The ABC is not biased against business despite perceptions to the contrary, research by the Australia Institute has shown, but it does focus too much on the big end of town to the detriment of smaller enterprises.
The research, based on one week of ABC content across television, radio and online, found that big business received three to five times more attention than small to medium businesses despite the smaller companies making up a third of the Australian economy.
Specialist programs such as The Business, hosted by Ticky Fullerton, cover big business five times more often than small business topics, the report found, and gave voice to inside industry commentators, such as analysts from research firms and banks rather than unions and consumers.
“It’s astounding that still there is this narrative out there that the ABC is anti-business and anti-big business in particular,” researcher Fergus Pitt told Guardian Australia. “The Australia Institute thought we had a role in providing some data that showed a different perspective to that argument.
“We were trying to understand the amount of air time that was given to small, medium and big business. And what we found was that the coverage the ABC gave to big business was disproportionate to their place in the Australian economy, admittedly on what was a fairly focused sample.
“So much of our interactions are with small and medium-sized businesses, which play an incredibly important role in our society and, like big business, some are fantastic and some act badly. And those parts of the economy deserve to be examined and have their perspectives heard.”
The Australia Institute report was released the week after Guardian Australia revealed that the ABC managing director, Michelle Guthrie, told the Four Corners team that the program would be better if it was kinder to business and did some profiles of successful business leaders.
Guthrie may have been echoing persistent criticism, largely from News Corp, that the ABC is anti-business.
The former ABC chairman Maurice Newman was quoted in the Australian earlier this year saying that ABC business commentary “tended to be from the left”.
The ABC board commissioned an independent review of the ABC’s business coverage, which was released in July. It concluded there was no bias but that the coverage was too unfocused.
Adviser to the review and former ANZ chief excutive Mike Smith admitted that, before he was asked to assist in the review, he believed the ABC was “inherently anti-business” but the evidence showed “this was incorrect and the coverage was generally unbiased”.
“I have observed that the ABC does a credible job across a range of media with quite limited resources when, compared to similar institutions, such as the BBC,” Smith said. “If there is a fault, I would say that business coverage is usually reported through a political rather than economic lens, which generally results in negative rather than good news.”
Pitt said the institute was not naive about the tendency for traditional media coverage to gravitate towards big business.
“Certainly traditional news values skew towards stories that have very very big impacts, so BHP is newsworthy because they employ an lot of people and they have a lot of shareholders,” Pitt said. “But, as a broadcaster that has a mission to represent diversity, their business coverage has a way to go.”
Like other media, when the ABC covers business it focuses on big business and the economic implications of public policy, the institute found. Radio current affairs program AM, for example, did 10 stories on ASX 100 companies but only three stories related to small businesses.
ABC News online’s business section covered ASX 100 companies and big private businesses five times more than small to medium businesses.
The Australia Institute report found that, while small businesses accounted for more than a third of private-sector jobs, they were rarely heard in business coverage on the national broadcaster. While chief executives were given a voice, consumers, consumer representatives and unions were rarely heard.
