The American Broadcasting Corporation

The American Broadcasting Corporation, universally the ABC, is the Crown-chartered public broadcaster of the United Kingdom of America. Established by Royal Charter in 1927, it operates a national radio and television network, a tier of regional services in every polity, and a set of minority-language services, and it is funded by a founding endowment together with an annual grant voted by Parliament.

It is a public corporation created by Charter rather than by statute, and its editorial independence of the Crown’s government is guaranteed by the Charter, defended by convention, and periodically tested. The corporation’s chartered remit is domestic and directed inward across the Realm. It maintains no government-funded World Service, and its one outward operation, the international news channel ABC World News, is run commercially and takes no public money. Its founding creed, set by its first Director-General and still taught in the Realm’s schools, is to inform, to educate, and to gather.

The ABC is not the Realm’s only broadcaster. A licensed commercial sector, established from 1959, is substantially larger than the ABC in entertainment and substantially smaller in news, and the relationship between the two is the central fact of the Realm’s broadcasting policy.

Constitution and status

The Royal Charter

The ABC exists under a Royal Charter rather than an Act of Parliament, and the distinction is the foundation of everything else about it. A body created by statute may be altered or abolished by an ordinary majority of the Commons on any afternoon it chooses. A body created by Charter holds its existence from the Crown, and its terms may be altered only at renewal, by a process in which Parliament must act openly and in advance.

The Charter grants the corporation editorial independence in terms: the right to report, to broadcast and to question without direction from ministers, and the corresponding duty to serve the whole Realm impartially rather than any party within it. It obliges the ABC to provide news, to serve every polity, to broadcast in the languages of the Realm’s peoples where a community of sufficient size exists, and to maintain the ceremonial broadcasts of the Crown.

It also imposes obligations the corporation has occasionally wished it could shed. It must broadcast the proceedings of Parliament, in full and unedited, whether or not anybody is watching. It must carry emergency communications on the direction of the responsible authority, which is the single point at which a minister may lawfully require the ABC to transmit something, and the power is drawn narrowly enough that its use is a matter of public record each time. It must maintain its transmission network to a standard fixed by the Charter rather than by its budget. And it must publish its accounts, its editorial guidelines, its complaints findings and its annual report in full.

The Charter says nothing at all about audience. The corporation is not required to be watched, and the omission is deliberate: an obligation to attract viewers would be an obligation the market could enforce, and the whole arrangement exists to remove the market from the question.

The Charter is granted for a fixed term and must be renewed. Renewal is the one lawful occasion on which the terms of the corporation’s freedom are reopened, and it is accordingly the mechanism through which every pressure on the ABC is ultimately applied.

The Court of Governors

The corporation is governed by a Court of Governors, which appoints the Director-General, approves the budget, holds the executive to account for editorial standards, and is answerable at Charter renewal for the corporation’s conduct. It does not make editorial decisions and is barred by the Charter from doing so.

Governors are appointed by the Crown on the advice of a cross-party parliamentary committee rather than of the ministry, and their terms are staggered so that they straddle general elections and no single Parliament appoints a whole Court. A Governor may not have held party office within the preceding ten years, and may not sit in either House. The chair since 2025 is Dame Harriet Oyelaran.

The Court numbers twelve. Its composition is fixed by the Charter to include members drawn from outside the metropolitan centres, at least two from polities of fewer than five seats in the Commons, and at least one from a community served by the minority-language services, requirements added in 1989 at the same insistence that entrenched the services themselves. Its meetings are minuted and the minutes are published after two years.

The Court’s relationship with the executive is deliberately awkward. It appoints the Director-General and can dismiss them, and it may not tell them what to broadcast, which means its only instrument in an editorial disagreement is the one it least wants to use. The Realm’s governance literature describes this as a defect and the corporation describes it as the design: a board that could correct a programme would be a board a ministry would want to capture.

The appointment mechanism is the corporation’s principal structural protection and was not part of the original design. Until 1974 Governors were appointed on ministerial advice in the ordinary way, and the change to a cross-party committee was the chief concession the ABC extracted from the Charter renewal of that year.

The Director-General

The Director-General is the corporation’s chief executive, appointed by the Court of Governors and removable by it. The office runs the institution: the budget, the estate, the staff, the transmission network, the negotiation of each Charter renewal, and the corporation’s appearances before parliamentary committees. It is the office that asks Parliament for money.

