Media Literacy and Behind the News

  • show transcript
Thursday 8 January 2004 8:30AM (view full episode)

The decision by ABC management last year to axe the long-running children's program 'Behind the News' was met with an angry response from students, teachers and parents.

At a time when educators argue that media literacy is of fundamental importance, the winding up of BTN was viewed by many as a disaster.


Mick O'Regan: Hello and welcome to the program.

Back in August of last year the ABC made a difficult decision.

It decided to axe it's third longest running program- called Behind the News, an educational show aimed at students in upper primary school classes.

The decision was made in the wake of the Federal Government's decision not to meet the broadcaster's request for additional funding.

Instead the Government has maintained the funding in real terms.

But that wasn't enough to maintain the existing schedule, and according to ABC management something had to go. So Behind the News ended up behind the eight ball.

The controversy around the decision has been echoing across the airwaves ever since.

Man: At this school to our mind, media literacy is the critical literacy that kids need for this century, in that most of them, and we know when we look at people's reading habits and their viewing habits, most people when they leave school, they'll view much more than they'll read, and reading has declined as a pastime, and for most people their impressions of the world, their understanding of what's going on in the world, will come to them through various media.


Presenter: In the news this week, 'Believe it or Not, French Fries'.

And the cutest little seahorse.

Also on the program today we go to a place we don't get to visit much, the Antarctic, to meet some curious penguins. So look forward to that.

Welcome to Behind the News; I'm Krista Eleftheriou.

Woman: The Behind the News program that the ABC has produced over 30 years is the only news program that this country has for children. Many European countries have a half an hour news time for children that has the news presented in a way that is appropriate for children to understand, they have a sense of context of that news, and it's put in a way that doesn't scare the living daylights out of them. BTN is the only program that does that in Australia, and now we're wiping it out.

Boy: I just want to say they shouldn't get rid of BTN because we used to watch the news in our class, but no-one really got it. And we watched BTN, and we did a lot of work based on it, and it makes it a lot easier with BTN.

Woman: Look I'm head teacher of the unit in a mainstream school, a special ed. unit for kids with intellectual disability, and the kids in my unit can't access the newspaper, because they don't read very well, and so for them it's the only way they can access current affairs.

Woman: They've been able to process, with a teacher, issues that I don't think otherwise they may well have been able to process. For instance, they have done things on the UN and background to the war in Iraq, and I think to be able to at age 10 and 11 to process and understand with an adult, contemporary issues such as that, it's absolutely crucial.

Alan Parker: Whether it's September 11, whether it's the Solomon Islands problem right now, the al Qa'eda situation, all of these things, Bali, kids get snippets of this sometimes as they go past the news at night time, and they react one way or another, they either find it too traumatic or else they're not interested at all. But at least BTN looks at the issue, doesn't try to hide the true story, but presents it in a way so that the children understand it, step by step.

Mick O'Regan: Teachers discussing media literacy among children, and some of the voices raised in protest at the decision to wind up BTN, Behind the News; the last voice being that of Alan Parker, the Deputy Head of the Junior School at St John's in Adelaide. As a classroom teacher, Alan Parker is especially keen on the capacity of Behind the News to stimulate both individual understanding and classroom discussion. The announcement that production of the program would end has left him confused.

Alan Parker: I couldn't believe that a program that's been going for over 30 years, targeted specifically for children, with a non-biased format, is going to be axed. I mean surely, this is one of the few programs of incredible value to kids. We've already informed the students at our school today that it's going to be terminated, and they are, they're genuinely distressed about it, they're upset because it was the sort of show where they could sit there, see a variety of segments presented to them at their level.

Mick O'Regan: And as a teacher, how do you use that program? How is it useful, say, to stimulate discussion that might lead on to other areas of the curriculum?

Alan Parker: Well one of the most important areas of the curriculum of course is society and environment, or Social Studies I suppose it used to be called, and I think when children see BTN, it's like getting a third opinion, they can hear what a teacher has to say about an issue, they can get their parents' view, they can get the view from the particular channel they were watching. But most kids associate BTN with being a very honest presentation of what the story's really about, and it sort of confirms in their mind the opinions given to them that day in the classroom.

Mick O'Regan: Could you take me through how a typical lesson that integrated the content of Behind the News might work? Do you have examples of where you were able to take the program, and if you like in the popular jargon, 'unpack' a particular idea or issue?

