ABC v Sky News smackdown: it’s on!
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This morning the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has announced that it will launch a new 24 hour news television channel — the latest in its multichannel offerings, adding to ABC’s 1, 2 and 3. This gives some form to noises Managing Director Mark Scott has been making for at least two years now, along the lines that if pay television’s Sky News can provide a round the clock news service with fewer journalists than the ABC employs, then the national broadcaster should be able to so as well. The new round the clock news centre that will service the new channel is being designed as a focal point for the invigorated Auntie, with its home to be in the cathedral-like foyer of the ABC headquarters in Ultimo – following the trend pioneered in this country by Channel Seven in Sydney of having journos on show to the public as they do their stuff. (No nose picking, guys). The channel will be launched this year, I understand in the next few months, and is being done without any new money from the federal government for content. We are promised new content designed for the channel, as well as the familiar existing offerings from the ABC’s News and Current Affairs department. Some – but I gather not all – of the savings from streamlining and automating of production over the last few years are being used to support the new service. But while the ABC is trying to stir up excitement about the new channel, a surprising number of questions remain unanswered, given that the launch is only months away. Will this Channel be badged “ABC 4”? No name has yet been decided. Will this be a matter of stretched ABC journalists being asked to do more with the same resources? Apparently not, or not only. I am told that job advertisements for more journalists to be assigned to the continuous news service will be appearing almost at once – surely the first time in a while that a major news organisation has mounted editorial recruiting. But how many new journalists? Once again, I can’t get answers. Perhaps less surprisingly, the ABC is not saying how much it is spending on the new service and channel. Nor will it say what the total saving is from the changes to production, and how much remains in the kitty after the spending on the new channel and the continuous news service is allowed for. The ABC media release quotes Scott as saying: “Broadcasting around the clock will enable the ABC to increase its in-depth coverage of local, national and international affairs through background features and analysis, combined with the ABC’s unrivalled long-form current affairs reporting.” The rumble from within Auntie is that it is precisely the depth of reporting that is getting harder to deliver, with reporters and overseas correspondents now having to deliver content to web, as well as radio and television, and thinking and research time at a premium. Yet Scott is probably right in thinking that a 24 hour news capability is pretty well compulsory if Auntie is to stay up with the times. Back to unanswered questions. The channel will be delivered using the ABC’s High Definition spectrum allowance – meaning that only those with HD capabilities will be able to receive it. Will it also be carried on cable, so it can also be received by more people? The question remains unanswered. Will the new channel be streamed live on the internet? Don’t know, although the media release speaks about using multiple platforms, so we should expect so. Meanwhile, as this column from News Limited’s Malcolm Colless anticipated, the ABC’s plans are likely to be cast by its rivals as “a taxpayer funded declaration of war on commercial media outlets in Australia”. ABC management can be expected to respond that serving Australians with news and information is a core requirement of the ABC charter. And that’s true. Nevertheless, it is another example of how one of the chief battles of the media decade will be between public broadcasters and commercial viewer-pays services. And one has to suspect that the timing of this announcement is designed to play into the current field of battle — the Australia Network, the international Australian broadcasting service run for the Federal Government under contract by the ABC. Sky News will be after the contract to run the service when the five year contract expires in 2011. Government is expected to make a decision on who will get the gig in the next six months. Followers of the ABC will remember Scott’s preemptive strike in his speech late last year, in which he announced high ambitions for the ABC to expand its international offerings to become the heart of the nation’s “soft diplomacy”. The continuous news service, and the new channel, will be part of that pitch. Meanwhile, here’s the snappy promotional video:
For more commentary, see my blog. |
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54 Comments
“The channel will be delivered using the ABC’s High Definition spectrum allowance – meaning that only those with HD capabilities will be able to receive it.”
For a media expert you know little about how digital TV is transmitted and received.
Digital transmissions are split into “multiplexes”: a single transmitter operating on a single frequency pushed out a big fat digital pipe. This digital pipe can be split any number of ways. ABC currently puts out ABC HD, ABC1 (SD), ABC2, ABC3, Dig and Jazz. They’re able to tweak the bit rates of each of those streams to have more or less quality on each of those “channels”.
