A for Arrogance, B for Bias, C for Contempt …

How do you think they reacted in the ABC newsroom when Peter Dutton tore strips off them for a reporter’s bias over Hezbollah and said the ABC was “in a worse state than I imagined”? Cowered under the desks in terror at the prospect of retribution? Promises to be fair next time? Not a bit. If they took any notice at all they would have laughed and jeered and given their opinion of Dutton in most uncomplimentary terms. They would regard having provoked the federal opposition leader into severe criticism as a win, as having scored a point against the enemy.

I have worked in television newsrooms and I know how leftist journalists behave (and non-leftists are an extinct species at ABC News and current affairs). Certainly, upper management makes constant pious protestations about charters and balance and impartiality and keeps harping on how much the ABC is “trusted”. The news staff couldn’t care less. They might even take a perverse delight in mocking their superiors. They know they are invulnerable.

ABC current affairs has been a bastion of left-wing prejudice since the Sixties, when producer and Marxist zealot Allan Ashbolt began stacking the news staff of the until the then rather conservative corporation with young leftist journalists. Ashbolt’s protégés as they rose to seniority appointed new young leftists, and so on, in a kind of apostolic succession of institutional leftism.

Given the herd mentality of its staff, and their quite unjustified pride in the supposed excellence of programs like Four Corners and Q&A, it would be surprising if ABC current affairs journalists didn’t simply assume that their views represent those of the public at large, rather than those of the diminishing minority of the public that still watches or listens to the ABC. If they give the question any thought, they no doubt categorise taxpayers who disagree with them as rednecks, fascists, transphobes and racists, or whatever other terms leftists are currently using to disparage non-leftists.

ABC staff are, correctly, convinced they are secure in their jobs, that for all Dutton’s fulminations no conceivable government will actually do anything to make them respect their charter. They know conservative politicians may huff and puff but the ABC house will not be blown down.

Therefore, anyone really cares about returning impartiality to ABC journalism must work to see a government elected that has the determination to act on its convictions. Such a government must have the political courage to face down the inevitable screams of “interference” from the ABC itself, most of the rest of the media, and the so-called “progressive” establishment in general and make it clear that ABC staff from the top down are not immune to dismissal if they are responsible for breaches of the corporation’s charter. The ABC must be stripped of its sense of entitlement.

The chances of that happening are to say the least remote.

With leftists it is one tedious fad after another, so it’s not surprising that this is reflected in ABC programming. You would know without being told that the ABC would be anti-Israel since that is the fixation du jour of leftists everywhere. As is the gay, lesbian and trans etc. agenda, which the ABC has made its own on social media with “ABCQueer” and which, it sanctimoniously states, “aims to make young LGBTQIA+ (sic) feel less alone.” Nonsense. Its aim is to proselytise for the gay etc. cause.

Race obsession is, of course, well on view  at the “national broadcaster”. The ABC deplores “racism” but with exquisite irony has been accused of “systemic racism” from deep within its own heart by just the kind of people it took on to show that it wasn’t “racist”. It gave preferential time to arguments in favour of the race-based Aboriginal “Voice” and has become a tool in the hands of Aboriginal propagandists in their shrill campaign to impose a veneer of Aboriginality on the nation through the use of “indigenous”’ place names, many of which one strongly suspects are factitious.

The ABC was an early climber on the anti-Trump bandwagon, emulating in this the American broadcasters it copies. It has retailed all the US Democratic Party’s lies —  Four Corners three-part series in which Sarah Ferguson (atop this page) alleged “Russian collusion” with Trump has never been corrected, although the fabricated origin of this smear has been officially admitted in Washington.

It persecuted Cardinal George Pell with merciless vindictiveness (as below), even after his High Court acquittal on child abuse charges. Who can forget the unconcealed glee of Leigh Sales’s first words on 7.30 at the time of Pell’s conviction, every syllable empasised, “George Pell is a child abuser” as though stating an objective fact rather than a judicial finding.

On climate, the ABC is securely on board with catastropharian dogma (below, report here) and never misses an opportunity to talk up a bushfire or flood as a manifestation of the “climate emergency”.

 

Apart from bringing it to heel, how should a truly conservative government deal with the ABC? There are not many options. Selling it off, like Qantas or the Commonwealth Bank, should be considered: state-owned broadcasters belong to the era of mantel radios and televisions on splayed legs with blue-grey screens and clunky knobs — an era when radio and television were thought too important to leave to private operators. But this mightn’t eliminate the prejudice, since commercial owners who once would have insisted on objectivity are pretty woke themselves nowadays. Splitting it into different entities would leave journalists’ prejudices intact.

Perhaps it would be best to make the ABC user-pays, like a subscription-based streaming channel. That way those who enjoy its output – like that repository of leftist platitudes, the Australia Institute, which believes that the ABC “protects and strengthens our democracy” – can pay for the privilege of enjoying its “free, fair, and independent reporting”, as they call it.

How many billions of dollars has the ABC cost again? How many more billions are yet to come?