National broadcaster of the secular Left

Today, the Australian journalists′ union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, launches a nationwide campaign to "take a stand for the ABC".

In this stirring endeavour, the union is backed by the Australian Society of Authors, the Australian Screen Directors Association, the Australian Writers Guild and the Screen Producers Association of Australia.

Still, many Australians might think the ABC needs little defending. After all, with a $773 taxpayer-funded budget, an effectively self-governing work culture and a largely tame board, it faces no perceptible threat to its existence.

A recently announced federal Government review of the adequacy and efficient use of current ABC funding levels is the excuse for the MEAA campaign. The union is encouraging members to use the review to become lobbyists for increased ABC funding.

The aim is to give the ABC resources equivalent to those of its competitors in the commercial media. The union also wants the Government to mandate higher levels of Australian-made television content on the ABC.

All this and heaven too? According to the union′s rhetoric, an already powerful ABC is in fact a victim in urgent need of a good samaritan. The MEAA last week letterboxed its members around Australia with a glossy booklet painting a piteous picture of an ABC whose "dedicated staff" are hard-pressed by "the whittling away of [government] funding".

The booklet is titled "ABC: the Eyes and Ears of Australia". One claim it makes is that commercial networks are obliged to air 150-200 hours of new Australian drama per year, while the ABC, by contrast, is to broadcast less than 20 hours of new Australian drama in 2005.

This is presented as self-evidently bad. But is it?

In fact, a situation where commercial, not public broadcasters, must produce a higher quotient of local TV drama makes perfect sense.

The imposition of high local drama quotients on commercial networks acts as a restraining influence on the profit motive of those networks, forcing them to serve the national cultural interest by commissioning higher levels of work by Australian drama workers.

This is a principle that the union, with its members′ best interests at heart, presumably, would strongly support.

In fact, the union′s "Eyes and Ears" campaign seems designed instead to extend the power and prestige of the ABC within the Australian media.

Defenders of the current ABC management regime loudly deny the existence of any ideological bias within the national broadcaster. But the absence of market forces in the ABC′s non-ratings-driven operating environment logically means that some other factor must dominate its day-to-day working culture.

That factor is staff control. To the extent that ABC staff culture is influenced by the narrow middle-class values of the Australian secular Left, so also is the programming and content of ABC broadcasting.

Though stoutly denied by ABC management, this point is often registered by outsiders. The Sydney Institute, for example, has editorialised on the theme that ideological bias strongly influences the national broadcaster, despite the ABC′s regular giving of offence to both sides of Australian politics.

What ABC defenders "cannot understand is that the ABC has offended Liberal and Labor governments alike - but always from the Left", it said.

Others have noticed that the ABC′s ideological bent finds its most obvious expression in its lifestyle programs. This issue has been obscured recently by political controversy over ABC news and current affairs coverage of the Iraq war.

Anxious to defend its own decision to go to war, the Howard Government has prosecuted numerous complaints against the ABC′s reporting of the war. Like the war itself, this may prove to have been a tactical error by the Government.

Lessons can be drawn from overseas. It is a "canard of the Right that all BBC journos are lefties", wrote British journalist Stephen Moss in The Guardian recently. Moss was responding to former BBC staffer Robin Aitken, who famously said he could not raise a cricket team of Tories among BBC staff.

Moss cited a Cardiff journalism school study claiming that BBC coverage of Iraq was in fact too timid. On the weapons of mass destruction argument, for example, BBC journalists′ questioning of the Government was construed as too pro-establishment by the study.

This highlights the difficulty of hanging an accusation of bias against a public broadcaster purely on its coverage of the Iraq war.

A danger for the Howard Government in pursuing a political campaign against the ABC on the basis of its coverage of the Iraq war is that it may in fact, ultimately assist the enemy: the ABC itself. Whenever a minister attacks the broadcaster for "distorting" the truth on Iraq, it lays itself open to the same accusation in return.

More broadly, ABC bias is not fundamentally a question of news and current affairs coverage, but rather a problem of class sociology. ABC executive Sue Howard has referred to this as a vague sort of "middle-classness". More savage critics call it a hatred of the Australian masses and their conservative values.

If this analysis is correct, the only solution lies in teaching ABC staff greater awareness and greater respect for the values of all Australians, including conservative ones. ABC staff and management must come to realise that values which do not fit within a secular small-l liberal world view are indeed intellectually possible, and are in fact believed in by many of the members of the public whom they are paid to serve.