Aunty′s entertainments warrant tougher scrutiny

NEW criticism of bias at the ABC has emerged this week from Queensland senator Santo Santoro. During a Senate estimates committee examination of ABC funding, Santoro slammed the public broadcaster not only for bias in its news and current affairs coverage but also for persistent hostility towards Australians who practise the traditional faith of the West, Christianity.

"Broadcasters continually make derogatory comments about Jesus, the Pope and Christianity in general in a way [that] I believe breaches the ABC′s own editorial policies and shows demonstrable bias," he said.

This follows further evidence of bias at ABC current affairs show Lateline, which last week lined up a succession of like-minded critics of the Howard Government′s anti-terrorism legislation over three nights without putting up a single acknowledgment - let alone a guest - supporting the fact most Australians demonstrably back these laws.

Egregious examples of the anti-Christian bias of the ABC derive not only from the broadcaster′s news and current affairs department but with greater impact from lifestyle programs such as comedy show The Glass House. The Glass House has given repeated offence to Christians with humour directed at the Pope and Mother Teresa.

It is today an open question as to which is more harmful to Australian intellectual culture: bias in the ABC′s news and current affairs coverage or bias in its lifestyle programming. My view is that the latter matters more. As far as imbalance in current affairs is concerned, as exemplified by last week′s Lateline coverage, it at least can be argued that few Australians will bother watching. Lateline is essentially of interest to those engaged full time in the business of politics: a small, if strategically important, segment of the population.

By contrast, non-news and current affairs programs, such as comedy and television drama, have the potential to reach and influence a far greater number of adult Australians. If bias exists here - in the form of agendas openly hostile to the values of significant sections of the population - then Australia has a real problem with its national broadcaster. This, I believe, is the existing situation.

American critics have referred to similar problems in their country as "the culture wars". At the heart of the culture war argument is the insight of influential 20th-century Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who argued that to change society you need to change society′s consciousness. In an affluent capitalist economy, that task essentially means "capturing the culture" through an ideological monopoly of the arts and the media. Entertainment, particularly cinema and TV drama, is a strategically vital part of the media, from the point of view of this wider project.

As observed by Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, maker of Battleship Potemkin, the motion picture is the most powerful means of political propaganda in history. Lenin agreed, saying that "of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important".

Lenin′s insight remains entirely valid - indeed, crucial - in today′s era of multiplex cinemas, TV drama and DVDs. It also increases the necessity of carefully sifting the entertainment product that is being made in Australia today and, even more important, who is making it.

A push is on by self-styled "ABC supporters" to increase the funding available for drama production at the national broadcaster.

Playwright Bill Garner led the charge with an opinion piece in The Age on October 20 arguing that Australian drama is in a precariously bad state and suggesting that this problem is intimately linked with the lack of drama produced by the ABC. "At ABC TV, although there are some drama projects in development, production has virtually ceased," Garner writes. "Without TV drama, the ABC loses one of its reasons for existing."

In a week when the top-rating program on national TV (behind the Melbourne Cup) is a privately funded, internationally co-produced drama series celebrating the life and courage of one of Australia′s pioneering convict women - Mary Bryant, on Ten - this is a significant assertion.

Mary Bryant attracted 1.6 million viewers in mainland capitals on Sunday night, making it the nation′s most watched program.

The ratings success of this historical drama is not only a welcome reminder that stories celebrating Australia′s past can engage a mass audience, it is also a pointed indication that the presentation of such stories need not promote a black-armband view of history.

However, Mary Bryant is unlikely to have been made at the ABC. At the very least, it could only have been made with the addition of extra scenes featuring the massacre of blacks, environmental carnage by the settler-convicts and a sermon against marriage by leading lady Romola Garai.

Mary Bryant did none of these things. Instead it told the story, admittedly with some artistic licence, of a historical married couple who escaped from Botany Bay and paid an enormous human price for their love of liberty. It was a program that hopefully has excited further public interest in our past - a task the ABC should perform but doesn′t - without further fomenting public feelings of guilt about that past, a task the ABC shouldn′t perform but does.

Contrast Mary Bryant with the much lauded, ABC-made historical drama series Changi by John Doyle, a show hailed by its promoters as "a gem of national historical consciousness". Changi showed Australian World War II prisoners as cynical, irreligious wisecrackers.

It also presented an extraordinarily soft portrait of the famously brutal wartime Japanese troops who held Australians prisoner.

Doyle′s Changi seemed to be motivated by a multicultural desire not to give offence to today′s Japanese and to rewrite the psychology of Australians in World War II, many of whom survived through the strength of their Christian faith.

The message about our past, and about our identity as Australians, could not have been more different.

There is no case for increased taxpayer spending on drama at the ABC. Rather, there is an urgent need for tighter, tougher scrutiny of more than $700 million in taxation revenue the national broadcaster already receives.