With Australians trusting media platforms less than do people in just about every other country, why would you set about dismantling the one institution they trust the most?
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our 86-year-old taxpayer-funded and constantly beleaguered public broadcaster, regularly tops surveys as one of the country’s few remaining highly trusted institutions, in the media or otherwise.
This trend was reinforced again in the past week when the UTS Centre for Media Transition in Sydney released findings of a qualitative study of trust in the news media in Australia. Interviewing 34 participants at workshops in Sydney and Tamworth, the researchers found what is becoming a familiar theme in a disintermediated world – with trust shifting away from institutions to peer-to-peer models.
The most frequent complaints about media from participants were of feeling variously overwhelmed, bombarded, manipulated and infuriated. There was a sense among many of being treated like idiots, with news over-hyped and dumbed-down by commercial players trying to attract eyeballs in an increasingly crowded landscape of traditional and social media platforms. Asked to name what was missing, participants frequently cited accuracy, credibility and reliability.
It seems people are tired of advertising dressed up as news, tired of hyped and breathless ‘live and happening’ beat-ups, tired of ‘he-said-she-said’ recitation of opposing claims without any context or verification, tired of the lazy promotion of calculated outrage merchants who seek to monetise hatred as a business model, and tired of partisan journalism that deliberately distorts or cherry-picks facts in support of an ideological and commercial agenda.
Which is precisely why, wouldn’t you think, that in a climate of clickbait, crude cross-promotion and calculated deception by dark forces there would be a substantial societal premium in having a non-commercial, taxpayer-funded broadcaster with a strong charter to act in the public interest? Indeed, the UTS survey found that amid all the negativity around the media generally, it was the ABC that consistently emerged as participants’ most trusted and well-regarded source of news.
“I access sources like ABC News because I feel that there is some onus on them to be more reliable,” said one participant. ““They have more accountability because they’re taxpayer-funded. Should they do the wrong thing, they’re accountable to a whole range of people, not just advertisers and editors.”
Yet, despite survey after survey finding widespread public support for a strong ABC, our ‘conservative’ government and its cheer squad in the plutocrat-funded think tanks and News Corporation seem determined to wreck it.
Whatever the failures of Michelle Guthrie, her sacking by the ABC board this week just half-way through her five-year term and the revelations that chairman Justin Milne was seeking to have a respected journalist sacked to placate his political masters are merely the latest symptoms of concerted attempts by powerful interests in Australia who resent the very existence of public broadcasting.
This is no conspiracy theory. The Liberal Party’s own peak council voted 2:1 in June this year to sell off the ABC. The IPA, the Libs’ paramilitary wing of Zegna-suited young fogey libertarians, have long called for its sale. And there is an army of apoplectic culture warriors at News Corp who have built careers on ranting about alleged left-wing bias in the broadcaster, despite their own publications being showcases for the very worst in partisan hackery and despite the ABC turning itself inside out to accommodate the views of the iPA and others. As ABC veteran Barrie Cassidy observed on The Project, the political pile-on has been given impetus by News Corp’s own self-interested jihad…
This is @barriecassidy‘s take on the government’s vendetta against the ABC. #auspol pic.twitter.com/hyv1DLNDCd
— Fred Smith: Pryme Muppet (@actualfredsmith) September 26, 2018
So as we saw with the same-sex marriage debate, the public concern over climate change, the rising disquiet over deepening inequality and the continuing war on the young and the poor by the old and the rich, the existential attacks on the ABC reveal a complete disconnect between broad, centrist public opinion and a far right, unrepresentative rump.
This noisy cabal, speaking to each other through the editorial pages of The Australian,have been inspired by the rise of Trumpism and are seeking to import to this country the oligarchic, money-driven, extreme libertarian. anti-public institution politics of the USA, a phenomenon acutely observed recently by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Of course, the marriage of convenience between ugly nativism, fundamentalist religion and scored-earth neoliberalism has been with us for years. But in the crisis besetting western democracy since the GFC, that trend has intensified in what looks like a rearguard action by carpetbaggers to destroy our remaining social capital. The mood among this group is to tear everything down, to harness the backlash against liberalism to knock over any last vestige of a collective good, or any institution not subject to ‘the market’. And Australia, with its quaint and resilient attachment to social democracy, stands in their way.
This is why the coming fight can be seen as about more than the ABC and public broadcasting. It is a fight for our remaining public institutions and social infrastructure against narrow, moneyed interests who want to torch what’s left. It is a fight for society against ‘the economy’. It is a fight for a conscious rebuilding of trust through formal and informal networks. And it is a fight that is going to require a revival of public-spirited journalism either within or without the media.
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