The ABC’s Grumpy and Abusive Fellow Travellers

It’s possible to feel sorry for ABC managers and presenters, so often attacked for bias. These criticisms leave them distraught, little more than human wreckage. I’m not referring to mild critiques from Quadrant, like my Referendum one, where ABC crews were unable to find a single No voter in the northern outback despite weeks of searching.[1] The ABC laughs this stuff off. The attacks they anguish about are from the army of far-left/green trolls who view the billion-dollar ABC behemoth — with some justification — as their mouthpiece.

For these trolls it’s a crime for the ABC ever to allow a conservative on their ABC platform. If someone like Tony Abbott gets on by mistake, the trolls demand blood and gore, not an interview.

My ABC sympathies arose from a reading of material, including speeches in the past month by Leigh Sales (her Andrew Olle Memorial Lecture, Oct 27), and another by managing director David Anderson (to ABC Friends Victoria Nov 17). I’ll first background the trolling, then look at how Sales and Anderson, in that order, view the trustworthiness of the ABC.

The trolls give editorial policies manager Mark Maley the heebie-jeebies. He’s just done a report (60 pages) asserting the ABC’s Voice referendum coverage was splendidly impartial, responsible, high-quality, respectful and accurate. He did note that the Yes crowd got 51% ABC airtime compared with 23 per cent for Noes, who were perverse enough at the polling booths to garner 60 per cent of the actual votes. In passing, Maley mentions,

Q+A also had a deluge of trolling on social media. Posts had to be carefully moderated and often comments had to be closed off because of their volume and viciousness. The trolling is often a disincentive to people joining the panel because they know they will be inundated on socials. (p5, my emphasis).

Maley doesn’t say so, but the trolls were obviously from the Left. He makes no references to Yes types being hard to recruit for QandA or pulling out. The talent that avoided appearing on QandA were ‘No’ types like Warren Mundine, who pulled out twice, and Jacinta Price and Senator Kerrynne Liddle, both invited but refusing just about every week of the campaign. Ms Price was actually invited at least 52 times but somehow wasn’t tempted to step into the ABC snake pit.

I went looking for troll messaging on the QandA Facebook site where Pat Karvelas hosted referendum chat, but there were only harmless glimpses, for example, “It was like watching [Murdoch’s] Sky News.”

ABC management policies enforcer Leigh Sales[2] has bemoaned the trolling for more than two years. Her piece about it on ABC News itself in 2021 was headed, “Bullying on Twitter has become unhinged. It’s time to call out the personal, sexist attacks.” Among the feral-left trolling she’d got were accusations of “performing sexual acts on Liberal men. Yes, people do say that.” She also disclosed that leftist trolls had run a campaign against one of the Canberra bureau’s females, falsely accusing her of having an affair with a Liberal politician. Even Fran Kelly and Patricia Karvelas were trolled as right-wing plants within the ABC, as if.

Sales also condemned the trolls for piling on to any questioning of covid vaccines and lockdowns – an inadvertent illustration of the green-left’s tyrannical instincts. She wrote, 

Something has changed recently which is making political bullying far more insidious and increasingly challenging to bear. It is that the bullying and harassment now comes, not in an occasional phone call from a real person, but at a furious pace on social media from politicians’ acolytes, lackeys, fans and proxies, mostly — but not always — operating anonymously. It is non-stop, personal, often vile, frequently unhinged and regularly based on fabrications. It has the effect of an angry phone call from a politician magnified thousands of times over…

Let’s not duck the common thread here — it is overwhelmingly left-leaning Twitter users who are targeting ABC journalists for abuse. Of course, there are right-wing attacks too but the most ferocious campaigns are reserved for any journalist who questions, in even the most anodyne manner, the policies or public statements of Labor politicians, particularly the Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, the Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and the West Australian Premier Mark McGowan. (My emphases).

Other journalists seem less worried about trolling. In her recent book Storytellers, Sales quotes The Australian’s star writer Hedley Thomas,

I don’t care about making lots of friends in journalism. If I upset people with something I write, I don’t care. Like, Twitter? Twatter. I’m not on it, it doesn’t bother me. Too many journalists have become hostages to what they think is the perception of them by ugly, agenda-driven apparatchiks, and others on social media platforms. If you pull your punches because you fear you might get people offside and be the subject of a pile-on, that’s a big problem. (P108, my emphasis).

