Media policy in Australia, no matter who is in government, is usually about one thing: politics. The government’s latest iteration is no exception.
The primary political goal is to look after the interests of the commercial free-to-air television broadcasters who play such an important role in election campaigns. They’ve been protected from competition for generations — competition from a fourth television licence, from subscription television, from digital broadcasting and, now, from streaming services that offer viewers the kind of choice and control that the antiquated free-to-air broadcasting model can never match.
That tradition continues, albeit dressed up in protectionist garb, with streaming services to be subjected to a scheme to “incentivise and, as needed, require” streaming services to spend more on Australian content — although how foreign-owner and -operated streaming services will be “required” to do anything isn’t clear.
For decades, the local content industry has insisted that Australians want to watch “our stories, told well”, but have always claimed the stick of regulation is needed to force media to pay for it.
The argument might have stacked up when it paid for hundreds of hours of Australian drama but the result these days is an incessant torrent of reality TV sludge like Married at First Sight, Big Brother or Australian Survivor.
With mostly foreign-owned streaming services burdened with extra costs for outcompeting local media (similar to Google and Facebook being punished for being better at advertising than News Corp and Nine), the government’s attention turned to the ABC and SBS.
There, things are trickier, because the Coalition’s long-term goal, encouraged by News Corp, is the destruction of a competitive public broadcasting system. But its incessant attacks on the ABC are deeply unpopular in once-safe, now threatened urban Liberal seats where Voices Of and independent candidates are threatening self-described “Liberal moderates”.
So the agenda to destroy the ABC has been placed on hold. The ABC’s budget won’t be further cut for the moment. Instead it will be given a small funding increase, below inflation — just an extra $87 million on a triennial basis, or about 2.8%. SBS, which poses little political threat to the government, gets 6%.
The ABC will be compelled to report how much it spends on local content, despite the very document the government published to justify it showing the ABC spent about as much on local content as the three commercial broadcasters combined.
In any event, those “moderate Liberals” can now tell their constituents about a funding increase for the ABC, even if it doesn’t make up for past cuts and is a cut in real terms.
The next problem is regional media, with regional TV broadcasters remaining on death row as advertising revenue declines and regional publishers continuing to struggle. Direct funding support for regional TV will continue until 2024, as will support for regional and public interest journalism. In addition, the government will provide $50 million for training and cadetships for regional journalism. The ABC has also been given additional funding to support regional journalism.
In this case, good politics happens to be good policy — regional and public interest journalism are both under threat and there’s no magic commercial solution to ensuring the continuing provision of them as the legacy media slowly dies.
The government deserves credit for continuing the support for public interest journalism initiated by Nick Xenophon in exchange for supporting Malcolm Turnbull’s media reforms in 2017 (Crikey’s owner Private Media has been a beneficiary of it). The economics of regional journalism aren’t going to improve any time soon, so continued government support is crucial in smaller communities.
Finally, as always, the subscription television sector has been thrown a bone: local content requirements for pay TV will be overhauled to make them easier.
We’re now into a second decade of handouts for the television networks. It started in 2010 when Labor cut the television licence fee from 9% of revenue and more than $250 million a year to 4.5%. The Coalition in 2017 got rid of it altogether and substituted the $40 million a year spectrum fee. And there has been other ad hoc assistance, like the more than $40 million given to Foxtel.
As always, the free-to-air sector has immediately complained that it hadn’t been given enough handouts — despite advertising revenue bouncing back strongly from the recession. In fact The Australian’s media section on Monday carried a headline “Huge rebound in TV advertising”, referring to 2021. But the commercial networks still want the spectrum fee abolished as well.
Nothing is ever enough for some of the greediest rent-seekers in the Australian economy.
That, too, is another media policy tradition.
Does restoring 2018 levels of funding for the ABC make up for the previous cuts? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Poorly rating repeat program formats, some of which rate 50% fewer viewers than they did two years ago, c grade American reality shows, sanitised news, sponsored content, soft journalism, just count the times Exclusive, and Chaos is used, in the course of a weeks news bulletins, yesterday we had classroom chaos, and I think it was out of control bushfire chaos tonight. All sandwiched between about 20 minutes per hour of station promos, advert breaks that contain relentless gambling adverts, and the same repetitive national advertisers. What is there not to like about the current commercial TV network programming?
Todays Crikey Weekender article is called “Chaos in Canberra”. Just saying.
If legacy media applied the same libertarian economic principles i.e. ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘sink or swim’ etc., then they should have been allowed to, with no government subsidies, partisan policies etc., cease trading; this would then allow other more competitive media groups to fill the spaces (which will innovate away from legacy channels of FTA tv/radio and print.
