Public Broadcasters have been in the news this week with the publication of Ken Inglis’ new book about the ABC’s recent history and recent lectures about changes at the BBC by British academic Georgina Born.
Cambridge academic Georgina Born is the author of Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC and Ken Inglis has just released his second book about the history of the ABC called Whose ABC? The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1983- 2006.
Joining in the debate about media ownerhsip and commercialism of public broadcasters, Born told ABC Radio’s Gerald Tooth:
“I don’t know about Australia but in the UK for example, our many disasters on the railways has led to a very lively public debate about re-nationalisation… My point was that the alternative perspective… is that what public broadcasting can do, is it can benignly affect the broader markets in media. And the way it does this is by a considerable amount of public investment generally, when licence-fee-funded or tax-funded or government-funded, and that investment has this very interesting effect, which is it tends to provide for very basic kinds of research and technological development, tends to be able to take risks in areas that even the big private corporations, even Mr Murdoch, will not take certain kinds of risks, and moreover can stand for a certain level of standards and quality whether in journalism or indeed the provision of high quality entertainment, which benignly affects the general state of the broadcasting market and tends to level things up a bit.
“In the UK for example, I’ve recently been giving evidence to the Lords’ Committee on BBC Charter Review, and we had extraordinary events like major telecommunications bosses coming in and saying ‘We need the BBC’. The BBC’s investment in digital radio, is what got digital radio markets really going in the UK. The BBC’s investment in free-to-air digital television has been largely responsible for getting this market in digital television up off its knees and going. There was a huge consumer resistance to a kind of Pay-TV American model of multi-channel digital television, until the BBC came along with this free view offering, a digital terrestrial offering that’s free-to-air. It was stalling, heavily stalling; government was very worried, government had pinned all its hopes on digital television. So I’m trying to tell you the big story is a very interesting one about the continuing utility of public investment which then generates a lot of commercial and entrepreneurial activity around it.
“This constant shift in platforms, to mobiles, to hand-helds, to podcasts, it seems to be gathering pace. How do we know when it’s going to stop? Where is it going to stop? We don’t know. At the moment this is a vast new vista of so-called delivery mechanisms and so on. You and I in our dotage may not be that keen on receiving the latest radio show off a podcast, but the research that they’re basing it on is that the new generations, the younger people, are moving in directions that it’s very hard to see, and hard to keep pace with. So I think it’s a very interesting idea that the BBC now sees that to keep up with this stuff, it has to fold the technology arms right into the content arms.”
In today’s segmented media markets Born believes a national public broadcaster has a nation building role to play in uniting the many smaller groups (publics) within society. She says we need a “universal public” because it mirrors our political system, the Federal political system. “We need a space in which all those micro publics can talk to them majority, and the majority can be expected to listen. And only mass channels provide that kind of universal space, now that for example a newspaper market is more and more segmented as well.”
Meanwhile, Errol Simper, reporting excerpts from Ken Inglis’ new book in The Australian newspaper, reveals that Jonathan Shier was considered a “jerk” and a “fool” by ABC board members during the application process for ABC Managing Director.
Simper’s report says Shier became the national broadcaster’s managing director through a combination of three factors that conveniently convulsed together to usher him into the office…
“First, there was a board preference for an outsider, someone without ABC baggage. Second, two fancied candidates – Stephen Claypole and Alan Kohler – fell away early in the process. Third, Shier appears to have significantly lifted his game for a crucial last interview with the full board in early November 1999, clearly outperforming his only serious challenger by then, Malcolm Long.
Inglis says it was Liberal Party powerbroker Michael Kroger who eventually swung his weight solidly behind Shier against Long, and that Chairman Donald McDonald sought to placate the waverers to get the numbers in favour of Shier.
“Was there governmental influence or interference? Inglis says that at one point during the process Kroger warned the board the Coalition Government wouldn’t accept Long. But Inglis also records McDonald as having told Garrett that John Howard’s then minister for communications, Richard Alston, had informed him that Canberra had no problems with Long or Claypole. In the end it didn’t matter. Shier was in,” reports Simper.
Ken Inglis new book is available from Black Inc Books.
Georgina Born is scheduled to give another public lecture in Sydney on August 8 at University of Technology, Sydney, Broadway campus. A full schedule of her lectures can be found by clicking the link below.