Sky News host Peta Credlin says what the national broadcaster needs is more respect for all the taxpayers who fund it, not just the ones living in the gentrified suburbs of our big cities.
Ms Credlin said ABC Chair Ita Buttrose claimed organisations such as News Corp – which owns Sky News Australia – reflected the views of editors or proprietors or perceived preferences of audiences and advertisers.
On the other hand, Ms Buttrose claimed the ABC was “free from commercial and political pressure and is accountable to the public”.
“Commercial media organisations are accountable to the public. If they lose their audiences, they lose their advertisers, and if they lose their advertisers, they’re dead,” Ms Credlin said.
“And what I say here each night is not dictation from some bloke in management. Like it or not, each night here at 6:00pm, I speak my mind; and sometimes I’m even at odds with the views of the News Corp papers or its journalists.
“But how is the ABC accountable to anyone, given that its funding is guaranteed by the government regardless of its audience?
“Buttrose went on to make the even more remarkable claim, that the ABC is not only the voice of Australian democracy but also Australia’s most trusted national institution”.
Ms Credlin said, “this is the ABC’s biggest blind-spot – the insufferably arrogant conviction that being taxpayer-funded makes it the only media organisation that’s unbiased and impartial”.
She said beyond news and current affairs, the ABC does good work and there was still a place for the high-minded national broadcaster that Lord Reith wanted the BBC to be, and that the ABC was originally modelled on.
“If Australians really do want the ABC to better reflect their values, then it needs to be moved out of its inner-city bubble, from Ultimo, in inner-city Sydney, out to the suburbs in Penrith. From Southbank in Melbourne to Glen-Waverly or Geelong,” she said.
“I am not one who thinks the ABC should be sold. It can’t be de-funded. Although we can do better in making it spend its money more efficiently.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it, that a broadcaster with such a snobbish disdain of the ‘quiet Australian’ is nonetheless happy to live off the funding that they work hard to provide.”