Outgoing ABC managing director Mark Scott was fortunate that Senator Sam Dastyari was leading the charge at Senate estimates on the ticklish issue of whether Aunty’s in-house tech editor Nick Ross had been leant on by editorial higher-ups.

Ross contends that prior to the 2013 election he was urged to go soft in his reporting of Malcolm Turnbull’s version of the national broadband network (NBN).

Dastyari is not the most forensic of questioners, often interrupting his own questions with subordinate questions, or elongated subterranean qualifications and distractions. He also has the disturbing habit of tossing in the word “right?” as an interrogatory at the end of a lot of his sentences.

Scott had no trouble batting away this pesky line of inquiry about the ABC wanting to stay sweet with the then opposition and its communications spokesman.

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Nick Ross was the man who had built-up a fearsome body of knowledge about the NBN and was of the belief that the cheaper Turnbull fibre to the node version had not been costed properly and would not function adequately, particularly as demand for things like online health services increased.

Ross is an advocate of fibre all-the-way-home – an approach that ran into strife with ABC management because, according to Scott at Tuesday’s Senate estimates session, this was not in tune with ABC’s requirements for balance.

Scott was critical that an 11,000 word article by the technology editor – critical of Turnbull’s NBN – had been published by the ABC without “upward referral”. Nothing of this astonishing length had previously been published by the national broadcaster.

There was another piece by Ross, that had been buried, critical of the use of the copper network – a key component of Turnbull’s cheaper and allegedly more speedily rolled out NBN.

The managing director told his Senate interlocutors that what current affairs manager Bruce Belsham wanted was “a plurality of viewpoints”, in compliance with the ABC’s editorial policies.

An ABC journalist is required to conform to the corporation’s obligation to be “fair, accurate and balanced” – a bit like Fox News.

That is all very well, but it didn’t manage to dispel the lingering suspicion that this tech journalist was causing too much political grief for Aunty and that he should go and get himself some “insurance” in the form of critiquing Labor’s fibre-to-the-home model.

Dastyari asked Scott in the hearing about a conversation Ross surreptitiously recorded with Belsham. Dastyari said that the recording showed Belsham saying that if the article on the shortcomings of the NBN’s copper component is published then “the Turnbull camp and my superiors are going to come down on me like a tonne of bricks”.

That is not quite the same as urging him to stick to the editorial guidelines and do all sides of the story.

Greens senator Scott Ludlum was quick to pounce upon that point at the hearing. Belsham, he thought, was not giving directions to Ross about being balanced, rather the idea was to go and write a “hit piece” on Labor’s NBN strategy, which at the time was being managed by Senator Stephen Conroy.

Specifically, he was trying to engineer a way to take the political heat off the ABC. Ludlum also pointed out that apart from online publications New Matilda and Crikey, there had been precious little reporting on this story – and nothing much at all about it from the ABC.

Welcome to journalism in the real world, which is riddled with political sensitivities, insurance policies and compromise. And that’s not confined to the taxpayer funded ABC. One can imagine the difficulties of getting something contrary to proprietorial beliefs into some of the News Corp papers. Try and write a story critical of Israel and see the how the fair and balanced processes work at major metropolitan newspapers.

As for the ABC, it has been mugged by thugs so many times that there’s little wonder it’s nervous about going too far outside.

The Nick Ross saga demonstrates the extent to which ABC reporting is contained. Nothing too wacky or way out is permitted in news and current affairs. The talk at editorial meetings is about being edgy and fearless, but not if it turns into advocacy that treads on political toes.

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The NBN is a vastly important project. The prime minister talks of encouraging innovation and agility. If Australia had a high speed connection with significant amounts of capacity that in itself would be a huge boost to innovation.

Tony Abbott as Coalition leader, being a digital luddite, didn’t want an NBN at all. If there was to be one, it could not be Labor’s NBN. A watered-down version open to vague and untested alternate technologies was the proposal. It has not been the Coalition’s most effective policy, leaving itself open to plenty of fair criticism.

Much of the Senate estimates experience is like watching paint dry. Fortunately for Scott, this was to be his last experience with the communications committee of the Senate. He retires later this year.

There’s only so much questioning you can bear on budget allocations for rural and regional radio broadcasting, programming decisions which see the SBS’s Dateline at the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent on at the same time on the same night, and the bidding process for the Asian Cup.

Unfortunately, Senator Eric Abetz could not be there to follow up his pre-Christmas questions about how much reporting the ABC had devoted to the Polish election results.