Any device that tunes in digital terrestrial transmissions captures that entire digital pipe, and pulls out the bits its interested in. So an SD digital set top box, as appears in many households and can be had for about $60, tunes in the entire pipe and pulls out the SD streams. If you try to tune an HD stream it’ll give some kind of error, but it can see the stream.
An HD tuner, such as in your fancy 42” LCD telly, will capture that same full digital pipe and pull out the appropriate HD streams to display on your telly.
So what the ABC are going to be doing here, it seems, is sacrificing its HD channel in favour of the 24 hour news channel. I doubt they’d transmit that without an SD stream option.
Astute viewers will also notice that ABC3 doesn’t transmit after 21:00 each evening. That would allow ABC to up the bitrate for its other channels. If they started closing ABC3 a little earlier (say, 19:00), they’d be able to transmit an HD stream for prime time while still accommodating the SD 24 hour news channel.
PS: My bet on the name: ABC News 24.
They haven’t shown much creativity in channel naming before, so why not just rip this of Auntie BBC too? Hell it’s a better channel name than “Frank”, “Go!” or “ONE”.
“The channel will be delivered using the ABC’s High Definition spectrum allowance – meaning that only those with HD capabilities will be able to receive it.”
Are you sure this is true? I’m having trouble finding confirmation, but I suspect that the new channel will be SD but using bandwidth previously allocated to HD. This would improve the image quality of the other SD channels too.
I have no firm idea one way or the other.
Why do we need a 24 hour news channel on free to air? (and tax payer funded no less) If people really want this, they can utilise the private offerings already available on Pay TV.
It better not result in more funding for the ABC. Surely $750 million a year from the tax payer is plenty.
Well, we used to trust the ABC news, until, that is, Shiers and Alston emasculated it. At least we will no longer have to watch that execrable crap on ABC breakfast, or will it be a succession of ABC journalists embedded with the US marines, like this mornings puff piece by Lisa Millar on the US invasion of Haiti.
If the new channel plays as much cross-promotional junk for other programs as the present ABC services, no one will watch it in any case.
Well, broadcasters are required to deliver a minimum of 1040 hours of high definition television per year (43 1/3 days).
So they’re going to have to broadcast some of this in HD. Of course, they could dump the resolution down to 576p (the minimum to be called HD) and free up some additional bandwidth to up the bitrate of the other SD channels.
SBS and the ABC are allowed to upscale their SD content to fill the quota so it still needs to be at HD resolution. The SD boxes still won’t be able to cope with it.
I think I know how this is going to work and how they’ll fill in the time, I just saw a video on the ABC News site of Mark Scott telling us this service is on the way, he took 10 minutes telling us what should have taken 60 seconds.
Looking forward to it though.
and Scott (above)
“Why do we need a 24 hour news channel on free to air? (and tax payer funded no less) If people really want this, they can utilise the private offerings already available on Pay TV.
It better not result in more funding for the ABC. Surely $750 million a year from the tax payer is plenty.”
Well we need it because we do …and the funding isn’t nearly enough obviously because Ch 9 and 7 are still operating, as soon as they close down I’d say the funding has hit it’s sweet spot.
This announcement is just tragic, and confirms what has been obvious for several years now. There are only two news and media sources and agenda-setters in Australia; News. Ltd. and the wires. Here, yet again, we have the ABC jumping “me too” to News. Ltd. There are no longer any sensible, let alone valid, reasons for continual taxpayer-funding of the ABC. The technology has passed by the ABC model, and its profound mediocrity negates any public interest arguments that might have succeeded 30 years ago.
Aunty? Time to take the old bag out the back fence, and put her out of our misery.
What a load of crap Skepticus.
The ABC isnt running a “me too” exercise to News Ltd the ABC will do it PROPERLY, News Ltd have nothing to worry about no one is challenging them at their level.
Glenn
There is no area of media that the ABC does “PROPERLY”. It has become a perpetual second-mover. It’s days have been over for years.
Skepticus - I’ve never really heard anyone say that but even if it were true I’d rather have the ABC with faults than a commercial station full of hidden agendas and BS
How can you say the 7:30 report isn’t done properly? or 4 Corners ? , I think you must be having us on.
Glenn
In 2010, there is absolutely nothing of note produced by the ABC. There are occasional gems broadcast, but invariably they are bought from third-party content-makers. And the nadir of the ABC product is news, followed by current affairs. 4 Corners can be good, but it is no excuse for an entire taxpayer-funded network, let alone for a 24 hour “News” channel!
