Public ideas
Public broadcasting: can “accuracy” and “impartiality” displace the ABC’s obsession with “balance”?
In March Kim Williams took over from Ita Buttrose as Chair of the ABC. It was not a partisan appointment: indeed many people were surprised that a Labor government had appointed a former CEO of Murdoch’s News Ltd. Perhaps they would have understood the appointment better if they had looked further into his resumé: he has been an accomplished clarinet player and composer, and was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.
The ABC does not change quickly, and nor should it. In its 92-year history it has continued on as a solid and trusted cultural institution, often facing the ire of politicians, mainly on the “right”, outraged that a publicly-funded institution should confront the powerful with the truth.
Such has been its embedded strength, and the power of its enabling legislation, that the chairpersons appointed with a partisan brief, such as Maurice Newman (appointed by the Howard government in 2012), have had only limited success in their attempts to re-shape it from a public broadcaster to a government broadcaster.
It is probably fair to say that Williams sees his influence in that position in terms of refreshing the ABC, re-affirming its role as one of the nation’s great cultural institutions, and re-invigorating an organization that has become timid and has lost its confidence because of political assaults and budget cuts. The ABC is also confronting the general problems faced by any media trying to adhere to standards of professional journalism.
We first heard his ideas about the direction Williams believes the ABC should take when he delivered the Redmond Barry Lecture in June (covered in the June 29 roundup under “Public Ideas”).
In last week’s Saturday Paper Martin McKenzie-Murray has a long article – Kim Williams on the ABC’s great divide – drawing largely on a speech he had made to ABC staff. And on August 22 Williams participated in the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, at an event in which he responded to a sequence of questions from Kerry O’Brien, covering pretty well the full gamut of the ABC, subsequently broadcast as a Big ideas session: Public broadcasting is not as simple as ABC.
It is indeed a huge gamut in areas – rural, emergency services, jazz, kids’ shows, classical music – where commercial broadcasters, funded by advertising, have no interest or where those broadcasters have become outlets for "infotainment" and dissemination of partisan misinformation and disinformation rather than news and analysis. As Williams says “opinion” is cheap, while solid investigative journalism is expensive.
Not that the ABC is immune from this drift away from serious broadcasting. To quote McKenzie-Murray:
In that staff speech, which lasted about an hour, Williams lamented what he saw as a preponderance of lifestyle stories. "I think people have, in moments of public torment, crisis, division, challenges to leadership, a right to be able to access it from us reliably and immediately, and not to suddenly see a lifestyle story being No. 1 or No. 2 or No. 3." he said.
Listening to the Byron Bay discussion would be an hour well spent and it is so tightly packed that no summary can start to do it justice.
Williams stresses that the ABC is an Australian institution. This is not a defence of parochialism – far from it, because he would like to see the ABC project a stronger Australian voice abroad. He notes that in Australia we suffer the great drawback in using the same language – English – as other countries generating news, ideas, and drama. Countries outside the Anglosphere enjoy cultures embedded in their own languages. (Can Williams persuade the ABC management to close its London office and send their staff to places with more relevance to world affairs?)
He speaks about governance. That’s usually a turnoff for audiences, but it’s important. The ABC is owned by all Australians, drawing its authority not from executive government, but from Parliament. He explains that the ABC is a true example of an independent statutory authority, because, unlike the Reserve Bank for instance, there is no government representative on the board. As a public broadcaster it is an important institution of democracy.
As an institution of democracy it has an obligation to help the public understand how our other democratic institutions function. We have a fine democracy (ask any informed American for confirmation), but most of us don’t know how our democratic institutions operate, and how they have their different domains of authority.
In this regard Williams is not specific, but we saw how Dutton and the “No” campaigners in the Voice referendum exploited people’s ignorance of the Constitution to run a scare campaign, and how Dutton relied on the public’s ignorance of the separation of powers to blame the government for the release of asylum-seekers with served convictions for criminal offences.
He warns that the ABC should not allow the tabloid media to set the news agenda. The ABC doesn’t have to follow the story of the day. There are plenty of important stories that the tabloids miss.
In both the Saturday Paper article and in the Byron Bay discussion, he stresses the need for “accuracy” and “impartiality” in news and current affairs broadcasting. In the Redmond Barry lecture he uses slightly different words, but with the same meaning, summarizing the ABC’s legislated Charter and Duties of the Board in eight points, the last of which is:
committing to accurate, independent, objective journalism of integrity.
