OPINION
Back when I did my journalism degree, I was obliged to study several compulsory Media Studies and Communications units, when I’d much rather have directed my time and energy to more Philosophy, History and Science units. But they weren’t a complete waste of time, as it happens. For one, I’m at least cursorily grounded in the neo-Marxist gobbledegook of Communications theory to see through it.
Media studies furnished me with another set of bullshit filters — specifically when it comes to media surveys and ratings.
In the pre-internet days, ratings were compiled by surveys and diaries. But, as one media studies researcher pointed out, these were often heavily biased by their subjects. For instance, households keeping a diary of their viewing habits tended to lie about them. People wanting to appear swankier and more high-brow than they were would tend to lie that they were watching, say, Four Corners or Foreign Correspondent on the ABC, rather than Married… At First Sight or I’m a Celebrity! Get Me Out of Here! on a commercial station.
News was an area where viewers were particularly prone to lying. Contrary to popular belief, at the time at least, Kerry Packer’s Nine network had the highest percentage of hard news content. Yet, it was the ABC which was (falsely) believed to be the bastion of hard news. Certainly, as new, hard data-based ratings show, the ABC is the least-watched of the free-to-air networks.
Which is why I take the ABC’s self-serving claim to be “Australia’s most trusted news source” with a Siberian grain of salt. Now, more than ever.
Once respected as a trusted voice, today the ABC is increasingly viewed as a loose-knit, self-serving collective which appears largely held together by a common hostility for the society in which its members live, work and prosper. Its lack of self awareness knows no bounds.
The recent Coronation broadcast saga is emblematic of its internal dysfunction. No longer hiding its biases, the broadcaster advertised a two-hour special on ‘how relevant the monarchy is to the lives of Australians, and within the broader Commonwealth in 2023’. Predictably, it featured a panel dominated by pro-republic figures, including former Q+A host Stan Grant, who spoke at length about colonisation and the damage the monarchy has inflicted on indigenous Australians.
When thousands of viewers complained — it was one of the most complained-about programs in the broadcaster’s history, Grant threw a tanty and quit, screeching “racist!” at all and sundry. Even ABC management refused to admit their mistake, instead attacking the ABC’s critics. ABC figures on Twitter repeatedly claimed — falsely, as a quantitative survey of coverage showed — that the “Murdoch media” had somehow engaged in a concerted campaign against them.
But that’s far from the only conspiracy theories the national broadcaster has indulged — at the taxpayer’s expense — against the Murdoch media.
This wilful blindness was behind the ‘Fox and the Big Lie’, double-episode Four Corners attack on arch enemy, News Corporation. The Australian Communications and Media Authority found that the documentary breached the Code of Practice on accuracy and fair and honest dealing. Undaunted, the ABC aired the show again.
The ABC has likewise never acknowledged, apologised for, or retracted its demonstrably false claims of “Russian collusion” by the Trump administration.
The ABC’s ideological crusades are becoming ever more shameless.
Some years ago, Jewish-Australian comedian Sandy “Austen Tayshus” Gutman took a Q+A panel to task over their disproportionate obsession with attacking Israel. Like the rest of the bien pensant left, the ABC collective have only got more openly anti-Semitic. To the point that the Executive Council of Australian Jewry has demanded an apology for “an outpouring of undiluted and uncontested falsehoods and vitriol” on Q+A. It got a mealy-mouthed load of ABC double-speak posing as a yeah, but, no, but… “apology”, instead.
Disingenuousness runs deep within the ABC. When the Morrison government announced a ‘highly contentious’ freeze on indexation the public was told it would ‘rip the heart out of the ABC, and our democracy’. Neither was true. First the broadcaster is not known for its defence of democracy and second, it was ultimately forced to confess it had 120 more employees after the freeze than before.
And, contrary to its constant whining about how impoverished it is, the ABC has still managed to find a cool million or so to pay for the defamation actions brought on by some of its most senior journalists — who still remain employed by the public broadcaster.
And the “most trusted news source” claim? Also bullshit — and Australians are catching on.
A Roy Morgan survey confirms the ABC has gone from 10th to 19th place in Australia’s ranking of trusted brands.
No surprise then that in the first GfK radio survey of the year, all of the ABC’s radio stations in every single metropolitan market experienced a concerning drop in audience share compared with the previous year. In the past twelve months, Sydney’s ABC 702 lost more than one third of its total audience falling to a paltry 5.9 per cent. Radio National averages a mere 64,000 listeners across Australia’s five biggest cities, the worst figures on record.
The Spectator Australia
Television ratings are just as bad.
And yet, Australians are still forking out over a billion dollars of their hard-earned taxes for this insular, far-left collective.
There’s a simple enough solution: slash public funding and turn the ABC into a volunteer subscription service.
Then we’ll find out just how much Australians really “value” their “beloved” public broadcaster.