I'm sick of the ABC being bashed around the ears about "balance". The ABC has plenty of "balance". What the Government wants is complicity.
The ABC may be left-wing: this is natural. It is a public institution, a creation of big government. Similarly, commercial media is naturally right-wing, or small government. This has been the natural balance in Australia's media during my lifetime.
However, this insistence on having extreme right-wingers on the ABC for "balance" is not only upsetting the overall balances in the media, but is injecting a dangerous element of anti-debate and anti-intellectualism into the ABC.
To date, the so-called right-wing commentators on the ABC have not been genuine debaters, but people who play the man and not the ball, and who regard politics as a team sport, whereby loyalty to the Howard Government is blind and all-consuming. Including Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman in current affairs is akin to publishing the Little Red Book as a miniseries. These people cannot debate sensibly. They have no commitment to the truth. They have no commitment to fair and open debate. They get pissed off every time they are challenged and they insist on browbeating everyone else. Then they use unilateral media types (usually the printed media, where no-one can argue back) to can the ABC for suppressing diversity!
I have become increasingly concerned at the Federal Government's reckless disregard for the fundamental element of open and honest debate in a democracy. It seems this is being extended to the ABC in every way possible, including appointing Keith Windschuttle (Aussie Keith reckons blackfellas were treated quite nicely by Europeans) and Janet Albrechtsen (most canned journalist for plagiarism in Media Watch in 2001) to the board of the ABC. Again, these are people with no commitment to open, rigourous, public debate.
This is dangerous: the control of information is the first step to dictatorships. Power tends to corrupt, etc... these guys have been in way too long.
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But the problem with your position: that the ABC is naturally left wing and this is balanced by the right wing commercial media. is actually beside the point because the charter under which the ABC is created actually requires balance and a lack of the bias that is so clearly there.
true... but does it have to be balanced with idiots? And where exactly is the centre of this balancing act? Is it liberal humanism? liberal socialism? or libertarianism?
I'd prefer to see an ABC committed to honesty, integrity and independence, combined with principles of open debate and a spirit of intellectual inquiry. If "balance" focussed around that, then (this is an old fashioned view, I know), hopefully a centre will emerge?
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