After the last week or so, many people are asking whether our political trajectory will be different from that of the USA. If the answer is “yes” then I think there will be four reasons for the difference.

  • Compulsory voting – a moderating force
  • The AEC – which runs elections efficiently and with integrity and public trust – we take it for granted. Events in the USA and elsewhere show us we should not.
  • Preferential voting – another moderating force
  • The ABC, and public broadcasting, or public service media.

I have been asked to reflect on democracy and the ABC. Obviously people are expecting me to talk about the journalism, and I will.

But within the democratic eco-system, artistic expression and explorations of identity are often overlooked but also essential.

Democracy is not only casting a vote. It is the sense of participation and agency in a society. For that, a sense of identity – who I am, how that relates to my community, suburb, state and nation – is an essential component. Disaffection, feeling alienated and powerless, is a pathology.

We see its worst expressions in mental illness, suicide and acts of terrorism. But alongside that we see social capital decline, vulnerability to misinformation increase and democracy falter.

How does the ABC address the need for explorations of identity? For connection?

We might mention the drama House of Gods – an exploration of politics and spirituality within a Muslim community in western Sydney

Or You Can’t Ask That. Which has explored post-natal depression, gay men, drug addicts, dementia sufferers and public housing tenants, to mention just a few.

Or Muster Dogs, which my dog loves. And which surely helps those who manage agricultural businesses feel seen, while educating the rest of us on some of what they do.

I am writing a history of the ABC. So I know that there are some programs, such as Who Do You Think You Are  and Alone, both powerful vehicles for exploration of individual identity within a society, which are not on ABC, but instead on SBS. That’s because of a policy at the time in the ABC Television division of not buying “formats” from overseas.

Whether that was the right or wrong way of looking at issues of national expression is a debate too complex for my ten minutes here.

Then there is Bluey, of course. Centred on the Australia cattle dog. Quintessentially Australian in that way. But  it was a co-production with the BBC and others, with the merch rights held by the BBC. What a shame. I imagine, had the ABC retained some or all of those rights, they would be funding a fair whack of its budget right now. As one of my interview subjects remarked “You don’t know you’ve got a Bluey until it’s, well, a Bluey. In other words, when it’s too late.”

This is worth  mentioning because it illuminates  broader issues about rights to content and what we want a public broadcaster to be. The advent of the streamers – Netflix and so on – means they have become close to essential partners in the making of original content. That means they want to control the rights to that content.

Does it matter that in five or less a drama such as Fisk is a hit on Netflix, and has disappeared from iView, and many people who watch it might never register that it was originally on the ABC?

What rights should we expect the ABC to retain? How dependant do we want it to be on other platforms, which it does not control? Or, are we content to get the content out there, as broadly as possible, on any and all platforms, to achieve its democratising effect?

Is it sufficient for the  ABC to be a commissioning fund and team? Or do we want more from this institution?

Many of these questions come down to money. If we want the ABC to do more, either on its own or with a budget that allows it to control more of the rights to its content, then we have to pay more.

But obviously for most people, think about the ABC and Democracy and it is about the journalism.

What is the evidence for the often-asserted claim that the ABC is good for our democracy?

Well, like many public things – public health, public housing – the benefits are hard to prove.

Nevertheless, there is evidence that a healthier democracy and public life is correlated with healthy public service media.

In the USA, public broadcasting has always been a bit player.

The USA ranks near the bottom on OECD lists comparing per capita funding for public broadcasting.  Switzerland ranks top, by the way. Australia is equal 13th with Japan.

A 2016 study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism  comparing public broadcasting and private media found that public service media broadcasts more news and current affairs at peak times, and more hard news.

And this was correlated with increased public knowledge of a variety of hard news topics, including politics, current affairs and international events.

And with that came positive indicators on trust, and social cohesion.

The evidence suggests this effect is not limited to the direct audience for public service media.

Another study compared news consumption and public affairs knowledge in six European countries, and found those with public service television had notably better levels of public knowledge about public events.

Even those uninterested in news were better informed than they might otherwise be, because they encountered information incidentally, in conversations and social interactions.

It spread through the democratic ecosystem and changed it for the better.

Now, I should say that these studies are not without flaws and limitations.

Correlation is not causation.

Knowledge of public affairs and current events is also, and more strongly, correlated with education levels, across both countries with strong public broadcasters and those without. And education, of course, is correlated with wealth.

Also, most of these studies did not account for social media.

Nevertheless, with some reservations I think they make the case for the democratic importance of public service media – and that is bolstered by the evidence from both from the ABC’s own research and independent reports that consistently shows the public broadcasters are the most trusted media organisations, by a long way.

Why are they trusted? I think it is:

  • the evident seriousness of purpose,
  • the relative lack of sensationalism and
  • that unfashionable thing, objectivity – which is a heavy burden and a demanding and sometimes soul-crushing discipline, as Laura Tingle, Antoinette Latouffe and others can surely testify.

I’d like to now address how the ABC might do better. It’s about funding, obviously, but not only funding.

