The party line at Their ABC

q&a party line tweetFor some reason — empire-building, actually — the ABC decided it really needed to get into the opinion business. Not content with launching The Drum, which today features a learned academic who argues that terror suspects don’t need to be locked up,  Mark Scott also has been very keen for the national-broadcaster to leave its size-13 taxpayer-funded footprint all over the internet. This was his justification for shutting rural news bureaus in order to spend those savings on tweets and other cyber wotnots.

Above, you will see one  manifestation of this policy. A tweet from an ABC elf on the Q&A staff, it might strike some as advancing a particularly partisan point of view — a clear violation of the much-violated ABC Charter. But since Scott has been allowed to get away with honouring his broadcaster’s statutory obligations only in the breach, and because board members do nothing more energetic than collect their per diems, it is business very much as usual.

Still, those of us who hanker for the return of decent journalism should take heart. While the ABC plays to the green-left constituency, whose cause it tirelessly espouses, it is also robbing market share from Fairfax Media, where the level of ambient intelligence has declined to such an extent that the headline below was today presented as one of the lead stories on the Age and SMH websites.

sheltered workshop J-school grad undoubtedly

If the ABC continues to firm its grip on the nitwit demographic and in the process drive Fairfax into receivership — and, ideally, the arms of a new proprietor — we might just get to see a media organisation step back through the looking glass and resume its former place as a sane and adult source of commentary on national and global affairs.

After that, who knows? We might even see a government with the spine to make the ABC clean up its own stable. Well, one can hope.

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