BIASED ABC GROWS EVEN MORE EXTREME

OUCH. I’ve just learned in a very personal way that the ABC really is run by and for the Left.

I learned this from Ita Buttrose, who was appointed ABC chairman by the Morrison Government, which hoped she might make the state broadcaster more balanced.

But I doubted she had the energy for that, and so it now seems.

Buttrose was last week asked on the ABC whether the Prime Minister had indeed told her “we should have more Andrew Bolts or Miranda Devines” at the ABC.

Buttrose denied he’d put such a condition on her role, and gratuitously added: “I certainly hadn’t thought that Andrew Bolt would be a great fit for the ABC.”

Pardon? See, it wasn’t long ago that the ABC still tolerated conservatives enough to employ me as a weekly “co-host” on Jon Faine’s 774 Conversation Hour, and as a regular panellist on

Insiders for 10 years, until I quit to do my own show.

And it was only three years ago that the ABC had me co-star in an ABC documentary.

Yet I’m no longer a “great fit for the ABC”? I know I haven’t changed, so I’m betting it’s the ABC.

Like the broader Left, the ABC has become more extreme, even pushing the new racism of identity politics.

It’s also become insanely intolerant of debate on its totemic issues, not least global warming.

Sure, the ABC was always biased, refusing to hire a single conservative to host any of its main current affairs shows.

But now staff publicly smear and denounce Sky News for having conservative presenters like me, and promote campaigns against its advertisers.

The Drum, an ABC panel show, has also banned speakers from the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia’s top conservative and libertarian think tank.

So intolerant and offencetaking are ABC staff that Buttrose called them “very sensitive people” who need to be “patted”. And, it seems, protected from me.

No skin off my nose. I had no plans to leave News Limited, not least because I like it boasting that I’m Australia’s “most-read columnist”.

But how strange that the ABC’s chairman now thinks such a conservative, in a country that voted Liberal at the last three federal elections, is the wrong “fit” for the ABC. Even though I twice worked for Labor.

Your taxes, but their ABC — and their closing minds.