SCREENING two episodes of Stephen Fry’s QI on the same night a couple of hours apart and doing that two nights a week makes it pretty clear Aunty has lost the plot when it comes to TV programing but there are far bigger issues facing the ABC and a frantic rush to cut jobs and find savings is not the best way to resolve them.
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Regional voters will be screaming that the ABC would not be in this predicament if Prime Minister Tony Abbott had told the truth about his plans to wield the axe before the election last year.
That is absolutely true. An honest statement before voters went to the polls would, at best, have created such a backlash that Mr Abbott would have dropped the plan and, at worst, put cutting the ABC on the agenda, giving ABC boss Mark Scott many months to work through the implications of a $254 million cut to the budget. But yet again, Mr Abbott did not tell the truth about what he had in store.
Aunty’s many fans will just have to wait for the cost-saving plan to be unveiled by Mr Scott today and hope core services are not hit too hard.
According to member for Calare John Cobb Orange and the rest of regional Australia should not have too much to worry about. In fact, he believes there are efficiencies that can be made without affecting regional services too greatly.
Sadly, there is evidence that in the regions the ABC has been forced to do more with less for some time. In the Central Tablelands, for example, the days of our local morning presenters being replaced when on holidays, sick leave or away for training (presumably on digital platforms) are long gone.
It is now standard practice to instead network a morning program out of the Dubbo studio or the northern Tablelands to half the state.
This is symptomatic of the problems ABC management should be wrestling with: how much money should be invested in websites and apps and what does their regional audience want anyway?
The ABC should be carefully reassessing its role and priorities in the digital media landscape.
Thanks to Mr Abbott it is now doing that with a gun to its head.