GAZA, THE ABC AND PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING – HENRY ERGAS

Increasingly, over decades, the global media has become polarised and viewpoint diversity has become rare in both opinion and factual broadcasting such as the news. In Australia, the most serious example is the reporting and broadcasting of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. On Wednesday 12 August, prominent opinion writer and intellectual Henry Ergas addressed The Sydney Institute and comprehensively analysed how such one-sided broadcasting has evolved – especially at the ABC

GAZA, THE ABC AND PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

HENRY ERGAS

There was a time when the very notion of an impartial newspaper was regarded as faintly ridiculous. In 1781, the London Courant declared that “the idea of an impartial print, and of an impartial individual in politics, are equally mean and contemptible.” As late as 1850, the United States still counted some 1,620 partisan newspapers against a mere 83 independent ones.

I begin with those observations because we forget how historically unusual balanced news actually is. For most of the press’s history, newspapers were partisan because proprietors, editors and readers alike wanted them to be, and the contrary ideal had to be created. Even those who eventually shaped that ideal considered it precarious: Walter Lippmann believed journalism could not become a genuine profession until “modern objective journalism” had been successfully created and durably entrenched.

The point was never that truth was unattainable, but that its pursuit required institutions capable of restraining a propensity to see what one wants to see, and to divide the world into the righteous and the damned. That is the premise for what follows: balanced, accurate reporting was a cultural and institutional achievement, and public service broadcasting was among the mechanisms devised to sustain it.

Origins

As with so many other inventions, the origins of that mechanism lay in war. The First World War revealed both the extraordinary possibilities of wireless communication and its dangers. British observers watched the Germans deploy wireless propaganda to spread false reports that, repeated widely enough, came to be treated as fact — reports disseminated, contemporaries claimed, in “vast floods,” like “poison gas.” Yet the same technology could distribute truth as readily as falsehood, and in April 1917 Wireless World proposed countering propaganda by saturating the ether with “truth ions.” There, in miniature, lay the conception from which public service broadcasting emerged.

Arthur Burrows, who ran Britain’s wartime wireless intelligence operation before becoming the BBC’s first Director of Programmes, looked back on the war as confirmation that wireless contained a force which, properly developed, could alter for the better “the social life of the people and international relations.” It was against that background that the Sykes Committee, in 1923, judged broadcasting’s “social and political possibilities” as great as any technical achievement of the age, and concluded that “control over it must lie in the hands of the State.”

What drove the Committee’s support for a public service broadcaster was, therefore the judgment that something so powerful could not safely be left to chance or commerce. Public service broadcasting was conceived as the answer to a single proposition: that the ordinary incentives of the media were inadequate to the responsibilities mass communication now created.

The BBC type

That explains a crucial feature of the BBC’s formative culture: John Reith, the engineer appointed in 1922 to run the new British Broadcasting Company and who remained its dominant figure as Director-General once it became a Corporation in 1927, did not believe the broadcaster’s task was to give audiences what they wanted. “It is occasionally indicated to us,” he wrote in 1924, “that we are apparently setting out to give the public what we think they need — and not what they want.” Far from denying the charge, he embraced it. Few people, he said, know what they want, fewer still what they need, and “it is better to overestimate the mentality of the public than to underestimate it” — his purpose, more positively put, being to give “all men an atmosphere where they may use ideas” while being “nourished and not bound by them.”

This paternalism was unapologetically rooted in Matthew Arnold’s conception of culture as the attempt to draw nearer to what is beautiful, graceful and becoming — the “raw person” to be brought to like it too, which commercial media, it was claimed, had no interest in doing. Hilda Matheson, the BBC’s first Director of Talks, put it starkly: it was no advantage that broadcasting reached everyone if what it broadcast was “silly, or vulgar, or false,” for “the ripples started by silly noises spread further and pollute more widely.”

What emerged from that attitude was what contemporaries called the “BBC type” — restrained, serious, disinterested, treating the microphone as a public trust rather than a platform for self-expression. The model had its absurdities, but beneath the mannerisms lay a real principle: freedom from commercial pressure was not licence to indulge one’s own prejudices, but a discipline that imposed a greater responsibility to restrain them.

The Australian inheritance

Australia inherited that principle, though somewhat chaotically. The BBC was the product of sustained argument about broadcasting’s purpose; the ABC came into being largely because things had gone wrong. Its predecessor, the private Australian Broadcasting Company, collapsed in the Depression, and what followed was a pragmatic sequence of compromises rather than any overarching conception. But if the institution was born by accident, its legitimacy was borrowed by design: the Postmaster-General told Parliament Australia would “follow the British system as closely as Australian conditions will permit”; H. P. Brown, head of his department, corresponded directly with Reith while the legislation was drafted; and Joseph Lyons, inaugurating the ABC in 1932, described its commissioners as “impartial trustees” of “an important national service.”

