Do modern democracies even need a state-funded broadcaster, any more?
The left would answer with a desperate “Yes!” Despite the dizzying plethora of viewpoints and services available at the touch of a screen, the left insists that state-funded broadcasters are necessary to combat the stranglehold of commercial media (which are all, it goes without saying, white, male and conservative) and create space for “diverse” voices. This was never a convincing argument at the best of times – after all, if a market existed, it was in commercial media’s interests to tap it – in the internet age, it’s a Boomer-level joke.
The only reason the left really want state-funded media is because they long ago captured it. In keeping with O’Sullivan’s Law, state-funded media in the Anglosphere were long ago subjugated by the Long March through the Institutions.
Jacinda Ardern is merely making the naked self-interest of the left more blatant when she dangles the carrot of government funding in front of her New Zealand media fan club. In Australia, successive “conservative” (so-called) governments have been too timid to take a meaningful stick to the bloated ABC.
But in Canada, the new leader of the opposition Conservative Party is unapologetically promising to curb the equally left-wing CBC.
One of [Erin] O’Toole’s campaign promises – unlike here, you understand, you have to appeal to your party’s core voters to win the leadership – was to halve the funding of the CBC English-language television operations. Not just cut the rate of increase of monies government would send its way. Not just freeze it. Cut. It. In. Half.
The best the “conservative” Morrison government is managing is merely reducing the rate at which the ABC’s funding will be increased. Even that sends the inner-city woketards into fits of the vapours.
But you know what? The [Canadian] party members loved this pledge. It may have been the deciding factor in O’Toole’s taking the leadership. In the past, O’Toole had accused the CBC of being ‘out of control’. Well, it is. But in my view it’s less one-sided, less biased, less lefty-partisan than ‘our’ ABC – in large part because in Canada the CBC (like SBS here) has to take some advertising money and that means you need to appeal at least a teeny-weeny bit beyond the inner cities’ virtue-signalling, left, renewables-loving, public sector viewers.
Even the British government is taking on the BBC.
Even Boris[…]has mooted making the payment of the license fee that funds it voluntary. And Johnson has recently slammed the BBC over its PC, woke decision not to let anyone sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ or ‘Rule, Britannia’ at the Last Night of the Proms concert the public broadcaster up there stages.
Listen to what Rod Liddle says about the BBC: ‘The BBC holds middle England in utter contempt …. It cannot tolerate anything which doesn’t fit into its woke agenda … It has lost touch with the values of the people who pay for its existence … Why should I pay for an organisation which hates and despises everything I believe in?’.
Which describes how many Australians feel about the ABC. Australians are told (by the ABC, of course) that they love their ABC – which makes it odd that it’s the least-watched of the major broadcasters. Fewer than one-in-ten Australians tune in to the ABC, and most of that would be for its childrens’ content, one of the few areas where it genuinely excels (although even that is not immune to the poison of wokeness: the ABC recently cut an episode of hit cartoon Bluey because the use of the phrase “ooga-booga” was supposedly “racist”).
The Morrison government is going to need to find a lot of savings in coming years to make up for its COVID largesse. There’s an easy billion-plus per year to be found by following Erin O’Toole, growing a pair, and slashing, if not selling off the ABC entirely.
Meanwhile, New Zealand would be well advised to run screaming from the very idea of a state-funded media. If BFD readers think the NZ media’s Jacindamania is nauseating enough in its sycophancy already, just wait until she’s holding the media’s purse-strings.
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