It is not, since 1974, the office that decides what the corporation broadcasts.

The founding holder was Ezra Linden, from 1927 until his death in office in 1944. The incumbent is Imani Voss, appointed in 2023, previously the corporation’s head of regional services, which is the first time the post has gone to someone from outside the newsroom or the metropolitan production tier.

Eleven people have held the office. Three have resigned over editorial matters, one was dismissed by the Court after a failure of process in a programme that had defamed a private citizen, and one died in post. The average tenure is under six years, which the corporation’s own governance review of 2016 identified as a problem: a Director-General needs three years to understand the institution and a Charter cycle runs to fifteen, so no holder of the office has ever seen a settlement through from one renewal to the next.

The office is also, by long convention, the person who reads the announcement when a sovereign dies. It is not in the Charter and nobody has ever proposed putting it there.

The Editor-in-Chief

The Editor-in-Chief holds final editorial authority over everything the corporation transmits, is appointed by the Court of Governors, and may be removed only by the Court. The Director-General cannot appoint, instruct or dismiss them. The incumbent is Hollis Barr, appointed in 2021.

The separation of the two offices is the least noticed and most effective provision of the 1974 Charter, and its logic is simple. The corporation’s exposure has never been to a government that forbids a broadcast. It is to a government that squeezes a grant until somebody inside the corporation decides that a particular programme is not worth what it will cost. That pressure works only if the officer who needs the money and the officer who decides the content are the same person. After 1974 they are not. A Director-General may be pressed as hard as any ministry cares to press and has nothing to trade, because the thing being sought is not theirs to give.

The arrangement is uncomfortable to operate and is meant to be. The two officers disagree, sometimes publicly, and the Charter provides no mechanism for resolving a disagreement between them beyond the Court’s power to dismiss either. A Director-General who believes a programme will cost the corporation its settlement may say so and may not stop it. An Editor-in-Chief who transmits it takes the consequences for the institution as well as for the item, and the convention inherited from the older undivided office is that an Editor-in-Chief who cannot defend a broadcast resigns rather than disown the people who made it.

Three of the corporation’s eleven Directors-General resigned over editorial matters, and all three did so before 1974, which is the clearest evidence that the division was needed. No Editor-in-Chief has resigned. Two have been threatened with dismissal by a Court and neither was dismissed.

Funding

The ABC’s chartered operations are funded from two sources and from no others. Its international channel is funded separately and commercially, and is dealt with below.

The first is the founding endowment, settled at the corporation’s creation and invested since, which produces an income the corporation may spend without reference to any minister. The endowment is deliberately insufficient to run the corporation and deliberately sufficient to keep it alive: it is a floor beneath which no government can push the ABC, and it exists precisely so that a ministry withholding money cannot close the broadcaster down.

The second is an annual grant voted by Parliament, which supplies the greater part of the corporation’s income.

There is no licence fee, no charge on the viewer or the set, and no advertising within the Realm. The absence of the first is a deliberate divergence from British practice, argued at the foundation on the ground that a charge levied on the act of listening would make the corporation’s finances a permanent grievance and its enforcement a police matter. The absence of the third is more fundamental still: a broadcaster whose income depends on audiences delivered to advertisers cannot serve audiences too small to sell, and the ABC’s minority-language services exist only because nobody has ever had to justify them commercially. The advertising carried on ABC World News abroad is the single exception, and it is ring-fenced precisely so that it cannot become one at home.

The arrangement has a cost, and the corporation has never pretended otherwise. The grant is voted annually by the Parliament the ABC exists to hold to account. A ministry minded to punish can always find a reason to be ungenerous, and several have.

The corporation’s accounts are published in full and its costs are therefore a permanent public argument. The largest single item is the transmission network it owns; the second is news; the third is the regional tier. The minority-language services, which attract by far the most political comment, account for a fraction of the budget that the corporation publishes annually in the hope of ending the discussion and that has never ended it.

The endowment’s income has fallen in real terms across the corporation’s life, since it was settled in 1927 on assumptions about investment returns that the following century did not honour. It now provides materially less of the corporation’s income than it did, which means the floor it represents is lower than it was, which means the grant matters more than it was designed to.

Transmission and coverage

The corporation’s obligation is to reach the Realm, and the physical difficulty of doing so has shaped it as much as any argument about editorial freedom.

