ABC Political Bias....

well nef that seems to be stating the bleeding obvious... 8)

I hate to say it but I have a horrible feeling that Labor will win the Election next year ... unless something dramatic happens.

LOL PVO is now working regularly on the ABC...  he's a big Malcolm fan and hates Abbott and keeps dumping on the Libs.

I posted this in his comments area in the Australian

Quote :

Good grief spouting the usual negative bile at the Libs I see Peter.  Is Labor employing you or do you simply do it because it follows your politics?

With Turnbull gone the party can actually get back to being a centre-Right alternative.  Do you hate that so much Peter?

IMO Morrison has come to the job much too early.  He comes across, to me at least, as too immature for the job.  He probably doesn't need help from people like you though dumping on him and the party on a daily basis while letting your mates in the ALP get away with the very things you accuse them of.  If you want to look at SPIN and NEGATIVITY look no further than the ALP and its Leadership team.  You want to look at outright lunacy print a few quotes from the Greens.  But all we seem to get from you Peter is very selective criticism of one side of politics and silence about the other.

As for the 35 geniuses you lament so often...  I lament Turnbull ever being in the liberals and ever being its leader and Howard talking him into staying...  Turnbull was always one big pile of instability, loathing and ambition.  Yet you seem to love that about him...

It would seem the vast majority of comment posters agree with me.

Bower is a total idiot....

FRAN KELLY'S TAXPAYER-FUNDED MORNING OF LEFTIST LOVE-IN

The ABC is now off the leash - brazenly Left-wing despite being taxpayer-funded and therefore obliged by law to be balanced. Example: check today's  menu of stories from Fran Kelly's ABC Radio National Breakfast, starting with her love-in with Cathy McGowan and including her promotion of the far-Left Rod Bower.


https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/fran-kellys-taxpayerfunded-morning-of-leftist-lovein/news-story/d0aa2cc4ecf687c4eba88953e7dcbd8d

Internal strife at Fortress ABC by Peter Westmore

News Weekly, October 20, 2018
It was highly revealing that The Sydney Morning Herald reported on the forced resignation of the ABC chairman under the heading “Politics”, given that the ABC is an organisation whose charter requires it to be independent, accurate and impartial.
Divisions on the boards of corporations occur frequently, and it is not surprising that the ABC board should reflect the divisions in society, particularly as the network’s programs so clearly depart from its charter on a range of important public issues such as environmentalism, migration, multiculturalism, gender politics and climate change.

In these areas, it is a participant, not an impartial and independent observer.
Despite vigorous self-promotion that it is “your ABC”, the hard evidence shows that the ABC is an outpost of left-wing groupthink.
A 2013 University of the Sunshine Coast study of the voting intentions of journalists found that 73.6 per cent of ABC journalists supported Labor or the Greens – with 41 per cent supporting the Greens. There is no reason to think that it is any different today.
What was surprising was the intervention of prominent ABC staff supporting the sacking of the $891,000-a-year chief executive of the ABC, Michelle Guthrie, and then demanding the removal of the chairman, Justin Milne, after Ms Guthrie revealed that he had asked her to dismiss two ABC journalists, which she had refused to do.
It is clear that relations between the chairman and the CEO had collapsed in the months before the board fired Ms Guthrie and, arguably, one or the other had to go.
But it was extraordinary that within a day of Ms Guthrie’s dismissal, prominent ABC personalities including Sally Neighbour and Juanita Phillips condemned her, and supported her dismissal.
Another vocal critic was Jon Faine, host of ABC Radio’s morning program in Melbourne.
Faine said, on air: “She was given the benefit of the doubt because she was a woman. She was smart and we were excited. But she was only interested in a few parts of the organisation.
“She wouldn’t advocate for us, which is an astonishing fail. She’s been all but invisible. Every time you tried to get something from her, it was all jargon.”
Faine’s comments reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the ABC’s managing director. She is not there to champion the cause of the ABC staff, as Faine believes, but to administer a $1 billion enterprise according to its charter.
What Faine and others apparently want is a board that will support any action taken by the staff, even (or perhaps particularly) when they are acting outside the ABC’s charter.
The reason the ABC staff opposed Michelle Guthrie was apparently because she did not fraternise with the staff, and refused to be their spokeswoman.
But the reason she was dismissed was quite different. She had fallen out with the chairman of the board over his attempts to get her to dismiss ABC presenters Emma Alberici and Andrew Probyn, and because of disagreements with him over the future direction of the ABC.
Despite the fact that the ABC itself was forced to concede that particular reports by these presenters had been factually wrong and biased – in other words, in clear breach of the ABC charter – no one was held to account, and ABC management left them in place to continue to say the same things.
Michelle Guthrie, a former executive with Google, was hired to continue the ABC’s transition towards the digital platform, in addition to audio and video. But as managing director of the ABC, she was also editor-in-chief, and therefore had final responsibility for the ABC’s content, and the conduct of ABC staff.
When the chairman called on her to exercise her role in this respect, it is clear that she refused to do so, leading him to make foolish requests by email to sack them. This was never going to happen, so why do it?
For his part, the ABC chairman contributed to the breakdown in relations with Ms Guthrie by pushing “Project Jetstream”, a hugely expensive project to digitise all the ABC’s content, and put it online.
Ms Guthrie correctly said that there was no provision for such a project in the ABC’s budget, and opposed the plan.
Elsewhere, the left-wing media has been repeating that the Turnbull/Morrison Government cut $84 million from the ABC’s current budget. Yet official figures show that Federal Government funding to the ABC was $1,036 million in 2016–17; $1,044 million in 2017–18; and is estimated at $1,046 million in the current financial year.
Contrary to repeated claims, the ABC is not the only government-funded program where expenditure has been frozen. Even the National Disability Insurance Scheme expenditure is substantially below budget.
In any case, an organisation that can afford to spend nearly $900,000 for a managing director is not exactly broke.
There will be a departmental inquiry into the sacking of Ms Guthrie and the resignation of the ABC chairman. But it won’t change anything.

