In a recent article in the Australian, ex ABC Board member Judith Sloan asks provocatively: "So what is the point of the ABC? Should taxpayers be funding the ABC to compete against private providers who both want to and can do everything that the ABC can do?"
It is such a cheap shot and Ms Sloan really should know better. Judith Sloan is currently a professorial fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne. She was deputy chairwoman of the ABC from 1999 to 2005.
So Ms Sloan has trotted out the old bromide about ABC vs the commercial media and how terrible it is that taxpayers have to pay for our public media service. Let's tease out the argument about who pays for a little. We know who pays for the ABC, but . . .
Who pays for the commercial media? Advertisers do silly! Oh Really?
Actually it's we consumers. It's commercial media not FREE media. Advertisers take 2-8% of their total turnover and spend it on advertising i.e. buying time to flog their products on TV, radio, billboards and the press. From every dollar you spend buying anything, a few cents of it is actually going to prop up hundreds of media companies.
I have no problem with that - I operate a small media company. But it is hypocrisy to pretend that commercial media is cost free to the taxpayer and the ABC is not. One is paid for by us through government taxation. The other is paid for by us with commercial taxation - i.e. extra money added to every product we buy.
So how does it work?
Say a bank spends a modest 475 million on promotion in a year (which Bank?). Where does that money come from? From bank profits! Yes. And where do profits come from? From us in fees and stuff. If an electrical retailer has heaps of ads on tellie, guess who actually pay for that air-time. It's you!
When you are buying stuff a few percent is tacked on for the advertising budget. It’s simple. It’s probably fair. But it is not visible like the ABC’s budget.
The ABC is paid for by us. Yes. And so are channels Ten, Nine, Seven and SBS. And all the radio stations. And all the newspapers and magazines. As are the production companies who pump out the pap we watch. The commercial journalists are all effectively on our personal payrolls.
We pay for all the media, not just the ABC. FREE media does not exist.
So you pay your money and take your chances. When people who never watch the ABC complain that their tax dollars are buying something they never use, I say that exactly the same thing happens when I buy products that prop up stupid commercial programs that I never watch but other people seem to really like. Fair is fair.
Media diversity is what it is about.
I have lived in America where commercial media is clambering over itself in a race to the bottom in tasteless programming. Where the public media (PBS and NPR) spends half its time begging for money to keep their doors open because there is no taxpayer funded media in the Land of the Free. If you have lived in that American media wasteland, you would be glad that we have such a good choice of media here in Australia.
The ABC delivers great local programming when compared to the commercial media and at a fraction of the true total cost of the FREE to air media.
It is just silly to ask how Mr Packer, Mr Murdock and the Fairfax family have got so rich giving away all those movies and free news services to us, the ever grateful masses. They don't give you stuff for free. They got rich precisely because it is not free.
How can advertising agencies pay huge salaries? How can a TV commercial cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to make? Because of the pot of gold you and I provide to businesses through commercial taxation that is directed to advertising and marketing budgets.
Just add all the profits of the media companies, the advertising companies, the research companies and see what the free nightly news on the commercials really costs you.
Who pays - we pay. And as long we all get value, that's fine.
Just lay off the ABC with silly arguments about who pays for it. Who pays for all the media - we all pay. We all pay. On every day and in every way - we pay. Say it over and over till you get it Ms Sloan.