Monday, October 16, 2006
Easy as ABC
ABC, BBC, CBC. The AB & CBCs; the AB, BB, and CBCs.
The symmetry itself is positively salubrious. What a shame that one of the "partners" may now be under threat, but it's a big maybe.
Mark Scott is the newly annointed great white hope at the head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and is today on record as committing to install checks and balances to ward against the rampant leftism the nominal Australian government broadcaster has become locally famous for.
Unlike BC Version A's spiritual parent, the British Broacasting Corporation or even, to a lesser extent, the colonial club comrade Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC is only locally renowned.
The initialism "ABC" is of course more commonly attributed globally to a private American broadcaster.
Changing the Australian broadcaster's name - to, say, BBCC or BBCA or ABBBC, or perhaps PMB (Poor Man’s Beeb) - would not, of course, solve the root problems it faces. There is the question of 100s of millions of tax payer dollars continuing to support a dubiously relevant anachronism, that's the big one.
Maybe the broadcaster ought to pay its own way. That would mean delivering content designed to attract an audience that is not appallingly small - which would be a huge culture shock at the ABC.
Which begs the question of why the organisation needs to continue to exist at all.
It's not as if the 21st century world is like that of the 1930s, when the ABC was created and when radio - and later television - access were a special thing. It's not as if the ABC can be compared to Telstra. However inefficiently, the latter continues to be the only provider of essential (telecommunications) products and services.
The same can’t be said of the ABC vis-à-vis broadcasting.
