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Friday, 2 December 2016

The ABC and I

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as I argued yesterday in A spittoon's worth of bigots, is not racist: http://spectator.com.au/2016/12/bigots/ The problem with the ABC is its bohemian-style socialism - that is, its ideology. Some will want to argue that a consequence of its identitarian ideology is racism but that, as I say in the article, is to borrow from the PC playbook. You call me a racist and I call you a New Racist and there is the end of the discussion across the great divide.

It also does not get to the root of the problem which, again, is ideological. This morning I looked up something I wrote about the ABC in June 2015 for Quadrant Online, titled The ABC's Distorting Prism, and found it was consistent with yesterday's piece: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/06/abcs-distorting-prism/

An interesting - though not necessarily connected - development occurred not so long after that article appeared in June 2015. An editor at the ABC's Drum Online invited me to contribute a piece to his site. A number of the resultant articles are collected here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/daryl-mccann/6773340

I found all the editors and line-managers involved very professional and polite. We all sensed, I assume, that giving me a voice on the ABC was a win-win. I got to speak to a different audience (often but not always antagonistic) and the ABC showed its "diversity" policy stretched to providing a forum for the occasional libertarian-conservative. Alas, in the middle of 2016 someone higher up at the ABC - not anybody I worked with - decided that the days of hosting contesting opinions at Drum Online were over, confirming my argument about the ABC made back in December 2013: http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2013/12/taxes-abc/

The solution is simple: the ABC can prove it believes in ideological and intellectual diversity by finding a forum for a contrarian like me. There is my challenge to Aunty.