Underlying News Corp’s criticism of the ABC is a fear it poses a risk to their own commercial interests in a difficult media market

For weeks News Corp papers have been running a barrage of opinion pieces, often several on a single day, alleging a lack of diversity in the opinions available at the ABC.

The generally agreed thesis advanced by these opinion writers – most of whom live in Sydney and Melbourne – is that too many ABC opinion-makers live in Sydney and Melbourne, and that this contributes to their “green-left” worldview.

This “green-left” worldview, News Corp writers contend, contributes to “biased” reporting and political interviewing on the ABC and infuses its wider programming as well, including – according to Piers Akerman at least – the “weird feminism” evident in Peppa Pig and the “left sludge” he hears when he tunes in the Triple J. (Does Akerman really tune into Triple J?)

Bias is, by definition, in the eye of the beholder, but to my eye it’s more evident when I tune in to, say, Ray Hadley and hear him ask “questions” like this one during a conversation with prime minister Tony Abbott about how to handle the Palmer United party when the new Senate sits from next July:

... and you’re going to have to be even better than you were at the beginning of the election. You won’t be taking my advice and saying listen Clive, stick it up your jumper. You’ll have to be even more diplomatic than you were in Indonesia.”

Or this one, in a television interview with Abbott by Andrew Bolt:

The attacks on you are astonishing. Have they forced you to change your media strategy, which until a week or two ago was to say little and let your deeds speak for themselves?”

The ABC’s critics argue that the public broadcaster has a particular responsibility to show even-handedness because it is funded by the taxpayer, and the ABC agrees.

In his recent address to the national press club, ABC chairman Jim Spigelman responded to the allegations of editorial bias with a new system of external audits, starting with an analysis of the impartiality of all radio interviews with the-then prime minister and opposition leader during the 2013 election campaign.

“I do not accept that [bias] is systematic, but I do accept that it sometimes occurs,” he said, noting the complaints were usually about programs that represented less than 1% of the corporation’s program hours, but which “happen … to interest the political class most”.

You’d think the ABC’s critics would have been pleased with this response to their complaints, but if you thought that, you’d be misunderstanding the real reason for their attacks.

News Corp columnist Miranda Devine derided Spigelman’s audits as “a sop” and “laughable”, saying a far better solution would be “to decentralise the ABC by splitting it into competing state organisations".

"That would disempower Left-Green inner-city elites who control the culture and help the ABC fulfill its charter to ‘reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community’,” she insisted.

Spigelman, in his speech, said many journalists had a “social and educational background, perhaps particularly in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, that may make them more interested in, say, gay marriage than, say, electricity prices. As a public broadcaster we must endeavour to engage with those sections of our community who are concerned with the latter”.

The Australian’s columnist Chris Kenny saw that as “a remarkable admission”, for which one (to him at least) “obvious” remedy was “to reduce the size of the ABC”.

“As mainstream media shrinks and the national broadcaster continues to grow, its publicly-funded, cosseted view of the world becomes increasingly influential and self-referential, even if it is ever more remote from mainstream Australians,” he wrote.

In other words, as the ABC sought to address the criticisms about bias, the underlying concerns of its critics became more transparent – that the ABC is a taxpayer-funded competitor to their own commercial activities in an increasingly difficult media market, and that over time this could mean the ABC gains influence as they lose it.

To date prime minister Tony Abbott shows no sign of responding to the fulminations. Although he has criticised the ABC for working with Guardian Australia on the story, based on Edward Snowden’s documents, that Australia had spied on the Indonesian president, he has not publicly backed the push to cut funding or rein in the broadcaster’s reach.

And when Abbott showed an inclination for a diversity of views in advice to government – for example in his appointment of former Democrat senator Natasha Stott Despoja as ambassador for women and girls – he was attacked by the same columnists.

According to Akerman, the appointment shows that “the Abbott forces have spat in the eye of every conservative and, more importantly, every conservative woman who has fought tirelessly through the dark years of opposition to keep the conservative flame alive when it was under heavy attack from the very forces which saw Stott Despoja as their champion.”

Abbott is forgetting, Akerman argues, the “first rule of conservatism – stick to your guns.”

Perhaps, Piers, Abbott is remembering that he promised to govern for everyone, or that democracies work best with an actual diversity of views and respectful debate.

Adjusting to a change of government is always clunky, as expectations shift like grating gears. The losing side takes time to adjust to the idea that the winners have a right to change things, within the parameters of what they promised to do, and the winners to the notion that victory doesn’t mean others in the political debate will raise the white flag, retire to a dark room for three years and abandon their policies or ideas. Reporting all of that does not reflect “lack of diversity” but the reality of a healthy polity.

It would be a pity if, “sticking to their guns” with the self-serving “ABC lacks diversity” argument, the “ABC only understands inner-city Sydney and Melbourne and doesn’t understand ordinary people in the suburbs” argument, the broadcasters’ commercial competitors might, even by attrition, convince people it is true – given what the ABC does, every day, to gather stories and views and news from all kinds of Australians, in all kinds of ways.

The critics do sometimes concede the role of regional ABC radio and local websites. But national programming does the same.

Recently, battling the unexpectedly visceral effects of grief, I came home from another day pretending to be OK, to find my family watching the final episode of the ABC’s music talent quest, Exhumed.

Some guys from Geelong with a passion for glam rock were just finishing their set, to be followed by a bunch of blokes from Launceston who liked to play really loud rock in their shed, four middle-aged Brisbane women who had decided they were never too old to try something new and formed themselves into a band, a country outfit from Warrnambool, a soul band from the Bellingen Valley with a lead vocalist who sang like a dream and the eventual winners, the wonderful Jahsifik, a reggae band from Kalgoorlie. They work as a truck driver, a scaffolder, a bouncer, an artist and a childcare worker. They play music for the joy of it.

After they had been named winners, the whole crazy lot of them had the Rooty Hill RSL up and dancing with a full-volume rendition of AC/DC’s It’s a Long Way to the Top complete with compere James Valentine on saxophone. And watching them, in all their wacky, ordinary, extraordinary, life-affirming variety, I suddenly felt joyful again.

I’m happy to pay my 10 cents a day for so much of what the ABC does, including finding non-elite, non-inner-city cultural, and human, diversity like that. May we exhume more of it – in politics and in life – in the new year.

• This article was amended on 21 December 2013 to correct a spelling mistake in the headline.