Australia’s public broadcasters have been under threat for over a decade. For the new government to fix the problem, funding shouldn’t just be expanded but shared with commercial media.
The recent election of the Albanese government will be a sigh of relief for Australia’s public broadcasters as the incoming government will seek to restore funding for the ABC after a decade of funding cuts by successive Coalition governments.
Labor committed back in July 2020 to restore $84 million in ABC funding if it won the federal election, which it now has. “It’s a precious national asset and it should be funded appropriately,” Albanese said to the ABC at the time.
But merely reinstating funding won’t be enough to save Australia’s media landscape and that’s because financing public broadcasting is only the start of the problem.
Restoring funding – and trust?
News has become an increasingly precarious business. That means it’s more reliant than ever on advertising, but that comes at a cost. A 2019 Ipsos study found trust in news media is rapidly declining, with 38 per cent and 41 per cent of respondents not trusting broadcast and print news respectively.
Meanwhile, another study found less than 28 per cent of news media consumers think media is independent of undue business influence, with rising concerns for integrated advertising content that’s indistinguishable from regular news.
In response to this dearth of trust, the ABC is frequently cited as a jewel of a solution. It is, after all, the most trusted news source in Australia by a country mile.
That means much of the conversation around public interest journalism tends to focus on funding for our public broadcasters. It’s only with more and stable funding for the ABC and SBS, the argument goes, that we can ensure journalism will exercise its democratic function.
Certainly, more stable funding is needed. The Coalition government froze indexing for the ABC’s funding from 2014 to 2020, amounting to a $783 million freeze. Critics have frequently called for more stable funding, ideally following British and German models of a broadcast licence fee, where taxpayers directly pay the equivalent of AUD$272 and $327 per year, respectively. While it would be politically difficult to shift the funding of the ABC to a more explicit bill for everyday Australians, it would also prevent it from becoming a partisan football, as it has been over the last decade.
But even if we did manage to settle on depoliticised, stable funding for public broadcasting, what about the role of commercial news? By only calling for more funding for public broadcasters, we implicitly assume that more public interest journalism is beyond the remit of commercial news. We assume that commercial news will always be too compromised by its political and commercial links to produce significant public interest journalism. But this shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion.
Sharing the funds around
Many industrialised nations invest significant funding in commercial news to encourage public interest journalism. France’s funds have historically been invested in newspapers to ensure modernisation, innovation and emergency coverage. This amounted to AUD$120 million in 2015. Similar funding can be found in Canada, Sweden and Norway, while the UK government commissioned The Cairncross Review in 2019 to charter the way forward for quality public interest journalism. That review called for interventions like the provision of subsidising to report local council meetings.
We saw the first hints of this in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic when the Coalition government intervened with the Public Interest News Gathering (PING) fund to save dying regional newspapers. That saw $50 million in funding – the vast majority of it repurposed from previously unspent regional support – to maintain critical news investigations in regional areas. All this in an effort to prevent what academics term news deserts.
There has also been a history of indirect support through tax breaks for publications but this has primarily been done with neoliberal deregulation-cum-innovation in mind, rarely leading to any explicit push for public interest journalism or more diverse news content.
While the PING fund is a step in the right direction, it shouldn’t be a band-aid crisis response. Funding could be long-term and more explicit in its expectations for investigative journalism. It could try to fix not just news deserts but also the equally problematic news monopolies in our capital cities.
As the Cairncross Review identified, funding should help guarantee local, investigative reporting across the country and from a plurality of sources. Otherwise the smaller fundamentals of our democracy, like daily operations of local councils, will continue to fall between the cracks of commercial news budgets.
Without that shared funding, the ABC might still be a precious national diamond, but it will be the only one in the rough.
(Featured image: Traditional media, like newspapers, frequently focus on large events of politics to the detriment of local investigations. Thomas Charters, Unsplash).
