ABC Mission Creep

A piece of mine has just gone on-line at Online Opinion (as rejected by several opinion page editors):

Top stories from June 16:

Britney says “back off”

Britney Spears' string of unfortunate encounters with the media is taking its toll on the pregnant singer. She's told US television her biggest wish is for the paparazzi to "leave her alone".

Married to the job

Hollywood actress Renee Zellweger has warned fellow Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman to call off her wedding to country music superstar Keith Urban. Renee's told a friend that Keith's too much of a workaholic.

Delta ditches mum as manager

Aussie songstress Delta Goodrem has dumped her mum Lea as her manager, to sign on with boyfriend Brian McFadden's management instead. She says the break was a mutual decision.

Want to have a guess at who put these stories top of the agenda? One of Rupert's tabloids? The UK gutter press? The National Enquirer? Nope. It was your ABC. Or more precisely, its pop culture blog, The Shallow End.

So how did we get to the point where the ABC, the national public broadcaster, has decided that it should publish celebrity gossip as a regular feature on its website? It seems to me that we need to re-examine the reason for the existence of the ABC in order to see how the current incarnation is a long way from where it should be. In short, the ABC has undergone what military planners might call “mission creep”.


Read the rest at Online Opinion.

Comments

boy_fromOz said…
the ridiculous thing is how the right gets up in arms over the ABC at every opportunity, like Windschuttle's appointment to the board last week. The content is 80% fluff, yet reading the Murdoch papers you'd think the ABC was a mouthpiece for the 'Marxist' intelligentsia
23 June 2006 at 18:10
From the lion's mouth said…
God I wish we still had a Marxist intelligentsia. And aren't right-wing demonologists like Windschuttle supposed to be warming us about Islamists now, and not so much the reds under our beds? I mean, reds under the beds are SO last century.
19 July 2006 at 12:36
Anonymous said…
You know, I'm genuinely surprised that the broadsheets didn't take that piece - it's very well written and makes some really interesting points. The only reason I can think of is that it's perhaps a little long.
20 July 2006 at 13:18
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