Glenn, no hidden agenas at the ABC? 7.30 report done properly? I think Don Randall put it best during a HoR grievance debate in 2008:
This bias is entrenched. It is no secret that the ABC is an incubator for ALP candidates, parliamentarians and their staffers. The most high-profile ALP export is the member for Bennelong, Maxine McKew. She was with the ABC for over 30 years working as a presenter on The 7.30 Report, Lateline, the Carleton Walsh Report, AM, PM, the Bottom Line et cetera. The The 7.30 Report presenter, Kerry O’Brien, was a former press secretary to Gough Whitlam. Insiders presenter Barrie Cassidy worked as a media adviser to Bob Hawke. David Hill, former
economic adviser to Neville Wran and former Managing Director of the ABC, stood as an ALP candidate for Hughes in 1998. The former Labor Premier of New South Wales Bob Carr worked as a current affairs journalist for the ABC. Mary Delahunty, the former ABC newsreader and host of Victoria’s The 7.30 Report, was elected to the Victorian seat of Northcote in a by-election in 1998. She held that seat until stepping down in 2006, having held several senior portfolios. ABC journalist Mark Bannerman worked for a senior minister in the Hawke and Keating governments, John Button. The Western Australian Premier, Alan Carpenter, started as a state political reporter for the ABC, moving on to be the Western Australian presenter for The 7.30 Report and the first presenter of Stateline. Former ALP Northern Territory Chief Minister Clare Martin was a journalist for ABC Radio and presenter of The 7.30 Report.
As an expat living in Asia my opinion is that the more Australian programming available to the rest of the world and especially to our neighbors in Asia the better it is for us as a nation.
A 24/7 Australian news and c/a channel will have a beneficial effect upon how Australia and Australian values are perceived in our global neighborhood.
Australia punches far above its weight in many areas and in our always on internationalised world we owe it to ourselves as a nation to make ourselves known.
Through an Australian version of teh BBC/AlJazeera/CNN and the like Australia will be more understandable and accessible to the rest of the globe.
Exporting our positive and sophisticated Australian mindset is better than showing off our golds from teh pool.
Have to agree with you there JBG re Maxine McKew but overall I think their coverage of everything not just politics is superior.
How they get away with political bias I don’t know, but yes it seems to be there, the presenters are allowed to push their own bias, (hi there Kerry) when that should be a sackable offence.
and Skepticus, I, like just about everyone else, don’t care where they get their content from it’s a damn site better the ACA or those other cartoons and thats the bottom line really, you knock the ABC and perhaps it deserves it but I see the ABC as the only sane network, if it were left entirely to the others I think mind control of an entire population would be possible, Hi Rupert, sorry to let the cat out of the bag.
How will the ABC manage a 24 hour news service for TV when it cannot manage it for radio?! “Newsradio” offers a very skimpy service, most of the day being handed over to broadcasts from USA and from the BBC, especially in the evenings. During the holiday season, it’s been worse with foreign broadcasts most of the time. Why not fix up this problem first? Why would I bother to tune in for much of a 24-hour TV news service whereas turning on a radio (in the kitchen or in the car) is so much easier and more accessible.
Maybe not everything Glenn, but you raise a very valid point. Four Corners, eg, is the shining light of the ABC stable and sets the standard for Australian current affairs.
Johnny Be Good. Dont see what difference that makes, or are you insinuating that the ALP is NOT a conservative party? Now if they were candidates for Socialist Alliance, perhaps you might have a point.
Glenn
What decade do you live in? Not only are you here getting your news from a private non-ABC/free-to-air source, you are also clarifying, pushing for more details, cross-checking, and making your voice heard all at once, and all in real time. If your support for the ABC is its gallant product differentiation from ACA, then dude you are like 20 years behind the times.
But just on ACA/TT, they actually do provide an excellent public service. Those easily and oft-caricatured camera-wielding cammandoes running down back alleys chasing odious fraudsters who have ripped little old ladies are excellent. Could you imagine Leigh Sales or Tony Jones involving themselves in any progressive public interest journalism. Pffft. The ABC - via Tony Jones (via Nannette Rogers) - finally got onto the abominable cover-up of the failed state of NT, practically a full decade after The Australian started covering the tragedy.
