ABC director sacked

[brian ross]

Oh, dearie, dearie, me. Someone who doesn't understand statistics very well. Your source was one night's viewing, not the attitude of the views towards the various stations such as compiled here, BO. No one trusts the commercial outlets for news and current affairs. They just watch it for the occasional thrills and a bit of titillation. When disaster strikes or a political controversy happens, they all turn to the ABC.

[Rorschach]

oh dearie, dearie, me, tut, tut, tut, tsk, tsk, tsk.....
Someone who is clueless lording it over others yet again.

ABC in crisis threatens Scott Morrison’s election hopes
Mark Day
October 1, 2018

Our ABC is now a full-blown crisis for the Morrison government. It is headless, directionless and adrift in a stormy sea. It requires urgent rescue efforts before it becomes a dead weight on the Coalition in the coming election campaign.

The ABC cops plenty of criticism, even from those who love it. And that means around 80 per cent of us who, according to polling, trust and love old Aunty, despite her foibles.

It is not hard to imagine a Labor campaign accusing the Coalition of trying to meddle with the independence of the ABC having a similar impact to the Mediscare campaign that so nearly unseated the Turnbull government in 2016.

The NSW Young Liberals have already given Labor the trigger through its silly resolution calling on the government to sell the ABC.

In truth, this was never going to happen, but you don’t need truth to sustain a fear campaign in this era of fake news.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Communications Minister Mitch Fifield now need to act urgently to head off this crisis.

The first decision is whether or not to spill the entire ABC board. Given that the board members sat on their hands as they watched their former chairman Justin Milne arm-wrestle with former managing director Michelle Guthrie there is an argument that says they were complicit in untenable behaviour. Milne’s failure is their shared failure.

But there are dangers in this. Continuity and the preservation of corporate memory is important — doubly so when the chairman and the chief executive are missing.

Morrison and Fifield will have to consider other issues: the ABC is under scrutiny from three inquiries — a departmental investigation of the circumstances surrounding the demise of Michelle Guthrie, an efficiency review undertaken by former Foxtel boss Peter Tonagh and former media regulator Richard Bean, and a “competitive neutrality” inquiry looking at the ABC’s role in the digital landscape.

All have the capacity to change the direction of the broadcaster. The question facing the government is: do we press ahead and plug the holes at the top, or do we wait for reports that might materially influence future directions, requiring specific skills from a new chair or new board?

It appears Morrison and Fifield may have decided to keep the board, following the appointment of Kirsten Ferguson as acting chair. A new, permanent chair will need to be a person who can take charge and heal divisions. One credible name mentioned here is former High Court justice Michael Kirby, although at age 79 he may not want a five-year term.

The appointment of a chair must take place before a new managing director can be considered because it is the board, not the government, that makes that decision. Until there is a new boss, the ABC animals will be left in charge of the zoo.

Milne’s departure, and the possibility of a spill of the entire board, means that there will be a vacancy or vacancies on the board. In the past, these vacancies were filled on the basis of the old mates’ act, or jobs for the boys or girls, but under the Rudd government a new process was established — board appointments would go through a vetting process with merit-based recommendations made to government.

Unfortunately, this “hands off” approach can be ignored if ministers wish and most of the current board seem to be “captain’s picks”.

Whatever steps the government decides on, they must be transparent. The government will underestimate at its peril the public perception that it is Our ABC, particularly as the current Yours on-air community campaign drums into us that we own it — and we know we pay a billion bucks a year for it.

Milne’s decision to get rid of Guthrie was taken in secret. It is extraordinary that no leaks occurred during the months of behind-the-scenes unrest as Milne and Guthrie locked horns. Until Stephen Brook broke the story of the sacking all that had been written was Brook’s report in Media last week that relations between the pair were “frosty”.

I spoke to a number of ABC contacts for my column last week and there was not a hint from the workplace that things at the top were falling apart. I should have asked Milne. It would have been interesting to hear how he might have defended the one he was planning to sack the next day.

Milne’s lack of transparency was central to his departure. He told us when announcing the sacking of Guthrie that “it was not in the best interests of the ABC for her to continue”. That was a line that demanded further and better particulars.

Both sides were spinning their case. Milne won the first round, allowing speculation that Guthrie was not up to the job.

Guthrie hit back with the leaking of the emails that brought Milne down. Milne insisted the pressure he applied to have economics correspondent Emma Alberici and political correspondent Andrew Probyn sacked was not the result of a political directive.

He said nobody told him to fire anyone — but left open the obvious inference that discussions with his friend, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had led him to the conclusion that Turnbull would be happy with them out of the way. It was a botched job all around.

The immediate job is to restore the ABC’s management structures. But beyond that the new chair and new managing director will face the same problems that Milne and Guthrie failed to address: the biases and lax editorial standards evident in the ABC newsrooms.

There has been a chorus of complaint about the commercialisation of its news services. These include irritating grammatical failures from untrained and unknowing reporters, meaningless live crosses, unwarranted commentary, lapses in credibility and bizarre story selection for news leads.

News standards have been condemned by the likes of Paul Keating, John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, Chris Mitchell, Chris Kenny — et Moi — yet the only change in recent years has been for the worse.

From someone who actually knows something and unlike bwian doesn't allow his politics on this occasion to cloud his judgement or the facts...

[brian ross]

Scott Morrison’s ABC threat sparks push to ‘guarantee’ independence

Leave the ABC alone you miscreants...

[Rorschach]

Still only reading LW Prog rubbish bwian....

Do you think your left only habits lead you to be so biased and so obviously wrong?

You do know that being Independent and being Unbiased are not the same thing right?

BTW The Guardian like its UK predecessor is a totally LW Prog rag. tsk, tsk, tsk bwian....