SCUM AT THE TOP

What has Jonathan Shier done wrong? The formal answer is: nothing. He is managing director of the ABC. He has every right to see any program - current affairs, drama or comedy - before it is broadcast.

He has every right to ask for changes (he is the boss). He has every right to seek another legal opinion. He has every right to disagree with the advice of his senior executives. He can, in the end, stop a broadcast.

But he does each of these at great risk to the independence of the ABC and, in turn, to the traditional checks and balances that exist in such a large and culturally important organisation as the ABC.

It is the informal culture of the ABC - as in other media organisations such as the Nine Network or Fairfax - that ensures freedom of expression and journalism without fear or favor.

It is an open secret that destruction of the ABC's traditional culture has been a Shier priority. Mass sackings, particularly of senior managers, have depleted the organisation of its memory. Certainly Shier would have no memory of how a public broadcaster handles issues like a controversial Four Corners program, because he has never worked for one.

Similarly, he would have no knowledge of how other, commercial, news organisations handle such journalism because his background is in sales and marketing. So he's doubly learning on the job.

The truth is that most chief executive officers in commercial television do have sales and marketing backgrounds - the dollar matters more than the content - but they rely on people such as Peter Meakin, the powerful news and current affairs head at Nine, to guide them through tricky editorial waters.

So, having depleted the ABC's cultural memory, but with no experience of his own, Shier has now faced his first big test: a Four Corners expose that may seriously anger the Liberal Party, including his chairman's best friend - and less than six months before a federal election. What is the tradition here?

The first thing to say is that the ABC's news and current affairs departments operate more like Fairfax newspapers than News Limited papers or Packer magazines. That is to say, like The Age's Charter of Editorial Independence (and similar documents in great newspapers around the world), the ABC journalists and their executives see themselves as separate from the wider priorities of the organisation.

Fairfax news executives would not dream of taking a story to its CEO, Fred Hilmer. In the vast majority of cases, neither would ABC broadcasters consult CEO Jonathan Shier.

The practice of non-consultation goes back many, many years. I worked at This Day Tonight in the early 1970s as a reporter, and that team would have been outraged if executive producer Tony Ferguson had sent a story to general manager Talbot Duckmanton for approval.

However, "approval" is one matter and "advice" another.

In rare cases it makes sense that, where a program may cause the ABC to be rocked by controversy, or have serious financial implications (usually through defamation cases), the boss be advised before broadcast.

I recall David Hill understandably saying, when he was managing director, that he simply did not want to be caught by surprise. If he had to defend something, he'd like to know his ground. Jonathan Holmes, fresh from the BBC and newly installed as executive producer of Four Corners, advised his managing director in 1983 that a coming Four Corners program, The Big League, would accuse the then chief stipendiary magistrate of New South Wales of corruption. Holmes was prepared to resign if the program was stopped, but he had fulfilled the correct protocols of his position. Likewise, when I was executive producer of Four Corners after Holmes, I sent a heavily legalled Paul Barry story dismantling Alan Bond's finances to the managing director, and waited. Those were the days when Bond was Australia's hero, having won the America's Cup. Both stories required courage from the managing director. Both went to air.

This latest Four Corners appears to be another of those "rare cases". The concern here about Shier is not that he broke some formal job description. It is the wobbliness he has displayed when faced with a test of his commitment to editorial independence.

I believe that the head of news and current affairs, Max Uechtritz, was not "referring upwards" to his managing director because there was a problem with the program that needed Shier's intervention or approval. Rather, this was simply "advisory", under the informal "No Surprises Act".

Shier seems to have gone a bit giddy about the program and had a last-minute panic, pulling it from air last weekend. Why this vertigo? Did he have problems with the program that neither his senior editorial managers nor his own ABC lawyers nor the outside legal consultant sought by the ABC's legal department had seen? If so, what were they? Were they legal or political?

Further answers are needed about the process within the ABC. Before pulling the program, did Shier consult his internal team? Did he consult the ABC chairman, Donald McDonald - a friend of the Prime Minister's - about the program, and/or, the ABC board? (Neither the chairman nor the board should be involved in such detailed programming matters.) Did he contact any Liberal Party members about the program?

The second question of process is why he needed to go outside for his own, separate, legal advice. The ABC legal department has a long and proud history of fighting defamation cases. It has lost some (including recently) but, overwhelmingly, it has won time after time. It has established precedents that have given us a wider ambit for freedom of speech.

Its head, Judith Walker, is thorough, meticulous, experienced and loyal. Her department, like others, has suffered large cuts while having to expand its Shier brief into multi-media.

It is unusual for her department to seek expensive external legal advice; this happens only in major matters. This Four Corners program was one such case. And the combined advice of the internal and external lawyers was: "let's broadcast".

Why was it necessary for Shier to seek yet another lawyer? It was certainly adventurous. Was he hoping for a different opinion? Would such an opinion be the pretext to overrule all the other lawyers who had spent months working with the program makers? It is very strange.

It is claimed that Shier and his public relations staff are justifying his last-minute vertigo on the grounds that he is "editor-in-chief" of the ABC. I must say I had never heard of this term until David Hill used it after visiting Bob Hawke during the Gulf War to hear the then prime minister's angry objections to using a particular academic in our current affairs coverage.

It was a notion that centralised editorial control in the managing director's office and dangerously ignored the previous practice of editorial independence within the news and current affairs departments. It's come back to haunt us. Jonathan Shier has leapt on the idea.

The problem is increased by Shier's background. Whereas Brian Johns and Geoffrey Whitehead were both distinguished political correspondents to their respective parliaments, and David Hill had been a journalist and Talbot Duckmanton a sports broadcaster, Shier, to my knowledge, has never been a "content" man. He's a salesman, good with the gab.

Week after week, Shier seems to betray more signs of being out of his depth. His appointment was a big mistake by this board; it has a lot to answer for.

Peter Manning, a former executive producer of Four Corners and former head of news and current affairs at ABC TV and the Seven Network, is adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Manning's article from The Age

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