Alan Parker: Well I could give you an issue right now. My Year 6 students are doing a unit of work on the Pacific Islands. They're doing research into the islands, they're making model Pacific Islands, so linking it with hands-on type technology. But a couple of kids found some old travel brochures with Honiara on it, and wanted to know why there are no tours there, and aircraft going there very much with tourists any more. So when we linked that with the problems of the Solomons and of course what's happening over there, and the task force we've sent there, and why, and the kids can see it optimistically when the country returns to normal in a few years' time, that maybe again it will return on the Pacific tourist route, if you like. So there's just one small example of how the two link together. It's got a wide audience. One-and-a-half-million children a week watch it. So to me, again I just cannot understand why those who are in charge decided to axe this program.

Mick O'Regan: Well just on that, what are your views on the priorities that have led to the axing of this particular program? What do you think it says about ABC management?

Alan Parker: Well I think they've got to get back to see what their service is for. They have to provide a service to the Australian public in many areas, and for goodness' sake, surely the children of Australia have to be one of their priorities. I understand that budget cuts are necessary in any organisation, but surely someone has to do a rational inquiry into which programs are the most valued. Look, over the years, the ABC has continually axed educational programs; this is one that's just got to stay, and we as a school for a start, will be organising letters and so forth to the head of the ABC, because we won't rest until we feel we've done our bit to try and get it restored.

Mick O'Regan: Alan Parker, who's the Deputy Head at St John's School in Adelaide.

Defending the government's position on the issue of ABC funding, the Communications Minister, Senator Richard Alston, has put pressure back on the ABC to justify why it chose to axe Behind the News, as opposed to what the Minister called 'frothy', lifestyle shows. Senator Alston also didn't rule out additions to funding coming from people who simply wanted to support the ABC. The Senator outlined his ideas when he was interviewed by Steve Austin, from ABC local radio in Brisbane.

Steve Austin: In the 1970s, the then Whitlam Labor government scrapped television licences, and the ABC's had difficulty maintaining funding with whatever government was in power at the time. Why don't you seriously consider bringing it back?

Richard Alston: I think the objection to licence fees is that, let's just assume that the ABC has a 20% audience and the bulk of that comes from one particular part of the demographic. I mean I'm being blunt in the analysis, but if you know what I mean, let's say they're middle-class viewers, right? That means that if everyone's paying a licence fee, because everyone's got a television set, it means lower-income people are actually subsidising or cross-subsidising middle-income people. Now that was not seen to be a reasonable arrangement, and I think that's why in the UK there are still calls to scrap the licence fee, even though over there, the BBC probably has about half the viewing audience.

Steve Austin: Why don't you then, seriously consider having the television part of ABC a subscription service, and get around that problem of licence fees that you just stated?

Richard Alston: There's actually nothing to stop people being subscribers to the ABC now. I read something the other day about this. You know how the public broadcasting system in the US is subscription funded. Now there's no reason why the ABC couldn't say to people who wanted to, 'Why don't you give us some money each year?' The only objection I saw was that we might suddenly withdraw our level of funding. Well that's not the case, I mean we've just guaranteed the triennial funding of $760-million a year for the next three years, so you could have a subscription on that basis generally. You're targeted on television, I'm not sure why you would simply target television.

Steve Austin: Because I assume it's easier to send it down an optical fibre or cable rather than it is for broadcasting on radio.

Richard Alston: Oh, you mean Pay-TV?

Steve Austin: Yes, actually make people ...

Richard Alston: Sorry, I was thinking of where you become a member of the club sort of thing.

Steve Austin: Well either/or. So let me get this right: So if the ABC was to start touting for cash on its network to Australians, the Federal government wouldn't reduce your funding, your current level of funding, by one cent?

Richard Alston: Well I don't see any reason to do that, no. As I say we've just guaranteed them funding for three years, so they wouldn't be at risk during this term of parliament, would they.

Steve Austin: Three years in broadcasting terms is nothing though, because they plan nearly 15 years ahead.

Richard Alston: Oh sure, sure.

Steve Austin: I mean are you being serious?

Richard Alston: It was an idea I read about the other day, it seems to me to be worth exploring. I mean I haven't considered that in depth, it obviously hasn't been to Cabinet and places, but in principle, it seems to me that if the ABC has people who want to give it money, then there's no reason why it shouldn't take that money, and that shouldn't interfere with the level of parliamentary or government funding.

