Can We Trust the ABC?

THE EVENING in October 2006 when Mark Scott launched himself, and as new Managing Director, his vision for the future of the national broadcaster to a packed meeting of the Sydney Institute, I asked the first question. Uncharacteristically for an ABC executive, Scott had chosen to speak on the tough, controversial topic of editorial values. In more than fifty years, I’d never heard one of his seven predecessors dare to give a speech on this taboo subject. He raised eyebrows across the room (and later temperatures throughout the organisation) with his candid admission of “A sense that the organisation has issues with balance and fairness—particularly through its news and current affairs content, although some critics would suggest, across its entire content.”

He went on to foreshadow a completely new set of editorial policies to be released in 2007, and promised that “Across the range of ABC content, audiences must not be able to reasonably conclude that the ABC had taken an editorial stand on matters of contention and public debate.” And he spoke warmly of the virtues that critics had long accused some ABC programs of ignoring, if not repudiating: fairness, accuracy, balance, objectivity, impartiality. He proclaimed himself Editor in Chief, seeing the need to address criticism carefully and comprehensively. A strong, challenging speech, the most statesmanlike ever heard from an ABC chief, presaging a hopeful new future in the digital age.

Mark Scott saw my question coming. The ABC and I had not long emerged from a bruising confrontation over my complaint that a Social History and Features Unit program on Papua New Guinea had breached all five of those virtues. In denigrating Australia’s trusteeship of the combined territories over thirty postwar years and gratuitously insulting the kiaps (the patrol officers and their superiors), “Papua New Guinea: Nation State or Failed State?”, broadcast in May 2006, had exhibited all the characteristics of heavily-opinionated prejudicial distortion masquerading as objective truth which critics had identified in so many ABC programs. More than bias, it was a determined attempt to set down a corrupted history.

My complaint took ten months to resolve. It ended with a determination by the ABC’s Independent Complaints Review Panel that programs other than news and current affairs programs were exempt from requirements of balance and impartiality. There was no obligation, it said, to present contrary points of view or introduce other arguments. Moreover, the Panel wrote, “Failure to do so does not reveal any fundamental bias in the program.”

“Mr Scott,” I began, bias usually derives from a lack of balance. Those of us who believe the ABC is indispensable but nevertheless from time to time had reason to complain about bias in ABC programs have usually found the defence given is that balance is achieved over time. Now tonight you have said that in opinion programs, the ABC is expected to present a plurality of views over time. How do you expect to enforce that, and over what time?

To which the new Editor in Chief replied: “Yeah, well, over a reasonable period of time.” Perhaps taken aback by the murmurs of amusement from the audience at this unconscious underlining of the problem, he stumbled on to promise regular internal reviews to define a reasonable period of time—and finally sidestepped the timing issue altogether by expressing confidence that when a full range of voices was being heard, satisfaction would follow. And presumably, the complaints would stop.

Mark Scott’s speech generated considerable interest outside the ABC and a wave of anger and apprehension within it. He had failed its dedicated staff by not making it merely the obligatory declaration of independence, righteousness and opposition to political interference. What especially enraged those programmers who felt themselves identified by Scott’s “can do better” theme was that the speech was delivered under the auspices of the Sydney Institute.

Disparaged whenever possible by ABC broadcasters as a “right-wing think-tank”, the Institute in reality is the most catholic forum in Australia for important discussion. It has offered its rostrum to speakers of all political colours, giving space for all the major debates of recent times. But the only way to attack it was through the person of its Director, Gerard Henderson. For some years, he had been permitted a brief few minutes commentary on current political events before the 8 a.m. news on Radio National’s popular breakfast program. Immediately after Scott’s speech, staff agitation began, to deny Henderson the microphone. It continued throughout 2007, and succeeded early this year.

IN MARCH LAST YEAR, the ABC released the new Editorial Policies that Scott had promised in his speech. The policies re-codified and considerably enlarged the principles and definitions under which all broadcasters would work. Most significantly, it replaced the two types of programming to which these rules applied—News & Current Affairs, and Factual— with four content categories: News & Current Affairs; Opinion; Topical and Factual; and Performance. The new Opinion category was defined as relating to “matters of contention and public debate”, and including lecture series, point-of-view documentaries, editorial commentary, speeches and commissioned programs. In the Topical and Factual category, content could include specialist topics such as arts, children’s, history, religion, science and sports. We began to see the hand of the lawyers at work when, in each of these two categories, the content that was not to be included was defined as content in other categories.