For now our media oligopoly fits the viewing habits of many older Australians in the important above media age voter cohort…
The ABC has been less critical of the government of late. Maybe this is its reward?
Why compare the ABC with the commercial free to air TV broadcasters . The free to Air stations do not get an annual budget from the treasury directly from the tax payer in the Federal Budget on Budget day .
No they don’t, do they?
The FTA stations occupy valuable bandwidth free of charge, collect lots of ad money, take the federal government’s handouts and feed the population the pap that the government requires them to do.
Oh, that’s right and Channel 7 collected in Jobkeeper money of $42,000,000 whilst having the profit levels rise.
Otherwise it is a flat playing field, if you ignore all the other duties which the ABC is required to fulfill.
The LNP is trying to neutralize its persistent attacks on the National Broadcaster because it still doesn’t get the fact that the ABC is supposed to be independent, not the voice of the government.
Agree 100% ratty
Where would we be without the ABC .The current group of lying , thieving rorters would turn this country into a failed state as they all join the gravy chain and plunder the national purse without the restrictions that provide some scrutiny at the moment.
Sports Rorts and Rates for mates would look like small change petty thieving if the real free press is nobbled.
Mining magnates would not need to spend millions on preference votes to buy influence to inflate the value of soon-to-be-stranded fossil fuel assets.
What was that gift of $30M (x 2) for minority sports (something undefined, undiscussed & undocumented) to NewsCorpse’s SKY, which has been FTA via WIN for more than a year?
This idea that the ‘pure’ ABC’s ‘public interest’ journalism is somehow not impacted by ‘for-profit’ motives in the same way that commercial TV…just doesn’t fly anymore. If it ever did.
ABC journalism isn’t controlled editorially by its Board, or even its executive hierarchy. It’s very aggressively editorially independent…essentially, run by senior journalists and journalists-come-bureaucrats, nominally on editorially objective grounds. That’s not automatically a bad nominal aspiration; but it’s also no different, really, to commercial sector journalism’s nominal aspirations. In practice, however, the way that editorial control often manifests in both sectors – both in motivation and in daily practice – is exactly the same, and it’s the oldest careerist story in the book: individual professional survival. The difference between commercial and non-commercial ‘public interest journalism’ lies essentially in where the editorial definition of ‘public interest’ is (self-servingly and selectively) situated. This ABC journo’s ‘public interest’ journalism is that News journos’ ‘ideological’ activism, and vice versa. But both are really the same kind: the journalism of self-preservation.
If you step back and survey the vocation as a whole, being an ABC journalist is – pound for pound, on average – now unquestionably the most financially secure, lucrative, workplace-amenable, desirable gig around…if you can get and hang onto one. As a mate of mine (axed in the last round of redundancies a few years ago) ruefully says: ‘It’s a nepotistic racket, mate.’ Pay, entitlements, conditions, training, resourcing…all are still unusually good at the ABC (no bad thing). But if you happen to be one of the ABC marquee – a David Speers, a Leigh Sales, the Four Corners celebs, PK, Laura, Annabelle…the ‘first names’ etc – they are insanely, probably far too, good. For an elite handful, it’s an incredibly well-paid journalistic gig, in which if you’re any good (as they undoubtedly are) you also get to leverage your taxpayer-underwritten Brand profile into multiple equally lucrative moonlighting journo gigs: books contracts, ready-made (taxpaper-made) podcast audiences, corporate MC one-offs ($15K a day/pop), cross-promotional appearances. Plus all the usual indulgences of ABC diva-dom: the work from home, the door-to-door transport, the sympathetic bespoke family and child care arrangements, the six weeks plus holidays, the well-resourced trips, the VIP access, the social pages…the daily imposition of your ‘public interest journalism’ media presence into the privileged, unacountable media-political milleu.
As my mate said: a racket. And everyone on the inside of it knows it. OK, so what. Good luck to ‘Our ABC’ stars!
