The incoming ABC chair, Kim Williams, will need to grapple with the nuances of marrying the need for diversity in newsrooms with the “old ideal” of objective journalism, former Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes says.
Holmes, who is also chair of ABC Alumni, emphasised that he was not saying that journalists from diverse backgrounds could not be objective, rather that the very nature of having different perspectives was sometimes at odds with the idea of “one objective truth”.
Williams, an arts and music buff and former News Corp Australia chief executive, will take over from Ita Buttrose in March.
In interviews after the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announced he had been chosen from a shortlist, Williams has been repeatedly asked about upheaval at the national broadcaster. It has been criticised most recently over its coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and the termination of journalist Antoinette Lattouf, leading to questions about its impartiality and the diversity of its journalists, and how those journalists are treated.
Asked if he agreed that diversity and impartiality could be seen as being at odds with each other, Williams said on Thursday morning that the situation was “complex”.
Holmes told Guardian Australia he was “comforted” that Williams recognised it was an issue.
“He knows that in the United States in particular, even more than here, this is a very live debate in newsrooms around the country – how do you marry the need for diversity in newsrooms, the need for different perspectives, with the old ideal of the objective journalist, which tends to imply that there’s really only one objective truth out there? That’s the dilemma I’m trying to get at,” Holmes said.
“Diversity’s really important. At the same time the ABC is legally obliged to portray the objective truth.
“A debate that hasn’t really happened yet is why do we want diversity if all we’re expecting is the same story from everyone?”
Holmes pointed to comments last year from ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson that the ABC was having a “very uncomfortable moment” with a generational divide. Younger journalists often had “a different approach to activism, to the expression of ideas through their journalism”, she told an Adelaide Writers’ Week audience.
Balancing diversity and impartiality is “complex”, Williams told ABC radio on Thursday morning.
“I think I probably share a common view with Jonathan that this is a complex matter and something that requires extended discussion until one arrives at a workable, appropriately informed view,” he said.
Williams referred to work by former Washington Post editor Martin Baron about the importance of striving for objectivity. Baron has said that objectivity in journalism is often misunderstood to be neutral, leading to false balance or “both-sidesism”. It also does not mean that journalists are free of bias, he has said, rather that they need to recognise that they are full of biases and must work to ensure those biases do not undermine accuracy.
On Thursday, Williams was asked about criticism of the ABC’s coverage of the war. He said such scrutiny was “inevitable”. Conflict produces “a variety of different viewpoints and very intense emotions”, he said.
“What is important is that one has a set of editorial rules of engagement that are reliable, that are coherent and that are resilient and that represent the best standards one can have in ensuring independence and integrity and impartiality.”
“Those things are non-negotiable.”
Williams also told ABC Radio National that the broadcaster’s culture “is pretty relentless in its focus on matters of interior dialogue … at times, nothing more or less than gossip”.
“I would like to see the ABC culture transform from being one that is obsessively interior in focus to being obsessively exterior in its focus – on audiences, on the nation, on the policy direction of the nation, on the intellect of the nation, the creativity of the nation,” he said.
“Sometimes the interior culture of the ABC can be quite all-consuming.”
Williams said some aspects of the ABC had “become bland”, but he declined to say which aspects.
Asked about News Corp attacks on the ABC, he said they were sometimes “unusually ferocious” and “destructive”.
“I think some of those attacks are unusually ferocious and are based on unstated but clearly very different views of what the ABC should be … The implicit agenda is one that is fundamentally, unhelpfully destructive,” he said.
In an excerpt from Williams’ book, Rules of Engagement, published in the New Daily in 2014, Williams wrote his relationship with News came unstuck after he agreed to launch the then Labor treasurer Chris Bowen’s book. “All hell broke out,” he wrote, and “by the start of August [2013] I no longer had a job”.
He said he stood by the speech, in which he said that “all countries need books like this and politicians like Chris”, along with other flattering statements that his News colleagues were outraged by.
The speech had been misrepresented, he wrote – and he thought Rupert Murdoch had not even read it, although he said he did.
Denis Muller, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, wrote in the Conversation on Wednesday that Williams “fell victim to the brutal internal politics of News Corp, where he was resented by the editors as an outsider, and resigned”.
