“Urgent” investment in the ABC needed: Chair warns

ABC Chair, Kim Williams, recently wrote an impassioned plea for Federal Government funding in the ABC or Australia faces “our own story disappearing under a tsunami of overseas content”.

Writing in The Saturday Paper, Williams said we “must renew the ABC into the best public broadcaster it can possibly be”.

Australia, he said, had “stood back for more than three decades and allowed the ABC to lose one third of its funding, at a time when its services were needed more than ever”.

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Geraldine Doogue delivers 2025 Andrew Olle Media Lecture

ABC legend, Geraldine Doogue, recently delivered a thoughtful and wide-ranging Andrew Olle Media lecture, suggesting that the media needs to move away from its focus on finding incompetence to competence and adopt a more communitarian approach.

Doogue conceded that the media landscape is “all bit grim to be frank, for those of us who love the media, love working inside it, consuming it, believing it’s vital to our way of life, our identities”. But she said it was not her intention to encourage her audience to feel “even more ready to escape to a cave”.

“I have come to wonder whether what’s needed is a more communitarian sensibility to our work in the media, and our approach to news, information and the characters of our communities: more than we’ve necessarily prioritised in our anxiety to survive and cut through all the noise.

…..in other words, fleshing out that vital interaction between individualism and the communal, an individual’s relationship with their community: the precious good soil that underpins a thriving culture, putting the community at the centre of social and political thought.”

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