abc charter

The broadcast watchdog has found the ABC breached the impartiality standards in a TV news report about Tony Abbott.

In the October 7pm bulletin report about a speech Abbott gave to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, political editor Andrew Probyn called Abbott “already the most destructive politician of his generation”.

 

The complaint to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said the segment was not objective: “This was the nightly NEWS — not an editorial, not Q and A, not 7.30 and not any other platform which invites journalists to voice their personal opinions. We were supposed to be listening to an objective report of Tony Abbott’s speech in the UK, not listen to a political activist masquerading as a journalist editorialising.”

In reply, the ABC said the speech was newsworthy, was the analysis was impartial, and referred to the Macquarie dictionary for a definition of “destructive”: “tending to overthrow, disprove, or discredit”. The ABC said that “the quality contemporary journalism practised by the ABC will do more than simply relay accurate facts to an audience”.

But ACMA found that the statement was “problematic”, the reasonable viewer would’ve understood “destructive” as a pejorative descriptor, and that the report was not analysis:

“The ACMA accepts that Mr Probyn is well placed to analyse federal political matters — including Mr Abbott’s political career. However, Mr Probyn’s description of Mr Abbott as ‘the most destructive politician of his generation’ was not, in the context of this report, analysis.”

ACMA’s finding is the second breach of the ABC’s impartiality standard in its code of practice, introduced in 2011.

In a statement, ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said the breach was the second time the ABC had broken its impartiality rules since the current code of practice was introduced in 2011.

“While this demonstrates strong compliance with these important provisions of the code, the ABC did not get it right on this occasion,” O’Loughlin said.

The ABC told ACMA it would use the finding in editorial training, but had no further comment.

Last year, ACMA found the ABC in breach of the same standard for an ABC TV story, broadcast in November 2016, about historical child sexual abuse allegations against Dr John Flynn. ACMA found that the story conveyed that the allegations were true without including any mention of Flynn’s denial of the allegations to the ABC.