The public broadcaster is due for a correction

THREE recent events show how important it is to act to bring the ABC back under control. These are the cavalier approach the corporation took to complaints upheld against the Four Corners documentary Lords of the Forests, the shrieks of outrage from metropolitan sophisticates and the ABC's own staff-appointed director when newspaper columnist Janet Albrechtsen was appointed to the board, and this week's public response to the Australian Broadcasting Authority's findings against its news and current affairs objectivity in relation to Iraq war coverage.

At Senate estimates hearings last month, the issue of why the ABC had hidden the trenchant criticism levelled by the ABA against the 2004 anti-timber industry documentary Lords of the Forests was given another airing. It needed to, and that's why I asked the questions I did. They were questions that go right to heart of accountability: independent assessment had shown the program to have presented subjective views as objective analysis, and apart from a media statement put out by managing director Russell Balding - and the "correction" on the Four Corners website of two errors of fact - no public atonement took place.

When Albrechtsen was appointed to the ABC Board last week, there were immediate howls of outrage - not from ABC management publicly, of course - and an instant kicking in of a campaign of denigration against her. I don't know Albrechtsen. But the fact that she is - horror! - a "right-wing" columnist on this page apparently is evidence that she is part of some News Corporation plot to take over the world. Most people probably see her columns as evidence instead that a plurality of views exists which - except for Michael Duffy in his lonely Monday afternoon outpost on Radio National - is neither fully nor fairly represented on "our" ABC.

The ABC's staff director, Ramona Koval, described Albrechtsen's appointment as inappropriate. A former ABC staff director, Quentin Dempster, still an employee of ABC News and Current Affairs, publicly protested against Albrechtsen's appointment -- but was strangely silent when Labor appointments Rod Cameron, David Hill and former Labor premier John Bannon joined the public broadcaster.

Albrechtsen has said the issue of bias is a priority and that as a director she wants the board to act to ensure the ABC meets its charter obligations to present impartial news and current affairs. In light of the ABC's extraordinary action on Tuesday in releasing its counter arguments to the ABA's findings of bias against the AM program over some of its Iraq war reporting and analysis from 2003, and given its heroic claim, again by management media release, that it was only a little bit guilty, if that, Albrechtsen's position is objective and correct.

It is a fact that the ABC invariably rejects the substance of findings against it. In this particular instance we have again been subjected to lecturing - one might almost say hectoring - from the lofty summits of semantics about what really constitutes bias.

The ABC's former director of news, Max Uechtritz, famously told a Barcelona conference in 2003 that the military were lying bastards. Two years later, the ABC itself is presenting the same argument, when in relation to the issue of propaganda - something apparently that some of its own operatives are very good at - it lectures the ABA on why it's all right to equate the presentation of US military analysis of a developing combat situation in Iraq with the unbelievable polemics of the Iraqi regime that was in the process of being removed.

The issue is not so much whether the ABC or the ABA is right. It is that the ABC remains hostage to a fundamentally Leftist elite that believes it is fighting the culture war and will not admit to the possibility that it might have erred.

At the Senate hearings last month I gave the ABC a public tick for its coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. I thought it handled that horribly tragic event and its aftermath brilliantly and I wanted it to get the public credit it deserved. Accolades are warranted where they are due and brickbats where they are deserved.

Albrechtsen's board appointment should hopefully help create an environment in which our public broadcaster can admit to occasional substantive errors -- instead of little idiocies such as using a simplified map and forgetting it was Abel Tasman, not Van Dieman, who "discovered" Tasmania, as it did in "correcting" its Lords of the Forests hatchet job. If true reforms can be implemented, then "our ABC" may finally be on the road to recovery. That would be significant public benefit for all Australians.

Santo Santoro is a federal Liberal Senator for the state of Queensland.