ABC chair Ita Buttrose has been a stalwart defender of ABC independence, so it’s hard to fathom why she and her directors plan to create a complaints system with an Ombudsman who answers direct to the Board, not to the Managing Director. This structure, if it goes ahead, would be unique among comparable media organisations in the democratic world, and is not without potential perils.

In a wide-ranging speech in Sydney today, respected former ABC broadcaster Kerry O’Brien has spoken of his despair at the lack of political leadership in Australia. “I have never seen Australian politics so rudderless,” he told a capacity crowd at a major election campaign rally organised by ABC Friends in conjunction with ABC Alumni. “Our parliament is failing us. Political leadership is in drought. Our public broadcaster is under sustained attack. And our democracy is in trouble.” Kerry’s message is simple: in these complex and challenging times, the ABC has never been more important – and so is this election. Our vote is the most powerful way we can speak up for our values. Please make your vote count by backing candidates who support an independent, properly funded ABC.

As several commentators have noted this week, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp outlets have gone ‘rogue’ on election coverage, making no attempt to comply with one of the media’s primary obligations to a democratic society — the provision of truthful news coverage. Instead, the dominant commercial media player has become a truth-distorting propagandist for one side, the Liberal-NLP Coalition, and has blatantly attacked Labor, Greens and independents, often without a shred of evidence. Both the Press Council and the ACMA seem impotent to rein in even the most appalling excesses. Add to this, News Corp’s overwhelming reach through newspapers, TV and online outlets – as well as its pernicious influence on other media – and questions arise about a fundamental threat to the health of our democracy. In this article first published in The Conversation, Denis Muller – Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at The University of Melbourne – sums up the main concerns.

“Never, in my lifetime, has the ABC been more important than it is today…yet it is constantly under attack.” – Kerry O’Brien

The former presenter of Lateline, The 7.30 Report and Four Corners, Kerry O’Brien presents the latest in a series of short campaign videos produced by ABC Alumni for social media platforms.

With the federal election campaign now officially underway, ABC Alumni today launches the first of a series of videos to inform the public of issues critical to the future of the ABC.

Around the world, growing government hostility is threatening independent media who do their job, ask tough questions, and hold the powerful to account. Here Alan Sunderland explains why the recent UK government’s announcement to freeze the BBC licence fee for the next two years, and potentially eradicate it, is about a lot more than funding models and has worrying parallels with what has been happening to the ABC for several years. 

For the current government “the enemy” appears to be anyone trying to hold that government to account – and right now, that’s the ABC. Here ABC Alumni director Quentin Dempster backgrounds the issues leading to Ita Buttrose – the Prime Minister’s “captain’s pick” as ABC Chair – becoming a prime target for politicians and others with grievances about the public broadcaster.

In a strongly worded statement, ABC Chair Ita Buttrose AC OBE says a new Senate Inquiry into the ABC’s complaint handling process “appears to be a blatant attempt to usurp the role of the ABC Board and undermine the operational independence of the ABC”.

There are rumours that the ABC is about to hold another review into its complaints system. The last one, in 2009, recommended the abolition of the Independent Complaints Review Panel, the ICRP, because it was an expensive and time-consuming duplication of the role of the regulator, the ACMA.

One of that review’s authors was then ABC Chairman Maurice Newman – now a columnist at The Australian and one of the ABC’s most trenchant critics.

Eleven years later, here we go again.  News Corp Australia is in the forefront of calls for a more “independent” ABC complaints system.

Meanwhile, what used to be “recognised standards” for all journalism, public or commercial, are nowhere to be found at News Corp’s own Sky News.