Two chairmen converted that inherited phrase into an institutional ethic — Boyer, a former Methodist minister, and Darling, a committed Anglican, both bringing to the task an unusually stern devotion to public service.

Richard Boyer took over after the Second World War — a war in which, as Menzies put it in 1939 inaugurating the ABC’s own international short-wave service, “the time has come to speak for ourselves.” Boyer codified the ABC’s doctrine of impartiality and veracity: news checked and double-checked by ABC staff before broadcast, rival views fairly and fully presented, the executive standing between journalist and political direction. The ABC’s allegiance, he declared, was to the public trust, not the government of the day.

Sir James Darling was even more explicit, insisting in his first speech as chairman in 1961 that the ABC must be “a fair, disinterested communicator of factual news and balanced comment,” a reputation earned only by “the consistent avoidance of sensationalism, partisanship and prejudice.” Freedom from government, he emphasised, carried a corresponding obligation, since a national broadcasting authority was responsible to every section of society, minorities included, “and beyond that, to Truth itself” — no ornamental phrase, he insisted, “for it must dominate all our thinking, even to the balance of our programming.”

Those words capture the underlying compact: the public granted the ABC privileges no ordinary media outlet possessed — secure funding, national reach, independence from the market — and the broadcaster accepted disciplines no ordinary proprietor faced.

Compressed to its essentials, those disciplines rested on four commitments: verification before broadcast, regardless of who supplied the claim; balance as a genuine, rounded presentation of events and views, not a token one; loyalty to the whole public rather than to whichever party held office; and freedom granted only in exchange for submission to a standard outside the institution’s own judgment.

The rupture

It was against that four-part discipline, not against some vaguer sentiment of fairness, that the counterblast of the Vietnam era struck. 1967 was the pivotal year: Darling was not renewed as chairman, a decision he bitterly regretted, and in the same year This Day Tonight was launched. The old ABC had not been devoid of opinion, but it suppressed opinion’s intrusion into what was broadcast: the presenter’s task was to convey the news, not become part of it. This Day Tonight inverted that. The interviewer moved to centre stage, adversarialism became a virtue in itself, and a new generation of recruits — younger, university-educated, deliberately drawn from outside the ABC’s traditions — arrived precisely to overturn them.

Allan Ashbolt, the self-described Marxist who became a prominent Four Corners figure and eventually a departmental head under Whitlam, personified the change — not because he converted the ABC to Marxism, but because views an earlier generation would have kept strictly separate from professional role could now be treated as infusing it.

That change also altered the meaning of independence. For Darling, freedom from government was one side of a bargain whose other side was accountability to “the whole public”: the greater the freedom, the heavier the obligation of restraint. The new culture kept the first half and discarded the second — or, as we shall see, went further still: the greater the freedom, the greater the duty to campaign. Darling warned, as his term drew to an end, that staff were demanding ever greater freedom without any corresponding sense of responsibility; when his chairmanship was not renewed, the balance shifted decisively.

The transformation was completed under Whitlam, whose choice of chairman, Richard Downing, wanted the ABC to help Australia “move to an open society” and effect the “social and moral revolution” the country needed. The older ABC’s ambition had been to enlarge the audience’s judgment; Downing’s assigned it a different role, to reflect and promote social change. Once that becomes the mission, impartiality is logically unstable: those resisting the desired transformation cease to be people the broadcaster disagrees with and become obstacles to the better society it has appointed itself to create.

Governance and its pathologies

Downing died suddenly on 10 November 1975, one day before the dismissal. But the cultural shift he signalled outlived him, and the new culture gradually became hegemonic within the organisation.

The scale of that transformation is striking: that it mirrored a broader cultural trend might explain dominance, but not the complete, undisputed control the new culture secured. Four mechanisms, each well studied in the social sciences, help explain why the conquest proved so sweeping — and then so durable.

The Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, writing on residential segregation, showed that even mild preferences among individuals for those they associate with can generate stark collective outcomes — a tipping from a mixed equilibrium to near-total homogeneity. As older staff left, a preference among those hiring and promoting for candidates who “fit in” was enough, repeated across hundreds of decisions, to transform the cultural mix, as the growing predominance of those preferences among the incumbents doing the selecting induced their even greater predominance among those selected.

