life at our abc-according to andrew bolt

High price of bias

24jul03

Our national broadcaster is unbalanced, unfair and largely unaccountable. And what's worse is that you pay for it every single day.

IT is a wonder how the ABC can so sweetly claim it's not biased.
You know it's of the Left. I know it. And over the years, many members of the ABC's board, bureaucracy and on-air staff have privately admitted it to me, too.

But officially the ABC denies it, unblinkingly. Look at how easily it this week dismissed all but two of the 68 complaints by the Howard Government of bias in its often smugly hostile coverage of the Iraq war.

It was our duty to ask hard questions of the Coalition of the Willing, the ABC protested. True, but where was the equally hard questioning of the anti-war protesters, the wolf-crying aid organisations, the doom-preaching old soldiers?

Of course, some in the ABC do try for the balance that is all that critics like me ask for, although they must recruit outsiders to get it.

Insiders, to its credit and credibility, is a current affairs TV show each Sunday which usually has me or one other non-Left commentator to "balance" the two on its panel from the Left.

Yet I can still spend whole days tuned to the ABC without hearing a single conservative ABC presenter, or even, on Radio National, a conservative guest.

When he was on the ABC board, Michael Kroger regularly asked for a report on the hunt the board had been promised for a "Right-wing Phillip Adams" – an on-air talent as conservative as Adams is far-Left, for the balance the ABC's charter demands. But each request was met with deep sighs. So hard, Mr Kroger. Still trying, Mr Kroger.

After asking more than 20 times over five years for progress in this "search", I'm told Kroger turned in exasperation to Sue Howard, the ABC's respected head of radio, and said her failure after so long to find any conservative at all suggested to him she was either incompetent or dishonest.

It's strange. The ABC can find enough black voices, feminist voices, lesbian separatist voices, Marxist voices, gay voices, Buddhist voices and radical green voices to burble almost non-stop – and SBS can find enough ethnic accents to transmit around the clock on both radio and television – but the ABC still cannot find a single conservative to front a show involving current affairs, the arts or society.

Not strange. Astonishing, given there are enough conservatives around to vote in a conservative government three times running.

Why has this happened?

Some smug apologists claim conservatives just aren't bright enough to do the jobs of giant intellects of the Left like, err, Red Symons and George Negus.

One prominent ABC radio host even told me the problem is that the few Right-wing types we see in the non-government media are too greedy to work for the "pittance" the ABC pays.

But the real problem is that the ABC's staff tend to think people who are not of the Left aren't just Right – they are evil. And it is immoral to balance the ABC by hiring evil people.

Take the case of David Marr, who hosts ABC television's Media Watch.

Marr – with SBS film critic Margaret Pomeranz – was one of several celebrities who this month protested against the banning of Ken Park, a film which lingeringly portrayed young teenagers having sex and a man molesting his son.

Marr is a typical example of the 1970s Left – a man apparently reluctant to accept that the strong should curtail some of their most destructive freedoms to protect the weak. And so he has denounced churchmen who want a war on the drugs that destroy so many lives as "enemies of pleasure".

This time, Marr and Pomeranz published a letter savaging our censors, adding: "We want an end to politically conservative appointments to classification boards, so the decisions are made by competent people with no axes to grind and with some understanding of Australia as a country of diverse communities."

This precisely sums up why Marr's ABC, and Pomeranz's SBS, are as they are, thanks to their staff collectives. Marr and Pomeranz celebrate Australia as a "country of diverse communities", yet also demand the Government ban one of those communities – conservatives – from a key cultural organisation.

Only conservatives, it seems, are not "competent" and have "axes to grind", and we must put "an end" to appointing them.

This is just what has happened with the ABC, another key cultural organisation, which is as free of conservatives as a Trades Hall rally. And so strongly does Marr seem to believe in this ethic (sic) cleansing that he has turned his Media Watch into a weapon against commentators who aren't of his Left.

Media Watch, which you pay for, is meant to watch the media for mistakes, abuses and trends. But under Marr, it's become a Right Watch – monitoring and punishing the few commentators who dissent from Marr's political ideology.

As one of our best Internet bloggers, Tim Blair, notes, since Marr took over Media Watch, he has used it to attack more than 69 non-Left commentators, often savagely, but just 17 of the far more numerous Left.

I have personal experience of Marr's ideological McCarthyism – for which, I repeat, he uses the ABC that we must all pay for, and despite a charter which insists it be balanced.

Marr's staff twice in 18 months demanded I explain why I allegedly said unsound things about protesters or Muslims. Both times their wonky case against me collapsed.

Last week they tried again, in what is amounting to a campaign of state-sponsored political harassment. This time I was accused of saying bad things about a Left-wing writer, Alison Broinowski, who'd said we rude Australians "invite the region's contempt" and "what happened to (the Bali bombing victims) is predictable".

I criticised her absurd theory, and on Monday Marr used his show to punish me for this thought crime.

He claimed I was wrong – had even lied – in saying Broinowski had received three Arts Council grants. I had lied in summarising her argument. I was just offended by her "ingratitude", thought her a "traitor" and believed her guilty of "the worst crime of all" – being an academic.

In fact, all those allegations – and four others – are false. Many are figments of Marr's imagination, or ravings perhaps inspired by his anger over criticisms I made of his own silly book, in which he, too, argued Australians were dumb and uncivilised xenophobes.

Just as I'd said in my article, and as her own CV admits, Broinowski was indeed given three Arts Council grants, and more besides, so can't Marr count to three? Nor did I misrepresent her argument, as her own words prove. There may be lies being told about this, but not by me.

The only one of Marr's allegations that had a hint of truth was that I was wrong to call Broinowski's husband Philip, not Richard. His full name, Marr failed to add, is Richard Philip Broinowski.

True, this may seem a petty squabble, and I'll leave my full rebuttal of Marr's false allegations for the Herald Sun's website.

Yet his taxpayer-funded attacks are not isolated, and not unimportant. They form part of a barrage of highly partisan state-funded criticism from the ABC – a policing of "thought crimes" that intimidates too many journalists, academics and artists who hate our stifling ideological conformity, but are too scared to speak up.

That is now today's ABC – rounding up the bad-thinking stragglers, and shooting the strays.

This was never meant to be the ABC's role. The ABC at its most glorious instead tried to challenge our thoughts, and to present a range of informed views – including ones different to those bleated so often.

It no longer does that – or not as often as it should.

And the price for the ABC's bias is not just that its audience gets only half of so many debates, but that it can be as boring as a monologue. Which, when Marr is involved, it often is.