Mark Scott: Bashing the ABC on content won't help

James Riley
Monday, 19 October 2009 09:25

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ABC managing director Mark Scott has made a robust defence of the public broadcaster's role in delivering news online, and says weakening the ABC will not help the current difficulties of large news organisations.

Appearing at a Senate Estimate hearing in Canberra, Scott said his controversial AN Smith Memorial Lecture in Journalism at the University of Melbourne last week was intended as a defence of the ABC.

The lecture was interpreted by some as an attack on Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation. Mr Murdoch’s son James had in recent months questioned the role of the publicly funded BBC in online news delivery, and News Corp has talked openly of plans to charge for its online content.

"What I really did on behalf of the ABC was to make clear the commitment that the public has already paid for this content and that they should not be expected to pay for it a second time to experience it on the device they want and in the format they want," Scott told the Senators.

"I would reflect on it as a robust defence of the independence of public broadcasting … and suggestions by others that we should either ‘leave the field’ or charge for our content was not going to happen here at the ABC."

Scott said as commercial broadcasters came under increasing pressure, that pressure is inevitably passed to the public broadcaster.

South Australian senator Simon Birmingham asked whether it was reasonable for commercial news broadcasters operating in a dramatically changing environment in which income models were under threat to 'hypothesize' about the future of news delivery and the public broadcaster.

Scott said "the answer to all of these questions is not to slap down the public broadcaster as seems to happen from time to time, and has been some of the language of recent times."

"The language has been that the public broadcaster should step away, should be weakened, or that the public broadcaster should charge. We need to reject those things … (which) would damage the ABC," he said.

Scott said the provision of news in Australia had been conducted for using "a strong and robust" mixed model public and commercial interests for 70 years, and that the online world should not disrupt that successful model.

"I support the mixed model. I don’t support at all the view that says only the ABC will be there at the end. I don’t think that is going to happen, but the ABC has a vital role to play and we should be allowed to play it."