Five hundred years ago, English capitalist farmers began a process known as “enclosure of the commons”, the forced and wholesale appropriation of public land – formerly used by villagers for arable farming.  Now corporate forces, led by Rupert Murdoch, and agents of the political Right are attempting a similar manoeuvre on public broadcasting – the broadcast commons. The ultimate price is our democracy.

There are few remaining really globally trusted brands in journalism – Reuters, The New York Times and the BBC spring to mind. Here in Australia, there really is only one news brand left that the nation turns to in a crisis – the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But as we shall see in a moment, even dear old auntie is on a slippery slope as – like a reluctant middle-aged stripper – she desperately seeks the approval of a vengeful Right that hates the very fact of her existence.

The attack on public broadcasting is not just an Australian phenomenon. In the US in the past week, House Republicans, citing left-wing bias, voted to cut federal funding to National Public Radio, all $5 million of it – a number that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted represented one ten thousands of one per cent of the federal budget. The Republicans’ ammunition, such as it was, included a recent orchestrated sting of an NPR fund-raising executive who was secretly filmed bagging the Tea Party.

The attempt to silence the last non-corporate, independent media voice in America comes despite an extraordinary increase in listenership for public radio.  According to the recently released annual Pew Centre Project for Excellence in Journalism, NPR’s listening audience increased 3 percent in 2010, to 27.2 million members weekly, up 58 percent overall since 2000. The fact is public radio is one of the last, if not THE last, bastions of serious, sober, accurate and trusted news – a field vacated by a commercial media increasingly obsessed with gadgets, vapid celebrity and the vein-popping screeching of polarised talkshow politics.

In the UK, meanwhile, Murdoch – who appears set to get his way yet again in moving to full ownership of satellite broadcasting behemoth BSkyB – has been seeking – through anointed heir James – to cut the legs out from under the BBC, which he believes operates unfairly with a public subsidy. A poll shows 60 per cent of Britons believe that Murdoch is already far too powerful. But politicians, wary of the reach of his platforms, are reluctant to curtail the spread of his ownership.

In a recent address to the London School of Economics, available on podcast, Michael Lyons – the outgoing chairman of the BBC’s governing body – mused that the perfect environment for an attack on public broadcasting by commercial media was one of recession and declining advertising revenues – exactly what the UK has been experiencing for the past two years. Murdoch resents the public subsidy that the BBC operates under, particularly now that it competes with his newspapers for eyeballs in the online space.

Here in Australia, where the market is even more dominated by Murdoch, it now seems clear that the state broadcaster is seeking to appease the forces of the corporate and cultural Right by allowing their already very visible agents free access to air time to spread their gospel even further. The Andrew Bolts and Janet Albrechtsons and Piers Akermans regularly appear on ABC political talkshows like Insiders and QandA to tell us that climate change is a con, that the Greens are fascists and that a powerful, non-elected, leftist cultural elite is forcing its views on the rest of the population.

Now, no-one is saying that a range of voices should not be heard on a publicly funded broadcaster. But it seems fair to ask why Andrew Bolt, a journalist who already has a platform to expound his views in the biggest selling newspaper in Australia, need any further publicity. What gives him special status? Why is his opinion so keenly sought? In short, why is the ABC – a public broadcaster with a charter to air a wide range of voices – so seemingly desperate to court the approval of paid columnists of a magnate who already controls 70 per cent of the metropolitan print media in Australia?

There was an interesting discussion of these questions recently on the Pure Poison blog run by Jeremy Seer and Dave Gaukroger. The discussion focused on the fact that while conservatives hate (and always have hated) the ABC as a nest of basket-weaving lefties, even progressives now are despairing of the broadcaster’s attempts to win favour with the Right by routinely running Murdoch paper talking points, routinely featuring his columnists and generally trying very, very hard to be seen to be batting for one side. Poster ‘Castidhe’ summed it up:

The Right hate the ABC for existing and denigrate it in the hope of getting it to the point where they can sell it to Murdoch and not have to worry about it any more. The Left are learning to hate it because it’s started pandering obsequiously to the Right in the desperate (and futile) hope of avoiding the fate of (1) thereby.

What seems very clear to independent observers is that public broadcasting is under a sustained attack by forces that would deny its right to exist and who insist that in the meantime it be yet another platform for the conservative viewpoints already crowding the editorial pages of the rest of the commercial media. Seeking the quiet life, the ABC has clearly decided that there is an asymmetry to the political pressures it might be under. Labor governments, now routinely afraid of fighting the culture wars from the left, will leave the state broadcaster alone, while Liberal governments will religiously run the stop-watch  on its programming to enforce an accountant’s conception of ‘balance’.

In a world now perilously short of publicly minded media, what’s needed more than ever is a rigorously independent public broadcaster which does not seek to pander to anyone, which asks hard questions of all sides of politics and which devotes its precious resources not to cheap and populist “opinionating” but to straight journalism, the type that exposes who is pulling the strings of power in a world in which wealth is ever more concentrated and independent voices ever more straining to be heard.

See also: “The ABC fears the conservatives”: Roger Wegener


21 Comments

Doug · March 20, 2011 at 10:22 AM

I agree.