But back on topic. The 7 pm news read is no different from 9 or 7, except no ads, which I agree totally is a big plus. Having said that, who ever watches ABC TV news? Why would you when you have a whole world of AAP/Reuters/blogs/news outlets from all over the world, Youtube, all updating in real time 24/7.
The only possible future for the ABC is to close down just about all its News & Current Affairs offerings and the airheads who “report” and channel all that money into Investigative Journalism.
Geez Skeptikus I don’t know what to say, so I won’t……….yes I will, if you think ACA or TDT have any merit whatsoever apart from being a not so amusing circus of BS for dullards and well……more BS then I think the Networks have done their job on you.
Hey Rupert you got one here, the plan is working.
And for god’s sake, can we also take out to the back fence and shoot those tedious old fossils ranting about ABC bias towards the ALP. Dudes, the days of there being any differences between the ALP and the Libs are long gone. The current crop of ABC public-fronting stiffs are less comrades than Australian Media Idol wannabes. They are gutless little Eichmanns to the yuppie managerialist Ayatollahs who are happy to hasten the ABC’s decline by axing one of its most important geopolitcs radio programs and perhaps the ABC’s most high-brow program, The Religion Report.
Glenn
The fact you completely ignore the public service role of sticking up for those little old ladies and other victims of fraudsters and corporate exploitation shows just where your priorities lie. With that sort of contempt, we really must ask what it is you actually think is great about ABC News?
Public service roll ? ROFL HAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahaha cough cough choke splutter choke…
Dude (so you can understand me) those reports do nothing, we have laws and law enforcers to take care of scum like that, the flim flam men who make a living jumping fences to chase car salesman are exactly like the Benny Hill show ………only not funny.
Anyway enough of this, I decline further exchanges on the basis that there’s only 25 minutes to the Ch 7 News, I can hardly wait to see what they think will grab the audience today.
If the proposed ABC 24-hour TV News Service covered news stories in greater depth than the brief reports on their regular news programs, that would be of benefit. Most of the news reports go for the visuals which are often repeated ad nauseam until you start to wonder if they actually match up with the story described. Commercial and Pay news services suffer with this too. I rely on “Lateline” for more in-depth material - commentary, interviews and discussions, although their opening news is very brief. My only grumble about “Lateline” is that the ABC shuts it down too early at the end of the year and re-opens it far too late into the New Year. Can’t they find enough staff to perform in front and behind the cameras? Do their staff say “We’re off on holidays and stuff viewers”? As a government-funded service, the ABC too easily goes into a holiday torpor each year. That’s the sort of thing a government should direct their Board on - our governments are always too nervous to challenge the ABC.
It’s just the final chapter in the NewsCaff takeover of the ABC. It will continue to be FOXTEL that leads the way in other genres like drama and comedy which the ABC will gratefully buy and air as it is doing already as the available funds get gobbled up by the NewsCaff monolith.
And did you see the article in SMH this morning? It reeked of the ABC’s “Rupert paranoia” and the Fairfax journos simply regurgitated it without even bothering to check the “facts” it contained (like Rupert owning Sky News Australia). This is another example of the standard of “journalism” we are coming to expect. I am looking forward to the day that we all get tired of the “cult of news” on television and the medium can go back to doing other programming properly.
Glenn
Mate, YOU are part of the problem. Your only defence of the ABC is your psychological projection of how you’d like to see yourself by creating a cartoonish ‘other’; Channel 7. Take away your negative self-image as being whatever the ‘other’ of Channel 7 is, and all we have is a Hollow Man, with nothing to contribute to a better media landscape, except loud denouncements of cartoons
As I said, time to take the old bag out the back, and put her out of our misery.
I agree with Hayden. The quality of ABC news is a great face for Australia to present to the region, as long as it broadens the focus of its south asian reporting from natural and political disasters.
