Your ABC Exposed doco lands some punches but exposes little more than an agenda

Well, no one could accuse Chris Kenny of being inconsistent.

His Sky News “investigation” Your ABC Exposed may have been heavily promoted as if it were some sort of scoop, but the hour-long program merely restated the assumptions that consistently guide him and many of his fellow travellers at Sky After Dark – principally, that the national broadcaster is burning through $1 billion a year of YOUR money in its pursuit of an anti-conservative agenda.

That was the meat of his show on Tuesday night, heavily stacked with conservative talking heads but leavened ever so slightly by Quentin Dempster as a friend of the ABC and, briefly, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland.

Sky News host Chris Kenny has long been a fierce critic of the ABC.

This was all sandwiched between two slices of sentiment designed to appeal to Sky viewers who may still harbour some lingering emotional attachment to the ABC – especially those in rural and regional Australia, where Murdoch’s Sky offers its services free of charge in a bid to expand its reach.

Early on, Kenny waxed nostalgic about Aunty’s coverage of cricket and the comfort of listening to the radio while driving through the bush. Comfortingly, he reassured us towards the end that he doesn’t actually want to do away with the ABC at all.

“I’m not one of those people who thinks the ABC should be sold off,” he said. “For starters, that’ll never happen. I think it’s crucial for our country to have a public broadcaster. Only it needs to be a lot better, a lot more mainstream, and a lot more accountable.”

To be fair, Exposed did land some punches in support of that view – though it was frequently undone by a rather selective reading of the facts.

Jonathan Shier, former managing director of the ABC, on Kenny’s special Your ABC Exposed.Credit:Sky News

For example, to illustrate how “out of touch” with mainstream Australia the ABC is Kenny claimed 40 per cent of its Sydney staff voted Green. Trouble is, that figure comes from a 2013 survey of journalists from multiple organisations. Only 59 of the 605 respondents worked for the ABC – which has more than 4000 staff in all – and only 14 of them said they would vote Green. Statistically, an uncontrolled sample of that size is utterly meaningless.

Kenny also took issue with the lack of conservative voices on shows such as Q+A, but he included a clip that showed him conceding on the show that other conservatives had been invited on but had declined to appear. This was a frequent pattern during the Coalition’s years in power, and a major contributor to the (contested) perception that the show was biased towards the left.

In classic doorstop style, Kenny buttonholed managing director David Anderson at an ABC function, claiming he had little alternative because no one from the national broadcaster would agree to be interviewed for his program. Anderson replied by saying he would happily appear on Kenny’s show if only he were invited.

Kenny buttonholes ABC managing director David Anderson at the Andrew Olle lecture.Credit:Sky News

Repeatedly the case was made that the broadcaster is hopelessly skewed towards the worldview of its citybound, and especially Sydney-based, staff. There’s some truth to that. But nowhere was it mentioned that Sky’s programs are predominantly made and broadcast from within its headquarters just 14 minutes away from the ABC’s Ultimo HQ, or that, unlike the ABC, Sky doesn’t have much of a regional newsgathering capacity or commitment at all.

These were the minor quibbles, but the more substantive claims centred on a handful of well-known cases: the reporting of sexual abuse allegations against George Pell and Christian Porter; the Alan Tudge affair; the ABC’s decision to cover the defamation and legal costs of reporter Louise Milligan over a tweet about Queensland conservative MP Andrew Laming.

With the assistance of Laming, Pell, fellow Australian columnist and former ABC board member Janet Albrechtsen, former communications minister Richard Alston, Liberal MP and former ABC journalist Sarah Henderson, and the ABC’s shortest-serving managing director Jonathan Shier, Kenny pursued the line that the ABC is “a staff-run collective” that sets editorial direction in flagrant breach of its own charter requirements to be independent and balanced. He claimed that it had unfairly pursued Porter, Pell and others. Implicit was the notion that taking any kind of editorial position at all, on any issue, amounted to a betrayal of objectivity.

“Vigilante journalism, campaigning journalism, is what happens at the ABC, and it happens on our dime,” said Albrechtsen.

How do they choose their targets, asked Kenny.

“It’s pretty simple. They’re usually conservative aren’t they.” Kenny nodded sagely in agreement.

In retrospect the case against Pell was weak, but it was pursued by almost all media outlets in Australia, not just the ABC. And with regard to Porter and Tudge, the idea that claims of a culture of sexual harassment in Canberra were not worth investigating is laughable.

The ABC is, however, vulnerable to criticism over the decision to pay Louise Milligan’s costs.

“In what universe would an employer pay over $200,000 in defamation settlement fees and legal fees for an employee who tweeted in a personal capacity,” Albrechtsen asked. “It comes down to fear and who controls the ABC.”

Louise Milligan agreed to pay Andrew Laming $79,000 in damages plus legal costs, but the ABC picked up the bill.Credit:The Age

Of course, it could alternatively come down to how much the ABC values a prize staff member and the degree to which management is willing to stick its neck out in order to protect her. But that sort of nuanced reading was beyond the interest of the talking heads featured here.

But near the end, what might be the real agenda of Exposed was briefly laid bare. “The ABC has grown into a broadcasting behemoth,” said Kenny. “In 2013 it was gifted unlimited scope when digital media was added to its charter.”

News Corp isn’t alone in thinking a publicly funded broadcaster with truly national reach has an unnatural and unfair advantage in competing for audience attention. But it is unique in dedicating so much time and space to trying to convince audiences that its corporate interests and their interests as taxpayers are in complete alignment.

Kenny is right to insist that the national broadcaster needs to do its best to speak to and for all Australians.

The national broadcaster does need to make space for a plurality of views. But it shouldn’t be cowed by exercises like this into not investigating allegations of inappropriate behaviour among the powerful, wherever they line up politically.

Email the author at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin.

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