If this was meant as a bold attempt to separate opinion from fact, it failed. It defined neither. Broadcast programs are not often clear-cut. At the heart of my complaint about bias and imbalance in the Papua New Guinea program was the observation that speakers said things that were absolutely untrue (and in some cases at least, they knew to be untrue) but were excused as having merely offered their opinion. No balancing views were included. The Independent Complaints Review Panel, under the chairmanship of Mr Michael Foster QC, a former judge of the Federal Court of Australia and of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, observing that “factual” and “factual content” were not defined in the ABC’s Code of Practice or its Editorial Policies, accepted that “Expressions of opinion, implications and inferences do not constitute factual content and are not subject to the requirement of accuracy.” From this, it then argued that a program reflecting a wide range of perspectives, exploring particular points of view and containing opinion and comment was not “subject to requirements of balance, impartiality and accuracy”. Ah! But if the program did not reflect that wide range of perspectives, surely a collection of untruthful or slanted statements, offered as opinion, constitutes bias? This gets to the heart of many complaints—the selection of contributors and the motivations of the programmers, which we will come to later.

That the definitional issue still exists, and still bothers the Panel’s logical mind, was proven in a determination only in January this year when it rejected a similar complaint claiming unfairness through inaccuracy. It lamented:

The restriction of “factual content” … to matters of fact which are readily verifiable is productive of some difficulty … many statements of fact can be complex and defy ready verification, while at the same time they cannot properly be categorised as mere statements of opinion or inferences. How, consistently with the Code [of Practice] and [Editorial] Policies, is this type of factual content to be dealt with?

A year since publication of the new Editorial Policies, it is clear that far from simplifying rules for broadcasters, their muddled legalisms have created even bigger obstacles for complainants, and merely cemented another brick into the wall of the organisation’s defences. Mr Foster, with no journalistic or broadcasting experience, now wades through a semantic and legalistic swamp of sections and sub-sections of the Policies, as if he were applying statutes and precedents to a case before the bench. Were there a jurist like Lord Denning on the Panel, it would focus on the impact of a program as a whole, but pedantically as it now operates, it has not been able to see the wood for the trees.

The confusion, and many of the public’s complaints about imbalance and lack of objectivity, could have been avoided if programs in the Topical and Factual category had been required to conform to the same standards as News and Current Affairs programs. These, according to the Guidelines, must be “accurate, impartial and objective, and thereby avoid bias”. In its lengthy review and internal consultative process to rewrite the Editorial Guidelines, the ABC ignored suggestions (including mine) that it should do this.

The ABC’s defensive mechanisms against criticism, however, come into play only in the hindsight of listeners’ and viewers’ responses to programs. What is more important is to understand how a national institution, funded by 800 million taxpayer dollars, and staffed by intelligent, dedicated and in some cases highly creative people, comes to broadcast programs which are seen to express personal prejudice in cultural and social values of one particular character.

Robin Aitken, a British journalist who spent twentyfive years in the BBC working at every level from local radio in the regions to the flagship Today program, tackled an identical problem in his book Can We Trust the BBC? In answering his own question in the negative, his analysis was revealing and salutary. Aitken concluded that BBC people were always ahead of public opinion in social terms. This was because they were urban and leftwing, but also because they enjoyed their power of being able to alter public opinion. He had no problem in identifying the BBC people who had committed views and reflected them in their programs. Like the ABC, the BBC insists it is absolutely committed to impartiality. But it often follows the lead of its renowned reporter Martin Bell, later an MP, who believed that journalism had become a “moral profession”. As a privileged observer, a reporter who saw wickedness at close quarters was obliged to jettison “objectivity” and take a stand, said Bell. This is dangerous ground for a reporter, and for his organisation.

Aitken’s real contribution is his observation that the qualities needed for personal success in a national broadcaster like the BBC derive from what he terms the tribe’s collective liberal values. “Liberal” in the BBC doesn’t mean tolerant, it means the opposite of “conservative”. This explains why the automatic response in both the BBC and the ABC to complaints of bias that “both sides of politics complain, so we must be getting it right”, is a red herring; the bias is essentially cultural. Aitken says that for the past forty years, the BBC has been surreptitiously promoting a set of secular, liberal values at odds with traditional morality. The campaign, he says, has been hugely successful in transforming public attitudes on a range of issues including abortion, marriage and homosexuality, among others. The culture has no name, but it’s easy to define. Newcomers to the BBC quickly learn to sign up to—or at least not publicly dissent from—a range of attitudes and opinions.

