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…