Felix · March 20, 2011 at 11:18 AM

If Mr Murdoch is smothering our thoughts with right wing propaganda how on earth was Mr Obama, a socialist by all accounts, elected? Shouldn’t Mr and Mrs Rush Limbaugh be the occupants of the White House with the red phone providing a direct line to Rupert Murdoch and not Russia’s President Vladimir Putin?

John · March 20, 2011 at 11:27 AM

Obama is a socialist?

Casablanca · March 20, 2011 at 2:35 PM

Just picked up “The Media We Deserve” by David Salter, former Exec Producer of ABCs Media Watch. Stuart Littlemore in his foreword quotes a former Murdoch Sunday Times Washington Correspondent as saying that:

“In Australia, the government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the News Corporation”.

It seems that the Howard Govt beat the ABC into submission but that both the Rudd and Gillard Govts have done little to re-dress the imbalance.

Mr D · March 20, 2011 at 8:53 PM

“Socialist” in American is what we call centrist.

Fran Barlow · March 20, 2011 at 9:15 PM

I'm now of the view Mr Denmore that the ABC ought to get right out of local news and Current Affairs. If all they can do is launder and recycle the views of the Murdochracy, then there is no warrant for them to have pu8blic money. Murdoch should be forced to pay and take explicit responsibility for his own propaganda.

Notus · March 20, 2011 at 9:37 PM

Howard's appointment of his personal friend Maurice Newman as Chairman of the ABC now appears to be part of an agenda to undermine traditional community support for the public broadcaster.
Labor seems to have painted itself into a corner by trying to stay aloof from such grubby behaviour.

Mr D · March 20, 2011 at 9:47 PM

Fran, I actually think the ABC should stop its general programming department encroaching on the territory of news and current affairs.

The problem isn't actually in News. It's outside there. The answer is to junk all the opinion-based pseudo-current affairs shows like Q and A and Insiders and put the resources back into straight news.

But I do agree with Notus that Rudd made a major mistake in not purging the ABC board when he had the chance. Once Newman goes, it may improve. But they also need an independent staff representative on the board again.

And they need to stop sucking up to the Murdochcracy. They will be pilloried whatever they do. So they may as well act independently and courageously.

senexx · March 21, 2011 at 12:07 AM

Exactly Mr. Denmore, What the US call Socialist is what we call Centrist.

There is no “Left” in the US. There is a US Left but it is not Left in any other sense of the global left/right paradigm.

Robbo · March 21, 2011 at 2:03 AM

Mr D, I'm not sure when the current sitting right leaning ABC board members terms are up but would that not be an opportunity for the federal government to restore some real balance, not balance as perceived by the right?

Dan · March 21, 2011 at 4:46 AM

Mr D: I think you are spot on when you say the ABC should 'junk all the opinion-based pseudo-current affairs shows like Q and A and Insiders'. This is actually lazy television that requires very little effort and very little budget from the ABC. They do no more than give yet another forum to people who have more than adequate access to the public, be they politicians, journalists or others in the public eye.

Anonymous · March 21, 2011 at 6:52 AM

The practise pf having MSM journalist on panels needs to cease. This practise only give the MSM a free platform. If they want these types of programmes, let them use their own media, where they have to pay for the pleasure.

Journalist interviewing journalist is not news.

I suggest that those who are unhappy with the ABC news and current affairs, go to the site, and enter feedback that is available in contact.

Anonymous · March 21, 2011 at 7:07 AM

I would like to add, where do we see equal number of ABC journalists on MSM panels, on a regular basis.

Colin Campbell · March 21, 2011 at 7:58 AM

Murdoch will not stop until media is concentrated in the private sector through him. Very disturbing.

Anonymous · March 21, 2011 at 7:59 AM

The practice of the ABC supplying commentary seems to have been deliberately designed to upset people – in other words, to undermine public confidence in the institution.

Anonymous · March 21, 2011 at 11:51 AM

Clearly Mr Murdoch has woven his spell on Felix..only someone under the zombified death grip of News Ltd would call Obama a socialist..

Anonymous · March 22, 2011 at 12:54 AM

Maybe Felix is pointing out that Obama made it to the hite House in the face of fierce opposition from the Murdoch media in the US. So it's not as all-powerful as it may seem from time to time.

Anonymous · March 22, 2011 at 5:09 AM

This is good, Mr Denmore, but the tone isn't quite right. We know its parody, just that the humour element is a smidgin' underplayed. Suggest you study the early posts at Verdant Hopes, where Alene Composta really nailed it.

Citing Pure Poison, that gave the game away!

Good, but could try harder.

Anonymous · March 22, 2011 at 8:57 AM

The ABC and SBS are doing a creditable job of presenting news and current affairs in Australia.

Where the ABC has failed Australia is in its extreme Anglocentric programming. I hate it that the ABC regurgitates so much BBC material.

Anonymous · March 22, 2011 at 9:16 AM

Well if you hate the ABC recycling you'd really hate the BBC recycling – along with Channel 4, ITV etc in the UK.

Rolly · March 30, 2011 at 2:43 AM

Long live the hypocrisy that the publicly funded media needs to present a visible balance in its' opinion; but the commercial media, funded by the same people, viz. me and thee, but via the advertising process, can be as politically biased and partisan as it pleases.
As a community we pay considerable more for the rantings of the right wing fanatics than for the services of the ABC and SBS.
Every item that we buy has the cost of advertising added to the final price.
Think on't.

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