Call for another ABC head to roll

Michael Duffy, presenter of ABC Radio National's Counterpoint and occasional journalist, has incurred the wrath of Ben Oquist, a Greens advisor who has written in Crikey :

The ABC must sack Michael Duffy. An employee attempting to bring its employer into disrepute would not be tolerated by any other boss – public or private.

While obviously taking thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money through his salary from the ABC, Mr Duffy continues to run down our national broadcaster through public utterances like those in The SMH on Saturday.

Here's some of what Duffy said:

My view is the ABC ought not to provide middle-class welfare - those services that, if it withdrew from the market, would continue to be provided by private companies supported by advertising.

Much metropolitan radio and much television falls into this category. Instead, the limited funds available should be devoted to areas where the free market arguably fails: regional radio, high-quality local drama and documentaries, and commercial-free news and current affairs and children's programs.

Alternatively, the ABC should consider running advertising in entertainment programs. As SBS has shown, much of the opposition to advertising is no more than dated fundamentalism. In a prosperous and technologically abundant society, commercials are an important source of information.

It can even be argued that businesses have the right to reach the educated middle class through broadcast media, which the ABC's near-monopoly largely denies them. Fairfax and The Australian certainly suffer from being unable to advertise on 702 ABC Sydney or Channel Two. (Incidentally, under the existing legislation the ABC could run paid commercials now on its very successful website and its podcasting.)

I disagree with much of this, especially the assumption that if the ABC withdrew from some program areas commercial stations would step in and continue to provide the programs (or "services") , but don't see why Duffy or anyone else, whether or not they work for the ABC, shouldn't raise the questions he has. He's correct to point out that the world of broadcasting is changing and that the ABC must change with it. Although it's anathema to the likes of Oquist and the hierarchy of the Friends of the ABC, paid advertising along SBS lines would IMO make very little difference. ABC TV already devotes a significant amount of time to promotion of its programs and some ancillary services eg ABC Shops. Aren't they really commercials?

Oquist also implies that Duffy is the beneficiary of political patronage:

Mr Duffy owes his job at Radio National to politics. Unlike everyone else at the ABC who had to win positions on merit, Mr Duffy had a whole program invented by an ABC management desperate to pander to the Howard Government.

And nobody else at the ABC owes their job to politics? And everyone else there has won their positions on merit? Do pigs fly?

As for Counterpoint, when it began I thought that it might be a thinly camouflaged forum for neo-cons and others of similar disposition. While such persons are more likely to be given a platform here than on for example Late Night Live there are refreshing exceptions. This week's program featured a journalist from the UK Guardian (hardly an organ of the right) discussing his concept of Unspeak which he defines as "a mode of speech that persuades by stealth eg climate change, ethnic cleansing". Even Mr Oquist might learn something from this.