JBG, your arguments about the ALP bias of the ABC are an insult to your own intelligence. Here’s a list of people who have worked for both the ABC and the Coalition, and it doesn’t include Janet Albrechtsen, Jonathon Shier or Donald McDonald -
Gary Hardgrave (former minister in the Howard government);
Peter Collins (former Leader of the Liberal Party in NSW)
Peter McArthur (Victorian state Liberal member)
Bruce Webster (State NSW Liberal member)
Jim Bonner(Malcom Fraser staffer and former Director of the Liberal Party in South Australia)
Pru Goward (current candidate)
Cathy Job ( former media adviser to David Kemp)
Vicki Thompson (former Chief of Staff for John Olsen, Liberal Premier of South Australia)
Ian Cover (former state Vic Liberal member)
Rob Messenger (current National Party member for Burnett in the Queensland parliament)
Grant Woodhams (National Party member for Greenough in WA)
Ken Cooke (former Qld State Director of the National Party for 13 years
Chris Nicholls (staffer for Liberal Senator, Grant Chapman)
Eoin Cameron (former Liberal member for the federal seat of Stirling)
Cameron Thompson (member for Blair)
The current State Director of the ABC in Queensland, Chris Wordsworth, is a former press officer for one time Liberal Defence Minister John Moore.
In March 2009 Scott Emerson, a former ABC journalist won the Queensland seat of Indooroopilly for the Liberal National Party.
Your arguments are as baseless and as tired as they come. The only people who think the ABC is biased towards the Coalition are Coalition supporters. Get real.
Dingbat
That list says nothing, as your claim is about a comparison. So please now post the list of ABC ers who were, became, or are ALP flunkies. If the global internet crashes because all the bandwidth has been taken up, we’ll know you have posted the list.
The BBC managed, on R4, from the 70s to use “off-cuts” and reportage otherwise (deemed) unusable on the news for “From Our Own Correspondent” which ABC aped.
NewsRadio is a good example of a pure news service run on the smell of an oily rag, rip’n’read, and thus able to break or switch to the day/moment’s major event. Unless they get hung up on form over content (not unlikely) there’s no reason ABC TV can’t do the smae thing. So much good stuff lies on the cutting room floor (there’s an ancient phrase!!) that it’s a shame that we can’t see it - after all we pay for it. BTW, surely it must be more than “8 cents a day” in the 21stC?
Dingbat
You miss the critical point of the original post - that being that the ABC has long been an “incubator” for ALP flunkies. Your list trawls through a who’s who of regional ABC outlets (and without having cut and paste a Friends of the ABC “we’re not biased” diatribe, how many of these people would you have been able to name?), whereas my main argument was that in the ABC’s prominent national news and current affairs porgrams there is an entrenched culture of employing ex-ALP flunkies who have fostered an entrenched culture of bias.
The number of people of the list who have worked for the ALP and the 7.3 report is my case in point.
I think anyone employed by the ABC should sign a cooling off agreement of at least 2 years before working in any capacity for a political party.
Also any employee should resign from any political party. I recall this was the line Phillip Clark as Sydney abc radio presenter used to take.
It would also mean people like (our resident Sienfeld?) Adam Spencer, would not take $10K MC jobs for a NSW govt departments on the side - as reported by the Naked Eye column of the Sun Herald about a year ago.
Any kind of side jobs should be off limits to ‘our’ ABC staff, otherwise they are exposed to potential partiality in their independence charter. It’s like local police turning up as security at your local beer hall.
After all if the ABC is ramping up it’s post Web 2.0 pre eminent role as the public square then it ought to think seriously about bolstering its integrity measures according to it’s independence charter? Nor is it any answer to list a binary split. Democracy is far more diverse - thank God. At least 1/3 don’t ALP or Coalition primary vote, so this systemic bipartisan approach speaks volumes already.
JBG
Your main point is that the ABC is biased toward the ALP. My main point is that a closer study of the facts reveals that they are not. Just because you can name Kerry, Barrie and Maxine does not mean that “the bias is entrenched” and that the ABC is an incubator for the ALP. It is an absurd statement unsupported by the facts. All you have done is show that 4 7.30 presenters have links with the ALP. Nothing more nothing less. Equally obvious is that 2 current board members (at least) are raging right-wingers, and Shier and McDonald have links with the Liberal party. And a whole host of others, including high-profile Pru Goward and a range of regionals (Delahunty and Martyn are regionals too aren’t they?) work for both the Coalitiona and the ABC. Perhaps the real truth is that the ABC is full of Coalition supporters.
With all the extra funding needed to support so many ABC channels, won’t the ABC go bankrupt? Then again, this could be the plan.
