You know, back in June, another national icon - Australia Post - announced it'd be cutting 900 jobs nationally and the period of media outrage dedicated to this seismic shift in the lives of hundreds of Aussie families (without Twitter accounts) was shorter than that devoted to the celebrity of the day saying a silly thing on social media.

Last month, South Australia's Caroma Industries announced it was moving offshore with the probable loss of 76 jobs. This year, according to Mining Australia, 250 jobs were cut at Arrow Energy, 1370 jobs at Forge Group, 500 jobs at the Vale Integra Coal Complex ... the list goes on and on and that's before we get to the car, manufacturing and publishing industries.

Stop whingeing: The ABC, like all media, vastly overestimates its influence outside the narrow corridors of media and politics. Credit:Paul Jeffers

The point is, in terms of the national economy, 400 job losses at the ABC is hardly calamitous but we're being treated to a media hissy fit of historic proportions because the positions are being cut from the left-wing media by a right-wing government.

People might argue that it's more than that - that it's an assault on free speech or a silencing of the voice of rural Australia but we've hardly seen this sort of outcry about the hundreds of jobs lost at Fairfax Media in recent years or the almost daily redundancies at regional newspapers and commercial television networks.