Aitken identifies the issues progressives favour: Europe, human rights, the UN, the Palestinian cause, immigration. Judgmental attitudes are disapproved of, non-discriminatory attitudes are strongly emphasised. Sexism and homophobia are the deadly sins, so it follows that the campaigns for women clergy and gay priests are endorsed. What the liberal-progressive culture despises is even more important, especially when reflected in BBC news and current affairs programs. These include: the monarchy, Israel, George Bush, the Iraq War, the Vatican, and a range of smaller fry: Orangemen, South African whites, Serbs under Milosevic, the Likud Party and US Christian fundamentalists.

Some of these attitudes have given real trouble when the bias in programs has been clearly perceived by listeners and viewers. At the beginning of the Northern Ireland conflict, the BBC’s early support for the Catholic civil rights movement morphed into outright antagonism to the Loyalist cause. I found this out under somewhat difficult circumstances. Reporting from a street battle in the Bogside in Londonderry, I was caught and roughed up by a Protestant mob armed with pick handles who thought I was a BBC journalist. Only my Australian credentials saved the day.

It’s illuminating to observe that the BBC attitudes Aitken identifies are replicated in the ABC. Add to them unquestioning support for the Kyoto protocol, Aboriginal reconciliation, the republic, David Hicks, multiculturalism, the “stolen generation”, climate change, alternative energy and illegal migrants, contrasted with unswerving disapproval of John Howard, private schools, big business, the Pacific Solution, the British heritage, nuclear energy, Australia’s colonial past, the coal industry and Japanese whaling, and the culture is defined. For each of these the national broadcaster’s programmers conceive it their duty to lay a flare path to a moral and politically correct future.

Even when the BBC has been caught out in flagrant breach of its own guidelines, the staff has rallied to rationalise and excuse its conduct. In 2003, at a time when the British government was criticising the BBC for its biased reporting of the Iraq War, its Defence Correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, in the peak morning Today program, said that the British government had “sexed up” the report of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by adding the claim that they could be made ready in forty-five minutes. He relied on an unnamed source, who was later revealed as Dr David Kelly, a former weapons inspector. When unmasked, Kelly committed suicide. A judicial inquiry presided over by Lord Hutton heavily criticised the BBC for Gilligan’s loose report which had cost Kelly his life, and upheld the government’s complaint, in what was in effect, a libel trial. But nobody seemed repentant. When the Chairman, Gavyn Davies, and Director-General, Greg Dyke, deservedly lost their jobs for defending Gilligan without investigating, staff staged what Aitken calls “ill-judged displays of loyalty towards Dyke” which extended from the Television Centre newsroom to the streets of London. Dyke resigned saying, “we got it mostly right”, and later wrote to the BBC governors claiming he had been tricked into resigning and asking for his job back. Gilligan, who had relied on one source for his information, instead of the two required under the guidelines (and got that wrong), still considers himself wronged.

There was a surprising echo of solidarity from within the ABC. In October the same year a Big Ideas program featured an unquestioning interview with Greg Dyke, in which he continued to protest that the whole affair was over the editorial independence and integrity of the BBC. This was the theme of his book Inside Story and the interviewer was Romana Koval—not a journalist who might have been expected to challenge Dyke, but the presenter of a cultural program, Books and Writing. The nastiness of the spin that Dyke (who had donated £50,000 to the Labour Party before being appointed Director-General) imparted to his account may be judged from this reply in the ABC interview:

I think basically Hutton had decided his position long before he started the inquiry. I don’t think Hutton is a corrupt man in any way at all. But I think Hutton was chosen for the sort of man he was. He’s a Northern Ireland judge. He’d lived with the Security Services for many years, who protected him. And if you wanted someone who was going to make sure that the Security Services weren’t criticised, you’d choose Hutton.

This interview was a perfect example of impartiality being jettisoned in what the ABC now categorises as an opinion program. Alistener who had not read the Hutton Report would reasonably have assumed it was a fair summary of events. There was never likely to be another program with an opposing view to Dyke’s statements, so balance would not be achieved through Mark Scott’s promised plurality of views over reasonable time. The proper course was for Dyke to have been interviewed by a journalist capable of challenging his interpretations and pointing out his errors of fact. But it suited the ABC culture, as it had suited the BBC’s, to present Dyke as a doughty defender of independent public broadcasting.

