HOW THE STAFF CAPTURED THE ABC

Image source: How The ABC Gets Away With It

Interesting item by Keith Windschuttle  from Quadrant.







When the left's long march through the institutions arrived at the ABC, Allan Ashbolt was there to lead it. The national broadcaster as we know it today -- infused with a green-left bias and populated very nearly exclusively by the like-minded -- is his creation and his legacy

  Keith Windschuttle writes:

The Australian on January 31 had a long editorial arguing that Mark Scott, the managing director of the ABC, was a failure, a man ‘out of his depth who lacked the focus or strength to lead the ABC in a new era’. He was failing in his role as editor-in-chief, the editorial said, and failing to take responsibility for the news stories broadcast on the network. Instead, it argued that the ABC was run by ‘a collectivist inner-city clique of broadcasters, bloggers, latter-day Trotskyites and inked hipsters’.
All this is true enough, but it doesn’t explain how things got that way.

In 2005, I gave a lecture titled ‘Vilifying Australia’, published in Quadrant in September that year, where I discussed the phenomenon of staff capture of media organisations by leftists, which I said went back to at least the 1960s. I nominated Allan Ashbolt as the originator of this push at the ABC:

Ashbolt was a maverick broadcaster at the ABC, then a largely conservative organisation. Ashbolt managed to find jobs for a small group of Marxists and radicals like himself. In the ensuing thirty years that group, its appointees and values, have captured the organization. Ashbolt’s views have not only survived, they have built a house culture that even the appointment of a board now dominated by conservatives has been unable to displace

.....now is a good time to bring that evidence to light. It is to be found in one of the most insightful pieces of media analyses ever written in Australia. The author is Anthony McAdam who in the 1980s had a regular column on the media in Quadrant. The title of the article is ‘The ABC’s Marxists’ and it was published in the January-February edition of 1983. It might be old, but there is still much to learn from it today.

Read more:  How the staff captured the ABC

Related post previously published: GET OUR ABC BACK
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