Their ABC "No healthy democracy should have a state media this dominant"

ABC can't keep its big advantage over private media

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
November 20, 2013

THE Abbott Government has wanted to dodge the fight it must have with the ABC. It can't afford the blood right now. It needs to establish its power and trust. And there's Malcolm Turnbull, of course, the ABC favourite who stands guard as Communications Minister.

But for how much longer can the Government let the ABC run amok? I don't just mean that the taxpayer-funded ABC has become even more stridently partisan since the election. Not satisfied with having Leftists helm every one its main current affairs shows, it's now screening slabs of comfort food for Labor viewers traumatised by the election result, from an hour of Julia Gillard being "interviewed'' by worshipper Anne Summers to four hours of Paul Keating being adored by Kerry O'Brien. Just as concerning is how the ABC is metastasising, using our $1.1 billion a year to strangle private media outlets and stifle diversity.

No healthy democracy should have a state media this dominant, with the ABC sprawling over four national TV channels and four radio networks, and now an online newspaper that gives free the kind of news and views that dying Fairfax newspapers must sell to survive. And, of course, there's the taxpayer-funded SBS and taxpayer-funded Conversation.

This week showed the danger the ABC now poses to diversity. In May, Peter Fray, former editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald, started PolitiFact Australia, a website that checked the truth of what politicians said. But while he was hiring staff, the Gillard Labor government gave the ABC a $10 million top-up, in part to create a Fact Check unit of its own in direct competition not just with PolitiFact but Fairfax's own "Fact Checker".

No surprise this week PolitiFact said it had cut its staff from seven full-timers to just three part-timers and even they would be gone unless some moneybags showed up.

Said Fray: "We don't have the budget the ABC does and taxpayers' funding."

So how much longer will the Government let the ABC destroy free enterprise - and the culture that supports it?

The Overpaid Labor Green Loon propagandists of "Their ABC"