background briefing 2-1 ..............5

Little by little, the ABC dies (cont)

But the UK government modified the BBC's Act specifically to include online services in its strict editorial guidelines. That hasn't happened with the ABC, which is why the Telstra deal slid past the guard-dogs despite seven months of secret negotiations.

The second ploy of snake-oil incrementalists is to claim that the integrity of the institution will be protected by China walls, firewalls or quarantining. They maintain it is possible to partition one section of an organisation from the others, and prevent any payola pollution from permeating the barrier of editorial independence.

This is complete corporate clap-trap, and everyone in business knows that, but it gets trotted out regularly by politicians.

Editorial independence at all levels in the ABC is constantly subject to funding threats, and news and current affairs have regularly fought battles to block back-door deals. Government apparatchiks tend to have a budget-centric mentality, which becomes especially dominant when they are reaching the limit of their terms, but are not yet ready to retire.

A third ploy is to claim that rules of editorial and accountancy separation no longer apply. In the Telstra-ABC case, board member Michael Kroger suggested full privatisation of the ABC's online division, and both the managing director and the minister imply Internet deals are not as relevant as flogging the credibility of television and radio programming.

In fact, Internet compromises are potentially much worse.

As an advertising medium, the Internet is introducing serious problems of privacy because it is interactive. Privacy is not a problem with conventional radio and television broadcasting because the channels are one way.

Everyone can see that the commercial value of the Internet lies with its unique ability to identify individuals, and later target them with advertising tailor-made to suit their requirements and interests. For this to happen, individuals must have a personal profile, which can only be constructed by computers using feedback techniques of the DoubleClick variety.

So even if the Telstra site's ABC news pages don't carry ads, the main advantages to Telstra for its $66 million gift is the ability to identify ABC users and profile them. Telstra can also exploit the ABC's credibility and deploy advertising around the index pages, which are essential repeated-access links in any online deployment.

Another ploy of incrementalists is to cast a few red herrings to hide the stink of their own fishing. The ABC-Telstra deal comes littered with more dead herrings than the rivers of Romania.

Brian Johns told the Australian Mobile Communications Congress he was confident the ABC's board would shun advertising of any sort, and that raising 'the spectre of advertising is a false and misleading issue in this debate'.

Rubbish.

The ABC cannot continue to be only a broadcaster, he said. 'It will be a benchmark deal if it comes about.' Apparently the arrangement with Telstra places 'real value on ABC content' (ie money value) and gives the organisation a leg up into broadband services. 'The ABC had to focus on revenue raising services,' Johns says.

We heard that story a few years back with ABC manoeuvres in pay television.

These assurances come from a man who committed SBS to only a little bit of corporate sponsorship (never advertising). He was commercialising SBS at the time David (Horatio) Hill was watching over the ABC series called Holiday (travel with contra deals), Great Ideas (funded by Telecom and mining companies) and Everybody (a life-style program funded by snack-food and fast-food companies).

When Johns replaced Hill at the ABC, he presided over the outsourcing of A River Somewhere (with obvious label promotion of fishing reels and grog) and Sports Australia, for which sports marketing companies were invited to kick in $10,000 to $15,000 per episode.

In the past week, the Play School staff and presenters have been fired, presumably to be replaced by someone willing to make choo-choos out of Coke or Pepsi cans. Or better still, they might incrementally drop toy-making using cotton-reels and cardboard boxes in favour of playing with the real thing: plastic Bananas in Pyjamas from ABC Enterprises, or perhaps GI-Joes with machine-guns from Toys-R-Us.

STEWART FIST, The Australian, 15/2/2000