The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is going through one of its periodic meltdowns, brought about because a new managing director has come down from the moon and set about doing things her way.



Michelle Guthrie has arrived at the public broadcaster via Google and the House of Murdoch, with a mission to trim the budget and to keep pace with technology and its impact on viewing patterns.

This is not a new mission, because squeezing services into ever tighter financial constraints and adapting to new realities has been going on ever since public broadcasting got under way.

In the case of Australia that was in 1932, in Britain 1927, Canada 1936 and New Zealand 1975.

All the major public broadcasters are engaged in a constant process of creating, squeezing, chopping, slicing and reinventing. Nor is the tireless criticism from commercial interests and governments – and from within – anything new.

Having said that, each managing director spreads his or her own brand of unhappiness in his or her own way. Guthrie’s appearance at the end-of-year Four Corners postmortem is a case in point. According to Guardian Australia’s Amanda Meade she told the ace reporters, researchers and producers who put together Australia’s premier investigative current affairs TV show that she would like to see in the lineup more stories about successful business people.

When it came to the program about children on Nauru speaking about their dire existence as captives of Australia’s offshore refugee policy, the managing director thought Four Corners should have found some happy children to interview.

In one breath she showed us she hadn’t a clue about journalism – yet journalism is a large chunk of the ABC’s core business. At least previous notable managing directors have had to varying degrees a foot in the journalist camp – Mark Scott, David Hill, Brian Johns – and consequently they had a grasp on how and what the news apparatus should be doing.

There are other dispiriting signs including the dismemberment of Catalyst, an appalling decision to strip from the schedule a weekly science program, and the ritualistic plunder of Radio National.

RN has been under assault for so long that it is constantly on a war footing. With an annual budget of $23m, the network costs peanuts while audience surveys show that its specialist programs are one of the factors that generate audience loyalty for the ABC. Radio National is where you find much of the creative brains of the ABC, so to tinker and mess with the formula shows management is not without skill when it comes to shooting itself in the neck.

Guthrie goes into defensive mode when pressed about the RN cuts, asking staff at a meeting in Perth, with raised voice, how they “justify their massive budget when their reach is so low”.

Along with much of her management, it’s evident she doesn’t “get” Radio National, where the mission is for more light and fluffy “flow” programming, while resources for documentaries, features and specialist broadcasts are diluted. At this rate what was once a bright shining jewel in an ocean of mediocrity will look and sound more and more like the mainstream sludge available on much of the ABC’s metropolitan radio stations, not to mention the drivel on the commercials.

Never mind the quality, feel the width. It’s not hard to sense that quite early in her reign Guthrie is on a slippery slope. Heartwarming support from Emma Alberici and Patricia Karvelas doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if a sizeable proportion of staff are offside. We’ve seen it before with the Jonathan Shier experiment.

There are dark mutterings that ultimately, and quite soon, the RN network will transmogrify into a bunch of podcasts available online and on mobile devices. A website that ate a radio station.

If Guthrie’s Google genes get the better of her she might entirely ditch the broadcasting frequencies and airwaves and turn the ABC holos-bolus into a website where customers can click away merrily for their radio or TV entertainment, sprinkled with advertisements for cars and credit cards.

The BBC saved £30m by moving BBC3 online, so imagine the savings if all the public broadcasting system was streamed, courtesy of one great thumping iView.

The one thing Guthrie has not mentioned as part of her reform agenda is ABC “news”, and here criticism by the former PM Paul Keating is spot on, with his complaint about stories that go nowhere.

“In the case of the ABC news, if you want to watch a good news service, watch SBS news, which tells you what’s happening in Iraq, what’s happening in the US election, what’s happening with Donald Trump.

“What you get on the ABC is: ‘A truck has just overturned on the Pacific Highway.’ It’s like in the 1970s. The ABC is letting Australia down in terms of news presentation.”

It’s baffling why an organisation stuffed to the brim with journalists should have such a dimwitted view of news. Maybe it’s the fault of managers many of who, in my former experience as an ABC presenter (Late Night Live, Radio National Breakfast and Media Watch), only have a slender grasp of what they are doing.

These serried ranks of bureaucrats on fat salaries with undistinguished achievements have floated into positions where they could tirelessly tinker and interfere with talented people trying to make programs.

This is not a universal complaint, but there are enough managers who would be better suited as footpath spruikers outside strip clubs than running important parts of a public broadcaster.

None of this is unique to Australia. The BBC and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation have been pressured by funding cuts and accusations by conservatives of liberal bias, while the NZBC is a shell of what it is supposed to be.

In the end Guthrie and her agents may have made an unfortunate contribution to the dumbing down process but the structural changes are being driven by forces outside their control.

While the noble mission for the great old public broadcasters was to provide a service that commercial operators didn’t or couldn’t, today they are expected to be sufficiently “popular” to justify their taxpayer funding.

Technology is making the future case for stand alone public broadcasters more difficult, but when you consider what else is on offer and the quality of the people making the complaints, then its clear we’d be a lot poorer without this crucial Australian institution, even with its repeats of the repeats.