ABC Ratings in Free Fall?

It’s easy for us to criticise the ABC as they are funded by our taxpayer dollars. If they were just a private organisation funded by a handful of subscribers, then I probably wouldn’t care what they do. But in the real world, according to the ABC’s Corporate Plan 2024-25, under Financial Information, they are funded to undertake two principal activities. The first is to provide radio, television and digital media services, and the second is to manage the transmission and distribution of those services. All these numbers are in thousands by the way. Each year the ABC receives more than $1.2 billion in revenue ($1.3 billion in future years) of our taxpayer money, so I think it’s our right as Australian taxpayers to critique our ABC.

Sure, I accept that it’s impossible for them to make everybody happy, but within this same document, they have Marc Fennell in Stuff the British Stole, basically framing British history as a terrible worldwide crime scene, Ginger and the Vegesaurs, subtly promoting vegetarianism to young children, Indigenous presenter Tony Armstrong’s Extra-Ordinary Things where he rides his pushbike around Australia to learn about its untold history (we just have to suspend disbelief that he’s not actually driving or catching a plane to get to these remote locations), an Indigenous girl at Garma 2024, Pacific Break: fostering Pacific music’s next generation, BTN High indoctrinating our children while they’re at school, The Assembly, which follows around autistic student journalists. Everything is about identity over at our ABC. Normal no longer exists apparently.

Their first Strategic Pillar is prioritise the trust of their audiences, specifically, “We will include social responsibility goals, such as diversity, inclusion and environmental sustainability, in all aspects of our operations”, “We will put inclusion and diversity at the heart of everything we do.”

Unsurprisingly, they have a Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Plan 2023-2026, where of course they have targets: 50% of executive rolls filled by women, 8% of employees must have a disability, 3.4% Indigenous employees, 30% must be culturally and linguistically diverse. Actually, according to their latest figures, women are already over-represented in executive roles at 55.4%, and already almost 13% of their workforce identifies as LGBT. I found this interesting, in very small writing, they state, “At the ABC, we recognise that gender is not binary”, but, “The ABC is also required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Act to promote equal opportunity for women.” Well, by their own statistics, they’ve failed. 55.4% of their employees are women, while only 44.1% are men. That’s not representative of the real Australian population.

Of course, they’ve got plenty of pictures of First Nations journalists and presenters, of course, with their pronouns, just in case you can’t tell, they’ve got people in wheelchairs and where they’re working, “Working on Kaurna Land”, and of course, people from different cultural backgrounds. She/her, working on Wurundjeri Land of the Kulin Nation. None of us have any idea where they’re working, but perhaps none of us care. They/them, ABCQueer. One would think that identity is the only important thing over at the ABC. But just to rub your nose in it, they finish by stating that this is your ABC. This train wreck of a dumpster fire is all yours.

The ABC stands against racism and discrimination. That’s funny, because in this report that I showed you yesterday prepared by a group of Indigenous Lawyer activists, they found, well, let me sum it up with one of their quotes, “The most racism I have experienced in my life has been at the ABC.” Despite your taxpayer dollars being funnelled into diversity and inclusion, they can’t even keep their diverse employees happy. Money well spent, hey?

But all this doesn’t matter in the world of TV and radio, does it? What really matters? Ratings! If ratings are poor, television shows are axed, or networks go bust, right? Well, ordinarily. So how is the ABC faring? Well, here’s the ABC Radio National Breakfast Ratings for the last three years. In pretty much every capital city, ratings are trending downwards, by a lot. This is the Australian Government’s transparency portal showing the ABC’s Audience Reach.

They have a lot more data for radio reach, so the table goes off screen, but I’ll paste the last couple of columns here. Again, nearly all their radio stations have suffered declines over the last few years. Only their digital audio has had a modest increase of 14% in listenership. Their radio websites are down by 14%. The ABC News on TV and digital are down by 20 or 30%. Similarly, their News video views are down pretty much across the board, with a massive decline of 54% in YouTube Live views. Perhaps they’re running less live segments.

But either way, the writing is on the wall, is it not? Your ABC is burning to the ground.

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Allégro by Emmit Fenn