The exercise of preference-based discretion in recruitment interacted with how people actually get hired. The labour market sociologist Mark Granovetter showed that jobs are filled more often through personal referral than through genuinely open competition, and that referral-based recruitment narrows the candidate pool with each round: friends recommend friends, colleagues vouch for people who think as they do, and eventually dissenters are recruited only by mistake or to silence charges of bias. As the ABC’s current-affairs departments expanded through the Whitlam years, staffed by graduates who knew each other from the same campuses and causes, that mechanism did the rest.

Thirdly, fitting in meant more than joining a payroll. Philip Selznick argued that institutions acquire a distinctive character over time, and that new members are socialised into it rather than merely informed of it. A reporter arriving at Ashbolt’s Four Corners did not sit through an ideology seminar; what was praised at story conferences and what was quietly shelved taught the new recruit that adversarial engagement earned respect, while Darling-style self-effacement was read as a failure of nerve — an unwritten norm that outlasted everyone who had first established it.

A fourth and final mechanism needs no theory of organisations, only an accurate view of human nature: it is far easier to let fact and opinion run together than to keep them apart. Darling’s generation treated that separation as a discipline requiring constant maintenance — puritanical self-effacement was enforced as a professional obligation. Once This Day Tonight made the presenter’s own judgment part of the broadcast, that enforcement lapsed, allowing fact and opinion to merge. Together, seemingly mild micro-preferencing, referral-based hiring and socialisation produced a newsroom that bore no resemblance to its predecessors.

All four mechanisms operate in the private sector too, but there competitive pressure corrects them. Studies show, for example, that New York’s “white shoe” law firms — Cravath, Sullivan & Cromwell, Davis Polk — did not recruit Jews before and immediately after the Second World War, turning away even the top graduates of Ivy League law schools. But as the firms those graduates founded or joined, such as Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, made sharp inroads into the most lucrative markets, the old firms changed course. It hardly needs to be said that no such corrective discipline operates on the ABC.

The change in the ABC’s internal culture was accompanied by far-reaching shifts in its external environment. In 1983 the Fraser government transformed the Commission into the Australian Broadcasting Corporation — a change less consequential, in the long run, than another the Fraser government inaugurated: a far more tense, conflictual relationship between the ABC and the government. The pointy edge of that conflict was funding. The battle became acute within a month of Fraser’s election and continued, in different terms, into the Hawke-Keating years.

By 1976-77 the ABC’s budget was at least ten per cent lower in real terms than the year before, and its own Annual Report recorded that its share of federal funds was the lowest since 1960-61. Under the Hawke government, funding was cut by a further 9 per cent.

The New York law firms may have confirmed Karl Marx’s quip that the English clergy would rather part with thirty-eight of its thirty-nine articles than one thirty-ninth of its income; the ABC proved unwilling to sacrifice either. Instead, it entered mass politics, in two ways.

To begin with, the Fraser cuts led the ABC to pioneer a tactic used time and again since: to punish the government by axing programs with particular appeal to its electorate — in this case Nationwide and State of the Nation.

Secondly, it was specifically in reaction to the Fraser government’s 1976 cuts that the Friends of the ABC was founded that April. It sustained an activist role through the 1978 strike, holding rallies at which ABC employees were prominent speakers. Nothing more starkly captured the shift from the Darling years than newsreader James Dibble’s admission at one such rally: “I felt I could no longer remain perched on the uncomfortable fence of objectivity.”

That campaign, tacitly sanctioned by ABC management, taught its leadership a lesson that became increasingly central: in a politicised environment, where whoever shouts loudest counts most, 100 viewers who regard the ABC as one of their uppermost priorities are worth more than 1,000 who merely like it. That did not by itself induce the ABC to jettison Darling’s commitment to serve “the whole public” by mirroring the prejudices of the 100 while ignoring and denigrating the views of the 1,000; but it made that shift more appealing, and more sustainable.

In short, the ABC underwent a cultural revolution that reshaped its staff and redefined its role from observer to participant — and these changes reinforced each other. Balance and objectivity are rarely sustained by self-discipline alone; they emerge from the clash, within an organisation, of genuinely different perspectives. An organisation that lacks that plurality, cannot retain the capacity for balance, however sincere its professed commitment to impartiality may be.

There is also reason to wonder how sincerely those values of balance and objectivity were actually held. University media-studies textbooks typically note them, then immediately drowning them in qualifications — doubting their feasibility, questioning their intellectual coherence, and echoing the old Marxist claim that objectivity merely serves the powerful. Students may pay lip service to the traditional values, but few internalise them as a demanding professional ethic; and it is precisely those graduates who believe journalism should be an instrument of social change who are most attracted to, and most readily recruited by, an organisation in which that conviction is nearly universal.

