Reporters from Australia’s national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), will undergo impartiality training when covering news about the controversial Indigenous Voice proposal.
The move comes after the country’s largest taxpayer-funded media outline faced heavy backlash for its reports on the Alice Springs community meeting in January, which its Ombudsman office has ruled as “not impartial” and “not accurate.”
According to an internal email to staff on Monday obtained by The Australian, journalists will be attending a “deep-dive” session into impartiality to make sure a diversity of views are presented in the report.
The guidelines warned reporters against favouring one opinion over another while at the same time avoiding the “unjustified use of stereotypes or discriminatory content.”
The email also stated that the ABC takes “no editorial stance other than its commitment to fundamental democratic principles including the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, parliamentary democracy and equality of opportunity.”
Editorial policy manager Mark Male and editorial policy adviser Bridget Caldwell-Bright will chair the session.
It was, however, unclear whether the impartiality training also covered other issues or only focused on the Voice.
ABC’s editorial policies stated that the media outlet aims to “present, over time, content that addresses a broad range of subjects from a diversity of perspectives reflecting a diversity of experiences, presented in a diversity of ways from a diversity of sources.”
Past Accusation Of Impartiality
Despite its stated commitment to accurate and unbiased reporting, the ABC has come under pressure over the past few years for its coverage of controversial topics such as climate change, Indigenous affairs, religious discrimination or gender identity.In late January, ABC apologised for its “incomplete” coverage of an Alice Springs town meeting, in which locals worried about escalating crime rates in the community were accused of being “racist.”
The ABC’s flagship radio program AM on Jan. 31 featured interviews of people criticising the meeting as a “white supremacist fest” and describing the vibe as “scary.”
In a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday, ABC managing director David Anderson admitted there were mistakes in the AM report and that it “should not have gone to air.”
“I do think that the systems and processes we have in place did not pick up the issue with that story before it was included in the AM package,” he said.
Reports by ABC Were “Materially Misleading”
In December 2022, the taxpayer-funded company was also accused by the ACMA of “materially misleading” audiences and inaccurately reporting on Fox News and its relationship with former U.S. President Donald Trump.ABC described their report, titled “Fox and the Big Lie”—which aired on its Four Corner program—as a “special investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and how the network promoted Donald Trump’s propaganda and helped destabilise democracy in America.”
However, in one case, ACMA found that ABC did not report on the role that social media played in inciting the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol.
ACMA also discovered that one Fox News interviewee was not adequately informed about the way ABC’s show would be presented.
Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is a spiritual practice consisting of moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, along with a set of meditative exercises.
After the ABC’s report was broadcasted, the Chinese government’s 610 Office quickly jumped on to promote the program on its website. The 610 Office is a Gestapo-like agency set up by former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin in 1999 as an “extra-legal” body to specifically target adherents of Falun Gong.