No Dingbat, you have not studied “the facts”. You have copied and pasted some talking points of the Friends of the ABC airheads. Please now post us the list of ABC ers who were, became, or are ALP flunkies. Surely you have it at the ready being such a keen student and all?
I don’t need too Skepticus, i don’t dispute that there are ALP people associated with the ABC. I’m merely providing the other side to the pathetic tired argument that you and others proffer ad nauseum. You can attack the messengers if you like, it doesn’t alter the fact that there are many ABC/Coalition connections.
As you are the ones making claims of bias i’m sure you have all the facts at the ready. What you do not and cannot do is refute that the current board is biased toward the Liberal party, and that John Howard made a concerted and explicit effort to change the culture of the ABC to be more friendly to the Coalition. Again i raise the point that merely stating a handful of ABC people work or did work for the ALP means “bias is entrenched” is a peurile argument.
And again i make the point that the people squealing loudest about ABC/ALP bias are biased towards both the ABC and the ALP. Simple really.
Listen Dingbat, I have already derided the dills who obsess over this issue. But I cannot sit back when public debates are being conducted by people who are either ignorant, disingenuous, or thick. If you are going to make a point based on relative data, you’d better persuade your audience you’ve done some work, other than fagging for Friends of the ABC and pimping their talking points and press releases.
Also, you need to learn what a corporate board does. Corporate board members do not get involved in the details of program production. If the ABC is not the ideological echo-chamber that so used to soothe you in your youth, it is more likely because the world has evolved, not because Janet Albrechtsen has Fran Kelly by the balls.
It’s very hard to pin bias on ABC on-air personnel. I know one of those former ABC / Liberal Party people listed and his view was always that despite a lot of strong left-leaning ABC workers, they prided themselves on keeping their own biases out of what they presented on air. He used to say you could walk down the corridors where office windows were plastered with left-wing stickers! I used to detect a left-wing bias periodically but there was a point when some issues came to a head when evidence of the bias disappeared (internal pressures I guess). The worst I heard was on a Saturday 7pm ABC TV News bulletin immeidately after the US invasion of Iraq where the producer allowed an un-named Scots peace protester in Baghdad (voice only) to shriek his head off about the US “murderers” - a lapse where I hope the producer was disciplined. I used to marvel at Maxine McKew on “Lateline” when she reserved her most vituperative venom in grilling ALP parliamentarians: she absolutely shredded them, more so than she did Liberal MPs. Then of course she put her hand up as the Bennelong candidate! There’s also a difference between being “off to the left” and being ALP supporters (these are often really more conservative than the Liberals).
I was merely highlighting the lack of research done by the original poster who made undubstantiated claims about bias. And since you failed to pick him up on his claim, with his lack of research and data, I thought i’d help him out. I am neither ignorant, disingenuous or thick, (nor arrogant Skepticus, and certainly not a wanker). I’m merely stating a counterpoint to those who peddle regurgitated twaddle. I couldn’t give two hoots about the Friends of the ABC, but again, just because you don’t like them doesn’t negate the information they convey. And Corporate board members may not get involved in production details, but to suggest they don’t influence the direction of the entity they oversee is naive (or ignorant, thick, disingenuous or dillish.)
The work that i presented merely showed that the ABC has connections to the Coalition, alongside my opinion that they do likewise with the ALP. And things far more exciting than the ABC, politics and biased posters soothed me in my youth.
Oooooh the ABC is full, I tell you, full of raging lefties!!!!
Fortunately we have Fox News to let us know what Rupe would get away with here if he could.
Faced with those options there is nothing else to do than watch 7, 9 and 10 for in depth, unbiased coverage of, ummmm, celebrities.
Roberto. The impact of Fox on the media landscape is of a magnitude the ABC could not possibly even begin to imagine for itself. The ABC is a soulless, directionless parasite on the public tit.
So it’s leftie or Rupert; what a choice!
If anything, the ABC has a conservative bias as a result of their affirmative action programs for aggrieved partisans like Bolt, Piers, Windshuttle, and Albrechtson.
Go ABC 4 , i will buy a HD Set top box when it starts. Would never pay for Fox Pox news, these guys are fruit loops ? and they get away with it ? Sky is not free, they pay to be dumbed down ? Wake up Rupert, and move to your left and let the ABC HD NEWS Train pass you and disappear into the future. The world would be a Happier and safer place without Rupert .
