Your ABC's complaints process might surprise you

The ABC, with its multi-platform presence across television and radio stations and the internet, is our nation’s most prominent source of news and current affairs. Being taxpayer-funded, it has a code of practice which prescribes required standards of journalistic professionalism, under self-explanatory headings such as "accuracy" and "impartiality".

Anyone who feels the ABC has breached its code may formally complain. However, they may be surprised to find who decides if the ABC has met its standards. The ABC does.

Its Audience and Consumer Affairs unit, or A&CA, is responsible for assessing complaints. While it is a separate unit, it is still very much part of the ABC.

In findings we have received dismissing our complaints, A&CA has simply cited the response from the content producer. It seems at times that if the ABC employee responsible for the report is happy with their work, so is A&CA.

In fact, A&CA rejects almost all complaints. Of 6057 complaints in 2019-20, it upheld, in whole or part, only 6 per cent of those it investigated. A case in point was the May 27 Q&A episode that in part covered the recent Israel-Hamas conflict. Its panel included pro-Palestinian activist Randa Abdel-Fattah and lawyer Jennifer Robinson, who has represented Palestinians at the International Criminal Court, but no equivalent advocate for Israel. According to the program, that perspective was to be given by federal government MP Dave Sharma, a former Australian ambassador to Israel. However, Sharma was there to discuss political matters, and was balanced by ALP MP Ed Husic, who also called for recognition of a Palestinian state.

Yet A&CA dismissed complaints that this imbalance blatantly breached the code requirement that the ABC not "unduly favour one perspective over another", stating Israel’s acting ambassador was invited to "participate". (He was invited merely to sit in the audience and maybe ask a question.) It insisted Sharma provided the necessary balance.

In 2015, the Radio National program Earshot featured two unrelentingly one-sided, anti-Israel documentaries, produced and narrated by an ABC producer who, as the program subsequently admitted on its website, was also an activist in anti-Israel movements. A&CA dismissed complaints about demonstrably false claims by saying they were, for example, "opinion rather than a statement of fact capable of independent verification", and "as such, it cannot be tested against the ABC’s accuracy standard". Furthermore, dismissing complaints about bias, A&CA made the Orwellian finding that the belated acknowledgement of the producer’s activism on the website and audio program contributed "to the overall impartiality of the program".

The ABC code of practice is, by necessity, open to interpretation, but A&CA sometimes takes "interpretation" to extremes. For example, the code requires a diversity of perspectives be presented "over time". Other A&CA responses we have received — such as that to the mentioned Earshot case — rather than defending the program in question, have simply cited other programs that have included an alternative view. This suggests a program can exclusively present one side of an argument as long as, somewhere on the ABC at some time, part of the opposite argument also gets air time.

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