This ‘adventure in democracy’ is unfair and unbalanced

Wednesday, 3rd March 2010

Far from representing a democratic spread of opinion, the ABC’s Q&A program overwhelmingly favours progressive types over conservatives, argues John Styles

Lefties complain that Fox News is a right-wing noise machine for the Republican Party. But at least when Rupert Murdoch’s channel has lefties on the air, the guests get to finish their sentences before the Fox blondes bang them around and feed the leftovers to Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly. If only ‘our’ ABC was as accommodating of conservatives.

Take Q&A, ABC1’s Monday night panel show hosted by Tony Jones. It is billed by the network’s promotional machine as ‘adventures in democracy’. It is a proposition supported by another line that Jones likes to drop frequently: Q&A is ‘the show where you get to ask the questions’.

In the spirit of telling it like it really is, here is a more accurate slogan: Q&A is the show where you get to ask the questions… but we get to decide which ones. Indeed, if Q&A is Auntie’s idea of the media’s role in a democracy, and an example of how it fulfils its obligation as a taxpayer-funded broadcaster to produce current affairs programs that are fair and balanced, it is time to sell off the corporation to the lowest bidder (as a blog commenter recently quipped) and let someone else have a go.

When Jones claimed, as he did in the very first edition of Q&A, that the show was a new adventure in democracy, he was wrong on all counts. The idea behind Q&A is not new. The show is based on the UK’s Question Time, a program that has been running since 1979. There have been similar programs in Australia — SBS’s Insight is a current example. Difference of Opinion and Australia Talks were recent ABC attempts. Q&A is democratic only in the mould of those infamous ‘democracies’, of which the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the best example.