Both parties are locked into the ABC's essentially authoritarian structure, says Tony Moore

The real trouble with the ABC

It's the audience, stupid, argues Tony Moore.

Audiences before politics

Democratising the ABC

By Tony Moore

The real challenge facing the new managing director of the ABC is how to make audiences central to what the national broadcaster does. In tackling this problem Russell Balding, an ex-accountant, need look no further than the Report of the Australian National Audit Office, Corporate Governance in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which found serious problems with the standards of corporate governance. Sadly, the political obsession with the office of managing director only serves to reinforce an institutional problem criticised by the auditor and well known to program-makers - a culture of managing up to the top of the ABC pyramid, rather than consulting with audiences in shaping content. In my opinion the auditor's concerns about lack of management accountability, the decline in young adult audiences under 40, and the long term failure of the ABC to better understand its consumers, call for the radical reform that Mr Balding says is not necessary.

It is no secret that ABC Television is looking worse for wear, but the standard excuses of reduced funding and the exodus of creative talent do not explain why ABC TV is so stale? In spite of the dedication and professionalism of ABC program-makers, a paternalist public broadcasting model blinds many senior gatekeepers to audience diversity and to new grass roots cultural energy. Commissioning, production and scheduling occurs at the whim of the senior executive service rather than in reference to audiences. In the absence of targeted audience research and performance indicators, ideas are greenlighted and vetoed on the basis of personal taste which, from the evidence of my TV, is depressingly middle brow, risk averse, British to its bootstraps and, in a word, conservative - these moguls in cardigans are a far cry from the radicals of Liberal nightmares. How many 'crazy ideas' have failed the good taste test? Left to the mercy of personal prejudice, could the successful BBC comedy Ali G have made it through the ABC's commissioning hoops? How many others have got up, only to die on screen, the victims of a thousand compromises. In the case of the ABC, the fish Aunty rejects doesn't make her the best. The result? While ABC TV's share of viewers 18-39 has declined by 13 per cent since 1990, it has increased its share of people 55 and over. TV management's reaction to these figures has been to define the over 55s as its core audience, and to do what it can not to alienate them - a shortsighted strategy if ever there was one.

Any reform of the ABC by government should adhere to the principles of democracy, diversity, creativity, accountability and efficiency. Many of the ABC's structural problems stem from the cult of managerialism that gripped many public institutions under the Hawke and Keating governments, only to be exacerbated under the Coalition.

This is a kind of internal privatisation, combining internalised market forces and cost savings with a top down re-structure that gives all power to bureaucrats. Rather than producing lean, mean machines that are responsive to consumers, the result has been an intensification of the old-fashioned civil service hierarchy under the new corporatism, but with the quality of service and public accountability often reduced. ABC radio, while not immune to managerialism, was exempt from the worst excesses because of the hands-on and immediate nature of its medium. But in television, the combination of an old-style public service nomenclature with managerialism's elevation of internal market forces has produced an infertile hybrid, not unlike the Soviet Union in its dying days. The problem today is not that the ABC is run like a business or the public service, but that it is run like a poor business and a poor public service, with little regard for the shareholders and consumers, who happen to be the same group: the tax payers.

The auditor finds that the ABC has made little effort to measure if it is meeting its Charter responsibilities to reflect Australia's diversity, and until recently was lacking even basic professional performance indicators that are standard in a modern business. The auditor identifies a problem of managers working up to the apex of the corporate pyramid, rather than down to stakeholders, that seems to have been exacerbated in recent years. Most senior managers, relatively new to the ABC, were ignorant "of specific features of the Commonwealth's accountability framework ... and do not perceive any major role for themselves [in public accountability] outside their line responsibilities to the Managing Director". The report concludes that this is "an insufficient base for the achievement of corporate governance standards suggested by the ABC's publicly funded status". The Auditor is particularly scathing about the ABC's failure to use audience research, to consult with its audiences, and to learn more about their preferences and tastes.

The auditor criticised the ABC for relying on inappropriate and statistically confused commercial ratings services ,such as OzTam and Neilsen, when comparable public broadcasters in Europe employed sophisticated qualitative and qualitative methods to engage their audiences in programming. The ABC "appears to be somewhat behind the majority of overseas national public broadcasters in measurement of the outcomes it expects to achieve". In the strongest terms, the auditor advised that, because the Charter enshrines terms like 'innovative', 'high standard', 'sense of national identity', 'cultural diversity' and 'multicultural character' of the Australian community, the ABC could be expected to have a methodology that would enable consistent reporting to Parliament in relation to these concepts. The report advises the ABC to undertake new measures to understand why its share of the audience is changing and to guide strategies to increase its appeal to disenchanted groups, such as young adults and people outside the cities. Again and again, the auditor stressed the need for understanding differences in audiences. Lamenting the lack of socio-economic data at the ABC's disposal, the auditor offered evidence from the Productivity Commission showing "clear relationships between media consumption habits and preferences and key socio-economic characteristics", as well as "age, occupation, gender, region, place of residence and family circumstances". The audit also stressed the imperative of combining financial information and performance information, a basic nexus first recommended by Dix 20 years ago.

The ABC has replied that it is "totally committed to research" as a strategic tool to meet the needs of its audiences and the Charter mandate. The audience research section of the ABC is to be boosted, with more outsourced and in-house audience testing and the establishment of an "Audience Appreciation" service similar to that operating in the UK. This is to be supported. But consultation across audience demographics must be made mandatory on television program-makers during the program bids process and after programs go to air. It should be a transparent process, carried out against agreed benchmarks.

