michelle guthrie ABC

In a world when media is desperate for trust, no-one does it better than the ABC. Look at any trust index.

Ad-free, the ABC has always sat where all media now want to be: fully focused on the audience. But in the free-wheeling attention-grabbing world of the internet, you can’t simply rely on broadcasting quality programming. The ABC needs something more; it needs compelling content that pulls the audience in.

But that’s not how the ABC has done things in the past. Rather, trust was built on consistency. It was sustained through an internal management-driven culture of cautious restraint, a “no surprises, no offence” approach to audiences and stake-holders alike.

Sure, they’ve wanted their broadcasters, producers, journalists to be creative, but never at the expense of standards and consistent quality. And, above all, they were always conscious of the needs for “balance” however that may be defined from time to time.

It’s that cultural tension between cautious restraint and creativity that makes the ABC’s actions seem so bizarre: one moment, they’re methodically breaking good stories out of leaked documents; the next they’re almost grovelling in a rush to return the filing cabinet of secrets.

One moment the Alberici commentary on corporate tax is right, then it’s wrong, then right again and finally, it’s just somewhere in between, depending on who’s asking.

The ABC is not alone in this tension. The stronger the institution, the greater the disruption. Earlier this month, Vanity Fair reported on similar tensions in what it called “the woke civil war at The New York Times.”

For decades the ABC approach worked: day in, day out, the ABC produced consistent quality interspersed with the simply remarkable. Across television, radio and on-line, it draws the sort of diverse audience any media institution would kill to have.

Yet, in the ABC, the official management survey shows that the key measure on staff alignment with the culture — staff “engagement” — is slumping and a union survey has lifted the lid on extraordinary stress levels.

That’s what you get when the risk adverse culture of management clashes with the necessarily creative culture of production that the new media world demands.
The risk averse culture is clearest in the organisation’s fraught relationship with its ultimate legal owner – the government. It’s fraught because members of the government (and their media supporters) fear and fund the ABC in equal measure. As Howard adviser Graeme Morris famously described it: “the ABC is our enemies talking to our friends.”

That’s led to an accepted truism within the organisation: the ABC should never, ever openly embarrass the government by asking for money. To an outsider, the 8 cents a day campaign by 1980s managing director David Hill remains a triumph of political messaging. In the folk memory of ABC management, it was an unadulterated disaster that embarrassed the government of the day. And later, if not sooner, an embarrassed government extracts a price.

In the culture of cautious restraint, the default response to complaints is to buy them off as politically cheaply as possible. So the filing cabinet is returned; resources are thrown at responding to a profoundly trivial list of complaints, a journalist is censured for an edgy tweet, a controversial commentator is no longer asked onto programs.

Even otherwise provocative actions are shaped through the culture of cautious restraint. So, the Triple J Hottest 100 is not moved from Australia Day as a political statement. It’s moved because leaving it on Australia Day had become its own statement.

But what management see as cautious restraint, creative staff see as caving to outside pressure. Worse, they see themselves as pawns sacrificed in the game of government relations.

Former managing director Mark Scott responded with a strategy of appreciation with congratulatory notes and public applause. He created a sense that he genuinely liked and respected the work that ABC staff were creating. It’s hard to remember how rare this was before Scott.

Staff say that, internally at least, Guthrie has continued this practice, particularly with female staff. But the strategy of appreciation doesn’t scale. And when it clashes with the culture of cautious restraint, well, as management guru Peter Drucker says: “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”