I have had no faith in the ABC to deliver unbiased reporting since the 1970's when Gough Whitlam sacked the entire board and replaced them with Labor sympathisers. The events of the past 2 weeks have vindicated Malcolm Turnbull's sacking and provided plenty of reasons for selling the ABC.

Sell the dinosaur and save the taxpayer $1Billion a year 

Proceeds of the sale should go towards reducing labor created debt

Of course the government should have total control over the media, after all it did wonders for Adolf and his government.  Those who argue that the government should be able to influence the ABC should remember, the Right will not always be the government, if you truely believe that the government should be allowed to interfere with news reporting you have to agree to the same conditions when Labor takes government.

For those who say " Sell the dinosaur"  just look at how many wrongs that have been reported by the dinosaur that the Right Wing channels chose to ignore.  

Sell the ABC and give up any hope of getting both sides of the political arguments of this country.

Just look at all the great countries where the media is controled by the government, China, Russia, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam  ........  We should aspire to be just like them.

Government control of the media is a double edged sword.

The ABC is fair and equal -- it is the other channels and stations that are controlled by the likes of Murdock etc that are right wing and brainwashing  the public -- listen to both sides -- it is the only way to know the truth --  the Government want the ABC GONE because it shines light on what they are up to -- absolute corruption!

Lets look at the recent history.

Abbott did not like reporting which showed him for the Murdoch owned stoolie he is so he set about trying to flog it off.

First thing is the talk about bias (sound familiar?) started from this government.  Then it was leaked by this government that it sould be sold because it was costing too mucg to keep on top of the claims of bias.

Fast forward to Turnbull.  ABC CEO Mark Scott was sent on his way despite doing a wonderful job.  Replaced by an ex Murdoch employee.  The Chairman was a hand picked Turnbull cronie as well and none of us know the make up of the Board at this stage.

Also TWO cuts in funding to weaken the ABC and use that as a reason to sell it off....to the Murdoch organisation.

The game is clear.  Cry cost and bias and then sell.  AT the same time NEVER a word about bias by the other big media players.  Having watched 7 News every night since Turnbull was knifed (by Murdoch and Stokes) all that happens EVERY NIGHT is the big pat on the back for Morrison with Shorten cut out of all air time.  This is how 7 News ran the last election campaign.  This sort of behaviour has passed the 'bias' stage and is blatant PROPAGANDA intended to put the worst government in this country's history back into office.

Turnbull was stacking the board. One board member was a mining lobbyist for goodness sake! Turnbull insisted on her inclusion, against advice from others, and I suppose it was Justin Milne who took her onto the board to please his mate. Turnbull was pulling lots of strings. Shame!

And you are saying the ABC is not slanted to left? When is the last time they were critical of say the Greens or Labor. Adrianus is the lonely voice here. I have listened to the ABC for 65 years and it certainly slipped of its perch decades ago.

It seems to me that the on-air staff are the ones with the biggest say in the running of the ABC. They seem to be able to say whatever they wish with impunity whether it's supporting one side or the other. The Board is there to set policy which is to be carried out through the CEO and the current problems have arisen because the Chairman wanted to be the CEO. As pointed out, it's ironic that the CEO was sacked for supporting the staff against the wishes of the Chairman.

Governments come and go and appointments to government positions are made by the government of the day. Whether one agrees with this depends on which side one votes. In the case of the ABC, they have a charter under which they are supposed to work and are tasked to be fair to all sides of politics. This fairness is a matter of subjectivity depending on whose side you are on. Both sides of politics have, in the past, complained about bias on the ABC so maybe they are doing a good job.

On the other hand, other media is controlled by owners and shareholders and are in the business of making money. They are not supported by the taxpayer and are all after the advertising dollar and that means they must report matters in a way to attract readers/viewers/listeners. Some sections of the commercial media support one side and other sections support the other side so people are free to support the media of choice. The ABC is not supposed to take sides.

The claims of bias in the ABC more often than not come from people who never watch it anyway, so their opinions are irrelevant.  They are probably just parroting what Andrew Bolt, et al, have to say.

If people think the ABC is never hostile to the left they should have been watching it when Julia Gillard was PM. 

Personally, I think there is a tendency to see bias against any sitting Government no matter who it happens to be because the ABC are the only ones asking the hard questions.

Great article by Waleed Aly in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

THIS IS ABOUT MORE THAN JUST THE ABC.

“She won’t be going, Peta, I can assure you of that. As I told Tony two hours ago. And in 23 years as a daily metro newspaper editor no COS [chief of staff] or PM has ever made such a suggestion to me about anyone. Even Keating.”

Those are reportedly the words of Chris Mitchell, then editor-in-chief of The Australian. He’s responding to a demand from Peta Credlin – chief of staff to prime minister Tony Abbott at the time – that he sack columnist Niki Savva after a column that incensed Credlin.

In a week where the ABC has been recast as an organisation more concerned with keeping the government happy than with the non-negotiability of journalistic independence, no quote from the past has struck me as more arresting, more germane, more instructive.

First, there’s the obvious contrast with the apparently cowed behaviour of ABC chairman Justin Milne who, according to reports in Fairfax, demanded a journalist be sacked on the basis that the government “hate her”. The criticisms of Milne – most clearly expressed in staff demands that he resign – are well worn and write themselves. What Mitchell’s response to Credlin reveals is the other side to this story that will receive far less attention.