Placing audiences at the centre of programming is 'radical reform' and would trigger a profound change to what we see on ABCTV. There is no substitute for originality of ideas, but program-makers have everything to gain from a more meaningful dialogue with audiences. Innovation and ideas can be tested with the target audience when the inevitable doubts are raised by Commissioners about a proposal's acceptability. In drama, documentaries, comedy, and infotainment, decisions over style, format, story or timeslot can be made with deep knowledge of the audience, rather than on the basis of anecdote, instincts or personal bias. Clearly the ABC editorial responsibilities, together with time constraints, minimise the practicality of audience testing in the news and current affairs. Programs with longer turn-arounds, however, such as Four Corners, would benefit from detailed audience feedback about topics and style.

The ABC should also consider expanding the role of ABC Online as a vehicle for audience empowerment. To date, ABC Online has been effective at recycling on the web site research for a current affairs story or documentary as the basis of a dialogue between program makers, talent and audiences. There can be good synergy between the two kinds of media: broadcast and post-broadcast, with audiences using the internet to participate in the direction of a TV program or to give valuable feedback on new program ideas.

Of course a minority of paternalist program-makers and executives will oppose formal obligations to consult audiences as 'commercial', but this is to see the world in terms of a crude dichotomy between the old elite public broadcasting and the old mass broadcasting. Commercial TV stations are interested in massing audiences together by appealing to the lowest common denominator. A 21st century media is concerned with audiences in their diversity, satisfying those niche interests that help to make us unique and encourage a vibrant, complex culture.

The Charter requires the ABC to provide innovative services. Everyone supports innovation, but real innovation often offends, angers or leaves one underwhelmed. One person's innovation is another's old hat. Similarly with the term 'quality', that is bandied about by program-makers and defenders of the ABC - one person's quality may make no sense to another person. Perceptions of what constitutes 'quality' may depend on particular cultural literacies which nowadays are not shared by a community criss-crossed by aesthetic and attitudinal divides. This is the real challenge of a divergences of opinion based on age, geography, ethnicity or class that Australia is still to deal with.

Public broadcasting has always sought to identify the tastes of the tertiary educated upper middle class with a universal notion of 'quality' that is seldom tested. 1940s House is good and the Big Brother House is bad, although both are unreal reality programs. The trouble for reformers is that the ABC gives most of us what we love - sober, abstract discussion of public affairs; BBC dramatisations of classic literature; truly intellectual radio programs; and bucolic soaps that buy into our childhood memories. A diverse society with many different ways of seeing de-stabilises this once sacrosanct notion, throwing open the parameters to a wider range of ideas, aesthetics, personalities and stories. The sheer volume and diversity of media in the post-broadcast age means people will be constantly exposed to things they don't like. But it is important to think about our fellow citizens who are left out by the old model of broadcasting. Surely it's not unreasonable to take into account Australians with different tastes, icons, knowledge, humor and dreaming?

The big problem for the ABC is how it caters for the diversity of younger adults up to age 40. All the evidence shows younger people are watching less and less free-to-air TV. The auditor noted that they are moving to alternative leisure activities, such as the internet, subscription TV and videos. What they are watching less of is mass model media, that looks to common denominators. The 'loyal' ABC viewer is making way for the discriminating conditional viewer, who makes an individual choice from the array of media options at his or her disposal - the internet, books, videos, games, pay-TV, radio, cinema, chat lines, magazines, and commercial TV - on the basis of personal interests and passions. Media that seek to treat the under 40s as one group, to attract them on the basis of what they are assumed to have in common, will have no audience - it's about serving and providing access to the public as diverse groups. Its also about being playful with the medium of TV, in the way that SBS, 2JJJ, Foxtel and even Channel 10 are. In my view, the policy response to audience fragmentation, increased lifespan and the exponential growth in information diversity is a second television channel; one that expands on the ABC's worthwhile experiments in digital television, ABC kids and Fly, the youth service.

Liberal politicians claim a special interest in making organisations business-like. In an ABC context this means a flatter, smaller management structure that devolves power down to more autonomous teams and accountability of content-makers to consumers, who are theoretically sovereign both as the shareholders and market. Historically, Labor stands for robust public institutions, the advancement of democracy and a lively Australian culture, which it understands as diverse. Labor should therefore champion a bottom-up reform of the ABC that gives the Australian public a meaningful role in ABC governance, and a fair dinkum input into programming. As part of a new agenda for public sector accountability, a visionary policy for the ABC will direct additional funding to mandatory audience research and a second television network, insist that board appointees are approved by both houses of Parliament, and enhance the community conduit into the ABC - the National Advisory Council - by introducing election for its members. Imaginative reform of public institutions like the ABC is the radical alternative to the crude dualism of opting for either market forces or sentimental clinging to the status quo. Yet both parties are locked into leaving an essentially authoritarian structure intact so that they can wield influence over a board undemocratically stacked with their mates. The craven hierarchical structure that makes the ABC a plaything for whoever sits as managing director is itself the problem, and simply changing the people who wield control in a top-heavy corporate hierarchy, whether steady as she goes accountants or 'crazy ideas people', will not change things.

Also on the Evatt site:

• The ALP and cultural democracy, by Tony Moore

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