The ABC’s main television and radio news bulletins should cover more human interest stories, local news and hip pocket issues, the managing director Michelle Guthrie has said.

Guthrie was endorsing an internal editorial review which found the 7pm ABC TV news and the 7am radio news bulletins assumed public broadcasting audiences were more interested in major national and international events than they were in their own community.



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“To characterise it crudely, an ABC bulletin might leave an anxious viewer sleepless over global instability, while Channel 7 will leave them more worried about crime or violence at the end of their own street,” the Diversity of Broadcast News Stories review found.



Led by editorial policies director Alan Sunderland, the review of eight weeks of broadcasts asked whether the ABC was failing to design a bulletin for the widest possible audience due to unconscious cultural bias.



“The question is not whether we should also be running footage of individual house fires or escapee animals, but whether there are some thoughtful, unique ways we could add more local, human interest and hip pocket stories to our coverage, possibly through better use of our regional resources,” the review said.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A pie-chart showing the subject matter of ABC bulletins in Sydney. Photograph: supplied

The review did not find any breaches of editorial policy in the ABC stories and found that even the shortest of news items was balanced. Across all the broadcasters sport and weather was a priority.



However, the ABC’s story selections were often substantially different from those made by the commercial newsrooms, in particular there were many more international stories on the ABC and SBS than there were on channels Seven, Nine and Ten.



The breakdown of the commercial and public broadcasters’ bulletins found the most space given to federal politics (16%) on the ABC; international politics (23%) on SBS; general interest (23%) on Seven; crime and sport (18%) on Nine and general interest (16%) on Ten.



“The ABC is also much less likely to cover celebrity news, human interest stories, including minor mishaps, or to include stories solely on the basis of spectacular (or sometimes not that spectacular) footage,” the review found.



The review recommended ABC journalists spend more time talking to everyday Australians about health expenses, public transport, wages and child care and increase the number of general interest stories “without trivialising or ‘dumbing down’” the bulletins.



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“Handled well, this could become a defining and promotable feature of our bulletins, especially on TV but also on longer radio bulletins. This is already happening on occasion to good effect, but should be expanded.”



Regional reporters should be used more to localise state news bulletins and make them more directly relevant to the community.



“These recommendations do not amount to wholesale change, but rather to strategic means of tweaking the mix of content here and there, or to shift the treatment of stories (away from the political and/or national) to increase the relevance and usefulness of news at a local level while maintaining our strong commitment to reporting the issues and events that matter.”



In the introduction Guthrie said the review, which is the 15th since the board introduced a series of audits under former ABC chairman James Spigelman in 2013, was a useful reminder of the importance of the ABC’s impartiality in story selection.



“The recommendations suggested to improve our diversity should be prioritised by our teams namely to cover economic/hip pocket issues more often and in a different way; drawing on our regional and rural reporters for more human interest stories; and for our local news bulletins to be even more local and community based,” Guthrie said.



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The background to the review was to ask whether the make-up of the ABC’s bulletins needed a rethink and whether the story selection was adequate to equip audiences to make up their own minds.



“The ABC is frequently accused of overlooking systemic gaps in its news coverage,” the review said. “This criticism takes many forms, but tends to coalesce over the proposition that the left-wing bias allegedly prevalent among ABC staff leads them towards stories which accord with a world view which is both progressive and ‘elite’. Another common and related criticism levelled at the ABC is that it ignores the ‘cost of living’ stories important to ordinary Australians in favour of progressive social causes.”



Guthrie and Sunderland will face a second round of questions about their handling of the Emma Alberici tax stories at an additional Senate estimates hearing next month.

