The bias marches on... and on.

Gerard Henderson's column in today's Weekend Australian highlights the fact ABC is firmly stuck in trolley tracks of left-wing bias and nothing looks like shifting it back to the centre. Worth a read as usual....

ABC’s leading journos out of touch with Australia’s key issues
GERARD HENDERSON

It is just four months since the ABC’s mission to Bankstown in southwest Sydney. Led by ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson, dozens of the ABC family headed to the outer suburbs for a planning workshop aimed at making content that was more relevant to average Australians than what had previously been on offer. That’s how ABC management described the mission at the time.

Gaven Morris (ABC director news, analysis and investigations) told Nine Entertainment newspapers there were “some parts of the community that we don’t serve as well as we could”. This implied the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster was in search of the “quiet Australians” to whom Scott Morrison had referred to immediately after the May 18 election last year.

The Coalition’s victory had stunned many journalists, but none more so than the ABC’s key political commentators — virtually all of whom got the result wrong. So certain was 7.30 political correspondent Laura Tingle that she told 7.30 presenter Leigh Sales on the eve of the election the Labor Party “will” win and dismissed the possibility of a Coalition victory with a laugh.

It is not clear what, if anything, the ABC learned from the mission to Bankstown of recent memory. Maybe only that it is a long way from its head office in the inner-Sydney suburb of Ultimo. Certainly the ABC is just as much a conservative-free zone as it ever was — perhaps even more so.

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Recommended reading

Gerard Henderson's column in today's Sydney Morning Herald titled ABC needs to rein in the rise of abuse posing as analysis is of interest picking up on the theme of falling standards at the ABC. The column concludes:
The advent of the internet age has encouraged the rise of abuse as analysis. This is engaged in by the extremes of both sides of the political debate. Scott cannot change the culture of language. But he can lead by example. And ABC presenters can desist from criticising the language of others while the public broadcaster runs such abuse on its own website.


We intend to explore more on this theme, especially in regard to the way ABC moderates its blogs in the coming weeks.
Gerard Henderson also runs Media Watch Dog