I’ll start by looking at the recent past.  

What we might we have done about social media, if we had had insight into what it might become, in 2006,

  • when Twitter was invented,
  • Facebook became available to general public and
  • Mark Scott began his ten year stint as Managing Director of the ABC?

Surely we would have wanted social media to be in public hands.

And/or we would have wanted it regulated from the outset.

Might the world’s public broadcasters had banded together to create their own social media platform? Would we have funded them to do so?

And if they had, how would public broadcasters have handled the algorithms that today help to divide us, drive some of us down conspiracy rabbit holes and help to make us crazy and ungovernable?

Differently, surely.

Better, surely.

And, speaking of democracy, a topic for another day might be, given we failed to adequately regulate social media at the outset, whether it is

  • desirable or
  • dangerous

for a government, such as the current one, to try to prevent teenagers from participating in platforms that are, after all, their main hubs of political speech and social and artistic expression.

Myself, I think it is dangerous for governments to do that. We might regret encouraging this populist attempt at an easy fix by limiting speech. There are better mechanisms to address the undoubted problems of social media.

Who can doubt that public service media is a potential asset in finding and implementing those better mechanisms?

Social media has been a force for good and evil. Its benefits and shortcomings are the same –

That voices not previously heard in the mainstream are suddenly visible and amplified.

We are confronted with each other.

People are able to organise in new ways.

But lies spread as quickly or more quickly than the truth, as we see most powerfully in phenomenon such as QAnon.

Australia is not immune, but so far less susceptible, to such phenomenon, and as I said in opening that is surely partly about the ABC and the pervasive sanity-spreading effect of a good public broadcaster.

But this digression into the recent past is mostly useful, I think, as a guide to the future.

Artificial Intelligence is upon us, and will change everything.

The failure to be sufficiently proactive at the dawn of social media should inform new approaches.

The streaming platforms are well established. AI is upon us. Social media is very much upon us. All these issues raise the question of how the ABC should interact with platforms it does not control, and how governments should respond to the threats and opportunities for the governability of the nation.

Just before Christmas the government made announcements about its intention to legislate the News Media Incentive  – a plan to use the tax system to impose a levy on digital platforms, such as Google, Meta and TikTok, with the money being redistributed to support organisations providing public interest news – defined as that which serves a civic purpose, operating with responsibility and accountability.

I like this idea.

There is plenty still to be worked out, plenty of room for timidity and delay, and in an election year, the attitude of the alternative government is not yet clear.

But with this, it seems to me, we have the first signs of a coherent media policy addressing the crisis in journalism.

But perhaps the most significant shift in the pre-Christmas announcement is encapsulated in the policy framework that was released with news of this initiative, which says:

“government influence [over the news media] must remain checked, but … inaction is no longer a viable option”.

I agree. The risks are obvious – government interference and a loss of independence. But when the market fails, we need to find solutions.

So is it all golden pastures from here? Far from it.

A Pew Centre survey has found that about one in five Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 – regularly get their news from influencers. That is, mostly non-journalists who gain followings on social media. Joe Rogan one of the best known.

We have to expect this trend to take hold in Australia.

In their book Avoiding the News, authors Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer and Rasmus K. Nielsen advocate news that is “closer to people’s lived experience, presented in more accessible ways, and focused on things they can influence”.

This, they acknowledge, will be seen by traditional journalists as a dumbing down of the news, or as mere puffery (though they point out there is plenty of puff already).

They say:

“The core of the matter here is not intelligence, it is intelligibility. Political journalism, especially, tends to make assumptions about what audiences know about political actors and processes that are impossible for all but the most dedicated news lovers to live up to.”

It is in this space that influencers will move.

Perhaps journalists could learn a thing or two from them.

I predict media companies will increasingly try to either recruit influencers or grow their own. Probably both.

What could the ABC do better? I call for a more connected news.

I think that suggests more localism – not only regional, but suburban, and particularly the urban edge, where a new generation of Australians are growing up, and disconnection and alienation are rife.

What would an ABC influencer look like – someone who could attract such audiences with relatable content? Someone who shuns what journalism academic Jay Rosen has described as “the cult of the savvy” in which political journalists largely display their feathers to each other, and forget the public?

Is the role of a public broadcaster influencer consistent with the discipline of objectivity?

I like to think so, and I hope that somewhere in the ABC there is a debate about what that might look like. Because otherwise the ABC will lose some of its positive effect and its audience.

We need the ABC to have seriousness of purpose, certainly.

Objectivity, properly understood, is central to broad trust, and therefore to effectiveness. (I have a whole lecture on what objectivity is, and isn’t. I won’t inflict it on you here).

But we also need change, and fresh thinking about political journalism.

So it is not only about more funding. It is also about imaginative leadership and courageous thinking.

That is hard to do when under attack, and the focus of the endlessly dreary, energy-sapping and predictable culture wars.

I hope for more courage and creativity, both from those who make decisions about funding  the ABC, and those who manage and staff it. 

Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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