Breaking the ABC Monopoly

Once again, ABC bias is in the headlines, and it’s the same script we’ve heard a million times over: ABC journalist voices a provocative left-wing opinion, the usual suspects are up in arms, and the call goes out to privatise or clean out the ABC. It never happens, and the cycle continues.

If there’s one complaint that is more tired and predictable than any I’ve heard in my time as a Liberal member, it’s the perennial jibe at the ABC. Don’t get me wrong, the ABC is biased. They try not to be, but they are. The fact that nobody has ever accused the ABC of right-bias is evidence that impartiality has eluded them; the truest sign of balance is when both sides slightly hate you.

But for all the whinging, little has changed. The efforts of successive Liberal governments to stack the ABC board with centre-right directors have availed little. Die-hard haters want to see it privatised or its funding gutted, but inconveniently for them the Australian public mostly likes and trusts the ABC, and they especially like getting things for free. Attacking the ABC will never be a vote-winner, and perhaps this is why the hackneyed ABC jibes persist: they express a collective sense of frustration that Australians like the thing they loathe. That’s democracy for you, I felt the same about Dan Andrews.

I believe we need to take a different approach to dealing with the ABC, and in doing so reassess how we fund public interest journalism in a digital world.

Quality journalism is a pillar of democracy and of immense social value. A strong democracy needs a strong press to hold those in power to account, inform the population and contribute to the contest of ideas. In our digital age, where speed and quantity often trump quality, safeguarding good journalism has never been more important.

Quality journalism should be seen as a public good, and its value cannot be measured by the profit media companies make from it. Yet, when we leave funding of journalism to the free market, that’s essentially what we’re saying: let the market decide the resources allocated to journalism according to how much profit can be made. This approach worked for a long time. In the days before Meta and Google, TV and newspapers were the best channels for advertisers to reach a wide audience. Before Realestate.com.au and Seek, newspapers were the best place to list classifieds. These were the primary revenue sources for news media businesses and now they are all but gone. When the money dries up, so do the journalists and so does quality journalism.

The Morrison Government identified this problem, and tried to address it by introducing the News Media Bargaining Code, which essentially forces the tech giants to give away their profits to prop up the media companies whose business models they disrupted. It’s the kind of redistributive and illiberal solution you’d expect from the Greens, but we championed it. Meta are now calling BS and the whole thing looks like it will come apart.

Trying to force the tech giants to compensate newspapers for taking their advertising revenue is like forcing Henry Ford to compensate the horse and cart industry. The main rationale – that these digital platforms are profiting from linking to news content and should therefore be forced to pay – holds no water. By that logic, every company that facilitates me reading news online should be made to pay: not only the search engine or social media app that linked me to the news site, but also the company that made my computer or phone, as well as my internet service provider and power company. Technically, all are profiting from me using their product/service to read news online.

There’s no getting around the fact that journalism needs more funding to be effective, and as a public good (like roads, hospitals, police etc.) it should be publicly funded. The problem is that the ABC have a monopoly on publicly funded journalism, and are not delivering value for taxpayer money.

Instead, we should allow all news media organisations to compete for taxpayer funding on equal footing. The idea is simple: Australians should each receive a voucher that can be used to fund a subscription to any news service of their choice. The funding should partly come out of the ABC’s budget, and any unused vouchers can default back to the ABC. It should represent a large net increase in funding for public interest journalism. It should not be limited to traditional newspapers either, but should extend to any form of media, as long as it is producing public interest journalism.

This would have multiple benefits: firstly, it is politically palatable because it allows people to continue to access free news, it simply gives them more choice. It also retains full funding for all the other content the ABC produces. Secondly, it introduces much needed competition and evens the playing field for news media. Competition is the single best driver of efficiency and innovation, and can only make the ABC better. Thirdly, rather than imposing balance on the ABC through legislation, they would be naturally incentivised to produce content that appeals to the broadest range of Australians instead of relying on their unfair advantage (i.e. being cost and ad free) to retain their audience.

It would also reverse a concerning trend in modern news: the proliferation of echo chambers and polarisation. Having to attract an audience and convince them to pay for something they could get for free from the ABC means that news media organisations must become more extreme, emotive and biased. We can see exactly where this leads: the political polarisation in America, which has crippled their ability to legislate and caused immense strife and division, feeds and is fed by a polarised media. It’s a vicious cycle of news media producing polarising content to satisfy their polarised audience. Instead of the ABC having a monopoly on the political centre – pushing their competition towards the fringes - we could have a fair contest for sensible, mass market, trusted news.

Finally, this policy recognises the inherent value of having a diversity of voices and perspectives being represented in the public square. While it tries to capture a diversity of opinion, the ABC will only ever have one organisational culture and consequently one prevailing narrative. Aren’t we better off funding a true diversity of voices, rather than a pseudo-diversity manufactured by the ABC?