In her lecture a month ago, Sales explained the intimidating effect that the ABC’s trolls aimed at. She said that during her coverage of the same-sex marriage debate of 2017, merely to give a ‘No’ campaigner a say involved serious courage — and afterwards she was touched and grateful when a gay staffer re-assured her it was all OK. “I share this to illustrate that while I believe journalists must forfeit the citizen’s right to activism, I’m not saying it’s easy,” she explained.[3]

When she gave her Andrew Olle address, this year’s Voice referendum had just been defeated. Doubtless many ABC journos were conflicted between smooching their Aborigine-identifying pals and giving the No case a fair trot.

Editorial director Maley has provided a reasonably fact-based report on the ABC’s referendum coverage, though larded with self-praise like “fulfilled our role/high-quality/respectful discussion/reporting accurately and fairly/responsible/impartial.” The guts, however, was in the third-party survey data in his report:

Overall, by exposure time – Yes case, 51%, No case 23%.

ABC Radio: Yes 47%, No 21%.

ABC TV: Yes 59%, No 28%.

ABC OnLine News: Yes 50%, No 24%.

ABC National TV – Evening News: Yes 42%, No 36%.

ABC National TV News – Yes 56.5%, No 32%.

Complaints to the ABC Ombudsperson Fiona Cameron: Total 383. Investigated, 121. Validated, 4 (all concerning a 7pm TV bulletin mis-statement that the 1967 Referendum gave Aborigines the vote – who let that howler through?). Fixed by corrections etc, 5. Complaints into her shredder, 112.

Maley had a variety of explanations for the data disparities, including that many ABC regulars (and voxpop interviewees from everyday communities) were fearful of being identified on the ABC as No supporters (why would that be?).[4] He found that of the prominent voices, ‘No’ people (eg Jacinta Price) were equal pegging with the Yes ones (eg Linda Burney), notwithstanding that No campaigners tended to shun the ABC.

Sales’ speech was on October 27; Anderson’s followed on November 17. Sales gets it about the ABC; Anderson doesn’t. That’s ironic because Sales is not even on half of Anderson’s pay of $1.16m.[5] Since Sales dislikes her views being taken out of context, I’ll consider both talks in detail.

WHEN Sales was invited to give the talk, she declined: “Do they really want me to say what I actually think? That’s what it is to step into the arena in 2023.” She was then persuaded by pressure from chair Ita Buttrose and Anderson. An extract is suggestive of her reluctance:

My own honest opinion as to why many people are losing interest in the news? Because … people rightly don’t always trust us any more. Too often, too many journalists, at all media organisations, are abandoning values espoused by people like Andrew Olle, for various reasons.

One is that some reporters prefer to be activists and crusaders rather than fact-finders or straight reporters. They enjoy their heroic status among the tribes of social media or their subscribers. I’m not sure they can even identify their own bias.

Others haven’t had enough training to understand what independent journalism actually is, or their organisation has an ideological bias and the reporter knows the way to get ahead is to toe the line … better still, to step over it. Or perhaps it’s awkward and exhausting to constantly push back against the groupthink of your colleagues.

Another reason is fear of the consequences of reporting the full picture: that inconvenient facts could set back a cause the journalist believes in … I believe that becoming a journalist means you relinquish the right to be an activist, even on important issues you really care about … When I see reporters whose work always somehow lines up with one side of an issue that’s complicated, I know I’m seeing activism, not journalism. It erodes my trust in what they’re telling me …

According to Roy Morgan Research, the ABC is Australia’s most trusted media organisation. But let’s be honest, all media organisations, from the ABC to News Corp, are being affected by news avoidance and declining audience trust.

The media overall is close to the bottom of the trust index. The ABC is currently the 18th most trusted brand in Australia, while News Corp is the 4th most DIStrusted. Back in 2019, the ABC was fifth most trusted. 

Let’s have the guts to look that in the face. It’s incumbent on every individual journalist in every newsroom, and I include myself in that of course, to ask ourselves, are WE doing something that’s causing audiences to avoid the news and to trust us less? If we’re too scared to scrutinise that, and to examine the issues we choose to emphasise and how we go about reporting stories and to perhaps have some awkward conversations about that, then we compromise our integrity.” (My emphases).

In contrast, David Anderson had all the resonance of Comical Ali, Saddam Hussein’s Information Minister in Baghdad. Ali proclaimed victory on TV even as US armour rumbled into the city.

