The radicalisation of the ABC

AS the prime minister, Robert Menzies, was turning 70, the old guard was losing its grip on the nation's cultural levers. The media landscape was changing rapidly.

 Frank Packer's The Bulletin under editor Donald Horne, and later Peter Coleman, had become a robust contributor to the national debate; Rupert Murdoch's The Australian had been launched in July that year, pledging to make its core business "vigour, truth and information without dullness"; The Canberra Times had been bought and refurbished by The Sydney Morning Herald; in Melbourne, 26-year-old Cambridge-educated Ranald Macdonald had become managing director of The Age and was easing out its conservative editor, Keith Sinclair.

In December 1964, The Australian ran extracts from a new book by Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, in which it noted that journalism in Australia was gaining a new edge, "produced by university educated men [who were] bringing new kinds of people on to their staff". As the developing cult of youth dismissed anything that had gone before, the ABC looked increasingly old-fashioned.

Restraint was the default setting at the public broadcaster; when public passions ran hot, the commission's task was to cool them. In February 1967, the respectable middle class took to the streets outside Melbourne's Pentridge Prison in their thousands to urge a reprieve for Ronald Ryan, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a prison officer. On the morning of the hanging, newspapers competed to be first with special editions bearing eye-witness accounts of the killer's final minutes, the slamming of the trapdoor and the jerk of the noose.

That night on the ABC's Sydney TV bulletin, the head of news, Keith Fraser, placed the story second to a forgettable report about links between Australian and Asian trade unions.

Even The Sydney Morning Herald, the most conservative broadsheet of the day, was shocked. Its TV critic, Harry Robinson, wrote: "By what trembling timidity can such a vague plan be put up as more important than the climax of a national dilemma?'

It was into this cautious culture that the ABC launched This Day Tonight in April 1967, staffed by salaried bohemians bursting with conceit.

"We had lots of cheek, lots of hide and lots of pride," said presenter Bill Peach. "We were mostly young, mostly idealistic, and we had the sort of bias that goes with that, the bias towards freedom, justice and truth." These were the people Horne had proclaimed as "the nation's immediate hope, and might become the generation that changed Australia".

They were graduates in their 20s and early 30s, who had grown up in sheltered affluence and had never experienced war or depression. Yet to Horne they understood "the demands of the age better and [saw] life in more complicated terms than the men they [were] trying to replace".

Menzies had given them a university education, and in return they despised almost everything he stood for and "the stiff-necked carrying on of old ways based on enervated wisdoms". To them, the lowered eyes and scripted language of the grey men on television betrayed a "lack of excitement about the problems of the modern world; the meticulous muddling around with trivia; the symptoms of a lost generation".

Even before TDT went to air, there was widespread expectation that it would break the mould of public-service broadcasting. Sam Lipski wrote in The Bulletin: "One question remains . . . how free from political pressure, real or imagined, will the Tonight team be? More than for any other program the ABC has launched since television began in Australia, the answer will be crucial."

The Daily Mirror tipped Allan Ashbolt as the program's chief, but events behind the scenes had made it impossible for ABC management to risk putting him in charge of such a high-profile program, as his ASIO file reveals. On May 31, 1966, WM Phillips, the deputy director-general of ASIO's NSW operations, told general manager Talbot Duckmanton in confidence of their concerns that the Communist Party of Australia was attempting to infiltrate the ABC and that Ashbolt was their point of contact. Duckmanton thanked him for the advice, describing it as "most worrying". Shortly afterwards, Ashbolt was moved from current affairs to become head of special projects.

He was to use the unit's Kings Cross offices as a nursery for a radical class of public broadcasters who saw themselves in the vanguard of a war of independence, launching what Ashbolt later described as "a guerilla campaign" against the ABC, "an ideological arm of the capitalist state machinery". His ideal ABC would be run essentially as a workers' collective in which power would be removed from the ABC commissioners and handed over to its employees. Quality, creative and budget control would be put entirely in the hands of the program makers, leaving the commissioners free to enjoy their claret in the boardroom of "Bullshit Castle", as Ashbolt liked to call Broadcast House.

In April 1967, talkback radio began on the commercial stations 2SM and 3AW, and in September ABC radio launched AM, a technically ambitious morning current affairs program, which offered journalists more freedom of expression than a choreographed news bulletin.

That same month, Peach presented the first edition of This Day Tonight, introducing a style of TV journalism new to Australia: investigative, prosecutorial, entertaining and declamatory. His generation was reinventing public broadcasting as it went along, encountering little resistance from management or the commission (the name then given to the board). To a restless, educated middle class, for whom the ABC's bland neutrality seemed like conservative connivance, the formula was appealing. "We were ruder than we should have been; and we were more assertive than we should have been," recalled Stuart Littlemore. "But there is no question the program dragged television journalism into adulthood by its ears."

Peach admitted later that the show was "outrageously self-indulgent".

"No doubt we were mightily swollen and self-righteous . . . and believed we knew everything." Paul Murphy credited TDT with helping to "shake a nation out of its Menzian, afternoon light . . . and actually contemplate an Australia which could experiment with a Labor government again". David Salter said TDT's hard-edged journalism "had clearly been part of tipping out the McMahon government", while Peter Ross boasted that it was "always on the side of the angels".