Mick O'Regan: The Federal Communications Minister, Senator Richard Alston, speaking to Steve Austin, on ABC local radio 612 in Brisbane.

Well someone who's studied the issue of ABC funding in detail and also the community attitudes to that funding, is Glenn Withers, Professor of Public Policy at the Australian National University in Canberra.

According to Professor Withers, the government's position that it has maintained ABC funding, doesn't address a key problem.

Glenn Withers: Organisations like the ABC which are very labour-intensive, actually have cost the rise much faster than the normal Consumer Price Index, so maintaining in real terms by that standard is inevitably posing an ongoing squeeze to a highly labour-intensive organisation with rising salary costs above the CPI. So the decision to maintain real is a decision to squeeze.

Mick O'Regan: Now when it comes to costs, from the studies that you've undertaken, how does the ABC compare with the commercial free-to-air broadcasters?

Glenn Withers: Well it's actually very efficient. People think that's a strange finding, but indeed, the ABC for instance spends about $140,000 per employee, whereas commercial television spends about $313,000 per employee. The cost of the ABC network is less than half that of the average commercial network. What people don't realise is how much those commercial networks have to spend on gathering, running, maintaining, operating their marketing and advertising and commercial operations on top of regular programming. All that process of advertising is an incredibly expensive process. The ABC saves that and gets programs to air at half the price of commercial television.

Mick O'Regan: Now when you undertook to look at the funding of a public broadcaster like the ABC, what were you specifically setting out to establish?

Glenn Withers: I was wanting to look at how the ABC compared indeed with other countries. I was interested not just in how they compared to commercial, because that's a bit of an apples versus oranges question, to some extent. So what I also wanted to look at was how the ABC compared with like organisations such as the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, European equivalents and so on, so we could benchmark the operations of the ABC, particularly when this was back in the times of Jonathan Shier, who was supposed to get the ABC all managerially efficient, and I wanted to see how much slack there was that Shier could squeeze out of the ABC. And what I found indeed again, was that the ABC was actually very cheap compared to its international counterparts. It receives much less funding per viewer, and per listener for instance, than organisations like the BBC and the CBC.

Mick O'Regan: Now if we look at the capacity, or rather the willingness of people to pay for the ABC, I want to ask you about whether you canvassed that in your study, and what you found. And I'm particularly thinking here about the sort of criticisms that have been levelled against the ABC, often by conservative commentators, saying that it's sort of a form of middle-class welfare, that only a small section of the audience watches the ABC and yet everyone must pay for the ABC through their taxation contributions. Is it a form of middle-class welfare, from your study?

Glenn Withers: Certainly the higher the level of education, the more the average Australian, as it were, listens to the ABC, that is the more educated groups do listen more. But what's also interesting is that study after study, including mine, seems to show that most Australians get something out of the ABC, some time during each week or month. There's something there for everybody, and in particular there's a lot there for people who don't fit that middle-class chardonnay belt image, particularly in rural and regional Australia, who are very heavily dependent upon the ABC for a lot of their news, information and entertainment.

Mick O'Regan: Professor Withers, if we look at the research you've done and try to ascertain where the public would actively like to see money invested in public institutions, what does that reveal about public broadcasting?

Glenn Withers: Well the actual answer's given by a big random sample of the population, were a very large preferred increase in spending for the ABC; the mean or average increase that was requested was about 46%. That was way ahead of areas like police, 34%, or the age pension, 20%, and people also had to nominate where they'd seek cuts, and they were suggesting cuts in areas like industry assistance, 13%, and social welfare, 10%, and relevant of a chardonnay image of the supporters of the ABC, they wanted arts cut by 8%, so they were actually singling out the ABC for support, even though they wanted the arts in general trimmed back, and sports by the way, too, a 2% or 3% cut there was recommended on average.

Mick O'Regan: So how would you compare the relative trends, if you like, between how the Federal government's thinking is developing about funding the ABC, and what your study would suggest about how the public feels about the funding of the ABC?

