Under chair Kim Williams, the ABC looks to be charging back into the centre of news content creation — “content” being defined as a never-ending supply of articles and commentary about the ABC and its internal machinations.
And not before time. For all the self-interested chatter about gambling advertisements and oligarch-owned television, the rejuvenation of “our” ABC should be recognised as the big media policy challenge of the moment.
The broadcaster’s pivot to “stability” in 2019, with the appointment of ABC-lifer David Anderson as managing director and Scott Morrison’s captain’s pick of Ita Buttrose as board chair, has been a disaster: increasingly bland, uncontroversial, lightweight and in a permanent defensive crouch, with only the occasional flash of traditional brilliance to remind us of how important the organisation can be.
The core asset of the ABC is “trust”, yet that’s precisely where it’s been sliding. The 2024 Reuters Digital News Report shows a 10 percentage point slide under the Anderson-Buttrose team, from 74% to 64% in just five years.
The result is a depleted, diminished and inward-looking broadcaster — even according to Kim Williams himself, with the chair speaking in a Q&A this month with Kerrie O’Brien at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival.
The loss of trust is partly the result of the relentless attacks from News Corp and its political allies (and the failure of the stability pact to resist it), but also reflects the slide in public trust in all media, as well as the unhappiness among usual ABC supporters at losing what they value most in the broadcaster.
Now, what a banger of a yarn we’ve got in the first big story of the Williams era: the shock-not-shock departure of Anderson as managing director — the first ABC insider in half a century to get the gig, gone just a year since he was confidentially and controversially reappointed to a second five-year contract at the end of the Buttrose term.
The ABC’s enduring critic, The Australian, captured the moment: “With ABC managing director David Anderson gone, new chairman Kim Williams is now free to call the shots”.
Anderson’s departure should have been no surprise for long-term ABC watchers. Since the Hawke government’s administrative restructuring changed the “C” in the broadcaster’s acronym from “commission” to “corporation”, only one out of eight managing directors have survived two full terms.
Only two of the rest even made it as far as their second term, and depending on the weight you give to internal gossip, at least three (and maybe as many as six) were encouraged out the door early by the board and its chair.
Why so unstable? It’s the incentive structure: the MD appointment is the one significant opportunity the ABC’s board gets to nudge the notoriously change-resistant ABC into a different direction — or to even encourage it in its current direction a little quicker. And board appointments are, in turn, the one way governments can attempt to shape the ABC.
That’s why both go looking for “change agents” from outside the organisation (and why newly appointed chairs are so often eager to move on the MD they inherit). Expect the new MD to be a change agent with what management-speak would call “strategic alignment” with the chair.
A change is gonna come. But just what change should we expect?
There’s one tip in past performance: expect content to be prioritised over the traditional distribution platforms (aka “radio” and “television”). That was Williams’ instinct when briefly in charge of the Murdoch family’s Australian interests a bit over a decade ago. Then his proposed content verticals (like sport or food) were found too challenging for the powerful masthead bosses.
There are a few clues, too, in what Williams has been saying while out and about talking with journalists (like the SMH/Age on the weekend or the AFR last week) and, bravely for an ABC representative, at this month’s writers’ festival at Byron Bay.
According to the Williams reset, radio — or “audio”, as we apparently should now think of it — needs to be distinctly different to what else is on offer. Local radio? It’s in “a rebuild stage” after a decade of neglect, Wlliams says.
Radio National is in decline with about 1.5% of the national audience. Rather, Williams says, it should “be at the beating heart of what the ABC does”, like the intellectually dominant Radio Four is for the BBC, with one in six of the British audience listening in.
On news and current affairs, he’s given the obligatory nod to impartiality. He notes that too much of current affairs and news brings a bland “tabloid sensibility”. Hopefully, that means fewer car crashes clogging up the 7pm news.
Even in its weakened state, the ABC has been shaping culture and breaking news. Time to stop hiding the work it does behind the safe veneer of stability.
What do you want from the ABC? What parts of its output do you value, and what parts should be given the flick? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