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Institutionalised bias in the ABC green propaganda machine
By Maurice Newman
12:00AM October 4, 2018

“All things considered, last week was a pretty good one for the ABC,” Alan Kohler, publisher of The Constant Investor and someone who has worked for the ABC for 23 years, wrote in The Australian on Monday. “Sure, it was messy and as the Prime Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday (on the ABC), the board had ‘a pretty ordinary week’. But the organisation? All fine …”

According to Kohler, while ­former managing director Michelle Guthrie is “a good person and a fine executive”, what is needed is someone who can “successfully lead the creation of content within the organisation or, to represent and, preferably, personify, what the ABC stands for, outside it, ­either to the public or the parliament”.

Add to this the appointment of a chairman who, unlike Justin Milne, who is “on way too many boards”, will simply concentrate on the broadcaster. Problem solved. Easy as ABC.

Reassuringly, Kohler informs us: “As someone who has worked in most parts of the Australian media, I can report that the ABC has the most infuriatingly diligent anti-bias and complaint-handling processes of any organisation. No one comes close to it in dealing with complaints, errors and bias, and no organisation is more genuine in trying to do the right thing, from top to bottom.”

If his analysis is correct, then it reflects very poorly on all other media.

Perhaps Kohler can explain whether the fact 41 per cent of ABC employees admit to voting Green influences their professional judgment? Why so many uncorrected examples of wilful misreporting and fake news are brought to light and why, almost without exception, when they are outed by others, the bias invariably favours the Left? Why it is there are no genuinely conservative voices presenting mainline programs? Why token conservatives such as John Hewson and Amanda Vanstone, whose views are well known, are the regular go-to “experts” on fashionable topics such as climate change and renewable energy? Why the ABC permits only one-sided narratives on global warming?

If it is balanced, why does it suffer from Trump derangement syndrome? If there is no bias, why does the broadcaster constantly single out former prime minister Tony Abbott and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for ridicule, scorn and vilification?

Why did it see fit to champion the Yes case in the debate on same-sex marriage? If it is without bias, why are its most vocal defenders the Greens, the ALP, leftist publications such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Guardian Australia, and a plethora of socialist academics?

It can’t all be coincidence.

If, as Kohler claims, “no one comes close to it in dealing with complaints, errors and bias”, that’s the “two wrongs” argument, and shame on the rest.

For the April to June quarter, the ABC received 5228 complaints, of which 626 (12 per cent) were investigated and 26 (0.5 per cent) were upheld. These seem incredibly low numbers given the numerous glaring examples of ­errors and misreporting revealed by its audiences and critics.

And how many were in the category of Bob Fernley-Jones, who lodged five well-researched, evidence-based complaints about a Four Corners program, Weather Alert? All he achieved was a rebuke: “Our records indicate that to date you have lodged five complaints via our web form. In future should you wish to lodge a complaint about a program please set out your entire complaint in one submission …

“Kieran Doyle wrote to you on April 12 acknowledging your emails and attachments … The email advised you your complaint would not be investigated by Audience and Consumer Affairs. This advice relates to all of the complaints you submitted.”