Glenn Withers: Well the fact is that the government, or at least those within the Cabinet who are taking the running on this, Mr Alston, the Prime Minister I guess, primarily, they're way out of touch with the public view on this. They can get away with it because people are not going to basically switch their votes because of the ABC, compared to big budget items like health, or education, or world peace and issues of the Middle East and the like, but when you get down to unpacking what people feel about different components of the budget, it's actually interesting that the ABC is one of the top areas that has come up over the last five years or so, as the public in general wanting more spent on it, that five to ten years ago this wasn't the case.

I think people feel that the squeeze on the ABC's gone far enough, and it's a big majority in favour of this, and if they have to pick out one or two or three areas, along with health and education, that they'd like to see some improvement in spending, sometimes even at the expense of a tax increase, but within a reshuffle of the Budget, they actually nominate the ABC to what many of us might think is a surprising amount. That is, I think Mr Alston and Mr Howard are a bit out of touch on public opinion here, or simply don't care; that is, they're more interested in the minor political games they want to play with the ABC, in the believe that overall people are not going to change their votes on that. But it's reaching a point where it may actually start influencing some votes.

Mick O'Regan: Professor Withers, the other area that I find interesting in this, concerns this notion of the discretion that the ABC management has in spending its Budget. So the basic scenario is this, that the government provides three yearly funding for the ABC, and then the ABC Board determines the priorities. Now Senator Alston has implicitly made the point that by taking away popular information programs, the ABC is making deliberate management choices, and those choices are having implications for the community. Do you think that part of that analysis includes the notion of tied funding, and could you elaborate on how tied funding would be different to the sort of funding the ABC currently gets?

Glenn Withers: Yes. At the moment, the ABC is given a total budget that it determines the directions in which that spending occurs. Now it does that with the approval, of course, and agreement and direction of a Board that's largely appointed by the government, and it has chosen to do so in the directions indicated recently, cutting back in some areas, like children's programming and information programming. What you could do is tighten the Charter. To go much further than that, however, to tying it to specific programs, you're starting to make the government a bit like a TV Commissioner. It's going to say that it wants five programs of this kind, ten programs of that kind; it's then in the business of running the programs itself, and it may as well forget about an arm's length statutory authority.

However, to give some sense of priorities within the legislation to broad areas such as children, news, information and current affairs without any detailed interference in the content of those, would seem reasonable. And to some extent the ABC, including perhaps its Board, has been a little silly at the moment; I think it's offering up areas to embarrass the government that really it should maintain its core programming commitment, such as children's programming.

Mick O'Regan: Now I realise Professor that your area is economics, but if I can ask you to press on into the political realm if you like, I wanted to follow up that. Do you think that what we're seeing here is a decision by the ABC to really focus the community's attention on this funding debate by actually deciding to cut those programs which the public are most likely to complain about? Because Senator Alston has actually said he wants to know why other programs, what he described as 'frothy' lifestyle and entertainment and comedy programming, might not have been cut back to preserve programs like Behind the News.

Glenn Withers: There's a possibility. I have no inside knowledge of what the actual decision motivation was for the ABC. But in public policy there's a thing called the Washington Monument Gambit: whenever the Department of the Interior in the US was threatened with cuts, it always closed the Washington Monument as the first way of getting cuts, which outraged Americans because it was so unpatriotic. The result was the cuts were always removed. I think the ABC could be playing that game. So you've got one political game, the ABC, and you've got another political game at the government end. It's time they actually both got together, got serious and gave the public what it wants.

Mick O'Regan: Professor Glenn Withers, from the Australian National University in Canberra.


Mick O'Regan: Naturally I was keen to ask either the Chairman of the ABC, Donald McDonald, or the Managing Director, Russell Balding, about the decision-making process that led to the cutting of new programming in the area of schools production.

Unfortunately, neither were available for interview. So I directed my questions to a former Chairman of the ABC, Mark Armstrong, who's currently the Director of the Network Insight Institute.

Mick O'Regan: Mark Armstrong, to take up Senator Richard Alston's point: he's basically said, 'Look, the ABC gets funding on a triennial basis from the government, then the ABC makes its priorities and decides what it cuts.' In cutting Behind the News, has the ABC played for maximum public outcry?

Mark Armstrong: I can't comment on that specific instance, but I can say I was much relieved to see that the ABC was no longer concealing the pain, just by reducing quality across the board, and by facing up to the inevitable consequences of the government cutting the money. I'm bemused by some of the people who are commenting about this and that, Behind the News, training programs etc. being cut, that they can see the government has cut the ABC's funding and yet they object to the ABC reducing its expenditure. To me, it just doesn't compute.