The transmission network was built between 1928 and 1954 and is owned by the corporation outright, which distinguishes the ABC from most public broadcasters and was Linden’s insistence. His argument was that a broadcaster which rents its transmitters from somebody else can be silenced by that somebody, and that the Realm’s only continental voice ought not to depend on a commercial landlord. The network was accordingly built at enormous cost over a quarter of a century, and is maintained at a cost that appears in every efficiency review as an anomaly.

Reaching the whole Realm is not a uniform problem. The eastern polities were covered within a decade. The plains and the mountain west required a chain of relay stations that took another fifteen years. Alaska, the interior of the March, and the treaty nations of Oklahoma-Sequoyah and the Dakotas were not reliably covered until satellite distribution in the 1970s, and parts of the Alaskan interior depend to this day on transmitters serving populations of a few hundred that no commercial operator would maintain for an afternoon.

The Charter expresses the obligation as a duty to reach every inhabited part of the Realm, and the ABC has taken the phrase literally. It is why the last hundred thousand people cost more to reach than the preceding several million, a fact the corporation states plainly in its annual accounts and has never been asked to apologise for.

History

Foundation

The Charter was granted in 1927, under Ernest III, on the advice of the Coolidge ministry, in the first years of the wireless boom.

The immediate cause was congestion. Broadcasting had grown up in the early 1920s as an unregulated scramble of stations run by newspapers, department stores, universities and enthusiasts, sharing a finite spectrum by no method at all, and the resulting interference had made large parts of the dial unusable. Every serious proposal for sorting it out required somebody to allocate frequencies, and allocation implied an allocator.

What the Realm did with that problem was characteristic. It could have created a licensing bureau and left broadcasting to whoever obtained a licence, which is what most of its trading partners did. Instead it chartered a single corporation, gave it the spectrum, and required it to serve the whole Union. The argument that carried was not primarily about culture or standards. It was about the Union itself: that a federation of forty-nine polities strung across a continent had no other instrument capable of addressing all of its people at once, and that such an instrument was too valuable to leave to whoever could afford it.

The chartering was opposed, and the opposition is worth recording because it was not foolish. The newspaper proprietors opposed it, correctly identifying a state-funded competitor for the public’s attention and, in time, for its advertising. The existing station operators opposed it, having built something at their own expense that was about to be absorbed without much compensation. A substantial body of members opposed it on straightforward constitutional grounds, holding that a Crown instrument capable of addressing every household in the Realm was a dangerous thing to create and would eventually be captured by whoever held office. That last objection has never been answered, only survived.

What defeated the opposition was the alternative. The ministry’s case, made repeatedly and eventually accepted, was that the spectrum would be allocated by somebody in any event, that the choice was between allocation to a chartered public body and allocation to whoever could pay for a licence, and that the second course placed the Realm’s only continental voice in private hands answerable to nobody. Coolidge himself was not enthusiastic and did not pretend to be. His recorded view was that the thing was necessary and would be regretted, which the Realm’s broadcasting historians regard as an accurate forecast of the following century.

The Charter was granted in the summer of 1927. The corporation’s first transmission was made in November of that year and consisted of a reading aloud of its own terms of reference, which was Linden’s idea and which the corporation has repeated at the commencement of every renewed Charter since.

Linden and the creed

The corporation’s character was set, hard and early, by Ezra Linden.

Linden was a Presbyterian minister’s son from the Lower Counties who had run a university station and a wartime signals unit, and he held that broadcasting was a public trust in a sense close to the religious. He was austere, difficult, contemptuous of popularity as a measure of anything, and he had a genius for institutional design that the Realm has never quite forgiven him for combining with such an unpleasant manner.

His formulation of the corporation’s purpose survives unchanged: to inform, to educate, and to gather. The first two obligations the ABC shares with every public broadcaster in the world. The third is its own. Other countries asked their broadcasters to entertain; the United Kingdom of America asked its broadcaster to gather, and Linden organised the whole institution around the third verb. It is why the ABC built regional services before it built a drama department, why it broadcast in Wisconsindeutsch within a decade of its founding, and why the corporation has always treated an audience that cannot hear it as a failure of duty rather than a gap in the market.

Linden’s other bequests were institutional habits that outlived his reputation. He established that the corporation would keep its own archive of everything it transmitted, at a period when recording was expensive and nobody else troubled. He established that its correspondents would be its own employees rather than syndicated purchases. He established an internal rule, stricter than the Charter required and enforced by dismissal, that no member of the news staff would hold party membership of any kind. And he established that the corporation’s annual report would be published in full and unedited, including the parts unflattering to it, on the argument that an institution which asks others to account for themselves cannot decline to do so.

