Australians pay over a billion dollars a year for the ABC. That’s a lot of money for a broadcaster almost none of us watch.
The ABC consistently scrapes the bottom of ratings. Of the twenty most-watched programs on Australian TV, just one is on the ABC.
Why Australians avoid the billion-dollar white elephant is a mystery to the ABC itself. So much so that management sent its staff on a “fact-finding tour” to the remotest corners of Australia. Abandoning the leafy seclusion of their headquarters in the harbourside Sydney suburb of Ultimo, they went all the way to…the Sydney suburb of Bankstown. Even there, though, the ABC luvvies were shocked – shocked! – to discover that the peasants in the suburbs had the temerity to think that their betters at the ABC are out of touch.
Well, the ABC are going to show those plebs in the suburbs a thing or two about who’s “out of touch”. The national broadcaster has just announced its 2020 lineup.
More of the same lefty crap they’ve been scaring audiences away with for decades.
Indigenous issues, climate change and clerical abuse spearhead a line-up of original Australian content that Michael Carrington, ABC’s director of entertainment and specialist programming, promised “will speak to and for all Australians, firing their imagination through bold content and creativity”.
Speak at might be the phrase he’s looking for. “Bold” and “creative” are also odd words to use to describe “the same old shit”.
Among the highlights are two new environmentally-themed series […] Award-winning journalist Sarah Ferguson will present a three-part series on clerical abuse […]from Blackfella Films comes the documentary Maralinga, in which the Indigenous Tjarutja people share their tales of survival after the bomb blast in September 1956.
[…]Meanwhile, Cate Blanchett will star in and produce new original series Stateless, a refugee drama.
“Highlights” is also an odd word to describe this woke-fest of lefty yawneroos.
Opinion polls consistently show that the issues Australians really care about are education, health care, cost of living, immigration and so on. So, what does the ABC serve us up instead? The usual gruel that so fascinates their inner-city dinner parties: refugees, Aborigines, how awful religions are (well, Christianity), climate change…
Then, of course, there’s heaping dollops of finger-wagging about “racism”, and a few has-been Brit nobodies.
The documentary The Australian Dream, in which Stan Grant grapples with the meaning of the Adam Goodes racism row […] And Miriam Margolyes, the 78-year-old beloved actor from the Harry Potter films, will examine what it means to be Australian.
Again, with those malapropriate adjectives: “beloved” for a bit-part actor almost no-one (except the tiny claque of ABC types, of course) could even name? And who better to tell Australians what it means to be Australian than a pommy blow-in.
Then there’s the usual whining about funding, from a lefty behemoth which gobbles a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.
The slate announcement comes as the broadcaster continues to work its way through the implications of an effective funding cut of almost $84 million over three years, announced by the federal government last year.
The funding freeze means the ABC needs to cut $15 million from its budget in 2019-20, about $28 million in 2020-21 and just over $41 million in 2021-22.
theage.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/abc-defies-conservative-critics-with-bold-tv-line-up-for-2020
“Effective funding cut” is a mealy-mouthed euphemism for the fact that the Morrison government laudably declined to shovel even more money into the ABC’s insatiable maw. The savings should be easy to find though: just make their staff join the plebs in cattle class instead of endlessly swanning about the country in business class.
This farce might be laughable if it weren’t for that billion-dollar price tag, not to mention the fact that the ABC is required by law to represent Australians. All Australians. The simple fact that almost no Australians bother to watch or listen to its crap shows how badly the national broadcaster is failing to meet its most basic legislative requirement.