Mick O'Regan: But just to keep you on this question that Richard Alston raises. He's basically suggested that he wants to know why the ABC gives comedy and entertainment by retaining certain programs, a higher priority than an education program like Behind the News. Now to move away from the specifics, is what we've got here the Minister correctly telling the general public that it's the ABC's priorities that have led to this cut, not necessarily the funding?

Mark Armstrong: Well look, I don't want to get into a detailed argument with Richard Alston, except to say I don't think it's for the government and the Minister to be making a lot of detailed comments about ABC programming. That's a trend that's been increasing. But look on the general point, I'd really like to know which are the areas of programs that nobody cares about, which are the unimportant programs. Can I give you an example, these things get very heated when we're talking about current issues. But when I was Chair, mostly under Hawke and Keating and then under the Howard government, we received a lot of hostility for giving a priority to expanding the Triple-J network.

There was enormous demand for Triple-J, every bit of analysis showed that people in that teenage to 20 sort of age group, were being seriously neglected despite social problems, and yet there were howls of unhappiness when we fulfilled what we thought was our social responsibility. You always get that. Every member of the community's got different priorities about what they'd like to receive out of the ABC. I confess that like many other former directors of the ABC, I sometimes was party to making across-the-board cuts, which is the least responsible thing for the ABC to do, because the public are deprived of the opportunity, if I can put it that way, to understand what's happening.

You just lower the service, the quality of service, and people don't really understand that the quality of service is being lowered. I think there's an obligation for the ABC to reflect cuts made to its budget in cuts made to the programs. What else do you do? I mean, it costs money to make them.

Mick O'Regan: So in effect it's passing the pain down.

Mark Armstrong: Well can anybody suggest there's another choice? All that the various comments have done is to suggest something they liked less should have been cut. It doesn't get you anywhere. Somebody, some group of people, and senior management and the Board are the right group of people, have to decide where to cut that many million dollars.

Mick O'Regan: Mark Armstrong, just as a final point, I have in front of me the announcement to staff, the message that came from the Managing Director of the ABC, Russell Balding, to staff earlier this week, and he makes five points. He says in looking at the budget strategy that management undertook they tried to minimise the impact of staff and on audience, maximise the achievements of the ABC's Charter obligations, balance long-term strategic priorities and its current three-year funding, and also balance the ABC's recurrent activity levels with sources of funding. Now in a nutshell, these decisions to cut programs I gather from that, that it's a real balancing act; can you give listeners an idea of what happens in a Board Room discussion when a proposal is mooted, to axe a particular program?

Mark Armstrong: What you just read me, in abstract terms, that's actually exactly the process that you go through. It's a matter of looking at what's the least worst cut to make. I have to add something here. This is against the disgraceful situation where politicians are saying, and the occasional editorial, 'the ABC has too much fat and it should cut from its administration'. Now that is one point which makes my blood boil. It's obscene to think that politicians, with extravagant superannuation schemes and perks, have got the ignorance and effrontery year after year to say that the ABC has too much fat and it should be cut.

The ABC has been cutting fat for ten years, and that goes back to when I arrived, and I'm pretty sure it's been cutting fat since long before that, how much fat can you cut off any organism before it dies altogether? I think any politician, I'm not talking about Richard Alston, I don't think he's been running this 'too much fat' line; any politician who's got the effrontery before the Australian public to make this outrageous suggestion, ought to have his or her own finances very carefully scrutinised, given the amount of public money that is spent on politicians.

Mick O'Regan: Mark Armstrong thanks for taking the time to speak to The Media Report.

Mark Armstrong: Nice talking to you.

Mick O'Regan: Mark Armstrong, former Chairman of the ABC and currently Director of the Network Insight Institute.

And that's the program for this week.

Thanks to Producer Andrew Davies and Technical Producer Jim Ussher.

If you'd like to contact the program send an email to

I'm Mick O'Regan and I look forward to your company next week. On the Media Report.


Alan Parker
Deputy Head, Junior School, St John's Grammar School, Adelaide.
Glenn Withers
Professor of Public Policy, Australian National University.
Mark Armstrong
Director of the Network Insight Institute


Mick O'Regan
Andrew Davies