The media has always been a fast business, and it’s getting faster. Social media was everyone’s darling a decade ago. Today its undoubted benefits are being overwhelmed by torrents of misinformation and disinformation. The pioneering social media platform Twitter was bought in 2022 by Elon Musk, who renamed it X and swiftly rendered it a smouldering bin fire. The same year, Patrick Mullins and I wrote a book entitled Who Needs the ABC? Why taking it for granted is no longer an option that reasserted the ABC’s value, after nine years of Coalition government hostility, as one of the nation’s prized cultural institutions.

The argument stands, but it is alarming how quickly the relief at the new Albanese Labor government restoring at least some of the ABC’s lost funding has morphed into a sense the national broadcaster is floundering. First, there was the resignation of high-profile journalist, Stan Grant, following a News Corp and social media pile-on over his comments about White Australia’s history of racism and colonialism during the live broadcast of King Charles’ coronation in May 2023. There was the cack-handed standing down of fill-in presenter Antoinette Lattouf in December 2023 over her posting on social media a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report alleging Israel was using starvation as a weapon in Gaza as part of its horrific response to the murderous attack by Hamas on October 7. The ABC dismissed her, referring to that social media post even though the ABC had itself reported the HRW’s allegations. Earlier this year, Walkley award-winning journalist Laura Tingle was ‘counselled’ over comments she made at a writers’ festival event in May about Australia’s history of racism and opposition leader Peter Dutton’s deploying of racist tropes. Her comments were in part loosely worded but overall were exactly the kind of clear-eyed political analysis expected of an experienced ABC journalist. Criticism has steadily increased from the progressive side of politics, which seems almost as frustrated with the ABC as its habitual critics from the right.