Review by Ray Martin and Shaun Brown given highly detailed brief after former terrorism suspect Zaky Mallah was allowed to ask a question on live television

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The fairness of Q&A host Tony Jones’s moderation, the diversity of guests and topics and even the behaviour of the audience will be scrutinised by the ABC board-appointed reviewers Ray Martin and Shaun Brown.



Brown, a former managing director of SBS, and Martin, a popular broadcaster, have been given highly detailed terms of reference for the audit, which will review the first 23 episodes of Q&A broadcast this year.



Q&A has dominated the headlines for three weeks since former terror suspect Zaky Mallah was chosen to ask a question and later made some provocative remarks which Jones ruled out of order.



How Zaky Mallah ended up on live TV: Q&A producers took a calculated risk Read more

The main focus of the external review is to measure the performance of the program against the ABC’s impartiality standards which all programs on the public broadcaster must take into account.



The terms of reference, which the ABC has released (pdf) ahead of the review for the first time, appear to be designed to detect bias, which the government has repeatedly said the program is guilty of, with prime minister Tony Abbott recently referring to it as “a lefty lynch mob”.

The audit will examine whether a “suitably broad” range of perspectives was canvassed which reflected the whole Australian community and whether the guests were diverse enough to represent all points of view.



Martin and Brown will also be asked to assess the program’s on-air Twitter stream and to advise on a social media strategy.



“Did the questions from the public featured in each program provide an appropriate diversity of topics and perspectives?” is one of the questions they will be asked to answer.



Abbott has imposed a ban on government frontbenchers appearing on Q&A but communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has not yet revealed whether he will honour his invitation to appear on Monday night.



On Thursday Turnbull was one of the panellists to be confirmed by the ABC as appearing on the next program.



The other guests will be war correspondent and film-maker Michael Ware; Canadian Christian scholar John Stackhouse; the director of polling at the Lowy Institute, Alex Oliver; and the shadow assistant minister for education, Amanda Rishworth.



On Monday Jones said he was “expecting” Turnbull to appear as scheduled.



The external review follows the ABC board’s formal warning to Q&A executive producer Peter McEvoy under the misconduct provisions of the ABC’s industrial agreement. McEvoy was sanctioned for allowing Mallah on the live program.



“Given [Mallah’s] criminal background and past public statements, the live broadcast meant that the ABC was not in a position to manage unpredictable or inappropriate actions or responses,” the board said in a statement last week.



The board had already decided to order the comprehensive independent review of the Q&A program after constant criticism from the government that the program was left-leaning.