background briefing 2-1 ..............6

A moral minefield

Shocks from the proposed ABC/Telstra deal continue to bounce around the print media. Most trenchant and informed of the critics is STEWART FIST of The Australian.

Below are discrete excerpts from his column of 29/2/00.

The ABC has suffered such severe cutbacks that it needs every source of outside money it can get. 'Who pays the piper calls the tune' is the appropriate adage here. The problem with subtle or overt commercialisation of the ABC is not so much the intrusion of business, but the power that can be exerted over the corporation once it starts to depend on outside funding.

But when a choice needs to be made between integrity and reducing output or abandoning expansion plans, some ABC managers and staff opt for a little bit of prostitution on the side, hoping the public and the more puritanical journalists won't notice.

'The public can be confident about such a deal because the ABC has strong editorial guidelines'.

In fact, the ABC's editorial guidelines aren't at all strong, and they aren't always observed. The main problem is not with the guidelines but with the lack of enforcement by management.

The recent history of the ABC shows that guidelines are only maintained by those working at the coalface of news and current affairs.

Usually, management is openly on the side of the breaches, because a bit of commercialism or compromise makes their lives easier.

The name John Millard comes to mind. He was the whistleblower who was 'victimised' by management for exposing some of these practices.

If ABC management had any real vision of the importance of the Internet to schools in Australia, and any real sense of public service, it would see its own online portal as one of its three key function in the future -- alongside radio and television services.

In combination with SBS (which has its own material and access to language translation), the ABC could establish one of the world's great Internet sites and one of the world's most trusted sources, in a global Web saturated with commercialism and rubbish.

Only two or three organisations in Australia have the wherewithal to develop substantial portals -- the ABC, Telstra and the Packer-Microsoft venture.

Of these three, only the ABC can mount a non-commercial portal with substantial content and with a high level of integrity. So the ABC is flogging off its unique advantage -- the trustworthiness of its news and current affairs -- just to make a quick buck. In doing so, it is also boosting the portal potential of its primary competitor, and reducing its own role.

Media monitor Media Watched

Keen readers with good memories will recall the frustration with which we have had to confront the vitriolic outpourings of Michael Warby, late head of the media unit of the Institute for Public Affairs, against the ABC, as in this choice piece from the February Adelaide Review:

'It has long been an open question which group or institution in Australian public life engages in behaviour most worthy of contempt.

Is it the ABC, paid for by the taxes of all Australian but which deigns to flatter the opinions only of a narrow slice (and to sneer at the opinions of a much larger slice), whose staff are currently whining that the Party of Menzies will not give it more public money when sneering at all Menzies stood for, is the posture of choice for so many ABC staff: a spectacle at once unctuous and pathetic?'

Warby adds to this list 'humanities and social science academia, using the taxes of working-class families to fund middle-class advantage' and purveying 'an obscurantist pomposity that sneers at human achievements past and present in order to polish an overweening moral vanity? '

His list goes on to include all trade unions, the Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace, Oxfam and Community Aid Abroad with their

'massively overblown reputation for altruism and their almost a complete lack of accountability to do their bit to trash Australian national interest'.

'Schadenfreude' best describes our feelings when Paul Barry on Media Watch 28/2/00 revealed that Warby had plagiarised a 400 word story from the Internet about Jane Fonda's 'treachery' during the Vietnam War, adding moral indignation that she had recently been given a prestigious award. Not only this, but the story was shown to be a hoax and totally discredited.

The next day Warby was stood down from his position as director of the Institute of Public Affairs Media Monitoring Unit.

What exquisite irony.