Calls to privatise the ABC have become louder in recent months, with Liberal Party members voting to privatise the national broadcaster at the party's annual federal council, though the Coalition Government's policy remains to keep the ABC in public hands.
Professor Davidson's claim is flimsy. In making the claim, Professor Davidson referred to a study published in 2013 which surveyed 605 journalists from a variety of organisations on their voting intentions. Fifty-nine of these journalists were from the ABC, and only 34 of them answered the question on voting intention, with 25 either undecided or electing not to answer. Of the 34 who did answer, 41.2 per cent, or 14, said they would vote for the Greens. But experts told Fact Check that the ABC sub-sample was too small and the rate of undecided and non-response too high to be able to draw accurate conclusions from the survey on ABC journalist voting intention, let alone voting intention of all ABC employees. Upon releasing the findings in 2013, the author of the study himself, Folker Hanusch, inserted numerous caveats about using sub-samples of the survey, including that the margins of error would be larger than those for the total sample. Professor Davidson neglected to include any of these important caveats in making his claim. Experts contacted by Fact Check, including Professor Hanusch, also took issue with comparing the results of the survey with larger, more stable studies of the voting intention of the general population, such as Newspoll. Whilst the survey found that Australian journalists in general tend to skew left, it showed no evidence that ABC journalists were five times more likely to vote for the Greens than the general public, and experts contacted by Fact Check said they did not know of any other recent studies which canvass the voting intentions of ABC journalists. University of New South Wales statistician Jake Olivier compared the survey results with those of Newspoll over the same survey period, and found ABC journalists were 2.4 times more likely to vote for the Greens. But he cautioned that the sample size of ABC journalists was too small to make strong conclusions about this result. Fact Check could find no research on the voting intentions of all ABC employees including those outside of the news division.
Fact check: Are ABC employees or journalists five times more likely to vote for the Greens than the general population?
['American_Broadcasting_Company', 'Coalition_government']