Every few months, the same argument resurfaces – the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is biased. Critics on the right point to a segment, a tweet from a presenter, an op-ed commissioned from the wrong side of politics, and conclude that our national broadcaster has a partisan agenda. The ABC’s defenders respond by pointing to audits and editorial charters, and the argument goes nowhere, as it always does. Both sides are arguing about the wrong thing.
The ABC’s real problem is not bias in the sense of a conspiracy or a deliberate editorial line. It is something quieter and harder to legislate against – cultural narrowness. The organisation draws its staff overwhelmingly from a specific milieu, tertiary-educated, inner-metropolitan, professionally credentialed and clustered in Sydney and Melbourne. That is not a scandal, but simply what happens when an institution recruits and promotes people from within a fairly narrow slice of Australian life. The result is not so much a newsroom that lies about the country as one that struggles to see all of it.
Bias Is the Wrong Diagnosis
Framing the problem as ‘bias’ invites a search for smoking guns, an unfair segment here, an activist tweet there, and it lets the ABC off the hook every time an individual example turns out to be defensible in isolation. A single story about a Christian aged-care provider, or a single sceptical piece about a mining project, proves very little on its own. What matters is the aggregate pattern of what gets covered as normal and what gets covered as remarkable.
Consider religion. Practising Christians make up a meaningful share of the Australian population, particularly outside the capital cities, yet religious life on the ABC is more often treated as an anthropological curiosity or a source of controversy than as an unremarkable part of how millions of Australians organise their week. Consider regional Australia. Mining, forestry and agriculture support entire towns, but coverage of these industries skews toward their environmental costs rather than the communities that depend on them for a living. None of this requires an editorial memo instructing journalists to slant coverage. It only requires a newsroom whose staff mostly do not go to church, do not live near a mine and do not know anyone who does.
Institutions Reflect Who Staffs Them
This is not a uniquely Australian pathology, nor is it unique to public broadcasters. Any organisation that recruits heavily from a small number of universities and a small number of postcodes will end up with a house culture that reflects that pool, whatever its politics. The difference with the ABC is that it is funded by every taxpayer and chartered to reflect the whole country back to itself, which makes cultural narrowness a more serious institutional failure than it would be for a private outlet chasing a niche audience.
The consequence is a kind of unconscious editorial instinct, in which certain views are treated as the sensible, mainstream starting point requiring no explanation, while others are treated as fringe positions that need to be contextualised or debated. A caller from Toorak worried about climate policy is a ‘”concerned citizen”, while a caller from Emerald worried about the cost of net zero for his freight business is, more often than not, framed as a case study in resistance to change. Neither caller is wrong to be worried, but only one of them tends to be presented as simply a normal person with a normal opinion.
Diversity of Thought, Not Just Demographics
The ABC has, to its credit, invested heavily in demographic diversity over the past decade, and that effort is visible on air. However, diversity of background does not automatically produce diversity of worldview when almost everyone hired still passes through the same handful of journalism schools and internship pipelines, absorbing the same professional norms along the way. A newsroom can look more diverse by every conventional metric and still think in a remarkably uniform way.
Fixing this is harder than fixing bias, because there is no single memo or policy change that solves it. It would mean actively recruiting journalists from regional Australia, from trades backgrounds, from religious communities and from outside the well-worn Sydney-Melbourne media circuit as people trusted with real editorial judgment. It would mean treating viewpoint diversity with the same seriousness the ABC already applies to gender and cultural diversity.
Until that happens, the ABC will keep fighting bias complaints it can usually rebut, while missing the deeper problem underneath them – an institution that, however well-intentioned, increasingly speaks in one accent to a country that speaks in many.
Read more: The Insight Corner