With an attitude such as that, what’s the point of complaining?

And does Kohler really believe a lot of people “who take the ABC’s independence for granted were shocked by the idea of a non-executive chairman, and friend of the prime minister, trying to get journalists sacked”? Has he forgotten Bob Hawke attacked the ABC over its overuse of “Middle East experts” who persistently opposed the 1991 Gulf war? The Hawke government threatened to withdraw funding, with treasurer Paul Keating promising: “They won’t get an extra zack out of us. It’s the most pampered, self-indulgent and self-interested outfit in the country.” Was that a challenge to the ABC’s independence?

The shock this time is not that the Turnbull government applied pressure but the clumsy way the chairman handled it. In a word, it was inept. But even the notion of ABC independence is a fiction.

Forget conservative taxpayers, the broadcaster is already a green propaganda machine. Who knows what subtle, informal collaboration occurs with groups such as Friends of the ABC and GetUp? The Friends have appropriated (with or without consent) the official ABC logo.

Its website includes promotions for mainly Labor Party frontbenchers and pages dedicated to Don’t Blame Me I Didn’t Vote Liberal, Human Rights Watch and GetUp, “an independent movement of more than a million people working to build a progressive Australia”. It denigrates Abbott, retails the ABC’s editorial line regarding the evils of Nauru, raises Aboriginal deaths in custody and celebrates “marriage equality made law”.

But, despite it all, Kohler naively insists “we can now be sure that no politician will ring a future chair to call for a journalist’s head, and it will be a while before any ABC director utters a peep about journalistic bias”. That’s hardly the point. It’s too late. The bias is so institutionalised it is beyond change. The charter is a relic.

Tut, tut, tut, tsk, tsk, tsk, oh dearie, dearie me... ABC...

Neferti wrote:

Of course the ABC is biased, always has been.  I never watch it. Fortunately, I have Foxtel, so don't have to watch the free-to-air channels either.

No Left Winger will admit that in fact many say it is biased to the right

Of course the ABC is biased, always has been. I never watch it. Fortunately, I have Foxtel, so don't have to watch the free-to-air channels either.

Been saying this for years and of course the usual suspects deny it and point to (biased) reports that refute what I say.  But the ABC radio and TV is politically biased and it leans mightily to the LEFT.

After pointing this out many times recently in the Newspapers someone has finally stolen a line I frequently used in those comments... 

Independence is not Impartiality...  Independent does not mean one is Unbiased.

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We need the ABC – it’s time it realised that it needs us
    Paul Kelly
    Editor-at-Large
    October 3, 2018
 
The recent struggles within the ABC are about power and control. This has been the story for the past 40 years. The names and personalities change, each dispute has its special character, but the central narrative is unchanged — how to manage rival stakeholders in Australia’s most important and public media organisation.

Reform of the ABC is the eternal yet elusive quest. The organisation is embedded in our lives, our memories, our sense of country and the world. It is eternally frustrating yet the indispensable companion. It is not just the national broadcaster but a power institution in its own right. It is driven by a strong ethos — the idea of independence as the legitimising cloak for its reporting, scrutiny and critique of the nation.

It is too big, too bureaucratic, too powerful, too impossible to control and, for all these reasons, it is the subject of perennial efforts to influence and control it. Among ABC listeners and viewers, everybody has an opinion — about what’s right, what’s wrong, what they like, what they dislike. And the government and its ministers have very strong opinions.

With the tribulations of the private sector business model — in television and print — the ABC is becoming more important and, in relative terms, more powerful.  It is without question the most influential media organisation in the country. But its character as the public broadcaster funded by the taxpayer as authorised by the government constitutes a structure heavy with tensions since the government is a target of ABC coverage, just as it must be a target of any robust media outlet.

The ABC, however, does not function like other media organisations. It has a managing director but no editor-in-chief. While both responsibilities are supposed to be fused in the MD role it is impractical in operational terms that they be conducted by the same executive. In the ABC, editorial power is far more devolved; there is little or no sense of journalists working for an editor-in-chief who defines and enforces editorial policy internally and explains it externally. Perhaps any such role is impossible in the organisation but, if so, that reveals much about the structure and culture of the ABC and the limits on internal accountability.

