‘without trying to sell anything’.26

Another aspect of that distinctiveness was the ability of this material to augment ‘hard’ news coverage. During the first COVID-19 outbreak,

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