Broadcasting for blokes
It’s hard to justify a publicly funded broadcaster that appeals predominantly to old, male lefties. By Nick Cater.
The important thing to note about this year’s budget was that it was less blokey than the last one. That was the grudging verdict of the ABC’s feminist commentators who view the world in all its glorious complexity through a narrow sexist filter.
Annabel Crabb revealed the hidden misogyny in Josh Frydenberg’s 2020 budget in an opinion article on ABC online headlined: “Can a Budget shaped by male leaders hope to deliver for the women hit hardest by this recession?” Few will be surprised to learn that the answer to this question was no.
The allocation of $10bn for transport infrastructure was one of many examples of blatant male privilege, according to Crabb. “Sure, women like driving on roads,” she wrote, “but they’re not going to be the ones building them.”
The lazy billion or so allocated to the ABC was exempt from the gender bias test, which was just as well, for if we are to insist that 51 cents of every taxpayer dollar should be spent for the benefit of 51 per cent of the population, the national broadcaster would be found wanting.
A poll commissioned by the Menzies Research Centre last week revealed that ABC viewers and listeners are predominantly male. Fewer than half of the 526 women questioned (49 per cent) had listened to ABC Radio in the previous week and less than a third (31 per cent) had tuned in to listen to the news. By contrast, 65 per cent of men had listened and 41 per cent had listened to the news. Another 6 per cent of men had tuned in for sport compared with just 1 per cent of women.
Source: True North Strategy
Source: True North Strategy
The ABC’s television audience is equally skewed. Only 56 per cent of women had watched it in the previous week compared with 67 per cent of men, which means that the average show is watched by 11 men for every nine women. Blokey? You would have to say so, but then perhaps women are more discerning. When asked which news service they most trusted, 19 per cent of women named Channel 7, 14 per cent Channel 9 and 17 per cent ABC-TV. For men, ABC TV News came top at 19 per cent. ABC Radio News scored 3 per cent for both men and women.
Source: True North Strategy
Source: True North Strategy
Source: True North Strategy
Source: True North Strategy
*Only selected news outlets appear in this graph. To view results for all news outlets click here.
The ABC may choose to quibble with this poll, as it generally does with independent surveys that fail to paint the institution in a favourable light. Yet the verdict of 1016 Australians in the True North Strategy survey is difficult to brush off, particularly when it is a representative sample balanced for gender, age, political persuasion and state, chosen by a leading global consumer panel provider whose reputation depends on the integrity of the data.
If the ABC were serving all Australians, standing patriotically in the centre of public life, one would expect its audience would conform to the same representative conformity. We might expect that 46 per cent, or thereabouts, of those who listen to, watch or read ABC news might vote for the Coalition, 36 per cent for Labor, and 12 per cent for the Greens, the voting split at the last federal election.
Yet Labor and Greens voters account for 57 per cent of the ABC’s audience while the Liberals and Nationals account for 42 per cent. If the result in 2019 were up to them, Bill Shorten would have won in a landslide.
What is the justification for a publicly funded broadcaster that appeals predominantly to old, male lefties, for, to put it brutally, that is the profile of the average ABC consumer. The median age in Australia is 37, while the median age for the ABC audience is 48. Only 21 per cent of those aged 18-34 said they had engaged with ABC news on any platform for longer than 10 minutes in the previous seven days compared with 54 per cent of those aged 55 or more.
The novelist Joseph Conrad observed that a man’s character should be judged by his foes as well as his friends. If so, the demographic profile of the ABC’s audience is a useful measure of its performance and should arguably be a prime metric against which it should be judged.
A more detailed analysis is called for. What proportion of the audience has a university degree and what is the average income? Would 30 per cent of them identify with no religion, as they did in the most recent Census, or might there possibly be more? Is the audience concentrated in inner metropolitan suburbs with a smattering out in the bush?
The answers to these questions will allow us to assess the ABC’s claim to be a true national broadcaster and whether its commitment to the fashionable virtues of diversity and inclusivity represent anything more than mere words.
The ABC’s management and board recognise the challenge of staying connected with a broad, national audience. Presumably, they are aware of the distorted customer profile, even if they prefer that it not be published. The ABC has repeatedly refused to provide audience data in response to Freedom of Information requests using the dubious excuse that they are related to program material and therefore exempt.
Managing director David Anderson highlighted the ABC’s commitment to “reflecting the spectrum of views across the country … to better represent and reflect the diversity of contemporary life” in the ABC’s last annual report. Judging by the variation in the size of audiences in each state, he has his work cut out.
The proportion of the population who had watched in the previous week ranged from 68 per cent in Tasmania and Western Australia to just 51 per cent in South Australia. Only 12 per cent of Victorians nominated ABC-TV as their most trusted news source.
A strong customer base may not be the imperative for the ABC that it is in the private sector, but there is no room for complacency. The ubiquity of digital media has eroded the justification for public broadcasting. The narrowing of the ABC’s audience erodes it further.
About True North Strategy
At True North Strategy we specialise in independent and non-partisan real-time polling, to enable organisations to have a finger on the pulse of public opinion. Due to our highly qualified analysts, use of propriety cutting edge technology and our strong partnerships with leading panel companies, we are able to provide the fastest turnaround of high quality and accurate public opinion polling in Australia.
Our Methodology
Our PhD qualified data scientist apply cutting-edge data analytics and propriety technology to ensure reliable and high-quality results. Recognising the world is rarely “black and white,” we often use proprietary intuitive sliding, rating and ranking scales to reveal greater sensitivity around issues. As our insights are often published in mainstream media, we go to great efforts to translate complex analyses into assimilable insights for a broad audience.
Accuracy of our Results
Our results gauge public opinion with an at most 2.5% margin of error. This is based on margin of confidence calculations for a sample of 1000 drawn by probability methods. Furthermore, the sequence of questions and multiple-choice answers are randomised to avoid primacy effects. We avoid priming and framing participants as well as asking leading questions.
Sampling
We collaborate with an industry leading professional consumer panel provider for our polls, who work with over 700 brands, publishers, and research groups worldwide. Our samples are representative of the Australian population. Constant quality control ensures that our samples accurately match distributions of age, gender, location, income and political orientation, as measured by the Census collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.