He was not much liked. The corporation’s own official history describes his management as authoritarian, his treatment of subordinates as cold to the point of cruelty, and his hostility to popular programming as a prejudice he mistook for a principle. It also observes that no successor has been able to dispense with anything he built.

Linden also established, by fighting for it repeatedly and at cost, the convention that the corporation’s independence is not a courtesy extended by ministers but a term of its Charter. He refused a ministerial instruction on the eve of the 1932 general election, was threatened with the loss of the grant, and made the threat public, which ended it. The episode established the pattern every subsequent confrontation has followed: ministerial pressure applied privately is survivable only if the corporation is willing to make it public, and the ABC’s chief defensive weapon has always been its own transmitter.

The Second Great War

The war made the ABC and very nearly unmade it.

Its audience became universal, its news division became the institution through which the Realm learned what was happening to its sons, and its reputation for accuracy was established in the only circumstances in which such a reputation can be established, which is by reporting defeats. The corporation broadcast the losses of 1942 in full, against the settled wish of the ministry, on Linden’s judgement that a population lied to once will not believe the truth afterwards.

The relationship with the ministry was nonetheless a wartime one. The corporation submitted to operational censorship, accepted direction on matters of security, and broadcast a great deal of material that was straightforwardly morale work. The postwar reckoning inside the corporation was severe, and it produced the standing distinction the ABC has applied ever since: it will withhold what would cost lives and it will not shade what would cost a government embarrassment, and the judgement between those two belongs to the Director-General and not to a minister.

The reckoning also produced the corporation’s most quoted internal document, a memorandum written by Linden in the last year of his life and circulated to every editor since, which sets out the test. A request to withhold must identify the specific harm, must come from the officer responsible for preventing it rather than from a minister’s office, must be recorded in writing, and must be reviewed for release once the harm has passed. Anything that fails those conditions is not a security request but a political one, and the corporation’s answer to a political one is that it does not take them.

The memorandum’s practical effect has been to make the number of successful requests very small and the number of attempts very large.

Linden died in office in 1944, three weeks after the Charter’s first renewal.

The war also turned the regional tier from a sketch into a system. Before 1939 the regional services were small, unevenly resourced and regarded internally as a duty. The war made them indispensable, because air-raid precautions, rationing, blackout arrangements, the movement of evacuated children and mobilisation notices were all local and a national network could not carry them. The corporation ended the war with a staffed and equipped regional newsroom in every polity. The tier has never been dismantled, and it has been reduced in every decade since the 1980s.

Television

Television opened in 1949 and changed the corporation more than the war had.

The wireless institution Linden built had been organised around the idea that broadcasting was a scarce public resource administered as a trust. Television was expensive in a way radio had not been, its audiences were larger and less patient, and it made the ABC for the first time an institution that had to think about whether people were watching. The internal argument of the 1950s, between the officials who held that the corporation should televise what it had always broadcast and those who held that television was a different medium requiring different work, was won decisively by the second group and is still refought at every Charter renewal.

Television also destroyed the corporation’s monopoly, because it made the monopoly politically indefensible. A single wireless service had been justifiable as spectrum management. A single television service, in a Realm that regarded monopoly with hereditary suspicion, was a different proposition, and the pressure to license competitors began almost as soon as the first sets were sold.

The internal history of the transition is more interesting than the argument about it. The corporation’s radio establishment regarded television as vulgar, expensive and probably a fashion, and resisted the diversion of resources to it for most of a decade. The engineers, who had built the transmission network and understood what was coming, sided with the television faction. The dispute was settled by audience figures.

What television did to the institution’s self-understanding lasted longer. Radio had been made by small teams working quickly and cheaply, and a producer who wanted to try something could try it. Television required capital, scheduling and forward planning, and it created within the corporation a management class that had not previously existed, whose function was to allocate resources between competing claims. Every subsequent complaint about the ABC’s bureaucracy dates from this period, and so does every subsequent defence of it.

The commercial settlement

Commercial broadcasting was licensed from 1959, at the second Charter renewal, and the terms of that settlement are the reason the Realm’s broadcasting looks as it does.

