Opinion
The ABC has lost its curiosity. Joe Rogan can help Kim Williams recover it
Parnell Palme McGuinness
Columnist and communications adviserThe designer who created the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Lissajous” logo – inspired by broadcast vibrations – seems to have had some insight into the cycle of birth, death and recrimination through which the ABC is doomed to cycle. The logo is reminiscent of an ouroboros – a snake-like creature with its tail in its mouth, representing birth, death and renewal – but twisted into tortuous knots. Or perhaps an infinity symbol with an extra loop of infinity tacked on.
We must be on the third arc of infinity this year, a time of especial drama before the swooping logo enters another valley of lassitude. An unusually high number of producers and journalists are retiring or being retired. The process is supposed to set the scene for renewal. But the question, as always, is how to introduce renewal into a closed system.
Kim Williams (right) might do well to find journalists who are curious enough to tune into Joe Rogan.Credit: Digitally altered image. Artwork: Marija Ercegovac.
Conservatives like to call for the ABC to be defunded. That’s a defeatist approach. The ABC is a powerful tool of social cohesion and new migrant integration. It’s given generations a shared cultural point of reference. From Playschool to Bluey, the ABC gives Australian children something in common regardless of their cultural backgrounds. Flagship current affairs shows once drove national conversations. When the majority of the population consumes the same entertainment and news, it creates a sense of nationhood.
The worst sin of the ABC is, therefore, not that it is biased. It is that it has become so dull it is no longer worth tuning into. Chairman Kim Williams is focused on the need for objectivity, but emphasising journalistic dispassion is only part of the solution. With the exception of a small number of programs, most relegated to minor time slots and barely promoted, the ABC has become incurious.
Topics covered by the ABC’s flagship shows have been narrowing and perspectives on the remaining topics are predictable. Politicians deliver their talking points. A narrow range of experts delivers a narrow range of perspectives (somehow the ethnic and gender diversity emphasised by the ABC never seems to equate to a wider range of ideas). Advocates call for more government funding. The presenters sigh sympathetically. I sigh in frustration. The formula is tiresome. Australians, including this long-time loyal listener and viewer, switch off.
Predictability is not a failing unique to the ABC. A range of other media outlets specialise in serving their audiences a diaphanous sliver of current affairs, carefully selected to support existing prejudices. If you’ve ever seen a journalist’s byline and the title of an article and felt the thrill of anticipation for a take with which you know you’ll thoroughly agree, you’ve been paddling in the warm yellow waters of subscriber self-satisfaction. That’s the subscribers’ prerogative, should they choose to seek it out. It’s simply a commercial reality that many people only want to pay for media that tells them what they already believe.
No particular political tribe is more prone to this than another; indeed, it’s just another manifestation of the many ways in which the left-right political paradigm has become obsolete. Open-mindedness and close-mindedness are now better descriptors of behaviours and traits than conservative or progressive.
Leave subscribers to make their own choices; the ABC has no business contributing to the closing of the Australian mind. Its mission is not commercial but patriotic, as Kim Williams styled it. Australians have a “sense of ownership” over the broadcaster, as Laura Tingle said in introducing the chairman’s National Press Club address. Too right. We do actually own it, and we pay for its upkeep and operations. As such, it is the responsibility of the ABC to reject the narrowness into which a subscription model can stray.
There is reason to believe that opening the ABC’s ideas horizon would also reverse the audience decline. At the same time our national broadcaster is losing its audience, some international journalists and podcasters are gaining huge followings. They have, as they say, “one neat trick” in common.
One is the wildly popular Welsh-American journalist Jon Ronson, who came to Australia at the end of November. His show focused on his famous book The Psychopath Test, first published in 2011. Ronson spoke to full auditoriums about this piece of exceptional long-form journalism. He would no doubt also have filled halls if he’d been talking about his book Them: Adventures with Extremists, a fascinating exploration of conspiracy theories and theorists, first published in 2001.
Ronson’s trademark is an obsession with finding out about interesting things and asking open-ended questions – virtues once highly valued in journalists. He strikes a flint of curiosity in his audiences as he seeks to satisfy his own.
If Kim Williams were to become audience member “three-billion-and-one” of The Joe Rogan Experience – as he resolutely declared he would not do at the National Press Club – he would discover that curiosity is also Rogan’s model. Rogan, who enjoys the world’s biggest podcast audience, is widely trashed and dismissed by those who have never taken the three hours it requires to listen to a full episode. But Rogan interviews interesting and powerful figures, asking them for their thoughts on topics, then exploring the logical contradictions in a way that allows them to further elaborate on their thinking. If he has a fascination with conspiracy theories, he is no more dogmatic about them than Ronson was in Them.
The ABC does have one show that follows a similar model to Ronson and Rogan – Annabel Crabb’s Kitchen Cabinet. Crabb doesn’t seek to outsmart her subjects or to put words in their mouths. She has a knack for asking questions that encourage them to reveal themselves and – refreshingly for politicians – they do. The magic is not just objectivity but openness.
This is what the ABC needs more of. The ouroboros has an unfortunate habit of swallowing its own output. If Williams wants the broadcaster to regain audiences, he’s going to need to look for journalists who break the cycle. Perhaps those who, whether or not they personally agree with Joe Rogan and his guests, have listened to The Joe Rogan Experience. Just because they are curious.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.