JUST WHAT THE PUBLIC really thinks of its public broadcasters has rarely been properly tested. Aitken comments that the BBC gives the impression of being so pleased with itself it finds it difficult to comprehend how arrogant it appears to those it marginalises. That could well apply also to the ABC, which quotes simplistic surveys showing the public trusts it, and handily trots out statistics to show how few of the complaints it receives are upheld. (It doesn’t like to be reminded that a staggering 25 per cent of the government’s complaints about its current affairs coverage of the first Gulf conflict were found to be justified.) But the BBC has increasingly shown itself concerned to buttress its proud claims to impartiality. The Neil Report (2004) after the Hutton inquiry, and the 2005 Wilson Committee’s report into BBC attitudes to Europe severely dented this pride. Wilson concluded that the BBC was systematically Europhile and had excluded anti-EU voices. As Graham Ellis, a BBC controller, commented in the Neil Report, “‘Impartiality’ is not an exact science but at its simplest, it’s about not taking sides.” Another independent panel report, into the impartiality of the BBC’s business coverage, did not find systematic bias, but saw “a number of individual lapses and identified trends which led to repeated breaches of the BBC’s standards”.

John Bridcut, an independent programmer who once worked for the BBC, went further, pointing out that the original meaning of impartial was “incomplete”. Bridcut wrote the 2007 report for the BBC Trustees’ Impartiality Steering Group, rather pompously and meaninglessly entitled “From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel”. The Group sampled public opinion as well as talking to broadcasters inside and outside the BBC. In the Ipsos- Mori survey it commissioned, 84 per cent of the sample agreed strongly with the proposition that impartiality is difficult to achieve, but broadcasters must try very hard for it. A clear majority of 61 per cent agreed that broadcasters might think they give a fair and informed view, but a lot of the time they don’t. Views were even stronger on news programs, 96 per cent of respondents believing journalists should stay open-minded and not make assumptions or judgments about people or events; 38 per cent believed it was “vital”. Out of the Group’s work, Bridcut enunciated twelve guiding principles, which the ABC could do well to adopt. In the context of this discussion, perhaps the most important is Point 9: “Impartiality can often be affected by the stance and experience of programme-makers, who need constantly to examine and challenge their own assumptions.”

As to how to go about it, Bridcut resorted to a powerful analogy:

Imagine twelve bottles on the alchemist’s shelf, with the following labels: Accuracy, Balance, Context, Distance, Even-handedness, Fairness, Objectivity, Open-mindedness, Rigour, Self- Awareness, Transparency and Truth. None of these on its own could legitimately be re-labelled Impartiality. But all the bottles are essential elements in the Impartiality compound, and it is the task of the alchemist, the programme-maker, to mix them in a complex cocktail.

From the beginning, Mark Scott has had the wisdom to see that new Editorial Guidelines would not in themselves ensure the ABC’s impartiality as a broadcaster and generator of content. In that initial speech he foreshadowed a role for an internal auditor, and later appointed Paul Chadwick as Director of Editorial Policies. Chadwick, a lawyer, Victorian Privacy Commissioner and former journalist, immediately signalled his willingness to tackle these difficult questions in an article in the Walkley Magazine in February 2007. Quoting the BBC’s founder Lord Reith in 1930: “when people feel deeply, impartiality is bias”, he went on to suggest that in a program in which the producer had included several different viewpoints, some contrary to one’s own, this impartiality might appear to be bias.

If Lord Reith’s simplistic definition was unfortunate, Chadwick’s interpretation of bias seemed decidedly unhelpful in the ABC’s attempts to achieve impartiality. It is precisely the lack of impartiality and balance in a broadcast that the lawyer’s “reasonable man” test would identify as bias. But here we enter into circular legal argumentation. Late last year, Chadwick had a more detailed look at the issue. In a paper entitled “The Elements of Impartiality” he proposed that impartiality within the ABC required at minimum: accuracy, fairness, balance, context, and no conflicts or prejudgment. It is similar to Bridcut’s and most could agree that it is a workable prescription.