The ABC did not oppose commercial licensing outright, having concluded that it would lose. One of the arguments that had made licensing inevitable was the corporation’s own carriage, from 1954, of a weekly programme made by Walt Disney to finance and advertise his park at Anaheim, which members of the Commons had described as an hour-long advertisement broadcast at public expense; the programme moved to the first commercial network the month it was licensed. It fought instead over conditions, and won most of them. Commercial licensees were required to carry news, to meet minimum standards for regional production, and to accept a schedule of listed events that must remain free to air. They were licensed by a new Broadcasting Commission, independent of both the ministry and the ABC. And the ABC’s own funding was insulated from the new competition: its grant was not to be reduced on the ground that viewers had somewhere else to go.

That last provision is the most consequential thing in the 1959 Charter and the least discussed. Public broadcasters elsewhere have generally been funded in proportion to their reach, which means that competition reduces their income, which reduces their capacity, which reduces their reach. The Realm broke that circle deliberately, on the argument that a broadcaster obliged to serve everybody cannot be financed on the basis of how many people choose it. The commercial networks have complained about the provision continuously for seventy years and have never persuaded a Parliament to remove it.

The corporation’s own conduct in the negotiation was not admirable and its official history says so. It lobbied hard against licensing while telling Parliament it did not oppose it, briefed against the applicants, and predicted a collapse in standards that did not occur. The Director-General of the period afterwards described the corporation’s behaviour as the conduct of a monopolist who had forgotten why it had been given a monopoly.

Two commercial networks emerged and remain. The Continental Network, licensed in 1959, is the larger and is built on entertainment, sport and a news operation that is respectable rather than distinguished. Meridian, licensed in 1966, was founded on a regional franchise model, and its news is genuinely good and genuinely underfunded; it has been owned since 1995 by the Walt Disney Company, under Broadcasting Commission conditions that protect its news from its owner. Between them they command a substantially larger share of viewing than the ABC. Neither has ever come close to the ABC’s share of news viewing, which is the asymmetry the whole system was designed to produce and which its critics regard as evidence of a rigged market.

The Charter renewals

The Charter has been renewed six times: in 1944, 1959, 1974, 1989, 2004 and 2019, and it falls due again in 2034. Each renewal is a set piece of the parliamentary calendar, and the history of the ABC is in large part the history of them.

The pattern is consistent. A ministry arrives at a renewal with a list of things it dislikes about the corporation’s coverage, dressed as concerns about efficiency, accountability or balance. The corporation arrives with an argument about independence and a great deal of public affection it is careful not to appear to be mobilising. Parliament, whose members individually resent the ABC and collectively understand what it is for, splits along lines that do not follow party. The result is usually a renewal with a reduced settlement, some administrative humiliation, and the editorial guarantees intact.

1944 renewed the Charter in wartime and was the least contested, the ministry having no appetite for a fight with an institution the public trusted more than it trusted the ministry. It extended the corporation’s obligations to the regional tier the war had built.

1959 was the settlement that ended the monopoly and is dealt with separately below.

1974 is the constitutional case and is dealt with at length.

1989 was the renewal at which the polities intervened. Successive efficiency reviews had identified the minority-language services, and a coalition of polity governments led by Alaska and joined by the treaty nations demanded that the obligation be written into the Charter rather than left to the corporation’s discretion, on the reasoning that discretion is what gets reviewed. It was written in, and the services have not been seriously threatened since.

2004 was the renewal of the interior’s complaint. The corporation had been told for thirty years that its commissioning was metropolitan, had agreed each time, and had changed nothing, and the renewal imposed a fixed proportion of production outside the two great centres. It is the clearest instance of the corporation being made to do something it had repeatedly promised to do voluntarily.

2019 was quiet, brief and financially punishing, and the corporation regards it as the model of the modern threat: no editorial demand of any kind, and a settlement that did not keep pace with costs.

The renewal of 1974

The exception, and the most serious constitutional confrontation in the corporation’s history, was the renewal of 1974.

The Nixon ministry, in office since January 1972, had reached the renewal at the moment the ABC’s news division was reporting most damagingly on the scandal that would end it. The ministry’s draft Charter proposed, in terms, that the corporation be required to broadcast ministerial statements unedited and at the ministry’s request; that its coverage of the government’s conduct be subject to a duty of balance adjudicated by a body appointed by the ministry; and that the Director-General be appointed by the Crown on ministerial advice rather than by the Court of Governors.

The corporation did what it had done in 1932. It published the draft.

