I don't know if the Howard Government realises it yet, but their campaign to neuter the ABC is within a whisker of completion. With the exception of the current affairs shows -- Radio's AM, The World Today, PM, and TV's Four Corners, and Lateline -- Auntie has turned into a snooze-a-thon suitable for old ladies and gents taking their tea in comfy armchairs. Well, what can you expect after ten years of funding cutbacks and incessant hectoring about its so-called left-wing bias. A recent screening on pay TV of the 1993 miniseries, "The Leaving of Liverpool" shows the strength of ABC's drama department when it had proper funding. Today's national broadcaster is not even a shadow of its former self.
The Howard Government has stacked the ABC board with its own: Janet Albrechtsen, who would have flourished as a propagandist for Hitler, and Keith Windschuttle, the state-approved revisionist of Australian history. His ascendance to centre stage in the so-called History Wars would be knee-slappingly hilarious if it wasn't so alarming. In saner times, Windschuttle would be just another nutter clamouring to be heard.
But it's those remaining current affairs shows that remain a thorn in John Howard's intolerant side. Now his government has installed a new managing director, Mark Scott, who has set up a new position, that of the director of editorial policies. It will be this factotum's duty to inform the government of anyone who steps out of line with the new "Editorial Policies 2007," and to insure the demise or "rehabilitation" of the current affairs shows.
When the few remaining socially conscious citizens still employed in the mainstream media complained of government interference over what amounts to a Bureau of Censorship, the Commentariat pilloried them.
Take Gerard Henderson, in his opinion piece in The Age:
Interviewed by ABC radio last Thursday, [Liz] Jackson objected to a management-initiated proposal whereby, under the ABC's revamped editorial policies, the showing of a documentary by leftist film director Michael Moore would need to be balanced by a follow-up panel discussion. She initially described such a scenario as a "problem" and then went right over the top by depicting the proposal as "verging on Stalinism". Really.
So here was a senior ABC journalist asserting that a genuine debate on the public broadcaster over a controversial film could be equated with a communist totalitarian regime that murdered tens of millions of citizens of the Soviet Union. How defensive can you get? And how insulting to the memory of the real victims of real repression?
Later that evening Kerry O'Brien introduced the Clarke-Dawe segment on the 7.30 Report with the comment that the subject matter was a "bit close to home". It certainly was, in a self-indulgent way. The comedians mocked Scott's plan to establish, within the ABC, a director of editorial policies who will report to him in his other role as the ABC's editor-in-chief. To Clarke and Dawe, the suggestion that the ABC's editor-in-chief should ensure that a range of views are heard on the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster is a matter requiring ridicule.
Henderson and his fellow travellers keep trying to equate people with a social conscience to communists or socialists or worse, appeasers of terrorism, when it is the policies of Howard's Government that come closest to communism's repressive need to quash dissent.
I'm going to assume that when Liz Jackson called adding the panel discussion to the documentary a "problem," she was referring a time slot issue: documentaries normally take an hour, but with an added panel discussion, the show would impinge on the next program. Simple.
What she depicted "as verging on Stalinism" sounds like a frustrated response to the government's insistence on the panel discussion. When the government of the day interferes with public broadcasting it verges on Stalinism.
If the documentary had been in favour of Howard or Bush's policies, you can bet there would have been no request for a panel discussion. This government doesn't want balance; it wants opposing views to be silenced.
Henderson then rounded on John Clarke and Brian Dawe and their satirical five minute spot once a week at the end of the 7:30 Report. Needless to say, this spot was neither more nor less biting than any other. It's just that even five minutes of dissenting opinion is too much for the Hard Right to bear. Henderson's message: Get rid of them all.
Nothing will stop Howard's conservative pit bulls. They've got a taste of blood and viscera; they've latched on to the throat of democracy and it's impossible to get them off. But then, they have nothing else to do. Their plate is nearly empty, save for business and the straitening and punishing of their lessers. They seem totally unaware of the ramifications of their policies and thus pay no attention to them. Iraq? Democracy will be peachy for anyone left alive. Global Warming? Don't be ridiculous.
It's just about all over. They've set up umpteen inquiries into bias over the years, all of which were knocked back. Poll after poll has shown that most Australians are satisfied with the ABC. Never mind. This government has never had the interests of the Australian public in mind. All that matters is their Thatcherite ideology and power. They have no credibility, and so nothing they do is credible.
But the damage they have done may be permanent.
-- Olney Garkle
Us lefties should be delighted with what is happening to the ABC. When the Howard government does inevitably fall it will leave an ABC so devoid of opinions that the new Labor government should have a dream run.
Creating a dictatorship only works for as long as you can hold onto power. Howard is getting old and long in the tooth. In the dog eat dog world he has created, the law of the jungle decrees he must lose soon.
Posted by Doug Steley on October 27, 2006
Sometimes when I have The 7.30 Report on in the background while I wash up, I have to check that I'm not watching A Current Affair or This Day Tonight.
I think your post title is right and Aunty is entering a dementia phase from which there may never be a recovery.
What critics of the ABC news and current affairs don't seem to get into their thick skulls is that both parties complain of bias when they are the govt and this is only because these programs are rightly examining the govt of the day which can work in your favour when in opposition.
Perhaps the death of the ABC is symptomatic of the dumbing down of most of society that is going on today. A deliberate hidden policy of govts? I don't know. And I don't have any answer (it certainly isn't the Alternate Liberal Party).
Posted by Ron on October 28, 2006