On Gaza, Anderson said Australia can be “enormously proud” of the trustworthy and impartial ABC coverage and its appropriate historical context. At least 5000 viewers have disagreed, complaining to the ABC about its pro-Hamas bias and distortions. The petitioners accused the ABC of fostering a “staggering” rise in anti-Semitic incidents, and breaching its impartiality charter and damaging social harmony.

Meanwhile, a couple of hundred rowdy ABC staffers vented anger in Sydney on November 8 at the ABC not being pro-Hamas enough. The SMH reported them wanting to lard ABC coverage with terms like Israeli “invasion”, “genocide”, “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing”. Editorial policies manager Maley, in appeasement mode, told them that Israeli war crimes were “obviously a credible allegation … it’s an opinion which has got enough basis, in fact, that it’s credible enough for us to be reporting it.”

The Muslim and Arab-background journalists also complained that the alleged ABC pro-Israel bias was harming their reputations in their communities: “Another staff member voiced concerns the broadcaster has made ‘possibly irreparable damage’ to the trust it has built with the Australian Muslim community over the years with its reporting.”

Let’s look at one example of ABC Gaza coverage, Hamas mainstream strategy of human shields. As I’ve mentioned previously, our household is a regular viewer of flagship ABCTV 7pm News. Night after night the Gaza segment shows bombed, injured and suffering civilians. A trope involves a Gazan male rushing into a hospital carrying a child victim of bombing. The clip implies a child’s life-or-death crisis from Israeli brutality. We’ve seen so many varieties of this trope that we have to wonder if they’re Pallywood productions. Whether or not that’s so, all video out of Gaza is either vetted by Hamas or self-censored – if you transmit anything unfavourable to Hamas, you’ll cop a bullet or worse.[6]

Out of curiosity, I checked the ABC search box for “human shields”. This turned up all of eight mentions since October 7: two quoting the IDF, two quoting Israel’s PM Netanyahu, one merely talking about human shields as an abstract concept and one each quoting the UN’s chief clown Antonio Guterres, a US journalist-interviewee, and a US human rights professor. (The professor was actually urging Israel not to attack any Hamas centre protected by human shields, because Israel was historically blameworthy for the conflict) [7]. Apparently ABC reporters themselves will not use the “human shields” expression concerning Hamas though they used it happily in regard to ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

On the ABC generally, Anderson’s good news was surveys showing that in the past year the public rating of the ABC as “good” had climbed from 78 per cent to 81 per cent, and trust in the ABC was up from 77 per cent to 79 per cent. His figures are from the ABC’s Corporate Tracking Survey each four months, involving online sampling of about 4500 people aged 18-75.[8] It also gets top marks for trust from the green-leftist Australia Institute, which the ABC is forever quoting as an authority on whatever comes up day by day.[9]

Anderson said that the ABC was the top-ranked broadcaster in fiscal 2022 with 6.8 million metro viewers (his annual $1billion-plus from taxpayers must have help) and ABC Radio had grown its reach 14 per cent in the past decade (Whoops! Australia’s population grew 16.5 per cent). But he conceded that on the 2023 global Edelman Trust Barometer, Australia was on a path to polarisation and weakening of the social fabric. Half respondents (51 per cent) blamed journalists for the division, slightly more than the 49 per cent blaming government. “That’s worth thinking about,” Anderson mused, overlooking the ABC’s effective deplatforming of conservative think tanks Institute of Public Affairs, Centre for Independent Studies and Menzies Institute, in favour of Australia Institute, Grattan Institute and countless academics of progressive persuasion. He didn’t mention an awkward Edelman figure that trust in the Australian media overall was down 5 per cent to 38 per cent (p44).

Anderson claims ABC impartiality is based on the facts and the weight of evidence from credible sources. He’s forgotten how the ABC witch-hunted the late Cardinal Pell, who unjustly spent 406 days in gaol after the pile-on by Dan Andrews and Victoria Police, with the ABC as their cheer squad. It was on Anderson’s say-so that $200,000 of taxpayer money was misdirected to pay off reporter Louise Milligan’s bills for defaming Liberal MHR Andrew Laming in posts on her private account.

As usual, Anderson lauded ABC diversity while ignoring its political monoculture of wall-to-wall leftist presenters. His ABC has just lost its last conservatives Tom Switzer (Between the Lines host) and Amanda Vanstone (Radio National’s Counterpoint). The Financial Review’s Aaron Patrick and The Australian’s excellent Adam Creighton were earlier cancelled by The Drum for speaking out of line, according to Gerard Henderson at the Sydney Institute.

