TerminatingThe Drum was a straightforward programming decision with which we have no serious quibble. Nothing in the transmission schedule should be sacred except the news and its standards. Programs must come and go. Otherwise,the whole service ossifies and descends into anachronistic irrelevance. We may mourn the cancelled shows and dislike their replacements but some level of renewal and revival is essential. After all,the programs we now treasure once displaced a previous show in that same time-slot that we’ve long since forgotten.
ABC managing director David Anderson (right) and director of news Justin Stevens.Alex Ellinghausen
As to the decision the contract of Andrew Probyn,no staff member – not even a Canberra journalist – is indispensable. We might never know the full story behind Probyn’s departure,but it was a legitimate management decision. There were plenty of willing and capable foot-soldiers eager to take his place in the ranks. Richard Carleton and Laurie Oakes were once newcomers,too.
Far more troubling to us has been the ABC’s failure to control the extracurricular opinionating of its on-air staff.
The recent sackings of two presenters who paraded their views on other outlets had the distinct sound of a stable gate being slammed shut well after the bias horse had bolted.
ABC SydneyAfternoons host Josh Szeps’ planned departure from the broadcaster following an unauthorised appearance on a Sky News programlast week. And stand-inMornings presenter Antoinette Lattouf over her social media posts about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
It is not as if the ABC’s leaders have not been advised to formulate and maintain clear and enforceable rules to constrain expressions of opinion by their employees. In response,they devised reams of lofty “guidance” paperwork that has clearly languished unread in the bottom desk drawers and inbox files of the staff who most need to understand the issues. It would help if those rules were widely published.
Illustration by Jim Pavlidis
The core principle is simple enough:objectivity and impartiality are articles of faith in public broadcasting that reporters and presenters must accept as sacrosanct. The defence that private posts on social media or guest appearances on another network,being personal,are somehow separate and not bound by that principle is untenable,as ABC management has belatedly confirmed.
Who’s responsible for the embarrassments? In our view,it is a failure of management and the self-satisfied,indulgent culture they have allowed to develop within the corporation.
Instability at the highest levels has become the house style. In its first half-century,the ABC had just two general managers,both of whom were veteran broadcasters. Since then,there have been eight managing directors,including six who brought no practical broadcasting experience to their appointments.
Antoinette Lattouf was filling on for ABC Sydney mornings before she was sacked. She has launched legal proceedings against the ABC.Instagram
An endless sequence of re-organisations has eroded the structure and skills base that underpinned the corporation’s standing and public trust. Meanwhile,in an attempt to appeal to niche audiences,the ABC spreads itself too thinly across too many forms of communication. Impact,authority and resources are all divided while largely untrained staff are expected to master multiple techniques beyond their reasonable capacity.
The factors that contributed to the recent downfall of the two radio presenters are similarly endemic. Most young media workers today are not trained in-house and “on the job”. They arrive from quasi-academic tertiary courses that emphasise so-called cultural studies.
The postmodern insistence that there is no such thing as absolute truth and the rejection of impartiality as a requirement of journalism act as an invitation to allow opinion to intrude into ostensibly unbiased reporting. The flow of the ABC’s journalistic waters has been further muddied by the grievances of those demanding further diversity and inclusion within the ABC staff and in the programming they produce,which then suffers from consequent fragmentation into smaller and smaller audiences.
The national broadcaster gives every appearance of being too willing to accede to pressures that allow the well-meaning goal of diversity to compromise professional standards. It is a demonstrable failure of management that its acquiescence to the barely appropriate demands of orthodoxy from worlds foreign to the news and information crafts prevents it from insisting on,and then maintaining,the basic disciplines required in public broadcasting.
As we have argued previously,the underlying problem is one of standards. Audiences can recognise second-rate work and bias,and will continue to drift away in disappointment. This disenchantment with the ABC’s service will continue for as long as its “content supervisors” (note the jargon:not “editors”) display so little knowledge or regard for the fundamentals of its trade:clear,literate and grammatical language,balance,well-presented speech,and careful and fair editing.
Attend to those objectives with diligence and the pitfalls of bias and opinion soon disappear.
Stuart Littlemore,KC,is a barrister and former ABC journalist. He was the founding host of Media Watch. David Salter is an independent journalist and TV producer who has filled senior roles at ABC-TV and the commercial networks.