But unfortunately that paper slithered around the concept of bias without defining it. It was fair enough for him to observe that a lack of accuracy or balance in a program might not imply bias in the individual responsible. But he went on: “Only when the internal traits such as open-mindedness are found on reasonable grounds to be wanting does it become possible for anyone judging the matter to conclude that bias was actually operating.” This questionable interpretation is highly significant for people who might wish to complain about an ABC program. Bias is the word most ordinarily used in serious complaints. According to Chadwick, a complaint of bias can be upheld only if a lack of open-mindedness can be established. Without evidence of personal predilections which might be proven responsible for a program’s distortions, a complainant would be well advised not to mention the word bias, but to argue the case on the basis of breaches of one or more of Chadwick’s five precepts.

Which brings us to the third leg of quality control in the national broadcaster’s structure—the complaints procedure. It is complex, bureaucratic, slow and, as instanced above, excessively legalistic. The serious complainant rarely goes the full distance of possible appeals, exhausted and convinced the organisation is fighting a defensive war of attrition. The ABC’s boast that it has the most comprehensive complaints system of any media organisation in Australia may be true, but is it workable and working? There are five levels available to a complainant: to the originating program unit; Audience and Consumer Affairs (which may seek a response from the program unit); the Complaints Review Executive (an ABC officer); the Independent Complaints Review Panel (which may or may not accept an appeal); and finally to the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Someone willing to go this whole journey (as I did once) needs to set aside the best part of a year to see it through.

The BBC’s recognition that “justice delayed is justice denied” was one of the reasons for the comprehensive restructuring of its complaints process which came into effect in January 2007. An internal Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) still provides the first review of a complaint, but an appeal now goes, not to the BBC governors but to the Editorial Standards Committee (ESC) of the newly-established totally independent BBC Trust. Under a chairman who is a professor of journalism and a former editor-in-chief of ITN, the Committee offers several features not available in Australia. Before it begins its adjudication, it sends both parties the briefing notes prepared by its secretariat; in serious cases, it may hold oral hearings in which the complainant can take part; it reports its findings direct to the complainant and publishes them monthly online. And it has power to initiate enquiries and to recommend changes and improvements to editorial standards. The committee has shown itself intolerant of tardiness. In the latest reported appeals, it upheld only two of the nine complaints on editorial grounds, but made five adverse findings against the BBC for its handling of the complaints.

The ABC is now charting an ambitious future in the digital age, which at last will give it the bandwidth to emulate the BBC’s range of services. A streamlining of the complaints system is sorely needed if credibility is to keep pace with technology. The five-step process that is so time-consuming could be reduced to two. A properly- staffed internal complaints unit, independent of Audience and Consumer Affairs, should handle all first critical contacts. Appeals from adverse findings should go to a new independent tribunal set up on the lines of the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee. It should have no fewer than five members, appointed for their intelligence and common sense—people who understand what words mean—and at least some with a journalistic or broadcasting background. The task is not essentially a legal one; legal expertise should be limited to a support function.

Although it has not yet been announced publicly, the ABC’s Chairman, Maurice Newman, assisted by Paul Chadwick, will review these procedures later this year. The process has been carefully explained to senior staff in bland and non-threatening terms as “a look into all the ABC’s self-regulation systems and structures to ensure it best serves our audiences”. Much will depend on how bold the reviewers are prepared to be; the credibility of the complaints system depends on the outcome. One reform that could well be adopted from the BBC is greater transparency, with the full details of all complaints easily accessible on the ABC website.

A few months ago the ABC invited Sir Ninian Stephen, former High Court judge and Governor- General to put down his thoughts on two of its cherished gateposts, “independence” and “integrity”:

Mere independence, in the sense of freedom from the domination of another, may be turned either to good or to evil use. It is no more than the statement of a negative. Integrity, on the other hand, is a positive quality of high significance, with no negative element about it. The happy outcome is attained when the freedom of action made possible by independence is exercised with integrity.

It would be difficult to find words that better encapsulate the character Mark Scott is reaching for in the national broadcaster. Will the three pillars—revised Editorial Guidelines, internal supervision of editorial policies and fairer complaints procedures—be able to overcome the dead weight of entrenched culture? Will these brave reforms lead to the restoration of a word that has been absent from the ABC lexicon for some decades—discipline? Will the public respond with renewed energy in surveillance to “keep the bastards honest”? If the BBC experience is any precedent, the answer is—not likely.

Can we trust the ABC? Not quite yet.

Geoffrey Luck’s memoir of his days as an ABC journalist in central western Queensland appeared in the April issue. A footnoted version of this article is available from the Quadrant office.