The introduction of regular TV current affairs programming rendered useless the conventions of equal time and the right of reply; stance, tone, gesture, inflection or irony were not recorded in the transcript. A mere twitch of an eyebrow from TDT's compere could "throw the whole item hopelessly out of balance", Clement Semmler later wrote.

Cultural conservatives faced an asymmetrical foe: TDT was not fighting on the political front but along the cultural divide. Those who challenged its moral prejudices found themselves branded as reactionary, behind the times or (heaven forbid) humourless.

Academic George Shipp studied 87 TDT segments recorded over four weeks in 1971 and discovered coded opposition to the Vietnam War. The producers' decision to screen six items in six days on the My Lai massacre could have had only one purpose: "To demonstrate the immensity of human suffering caused by the war, the generally dehumanising effects it has had on participants, particularly the Americans."

On the recognition of China and the sale of wheat to China, Shipp observed "nothing less than a campaign". On Aboriginal rights, "the TDT team clearly felt so strongly that it was on the side of the gods, that this was not a matter of controversy at all".

Answering Shipp's claims in a public debate, TDT producer Gerald Stone said the program was intended to be "thought-provoking, not thought-manipulating", but conceded: "The fact is that TDT, in overall programming, tends to deal with what's wrong with us, rather than what's right with us." If the program was biased, it was because those who worked on it shared three basic assumptions: "We as Australians are not as free as we should be; we are not as well off as we think we are; we are not as good to each other and to outsiders as we claim to be." People who thought that way would naturally share certain political beliefs, opposition to the Vietnam War being one.

Shipp argued that the three assumptions, while "harmless and uncontroversial when viewed in isolation", became the source of systematic bias when elevated to cornerstone principles. Economic considerations, for instance, became "irrelevant when dealing with questions of poverty, pollution, conservation". The result was "an inconsistent line on issues involving individual freedom".

Shipp wrote: "There is inevitably in this political style a doctrinaire, intolerant, even illiberal streak -- a tendency to place beyond the pale all those who do not share the conglomerated values and beliefs of the moralisers. And the interests of those who oppose the ideologically determined goals and policies are seen, prima facie, as illegitimate and not deserving of any consideration."

Phillip Adams, The Australian's then TV columnist, agreed that TDT had a left-liberal bias, "but so, it seems, does history". Shipp, he said, would find the same bias in the editorial columns of many Australian newspapers (Packer's Daily Telegraph excepted), in the classroom and in the pulpits, and in public opinion generally. Liberalism was "clearly the mood of our time . . . even such immovable objects as the Vatican and the Pentagon are forced to secede ground to liberalism's irresistible force. The process would seem both inevitable and irreversible, a form of social evolution."

In the news department, however, the old guard was doggedly attempting to remain even-handed as the decades of Liberal and Country Party rule drew to a close. On the eve of the 1971 South African Springboks' tour to Australia, news department director Keith Fraser reminded journalists: "There are two sides of this apartheid business and it is our duty as ABC journalists to present both of them. We have no charge at all to express editorial opinions. So let us stick to our job and report the facts with balance and good taste."

Fraser, a former north Queensland policeman and cattleman, belonged to a generation of broadcasters who were taught to be circumspect in front of an open microphone, conscious of the civic responsibility that attached to public-service broadcasting, and respecters of the chain of command. Fraser would tell young reporters: "Credibility is our greatest asset; we might not be first with every story but we must be accurate every time." His staff were expected to leave their opinions at the door; their task was to present "as balanced and impartial a picture of events and issues as humanly possible".

Yet under Duckmanton's management, the commission was exhibiting all the signs of institutional decay. "The ABC once had a clear vision of the Proper Australian," Frank Moorhouse wrote in 1970. "It is now less clearly defined and certainly fading, along with a strong sense of mission." Staff rules were being openly flouted: Bob Ellis, who had been at the ABC for four years working on TDT, Checkerboard and later scriptwriting, began moonlighting as the television critic for the fortnightly journal Nation, using the platform to claim that a vital part of an interview with a Vietnam veteran had been suppressed by the "oafish tyranny" of "the claret-pickled pontiffs of the ninth floor". He defied management's instructions to cease and desist, and on 20 August, 1971, Duckmanton sacked him. Ashbolt, however, was a tougher nut to crack. For two years he had ignored written instructions to give up his job as Sydney correspondent for the British left-wing weekly New Statesman, but ABC management lacked the courage to take it any further.

In a sign of bureaucratic desperation, Duckmanton set up a joint committee of staff and management in December 1971 to consider internal communication. In Sydney, the ABC's divisions had become geographically and culturally isolated: senior management bunkered down in Broadcast House in the city fighting rebel strongholds at Gore Hill and at a ramshackle Special Projects unit at 171 William Street, where Ashbolt held court. Consultants were hired and flow charts prepared, but they were of little use; the divisions were philosophical not managerial. Taken to its logical conclusion, producer independence was an anarchist's charter.

Any notion of corporate agency beyond the collective freedom of expression would be lost. An ABC captured by the producers would serve the interests and reflect the prejudices of its staff rather than its listeners. A national broadcaster as it was once envisaged, as a defender of national values and an investor in cultural capital, became impossible; management from this point on would be by negotiation, rather than fiat.

From The Lucky Culture, by Nick Cater, published this week by HarperCollins