Who will replace Ita at the ABC? You’re asking the wrong question

The ABC is controlled by its charter and the ABC Act, which sets out its purpose, its responsibilities and its duties. The chair and the rest of the board are obliged by law to follow that charter, maintain good governance, and ensure the organisation does what it is charged to do. All the rest – the day-to-day management, the programming decisions, the strategy, are driven by management, which is the way it is meant to be. Any prime minister who thinks he or she can control the ABC by choosing a mate as its chair is a fool.

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The second reason is that the Albanese government came to power promising to be different. In a climate where pork-barrelling, corruption and jobs for the boys have become more and more overt and more and more offensive to the Australian people, Labor has promised to be different, and to enforce a higher level of integrity in public life. Well, the appointment of a new ABC chair is one of the first big tests of that promise.

Australians are watching. Will the independent nomination panel’s work be respected or swept aside? If ever there was a time for the politicians to back off and let a merit selection take place, now is that time.

But there is a third reason more important than either of the other two. It’s connected with a more significant announced departure from the ABC than that of Ita Buttrose. Stan Grant has also left the ABC, but in doing so he made a profound point about the general state of the news media.

In 2023, you can’t talk about the problems of the world without talking about polarisation, disinformation and conflict. The media, far from being seen as a solution to those problems, is generally recognised as being part of them.

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For the ABC, as much as for any media organisation, the immediate challenge is to find a way of replacing conflict with communication, polarisation with nuance and depth, disinformation with context and analysis.

The big question facing the ABC, then, is not who will replace Ita Buttrose as ABC chair. It is how the whole organisation will rise to the challenge of creating a media that serves the public by solving more problems than it creates, by delivering information that empowers people to understand rather than encouraging them to argue.

If the catalyst for Grant’s departure is the state of Q&A and the quality of public debate it generates, the problem is a wider one than that. The discussion about the Voice across all media outlets is a perfect example. The focus of too much reporting has been on the opinions of those at the extremes of debate, who seem keen to dissemble, confuse, hector and misrepresent but who make for good copy and good headlines. A calm and considered discussion of the actual issues and the specifics of what is being proposed have been much harder to find. That needs to change, not just for the Voice but for many other significant policy challenges such as housing, population and immigration.

The responsibility for that will fall to the journalists, the program makers, the rest of the staff and the management of the ABC. The best a good chair can do is support and champion that and hold management to account on the journey. So, for a change, how about we pick one purely on merit, trusting the independent process established for precisely that purpose?

Alan Sunderland is a former editorial director of the ABC.