'patriotic' state-owned ABC would not serve Australia's best interests

A 'patriotic' state-owned ABC would not serve Australia's best interests

For Tony Abbott to berate the ABC for not being on 'Australia's side' and ask them to bat for the home team is bad media policy. Why? It simply doesn't work

Margaret Simons

Prime minister Tony Abbott's view that the role of state-owned media is to be patriotic, cheering on the home team, is not particularly unusual or radical. It's just that one would normally expect to hear it from government leaders in countries without a tradition of a free media.

In Chinese media policy, for example, the media is not outside government, but rather an instrument of governance. Recent policy announcements as the Chinese Communist party struggles with the impact of social media talk about the role of journalists as being to "guide public opinion" and maintain the cohesiveness of the nation.

It's a tempting view of journalism for those faced with the challenge of governing at a time of rapid change. It is also completely wrong-headed and dangerous.

This is not only because of the ideals of a free media. After all, as we saw in last year's controversies over the Labor government's attempts to increase regulation of the media, "media freedom" (like "the public interest") can be a hollow catch phrase meaning little more in some mouths than more power for the dominant media corporations, no matter how badly they do their jobs.

Freedom of speech is a right held by individuals, not organisations. Media organisations have freedoms not because the organisations are good things in themselves, but to the extent that they serve individuals’ right to freedom of expression. While this has always been the case, it is newly important to remember it in our own time when, for the first time in human history, the means of publication are in the hands of most citizens.

The wording of every important statement of the right to freedom of speech, from Milton's famous 1644 speech to the English parliament to the Australian high court decision in the Lange case, makes clear that freedom of speech is an individual right, and is held by "the press" only consequentially. Every individual has a right to publish.

The right to freedom of speech can be claimed by media organisations only because they are composed of individuals, and because they disseminate news, views and information to citizens. They hold it to the extent that they put the rights of citizens to freedom of speech and access to information into practical effect.

It is worth remembering, too, that the focus of last year's attempts to introduce more media regulation was the power to enforce the publication of corrections. If those reforms had gone through, and if the ABC's reporting of abuse of refugees was inaccurate, then a correction could have been more powerfully demanded. But Abbott, then in opposition, was vehemently opposed to any such increase in government control of the media.

There is a more pragmatic reason, though, why calling on journalists to bat for the home team is bad media policy. It doesn't work.

As the media historian Mitchell Stephens has observed, the lesson of history is that the sharing of news and information, over time, exercises a subtle cohesive force on society. It keeps us all thinking about the same things, and facing in the same direction, even when we disagree. This is the case even when individual news items and pieces of journalism might appear to have a corrosive effect on social cohesiveness. There is a larger force at work.

But as China is discovering, in the new media world if people begin to distrust the content and pitch of mainstream media, if they suspect it of being propaganda, then mainstream media loses its agenda-setting power.

In the Chinese context, party owned outlets are no longer as effective as an    instrument of governance as they used to be, because people are turning to social media, to privately owned newspapers and the internet to get their news. By batting for the home team, party-owned papers have lost the trust of their audiences.

Consider, in this context, the Snowden stories, the ABC's involvement in which has so displeased Abbott and the government.

Imagine if the ABC had decided not to get involved, not seeing breaking such news as part of its charter. Would its credibility have risen? Of course not. People would simply have obtained the news from elsewhere and, to a degree, the nation-building capacity that was the justification for founding a national broadcaster in the first place would have been diminished.

The capacity of the ABC to contribute to a healthy Australia depends on it being a trusted source of news - and all the surveys tell us that by and large, it is exactly that. If it becomes bland and non-controversial, then it loses the power to fulfil its charter.

Meanwhile the planned efficiency review of the ABC is not necessarily a bad thing for Auntie. Long term ABC watchers will be feeling déjà vu: it was 2005, and the ABC was in the sites of the Howard government. The ABC board - stacked by the government with cultural warriors of the first water - requested an external review. The Government commissioned KPMG.

The result, leaked in 2006, was a report that found the ABC was very efficient, and needed an extra $125.8m in core funding over the next three years to maintain its present operations. After comparing the ABC to Australian commercial broadcasters and public broadcasters overseas, KPMG concluded:

The ABC provides a high volume of outputs and quality relative to the level of funding it receives … the ABC appears to be a broadly efficient organisation.

The result was modest increases in the ABC funding in the following budget. It may be that in the current exercise, the motivations of minister for communications Malcolm Turnbull include insulating the ABC from swinging cuts. If so, management's support for the exercise is not surprising.

There is room for some cost cutting at the ABC, but the cost is heavy. Further denuding the broadcasting capacity in Hobart, Adelaide and Brisbane, for example, and ceasing coverage of things such as local football, would free up more funds but also unleash a political storm, including in marginal electorates.

Could the ABC management be looking for excuses and external justification to bolster them in making these cuts? The appointment of commercial television veteran Peter Lewis, who could only blanch at the costs of, for example, bringing state-based football to tiny audiences, suggests so.

Reading between the lines of the terms of reference, there is another issue which has been perennial ever since SBS was founded in the early 1980s. Could the two public broadcasters be merged? Or, failing that, could their "back office" functions be combined, leading to efficiencies?

In a recent interview with me, ABC managing director Mark Scott said an SBS and ABC merger was a "matter for government", and not one the ABC would pursue. However he also observed that if, in the current day, one was seeking to establish an ethnic broadcasting presence, the natural solution would be found a new digital multichannel or two, rather than establish a whole organisation.

The terms of reference for the inquiry also make it clear that the government istaking separate advice on the transmission costs for the ABC and SBS. Not before time, since that particular heavy cost centre has a nasty and expensive history.

There is a reason the ABC has survived, when so many other nation-building "commissions" founded in previous centuries have disappeared. It is because media has a fundamental role in nation-building, and the ABC's high public trust ratings show that most people implicitly understand that.

But it is not exercised by being bland, partisan for the home team, or skewing the news. A public broadcaster that failed in breaking uncomfortable news would lose much of its reason for being.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/31/a-patriotic-state-owned-media-would-not-serve-australias-best-interests