Does Australia really need an activist public broadcaster?
Laura Tingle, the ABC political correspondent, clearly has an interesting conception of the qualities required of her in her high-profile job for Australia’s state broadcaster. Might adherence to a creed of impartiality be useful? Most would say it would, but Ms Tingle’s attitude appears to be ‘forget it’: and forget, too, that some of those who watch Ms Tingle’s reporting might not share what turn out to be her political views.
Judging from her comments at a writers’ festival in Sydney the other day, she sees her purpose in life as not to report, but to indoctrinate. And, in doing so, she does not merely compromise the confidence that her viewers might have in her as a political correspondent, but – and this is even more important – their confidence in the network for which she works, and its duty to give a fair and unbiased account of the news.
Ms Tingle decided to fire a broadside at Peter Dutton, the leader of the Australian opposition, not least over his sensible immigration policy. She then went on to make the outrageous, and insupportable, claim that Australia was a ‘racist country’– a country so racist, indeed, that people from all over the world, irrespective of their ethnicity, are longing to live in it.
But then in the world of virtue-signalling, there is nothing that earns the signaller a commendation faster from those whose favour they covet than accusing someone else of racism, an evil that admits of no degree and has come to surpass all others. Ms Tingle will have enhanced her credentials as a darling of the left for making such improper comments.
She has plenty of form. She once accused John Howard, one of Australia’s most revered prime ministers, of lowering the standard of public discourse; and accused Scott Morrison’s administration of ‘ideological bastardry’. It is bad enough that she keeps on doing this, given her public-facing role for a state broadcaster; it is even worse that the people to whom she answers at the ABC appear to have done nothing to prevent her astonishing behaviour.
One is forced to conclude that they see the corrupting of their institution’s impartiality as a necessary and positive act. This, effectively, perpetrates a fraud on the Australian people who get their news from the ABC, and seeks to manipulate them. It has to stop.
The rules are, or ought to be, quite simple: if somebody works in news and current affairs at a public service broadcaster, he or she has a duty to observe impartiality. If such a person doesn’t want to do that, then he or she should be moved to a different job, or go and work for someone else. If someone with pronounced political views or prejudices remains determined to work for a state broadcaster, and his or her bosses condone such behaviour over a number of years, it becomes clear that the political stance has become institutionalised.
Such behaviour is not unique to Australia. National Public Radio in America has become a leftist broadcasting service on which assertion is passed off as news.
And, as the general election campaign got under way in Britain, a BBC newsreader, Geeta Guru-Murthy, was forced to apologise on air for describing comments about Britain’s chronic illegal migration problem by Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, as ‘inflammatory’. It appeared the only person who felt inflamed was Ms Guru-Murthy.
The BBC realised quickly that with an election campaign on it could not allow one of its anchors to use such language about Mr Farage, however much he might offend the sensibilities of those who represent the institutional mind of the BBC, and within two hours the offender issued an on-air apology to Mr Farage and the viewers.
The ABC board is digging its own grave if it goes on tolerating someone in Ms Tingle’s position behaving in the utterly partial fashion that she does. A ‘final warning’ may be pointless, as she has such a long track record of violating the norms of her job; a sensible broadcaster would either sack her and have done with it, or move her to other duties where she cannot inflict her views upon an unsuspecting viewing public.
But this does have to be a final warning for the people who run the ABC, and who have allowed Ms Tingle’s career as a political partisan to flourish alongside, and as part of, her television journalism. If anything remotely like this happens again, not only would the journalist who did it have to lose his or her job pour encourager les autres, but so too would anyone who tolerated it.
With an election in Australia due within the next year, the state broadcaster has to ensure that everyone – whether in front of the camera or in the gallery – is behaving. Because if such behaviour continues unchecked, the question will have to be asked whether Australia needs a state broadcaster.
Come the election campaign, the Liberals need to be alert for signs of egregious bias; and the Liberals should, in that campaign, promise a review of the ABC’s future if they win. The way things are going, it is a public service that many sensible Australians may soon feel they can quite easily do without.
