[AU] ABC board members were hand picked by Coalition governemnt - Polidicks

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/more-honoured-in-the-abuse-than-application-abc-panel-member-hits-out-at-board-appointments-20180930-p506zy.html 'More honoured in the abuse than application': ABC panel member hits out at board appointments Neil Brown, a minister in the Fraser government and a deputy Liberal leader under John Howard, also launched a stinging attack on Mitch Fifield, accusing the Communications Minister of "making a fool of himself" by repeatedly ignoring advice from the panel. The government appointed half of the current ABC board without the endorsement of the independent nomination panel designed to depoliticise board appointments. Senator Fifield has also appointed others to the SBS board who did not go through the nominations panel process. In his first public comments since his three-year term concluded last year, Mr Brown said the panel's work was "basically wasted". Critics have claimed the board did not do enough to respond to documented evidence of Mr Milne's request to sack political editor Andrew Probyn and chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici, and only moved against him once the details became public. TL;DR: The independent panel set up to ensure board memebers were depoliticised was ignored by the Liberal government with half of the current board members being hand picked by the Liberal party.

That's pretty fucking bad. We have a nationalised broadcaster in Britain, but the BBC criticise both our main parties extensively.

You don't say??

The ABC does give each side of politics a fair amount of flak when it is due. Eg when Tony Abbott was Prime Minister, ABC journalist Leigh Sales did a really humiliating interview with him. The Liberals may have appointed half of the board, but I think that for the most part, the board doesn’t really get involved in the actual journalism; Australian politicians and political appointees are typically much more impartial than overseas counterparts, especially Americans. The scandal that happened recently was, yes, when one of the Board members attempted to put pressure on others to fire two journalists who might be perceived to be too harsh on the government. But that Board member was not necessarily asked by the government to do that. And if that were a common thing in the ABC, then surely this scandal would have happened not in 2018, but maybe in 2013 or 2014 following the Liberals and Tony Abbott winning government. It is suspected that the reason why the scandal happened was because the ABC’s funding is not as independent from government as eg the BBC’s funding, and so that ABC Board member wanted to reign in what was perhaps too much criticism of the government, in order to protect future ABC funding.

The former chairman of the ABC, Justin Milne, directly attempted to fire two senior jornualists after recieving complaints from the Turnbull government, he didn't put pressure on them or acting in foresight, he tried to fire them for critizing the government. It is clear that the board does get involved when it is attempting to suppress reporting and programming on behalf of the government. Calling the board memebers impartial is totally incorrect when they were not only hand picked by the Liberal party but in some cases the people chosen didn't even want the job. The Liberal party completely ignored the panel for hiring board members and any form of merit based hiring. While you are correct that funding is clearly a issue for the ABC it is also becoming increasing clear that Liberals are trying to take more control over the broadcaster by implanting board members, by bringing down funding and even attempting to privatise the ABC.