 Anderson did fret that the ABC might be exacerbating divisions in the community – by not being leftist enough! He believes, for example, that young people want even more spending to change the weather than Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen is currently wasting.

On US reporting, Anderson put the boots into Fox News – Sarah Ferguson already had multiple goes at that one on Four Corners and for her pains got a rocket from ethics guardian ACMA. Sure, Fox News highlighted 2020 election frauds – which probably weren’t big enough to be a decider. The deep-state and legacy-media coverup of Hunter Biden’s laptop, on the other hand, might well have done the trick for the Democrats. Unlike the New York Times and Washington Post, the ABC has yet to even admit and correct its reports that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.[10]

Re glass houses, Anderson also forgot about Sarah Ferguson’s 2018 “Story of the Century” on mythical Trump/Russia collusion, together with the ABC’s four years of Democrat-sourced lies about it. And the Biden crime family’s money-harvesting from China and Ukraine continues to be resolutely ignored by Anderson’s ABC.

Heavens, it’s time for my household to watch the 7pm News coverage of Gaza again. We’re sure they’ll mention the “human shields” aspect this time.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] In the ABC piece’s two minutes we see 13 “VOTE YES! ” signs, three “VOTE YES!” T-shirts, two “VOTE YES!” flyers, and the ABC finds three vox-poppers to deliver YES messaging. The ABC’s score for the “NO” camp: zero, zero, zero, and zero respectively.

[2] Leigh Sales supplied ABC presenters and reporters with scripts to be delivered with a straight face: Ms X, respectfully, I’ll correct your claim that the Uluru statement is a 26-page document. It is a one-page document, the other 25 pages were minutes collected during a consultation phase [as if!] that do not form part of the final document.” If any punter pushes back, Sales’ script went, “It is inaccurate to suggest I am correcting the record because the ABC is ‘biased’ ” or “The ABC is far from the only organisation to call out the spread of this misinformation.

[3] Sales found reporting the same-sex-marriage debate to be the hardest task in her entire career, “because of how much I love my LGBTQI friends and how important that issue was to them.”

[4] Maley: “Local Radio also consistently recorded difficulty getting No voices on talkback even in communities which ultimately recorded high No votes.”

[5] Sales says the high pay for TV anchors reflects their often precarious tenure: “The position is subject to intense scrutiny and can be short – lived .” (Storytellers, p277). Her own tenure at 7.30 lasted a decade, ending in 2022. Hence she adds, “The flipside is that a skilled anchor can turn their programs – and themselves – into beloved and trusted public institutions .” She also remarks about hesitating to see a London show in the West End, “And then I was full of self-loathing because I was like , ‘ You are such an entitled moll because look at you, you’ve got the money to go and see one of the world’s great shows.’ (Well Hello, p478).

[6] The ABC quickly rotated its Middle East correspondent Tom Joyner out of Israel after he told 600 media reps on WhatsApp that the baby-beheadings were “bullshit”.

[7] Andrew West (ABC) introduced the segment: Now as we were completing the show, Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad were blaming each other for a missile strike on a hospital in Gaza that’s killed at least 500 people [what a ridiculous recycling of Hamas propaganda].

On human shields, Professor Samuel Moyn, Yale University, replies: “Now, someone might say, well, that means that Israel can’t ever attack, because Hamas is going to operate in ways that raise the levels of likely harm from any Israeli attack, such that it outweighs any military objective. I guess I would respond, well, that’s a situation in which Israel was involved in creating. This is a tiny piece of land. It’s been under de facto or even according to some de jure occupation for so long. I’m not sure we should want to have the view that Hamas’s activity should allow Israel to leave the moral high ground when it comes to protecting civilians. It has to fight consistent with these rules, or it has to explain why not.” 

[8] The ABC’s submission to the federal government’s transparency portal gives minimal information about this Corporate Tracking Survey.

[9] “Research from the Australia Institute, the independent public policy think tank, consistently shows that the ABC is the most trusted source of news in the country.” ABC annual report 2022, p2

[10] The ABC’s last significant mention of the all-too-real laptop contents was three years ago, in an exculpatory piece headed, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden have been accused of corruption, but there’s good reason to be sceptical