But it’s what this gives rise to in the ABC’s day-to-day journalistic decision-making processes that makes BK’s determinedly contrived distinction b/w for-profit and ‘public interest’ journalism so illegimitate. Because there’s huge motivation for a Laura Tingle or a Speersy or a ‘PK’ – all of them btw recent refugees from a journo private sector they know better than most is increasingly under the fiscal/business model pump – to hold like hell onto these incredibly-juicy taxpayer gigs-for-life. What does this in turn demand of these ‘leading’ ABC journalists, in allegedly ‘public interest’ terms? It means them ‘playing safe’ in the internal ABC political-careerist game, when it comes to story selection and focus and rolling triage, it means taking the ‘obvious’ easy journalistic pathways…no less than it does over at SKY, or at Pravda-by-the-Yarra, or on 2GB (just with different political, partisan, ideological, in-house politics parameters). So, for example, it’s why a five month Four Corners investigation on Tudge and Porter’s low-grade (borderline-irrelevant) boof behaviour gets an Aunty ‘public interest’ green light (and, duly, five months’ of budget allocation internally)…but an arguably far more valid deep-drill on, say, domestic violence and sexual crime in Indigenous Settlements (35-odd times more likely to be hospitalised by your partner if you’re an Australian black woman) never, ever will. Not ever. Because it would transgress the local prevailing ‘editorial goodthink consensus’ – just ask Chris Uhlman, or Amanda Vanstone, or Tom Switzer – and that, in turn, risk placing in jeopardy the job of whichever individual ABC journo was suicidal enough to push it on its merits…careerist-opportunism and office politics being what they inevitably are in any workplace.
The stakes are just too competitively high now in all ‘professional journalism’ for professional journalists who do still have good jobs to risk them on vocational purity (genuine ‘public interest’) grounds. Who can blame anyone at the ABC for not wanting to propose a story to Sally Neighbor on Indigenous child abuse? Chances are you’d not be asked back; not necessarily because Neighbor is a bad journo, but because if she did greenlight you, she’d likely become the one with a career knife at her back, from the next self-preserver. It’s careerist office politics; same applies over at SKY, etc. It’s groupthink combined with ambition and self-preservation. It’s something that no journalist – whatever the forum or company – will ever be truly honest with us non-journos about, but a career in journalism is overwhelmingly about editorial sponsorship, championing, alliances, mentorhood, yarn allocation and hard-won content/byline real estate…it’s about being good, sure…but equally being a ‘safe’ pair of editorial hands with your competence, even your excellence. It’s about daily-pragmatic incumbency, content-churn, not rocking the systemic boat. This is largely what keeps you in any decent media gig, and it applies equally to all journalism. It’s not so much about dutifully toe-ing an imposed ‘propaganda line’, as it is about voluntarily embracing – as a self-convincing virtue – selective self-censorship and what you might call ‘vocational transferrence’. I think this latter has been an especially big part of the ABC’s disproportionate obsession with the Catholic Church and #MeToo these last five years. The wider progressive left surrendered on economics and foreign policy two decades ago – post-Keating – and the Fourth Estate followed suit, instead since slaking its frustrated appetite for (what is a desperately needed) progressive ‘public interest’ scepticism on these relatively trivial, but job non-jeopardising, softer issues/yarns. Let’s face it, no ABC hack is ever going to ‘get not asked back’ for sticking it up the LNP, or a Mick or Hillsong priest, or some haplessly misogynist/homophobic old fart like me.
Same applies to a Sky hack dissing on the Greens or Malcom Turnbull or some University CC expert.
The reality for any working journalist today – in ALL outlets, profit or not (except the geniunely-independent likes of Michael West Media, and perhaps here at Crikey) – is that the primary daily anxiety over-riding all other editorial influences is: will this yarn or this angle on this yarn lose me my paid job/shut the door on future paid ones? The ABC’s journalism is no different, and in fact – because of its increasing corporatisation and quasi-commercialisation at the hands-on working level and the parallel rapidly shriking number of job opportunities for journalism workers elsewhere – I’d argue it suffers even more so: that BK’s attacks on the journalistic integrity of the ‘for profit’ commercials applies much much more so to the ABC and SBS. Really, to suggest that a David Speers is somehow an ‘editorially purer’ journo because he works at a nominally ‘not for profit’ journalism outlet…just doesn’t fly. To cite my earlier example again: for the last couple of decades, his last employer – News Corps – has actually all over pretty much every other Australian outlet around when it comes to ‘public interest’ stories on just such truly difficult, unpopular, unpalatable Indigenous issues as DV in remote communities. And it’s especially sh*t all over Speers’s current supposedly ‘purer’ vocational home: the non-ABC-approved dissenting views of a Jacinta Price or a Ken Wyatt or even a Noel Pearson can barely get air time on ABC radio, let alone a 7.30 Report or a 4C.
“…one of the ABC marquee…” – did you mean ‘manqué‘?
Speaking of which, the HigginsTame troupe roadshow at the NPC today opened with a blatant & deliberate sub judice declaration – no in-house lawyer or maybe the odd legal journo. available?
If it has changed this much for the ABC A-list, Mike Moore might yet sign up!