Gaza

That is the context in which the events of 7 October 2023, and the conflict that followed, unfolded — and here the argument ceases to be institutional genealogy and becomes one of consequence.

A comprehensive audit of the ABC’s performance is complicated by the fact that transcripts exist for only a selection of its programs. Even so, the available evidence strongly supports two inferences.

The first concerns the coverage itself: Israel is mentioned roughly ten times as often as Hamas. Coverage of Israel is also far more personified, with Netanyahu, and the most extreme ministers in his government, a recurring focus of attention.

The contrast to Hamas is striking. I have not located a single instance in which the ABC referred to the Hamas charter, to its repeated calls, invariably in Arabic, for the destruction of the state of Israel, or to the explicitly antisemitic statements of its most influential ideologues. The even more extreme statements of Hamas’s flanking movements, such as Islamic Jihad, are also entirely ignored, though Arabic translations are readily available.

No less striking is the contrast to Hezbollah. I have not found a single reference to Hassan Nasrallah’s famous statement that Hezbollah’s inevitable triumph would signal the end of “the Jews” — to which he added, lest there be any ambiguity, “and I am not saying the Israeli: we have to know the enemy we are fighting.” Nor is there a single reference to the term Hezbollah has routinely used, before and after October 7, for Jews: “the descendants of apes and pigs,” whose fate is to be exterminated.

Yet almost every extreme statement by an Israeli minister, no matter how utterly inconsequential, was aired, even as the far more influential statements by the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah were not.

That imbalance matters because coverage does not merely describe events; by deciding who appears in the story, it assigns agency. War becomes something Israel wages, hunger and child deaths something Israel causes, while Hamas and Hezbollah dissolve into the background — features of the landscape rather than ruthless belligerents with responsibilities of their own. The ABC has, as best one can tell, never noted that Hamas built kilometres of tunnels for its fighters while providing no bomb shelters for civilians — a fact that underscores the imbalance in assigned moral culpability. Nor has it ever noted that 90 percent or more of the rockets and missiles launched by Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran were launched at purely civilian targets, including hospitals, child-care centres and schools.

A second, also apparent, feature of the ABC’s coverage is the extraordinary prominence it has accorded the conflict in Gaza.

Differentials in coverage are not unusual. The political scientist Amber Boydstun has shown that media attention generally follows a boom-bust “alarm/patrol” pattern rather than tracking real-world severity: newsrooms lurch into “alarm” mode around a triggering event, then shift into sustained “patrol” coverage of its surroundings, and it is this combination, reinforced by simple momentum, that produces what Boydstun calls “skew” and “explosiveness” — patterns she finds “endemic to the media as an institution.”

A further selection effect compounds the one Boydstun identifies. Anne Rothe’s study of what she calls “popular trauma culture” shows that mass media do not merely favour whichever crisis has already seized attention; they favour a particular narrative shape — an identifiable wronged party, a legible culprit, a moral structure capable of delivering what Rothe, following Milan Kundera, calls the audience’s “second tear”: not the genuine sorrow of direct engagement, but the pleasurable, self-regarding catharsis of melodrama. A conflict that can be emplotted that way — a powerful aggressor, a weaker victim, a resolvable arc — travels. A conflict that cannot, being diffuse, multi-sided, harder to film and slower to resolve, does not, whatever its human cost.

The result is that there is virtually no correlation, in commercial media, between a conflict’s fatalities and its coverage. But it is precisely because both selection effects are built into the economics of commercially driven media that a publicly funded broadcaster has a distinctive obligation to resist them. A commercial outlet has every incentive to chase the alarm and prefer the story that fits the kitsch template if that is what the market rewards. A public broadcaster, funded independently of that competition, has no such excuse; it has, on the contrary, a stronger duty to resist the imbalance, being the one institution not structurally rewarded for skewing coverage toward the more marketable catastrophe.

A single episode highlights the extent to which the ABC has blatantly ignored that duty. A simple audit of material added to the ABC’s website over one month returns 5,750 results for “Gaza” and 3,380 for “famine and Gaza.” For Sudan, none, and for Darfur, one.

Yet during that period — in which the ABC repeatedly claimed the Gaza famine was the most devastating being experienced globally — Sudan was enduring what the World Food Programme rightly called the world’s greatest contemporary hunger crisis: 25 million people acutely food insecure, 650,000 in catastrophic hunger, the highest figure anywhere, and rising, while atrocities against the Masalit, including the rape and murder of children as young as one, could scarcely penetrate the ABC’s field of vision. Historian Benny Morris supplies the explanation the ABC will not: these atrocities “tell us something many in the West don’t want to hear about the behavioural norms of Arab combatants in wartime.” By hiding discomforting facts, the ABC’s silence on Sudan obscured a central element of the context in which the whole region’s conflicts, including Gaza, are unfolding.