It many ways the ABC remains a government bureaucracy trying to be a contemporary media organisation in a world where technological change is faster than ever and political positioning is indispensable to the profile of media organisations.

There are four obvious features of the recent complex drama: the ABC has editorial problems in relation to what might politely be called editorial quality, witness the Emma Alberici saga; it has flawed internal mechanisms to address and resolve such defects, with managers lacking the authority over staff of their private sector counterparts; while any government is entitled to complain about the ABC, such complaints constitute a risk, and although Malcolm Turnbull denies seeking any journalist’s dismissal, his complaint ­seriously backfired for the government; finally, the pivotal role of ABC chair requires wisdom and restraint, but Justin Milne in his instructions to Michelle Guthrie was reckless and unjustified in demanding the dismissal of journalists, made his own position untenable, and seems to have compromised the entire board.

The ABC can function only when the chair and MD work in harmony, but this seems to have been cancelled when Milne decided Guthrie’s leadership defects were such that mediation was impossible and dismissal the only option. This was a big call heavy with unintended consequences.

Guthrie had implemented a series of reforms to remove management layers, reduce the number of support divisions and free up more investment for the regions. But she resisted Milne’s Project Jetstream for a big injection of government funds to create a huge digital database for all ABC content in a post-television world.

When Milne told Guthrie journalists had to be sacked in order to “save the corporation” and, by implication, win the funds for his ­vision, she saw this as a futile exercise. Guthrie may have had “leadership style” issues, as Milne said, and been inept in dealing with government, but this was worse.

The backdrop was staff agitation, public applause at Guthrie’s dismissal, cries that ABC independence was compromised and demands for Milne’s head. The Morrison government played catch-up trying to contain the damage and appointing an interim chair, Kirstin Ferguson, likely to satisfy no one.

In the end, what sticks is the idea of ABC independence at risk. The message is that the problem is not the ABC, it is the enemies of the ABC. This reveals a deep cultural reflex. It is a smart power play by the staff who, in such crises, mobilise as a political force under the banner of independence, aware they have a loyal constituency in ABC supporters, strong enough to serve as a disincentive for any Coalition government to challenge the organisation. Ultimately this is the critical power equation.

For what cause is independence being proclaimed? What is the editorial culture of the ABC? It is a vital question that is never asked. These days every media organisation has an editorial culture — just think of CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fox News, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the Macquarie radio network, SBS, Breitbart, The Australian and Sky News, to list names at random. Which one is politically impartial? None. This leads to the obvious question: in a time when politics defines the market position of a media organisation, how can the ABC be impartial, and how long can it continue the pretence it is?

This is the real dilemma of the public broadcaster under a legislated charter purporting to be free of bias. You cannot square the circle. It doesn’t fit any more. The hoax becomes more and more absurd. Knowing your audience means knowing their demographics and their politics. It’s about being professional.

The ABC, of course, is different to most media organisations in its size, the numbers of journalists and media professionals, its geographical spread and its multiple TV, radio and digital outlets. It cannot be a monolith and it is not a monolith.  Yet the sense of a prevailing culture cannot be missed

Let’s ask some questions: Didn’t the ABC display a strong preference for same-sex marriage? Wasn’t it critical of border protection measures to stop asylum-seeker boats? Doesn’t it favour strong action on climate change and criticise governments for not being sufficiently ambitious? Doesn’t it project support for renewables and faster efforts to phase out fossil fuels? Wasn’t the ABC distinctly unsympathetic to the policy of corporate tax cuts? Wasn’t it hostile towards reform of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act and unsympathetic to free speech arguments? Doesn’t it push for a referendum on an indigenous voice to parliament and criticise government over this? Isn’t it uncritical of social spending programs and critical of cuts to such programs in the cause of fiscal discipline? Isn’t it more ­focused on inequality than economic growth and more supportive of government intervention over market forces?

Perhaps all of this is fanciful. Each person has a different perception. If true or even half true, it means the ABC is the strongest force for progressive politics in the country. Is that what the passion for independence is about? Might this be the reason every Coalition government gets agitated about the ABC and believes there is a serious issue in terms of fidelity to the charter?

The ABC is a great institution. Australia needs it. Liberal Party talk about its privatisation is juvenile and clueless. But the ABC’s denial and lack of honesty about its own flaws and its editorial culture is unworthy and doesn’t serve the country. An institution that is genuinely strong will confront its strengths and its defects, not cultivate a victimhood while prosecuting a cultural crusade.