Oh dear, we’re still getting affronted by ABC left wing bias after all these years? John Howard sorted all that out from 1996 when he brought in outsourcing, tied funding and shameless Board appointments. The real debate now is does Australia need another 24 hour news channel? From the ABC’s point of view it is an easy option. There are loads of eager young jounos churned out every year - no problem with staff. News happens every minute, no problem with the content. Easy.
What if Mark Scott had tried something hard, like a 24 hour Arts Channel? He would have to find the artists, most of whom have long given up hope of ever being seen in prime time while Reality TV is so much easier and cheaper. Then he would have to find the program makers - most of whom have long gone with nobody trained to take their place, in line with John Howard’s ‘cleansing’.
What do we already have? A 24 hour news channel. What don’t we have? A 24 hour Arts Channel.
Bring it on! I loathe all the commercial channels news and I will not pay to subscribe to any pay TV systems while I am not given freedom of choice on what channels I wish to select to receive. I do not want one of their packages with a lot of dross I will never even look at.
If one of them offered news/docos/ nature-science etc I’d be happy (and some sport for himself).
I look forward to the ABC’s news channel and feel it is a good use of my tax monies.
The ABC is Left or Right depending on one’s own political perspective.
You will watch it or you will not.
If you don’t ’ it is a waste of taxpayer dollars ‘.
If you do. It isn’t.
That’s it , really.
Aside from the tedious and never-ending debates about bias, the real question is whether Australia actually NEEDS a 24-hour news channel. I would wager this will just end up with jaded and over-worked anchors ripping and reading wire copy and running agency pictures from Reuters and AP. Like every bother bloody cable news channel.
There is already too much information and mindless chatter out there. I would prefer the ABC spent the money on a decent current affairs program that involves rigorous investigative journalism and excellent production standards.
We already know WHAT’s happening - it’s online in real-time 24 hours a day. We have access to more news sources than ever. I can look at the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal sitting at my desk at work. I already know what happened today.
What’s missing is the WHY angle most of the time and the HOW does the stuff happening over there affect us HERE. The ABC 24-hour channel no doubt will deal with this by churning through the usual bunch of predictable talking heads given us their familiar spin on global events. US politics? Oh, let’s call in Bruce Wolpe from Fairfax. Sharemarket ructions? Alan Kohler will have a view. Cultural wars? Give Gerard Henderson a buzz. He never says no. Climate change? Time for another debate between Clive Henderson and Andrew Bolt.
Yawn. Waste of money.
This isnt a waste of money at all, I dont use the Disabled Aboriginal Parents Without Partners Puppet Support Group facilities but does that make it a waste of money ?, I dont watch the book of the month show on the ABC so does that make it a waste of money ?. Of course not.
I imagine this will be news headlines every half hour and an in depth look at some stories in the meantime.
This is a very smart initiative and will help undo some of the damage inflicted by the mainstream media on the general public.
@Mr Denmore, you say “we already know WHAT’s happening”, but what you really mean is YOU already know what’s happening, and YOU have access to more news sources than ever.
Perhaps you might cast your thoughts to a person living in rural Australia who does not have access to 24 hour news of any kind, and will benefit from this channel once free to air TV is beamed from satellite (as per Conroy’s recent announcements).
Jeebus, I don’t think the bush is as unwired as you suggest. Besides, you don’t need to sit around watching talking heads on expensive television news service to stay informed. The radio is as good as anything.
Let’s hope the ABC 24/7 crew are better at writing copy for the spoken word than all the ex- newspaper hacks at Sky.
I regularly burst into laughter at the howlers Sky broadcasts.
One thing though…the Sky news readers are a FAR better than those on ABC TV News. It’s something to do with experience.
Finally, has anyone seen how the camera loves to death the new stand in Nine News reader Alison Langdon…am I the only one, or is Chris Bath just about to be given bath by Langdon?
I take it that all the above commentators like TV advertising.
Well I don’t!
For that reason I choose the ABC, the rest of you have no brains!
The glove puppets at News corp now have their days numbered by competition.
These biased grovelling animals who for so long have snivelled to their proprietor will soon have to look for other jobs - perhaps they could work as snivelling subservient nannies, maids or butlers.