Consider: “No COS or PM has ever made such a suggestion to me about anyone”. Mitchell is pointing to a serious line being crossed in an utterly unprecedented way. The highest office in the land had reached a point that it felt it entirely appropriate to demand the sacking of a journalist.

To be clear, there is no suggestion Malcolm Turnbull had demanded any ABC journalist be sacked. But to be equally clear, we’re in an age of increasingly aggressive, emboldened political interference in journalism. That doesn’t remotely excuse an ABC chairman who apparently wanted to sack selected staff or intervene in Triple J’s decision to shift the Hottest 100 from January 26 for reasons like “Malcolm will go ballistic”.

But it points us to the fact that this story is about something much bigger than how the ABC’s management of a particular time and place seemingly lost its grasp of the fundamentals of independent journalism, and with it, the ABC’s mission. It’s about a civic culture that is slowly falling apart: a political class with fewer civic boundaries, less concerned with the independence of institutions, and a muscular intolerance of dissent.

To see this, let’s take an example you’ve almost certainly forgotten that has nothing to do with the ABC.

Andie Fox is a blogger, who found herself chased by Centrelink’s “robo-debt” system, which became a brief scandal as it emerged people were being chased for false Centrelink debts by a computer system that had errors built into it, offered no right of reply, and little chance of fixing errors by speaking to an actual human. Fox wrote of her experience, the humiliation she felt, and the extreme lengths she was forced to in order to have the debt wiped.

In response, the Turnbull government unearthed private information about Fox’s case (including about her ex-partner), and gave it to a Fairfax journalist who then published those details as part of Centrelink’s side of the story. This was not private information released between departments for the purposes of, say, administering the welfare system. It was private information released to a journalist for the purposes of discrediting a critic: that is, for the purposes of helping the government win an argument. This, it turns out, is legal. But as a matter of civil conduct, it’s positively frightening. Imagine the effect on government criticism if people know the government is prepared to release their private information for its own political – not administrative – purposes.

Elsewhere, the government would subordinate journalism to unaccountable declarations of national security. Perhaps the high watermark here is the legislation it passed that allowed it to declare something a “special intelligence operation” retrospectively and with no objective or independent justification. The result of this is that it would make reporting on it illegal. So if, for example, a journalist publishes an embarrassing report on ASIO officers breaking the law, the government has the power to declare that report illegal after the fact, and see the journalist prosecuted.

Or we could cite the example from 2016 where, after some embarrassing leaks that Labor seized upon to criticise cost blowouts and delays with the NBN, the (government-appointed) NBN board ordered the federal police to find the whistleblowers. The result was a raid of the offices and homes of Labor politicians and staff, in part to discover email correspondence with journalists.

The broader picture here is of a political culture hostile to criticism and if it comes to it, transparency; aggressively prepared to pursue critics, whistleblowers and journalists rather than engage with the substantive complaints those people might be raising. Not all of these responses are the same. Some are legislative, others are intimidatory.

In the case of the ABC, it’s a story of relentlessly reduced funding, of a governing party whose members have officially voted to privatise the public broadcaster, and of a communications minister and former prime minister who were inordinately down in the weeds, picking fights over the details of particular reports by  particular journalists designed to make it look as though their work does not merely contain errors, but is fundamentally flawed and irredeemable. It’s the kind of obsessiveness that was once left to fringe characters like Richard Alston, who launched some 70 complaints in 2003 against the ABC’s coverage of the Iraq War. His boss, John Howard, would never have dirtied his hands that way.

There aren’t even those kinds of lines any more because we’re in an age of total politics. Where government figures routinely play media favourites and simply refuse to appear on certain shows or outlets, and show disdain to those institutions designed to keep them in check. Where senior ministers can openly say the “crazy lefties at the ABC” are “completely dead to me”. And where apparently even the chairmen of independent entities seem content to be no less dominated by politics. What irks most is not the thought of incompetent or venal leadership here or there. It’s the thought that the pact is broken: that this is a time of unprecedented demands, unprecedented capitulations and inevitably, unprecedented dysfunction.

Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and a presenter on The Project.

PHOTO: Kirstin Ferguson is an adjunct professor at the Queensland University of Technology.(Facebook: Kirstin Ferguson)

To be appointed as acting chair for the ABC

We dearly need a Royal Commission into the ABC and it’s deep rooted communist culture and biased reporting

Meanwhile the banking RC has today issued its interim report and as expected nothing really of note to be concerned about with the way our banks are run

Bank share price rightly skyrocketed as a result 

now that the banking RC fiasco is over let’s have an RC on a matter of real substance and concern to us all - the rotten journalistic culture at the ABC which only employs those of a particular political leaning 

 1 billion dollars of workers money per year, paying for 4 tv channels , two of which at least, show the sa me programs at the same time.

I don't know how many radio stations.

Monumental paypackets, which the average worker can only dream of, for talking heads.

A billion dollars per year!        Yet there are people here and on other blogs and forums  obvious.y who vote for the err ....workers party, who think it's absolutely fine to see all this money spent on this  parody of what used to be a great service to Australia.

Where's the rationale for that kind of spend, yet hospitals have to constantly run raffles and beg for money.  I wouldn't be here today except for the fantastic people at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and I gladly contribute to their fund raisers. But wouldn't it be wonderful to see a bilion dollars a year spent on our hospitals. The ABC should be subscriber only. That way, you don't have to pay for it. As for the argument that Newscorp is biased....the workers have a choice whether to pay to read .

The ABC should be subscriber only.

Except for the rural areas.