Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott yesterday came under pressure from his communications chief over his criticism of the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC).
Australian Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said ABC must not be accountable to politicians, after Abbott on Wednesday accused the national broadcaster of being unpatriotic by taking “everyone’s side but Australia’s” in its coverage of asylum-seekers and the leaks by US intelligence fugitive Edward Snowden.
“It dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone’s side but Australia’s, and I think it is a problem,” Abbott told commercial radio station 2GB, adding that ABC was “lacking affection for the home team.”
However, Turnbull, while defending Abbott’s right to critique the publicly funded broadcaster, told the Sydney Morning Herald the ABC must retain its editorial independence and be accountable to its board of directors, not politicians.
“What’s the alternative ... the editor-in-chief [of the ABC] becomes the prime minister?” asked Turnbull, who lost the leadership of the conservative Liberal Party to Abbott in a 2009 party challenge by a single vote.
“Politicians, whether prime ministers or communications ministers, will often be unhappy with the ABC... but you can’t tell them what to write,” he said.
The broadcaster had no comment on Abbott’s broadside, but former ABC managing director David Hill said Abbot’s opinion was “laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.”
“This is the first serious suggestion I know of, certainly in the last half a century, where a prime minister of the country is suggesting the Australian public be denied access to the truth,” he told the Herald.
“And the first time that a prime minister has seriously intimated that the ABC should censor and withhold information from the Australian public,” he added.
Abbott has had a strained relationship with the ABC, criticizing it late last year after it broke a story about Australia spying on Indonesia, which sparked a major diplomatic crisis. He has also been unhappy with reports about claims by asylum-seekers they were tortured by the navy during anti people-smuggling operations at sea.
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