ONE of the few spectacles more boring than watching politicians talk about politicians is watching the media talk about the media.
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Over the past week television news and metropolitan newspapers, in particular, have been consumed by the turmoil in upper management at the ABC.
Before Monday, how many Australians could have named ousted managing director Michelle Guthrie? Not many and, you would imagine, even fewer could have named former board chairman Justin Milne.
And yet those two people have dominated headlines for a week, pushing every other issue of concern into the background.
And for what? At the start of the week Ms Guthrie’s alleged inability – or unwillingness – to advocate for the ABC and its staff was seen as the crucial issue.
By the end of the week, though, the focus had turned squarely to Mr Milne and his apparent yielding to political interference to try and influence the day-to-day running of the national broadcaster.
Suddenly, Ms Guthrie was not the biggest problem.
The problem, of course, is that the idealised national broadcaster would operate completely independently from the politics and politicians of the day.
But the ABC is inherently political – existing only on the $1 billion a year it receives in government funding – and it is operated by people, not robots,.
People – including managing directors, board chairs and journalists – all have their own opinions and internal biases.
And this becomes a major problem at the ABC when the prevailing bias of the organisation runs contrary to the bias of the government of the day, as appears to be the case now.
An ABC that is funded by every Australian should (ideally) represent the prejudices, biases and opinions of every Australian but, in practice, that is not possible.
So changing the board’s chair and bringing in a new managing director is not going to end those criticisms being levelled at the national broadcaster.
Still, we must wonder just how invested ordinary Australians were in this debate to start with.
A lot of time and space has been dedicated to the ABC this week but expect no lasting change to come from it.
And if the ABC remains on air this summer bringing us the cricket and bushfire warnings, that will be enough for most Australians.