We might ask if this means that the ABC will abandon its “election mode” model – the model it applied to the Voice referendum, and that it has applied to national elections, in which the idea of “balance” dominates, as if elections are like football matches, in which each side is playing to the same rules.
That model is surely past its use-by date: in fact it’s been going off for 80 years as the “Westminster” two-party system has been slowing decaying.
And it’s a model that gives the same moral and intellectual weight to scare campaigns and lies as it does to reasoned argument.
We could imagine how long the ABC would continue to seek the views of a public health specialist if he or she started spouting conspiracy theories about microchips in Covid vaccines. Or a university economist who suggests that we should pursue a Venezuelan-style policy of printing money without constraint.
Yet the ABC freely gives airtime to politicians as if they have some special licence exempting them from truth and reason.
Journalists challenge politicians’ most outrageous claims, and occasionally land a “gotcha” (from which the public learn nothing), but they mostly lack the confidence and competence to force politicians to explain their policies clearly, stripped of spin and in a way that the public can judge the merits of policies on offer. In an election likely to be dominated by a few issues -- economics and immigration perhaps – it may be informative for the public if the ABC were to hand political interviews to its specialist journalists.
Also there could be more use made of independent commentators who can explain what’s going on. They rarely get a look-in when the ABC’s in “election mode”, but they could calmly explain issues politicians don’t necessarily want the public to understand. We can imagine how experts explaining the workings of dividend imputation, and the performance of electric vehicles, could have helped voters make a more informed choice in 2019.
We can imagine, in the Voice campaign, that the ABC could have politely denied airtime to Dutton and other No-campaigners peddling confusion, lies and scare campaigns, while inviting them to come back when they were ready to present reasoned arguments. They would have accused the ABC of bias, but they would have come back, because there were defensible arguments against the Voice. Had those arguments been put, they would have forced the Yes campaigners to present their case more clearly – a case that has been well-articulated only in the time since the referendum. The referendum may still have failed, but there would have been far less bitterness and feeling of betrayal.
With its obsession with “balance” the ABC did not serve us well in its treatment of the Voice. Can it insist on standards of accuracy and impartiality in next year’s election campaign?
On evidence-informed policy
“Evidence-informed policy making is a deliberate and rigorous approach that seeks to support policy with the best available evidence, rather than intuition, ideology, anecdote, or short-term political expediency.”
That’s a quote from an address by Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy, at the University of Adelaide on evidence-informed policymaking.
He starts by stressing the importance of sound policy-making. The processes must be robust, and the public must have trust in those processes:
Our democratic capitalist system relies not only on market mechanisms but also on trust. Trust that decisions are grounded in the best available evidence, that experts are engaged and heard, and that policies are designed to serve the public good.
He goes on to describe what good policy development processes look like – the consultative processes, and the ways governments use the information they collect. It’s a textbook description of social research methods, and the ways that research can be put to use to help develop policies that improve outcomes for individuals, communities and society.
He concludes with examples of best practice in the Commonwealth government. It’s a refreshing reminder of the importance of a professional public service, in a political atmosphere where the voices of greed and self-interest denigrate the value of public service.
He covers examples of good consultative processes. But he does not mention the feeling in the community that the Commonwealth government is inaccessible, cut off from Australia in its Canberra citadel. Privatization of services, the downgrading and closure of regional offices of Commonwealth departments, the closure of the old Commonwealth Employment Services offices, have all contributed to that sense of isolation and distrust. The sheer volume of emails and other correspondence addressed to ministers or to the prime minister, suggests that people just don’t know how to connect to the public service.
Kennedy does not step into the arena of partisan politics, but he comes close to the edge where he refers to the “acrimonious” nature of some of our policy disagreements.
His most tantalizing comments are in his concluding paragraphs, where he refers to obsessions that have dominated economic policy objectives in times past, often based on inadequately unverified models of economic dynamics. He refers to the idea that higher minimum wages result in fewer jobs (an idea that hasn’t entirely gone away), and to the obsession late last century with the current account deficit.
Words like that don’t just slip into a speech. It would have been carefully drafted, passing through many hands. Is he hinting at the dominance of a current obsession, and, if so, what it it?