ABC’s boardroom backlash
IS THERE anything more laughable than senior Labor figures pretending to be outraged about the Turnbull government’s attempted political interference at the ABC?
There was Tanya Plibersek and Michelle Rowland, Jim Chalmers and Stephen Conroy all expressing their indignant outrage at any attempts to interfere in news coverage of an independent media organisation such as the ABC.
As a journalist, of course, I entirely agree with their sentiment. Wouldn’t it be great if our politicians weren’t such sensitive snowflakes and never complained about being held to account in the media?
But what I can’t cop is Labor’s holier-than-thou attitude. How conveniently they forget their current boss Bill Shorten has a propensity to attack the media for running negative stories about his policies.
As Labor MPs know all too well, Shorten’s attitude — and his temper — is the same as Turnbull’s.
Look, when it comes to press coverage, every politician and party thinks they are treated less fairly than the other. Turnbull is hardly alone.
Turnbull publicly claimed to be an ardent supporter of the free press, often quoting Winston Churchill’s comment that politicians complaining about newspapers is like a sailor complaining about the sea, only to have monumental meltdowns in private to media proprietors and chairmen when news coverage did not suit him. But the former prime minister’s attempts to rein in the bias at the ABC failed, with the wrong approach taken by its now-former chairman Justin Milne.
Instead of demanding Michelle Guthrie sack journalists, he should have asked Guthrie to address ongoing issues of objectivity in news reports. That would have been applauded by the Australian community.
Instead, Milne reacted to the white-hot fury from Turnbull over Emma Alberici and Andrew Probyn by moving to sack them. In this sense, criticism of him for being spineless is entirely legitimate.
And so it was two days after sacking the ABC’s first female boss, Milne fell on his sword and resigned — his power play spectacularly backfiring.
A day earlier, Prime Minister Scott Morrison had sent a clear message to Milne and the ABC Board, through Communications Minister Mitch Fifield, that he did not want this leadership saga festering through the weekend and into next week.
He wanted it resolved before the end of the week.
It was a message the board initially ignored as they stuck by Milne on Wednesday. But by Thursday, with damaging revelations he had pushed Guthrie to “shoot” top political editor Probyn, Milne was gone by lunchtime. This explosive turn of events and the fact Milne may have felt beholden to Turnbull dates back to the 1990s when the two men worked together on the OzEmail venture.
Milne was managing director and Turnbull was a co-founder and major investor. It made Turnbull in excess of $520 million and created his reputation as an early technology adopter and entrepreneur.
Two decades later, Turnbull appointed his long-time friend to the prestigious role at the ABC when Jim Spiegelman’s term expired.
They shared a vision of digitising the organisation. Milne has been obsessed with his pet project Jetstream, which he appeared to be hoping Turnbull would lend the federal government’s support to, with an additional half a billion dollars in funding — presumably on top of the $1 billion annually the ABC gets from taxpayers.
After accepting the prestigious role, Milne was under pressure from Turnbull to deal with bias and inaccuracies in the editorial content at the ABC.
At the ABC, left-leaning managers hire left-leaning journalists who are passionate advocates for socially progressive issues such as climate change and asylum seekers. They have also hired recently a string of pro-Palestinian journalists — or activists — rather than anyone who supports Israel.
But now the leadership of the ABC is crumbling.
Now, with both the managing director and chairman gone — and the board damaged in credibility — the bias that is so obvious to any avid consumer of the ABC’s political coverage shows no signs of being addressed.