The mechanics of demonisation

These distortions are not merely quantitative but causal and moral — and at that point the problem ceases to be uneven coverage and becomes demonisation.

The mechanism is one Lewis Coser, the German Jewish refugee from Nazism who spent much of his career studying how conflict hardens social boundaries, brilliantly analysed. Repeated concentration on a designated transgressor reorganises the moral field itself, so that one party becomes the active bearer of guilt and the other the passive repository of suffering, with every new event fitted to the pattern. “Mobilisers” supply the scripts that convert condemnation into outrage, until the transgressor passes beyond the public’s “span of sympathy” — and pollution spreads to anyone associated with it, who can regain social acceptance only by publicly disclaiming any connection with the alleged perpetrator.

Exactly as Coser’s model predicts, Israel was transformed into the embodiment of absolute evil, allowing people who should know better, such as Chris Sidoti, to call the Israel Defence Force the most evil army in the world. That transformation has had immediate consequences in Australia. A synagogue bears no responsibility for Israeli military operations; a Jewish-owned business does not set policy in Jerusalem; the Gandel family’s philanthropy to the National Gallery of Victoria does not make it an agency of the Israeli state. Yet all have been treated as legitimate objects of hostility. The connecting thread is not what they have done but what they are associated with — and once “Israel” functions that way, it has become, for practical purposes, a euphemism for “Jew.”

Coser feared, late in life, that the emerging “global village” would accelerate rather than diminish this dynamic: the old village burned witches because everyone knew who the witch was; the digital village is larger, faster, and capable of manufacturing its witches by the hour. It takes a village to burn a witch, and no village mobilises witch-hunters more venomous than the permanently on-line one we now live in. Far from helping prevent that spiral, the ABC has fueled it.

The betrayal of purpose

My point is not that suffering is unreal, or that claims of it should be dismissed because of who makes them. It is the opposite: because suffering is real, humanitarian claims are powerful weapons, which makes their verification more important, not less. As Hamas well knows, a terrorist organisation needs only that journalists abandon scepticism at the decisive moment. And it is here that we return to the purpose for which public service broadcasting was created.

Recall the fear from which the BBC emerged — that mass communication could spread falsehood “like poison gas” — and the answer: to saturate the ether with “truth ions.” Recall Matheson’s warning that broadcasting which is silly, vulgar or false sends ripples that “pollute more widely,” and Darling’s injunction that the ABC’s responsibility ran beyond government, beyond faction, beyond its own staff’s preferences, to “Truth itself.”

Viewed against those standards, the problem with the ABC’s Gaza coverage is not that it has criticised Israel. Israel is a democracy fighting a brutal war; its conduct should be scrutinised and its claims tested, in every direction — which is why it is not enough to answer criticism by observing that all journalism involves judgment. The question is what disciplines govern those judgments, and what it means when a publicly funded institution’s judgments repeatedly run the same way. If Sudan can virtually disappear during a catastrophe on an even greater scale, if Hamas can scarcely be seen amid thousands of reports on a war it initiated, and if the institution responsible reserves to itself the right to judge its own coverage, the problem is institutional, not occasional. It strikes at the bargain on which public broadcasting rests: the broadcaster cannot invoke its claimed difference from partisan media when demanding public money, and disclaim it when meeting the obligations that justify the money. Independence without accountability is publicly funded power, not public service.

There is a phrase for that condition. In 1931 Stanley Baldwin turned on two newspaper proprietors, Beaverbrook and Rothermere, who had spent two years trying to dictate Conservative policy from outside the ordinary channels of party and parliament while answering to no one but themselves. What they were exercising, Baldwin told a Westminster audience, was “power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Baldwin aimed that charge at men who at least owned what they published and placed their own money at risk. It applies with still greater force to a broadcaster that owns nothing, risks nothing, is funded entirely by the public it is meant to serve, and answers, when its judgment is finally questioned, only to itself.

None of this reflects hostility to public broadcasting; it springs from taking its purposes seriously. There may remain a case for institutions devoted to reporting and culture insulated from the immediate pressures of commerce. But insulation is not immunity, and independence is not sovereignty. Public broadcasters were established to prevent the fading of a nation’s common dreams. They should not be allowed to become the architects of its recurring nightmares. On Gaza, as on so much else, that is exactly what the ABC has become.