Without innovations like iView and News24, the ABC would be less relevant and in decline, says outgoing managing director Mark Scott.
“There’s no doubt, if we’d just sat where we were and been a traditional, old-style, linear broadcaster on radio and television, we’d still be held with great affection by the Australian people, but we wouldn’t be as relevant, we wouldn’t be as compelling, and I don’t think our future would be as healthy as it is today,” Scott said in an exit interview with Paul Barry on Media Watch on Monday.
Scott rejected criticism that the ABC had become too big and was a significant competitor to struggling commercial media companies such as News Corp Australia and Fairfax Media.
The ABC, which has a budget of $1bn, is worth funding because it is a public good, he said.
“The problems that particularly newspaper companies are facing, they’ve got nothing to do with the ABC or public broadcasters,” Scott said, pointing to the US where the lack of a strong public broadcaster had not helped the newspaper industry.
Scott said newspapers were losing their advertising to Apple, Google and Facebook and not to the ABC.
“And when it comes to paywalls, newspapers are being challenged about getting people to pay for their content, but it’s not because there’s a public broadcaster in the market, it’s because there are hundreds of millions of free websites that are offering content without charging for it, including so many different news and news services.
Scott said critics who claimed the ABC was biased were ill-informed because the ABC practiced professional journalism and its staff were bound by standards so their personal opinion was irrelevant.
“We do a different style of journalism to the journalism that I think increasingly you see in News [Corp] papers and increasingly you see with different columnists as well,” Scott said.
Scott conceded the ABC had been a little narrow in the range of topics covered but had made changes to ensure it covered issues which were important to the broader community like electricity prices.
“I think we’re not the least bit complacent about it, and I think the answer in truth, Paul, is that we do very well most of the time, but we’re probably not as good as we’d always like to be.”
Scott warned that if the government did not renew the targeted funding for the news division in the budget, another round of redundancies and program cuts would follow.
An extended version of the Scott interview can be seen online.