The decision was not obvious and was not unanimous. The draft had been supplied in confidence, in the ordinary way of pre-renewal consultation, and publishing it broke a convention that had held for forty-seven years. The Court of Governors divided. The Director-General’s position, recorded in the minute, was that a confidence which exists to allow a government to propose in private what it would not propose in public is not a confidence the corporation is obliged to keep, and that the ABC could not both accept the draft’s terms of secrecy and refuse its terms of control.

The publication is the reason the confrontation is taught rather than merely remembered. The ABC broadcast the ministry’s proposed terms in full, in a programme presented without comment, and let the Realm read them. Members of the ministry’s own party said afterwards that they had not known what was in the draft. The Commons committee that considered the renewal reported against every one of the editorial provisions, on cross-party votes, and the Nixon ministry did not survive to press them, the Prime Minister resigning on 9 August 1974 while the renewal was still before the House.

The Charter that emerged went further than the corporation had asked. It moved the appointment of Governors from ministerial advice to a cross-party parliamentary committee, separated editorial authority from the chief executive by creating the office of Editor-in-Chief and writing its independence into the Charter’s text, so that it could not be varied by administrative arrangement, and required that any future proposal to alter the editorial provisions be published in draft not less than twelve months before a renewal. The last of those is the reason no subsequent ministry has attempted anything similar: the attempt would have to be made in public, a year in advance, which is the same as not making it.

The Realm’s constitutional writing treats 1974 as a case about the Charter and the ABC’s own historians treat it as a case about the Crown. The corporation survived because a Charter is not a statute and could not simply be replaced by a majority; because the Crown’s instrument was not the ministry’s to redraft at will; and because the mechanism by which the attempt was defeated was publication rather than litigation. No court was involved at any stage. The corporation’s whole defence was that it possessed a transmitter and the ministry’s proposals could not survive being read aloud on it.

The episode is taught in the Realm’s law faculties alongside the reserve-power cases, and it is taught with a caution attached. The ABC won because the ministry was already failing, because the draft was indefensible on its face, and because a Director-General was willing to stake the corporation’s existence on a judgement that could have been wrong. None of those is a structural protection. The Charter provisions that followed are, and they were obtained in the one week of the century when the corporation had the leverage to obtain them.

May Day and after

The corporation’s conduct on 1 May 2006 is the subject of its own article and is the modern foundation of its standing. The ABC broadcast continuously through the day of the bombings, corrected itself on air repeatedly and in terms, refused to transmit unverified casualty figures that every other outlet was carrying, and closed the day’s coverage with the silence that has become the Realm’s fixed observance.

The May Day silence is now written into the ceremonial calendar. During the final verse of Abide With Me at the annual observance the ABC transmits no commentary of any kind, carrying only silent images of Grand Central, the airport and the ferry terminal. The practice began as a decision taken in a control room by people who could not think of anything to say, and it was made permanent afterwards because nothing better was ever proposed.

What May Day did to the corporation’s standing was larger than any single decision taken on the day. The ABC emerged from it as the institution the Realm had used to find out whether the people it loved were alive, and the Realm’s regard for it since has been of a different order from the regard it holds for any other federal body. Successive ministries have understood this perfectly and have adjusted their Charter tactics accordingly, which is the chief reason the renewals of 2004 and 2019 contained no editorial demands at all.

The corporation’s own view of its conduct that day is notably unsentimental. Its internal review, published in 2007 in full and including the criticisms, found that it had been slow to correct one early error, that its early casualty language had been imprecise in a way that caused avoidable distress, and that its decision-making had depended on a small number of individuals being unusually good under pressure rather than on any system. The review’s principal recommendation was that the corporation should not rely on that happening again. The standing arrangements that followed, a designated senior editor with authority to halt any transmission, a rule against reporting a casualty figure sourced to anyone but the responsible authority, and a rehearsed protocol for continuous coverage, are the ABC’s answer and have been used four times since, twice for events that turned out not to warrant them.

The corporation also carries an obligation from that day that it did not have before. The Realm’s emergency communications now depend on the ABC in a way that is written into federal contingency planning rather than merely assumed: in a general failure of other systems the corporation’s transmitter network is the designated means of reaching the population, which is the practical reason no efficiency review has ever succeeded in getting the network sold.

The digital age

The audience the ABC was built to gather no longer assembles. The corporation’s own research puts the last year in which a majority of the Realm watched the same thing on the same evening somewhere in the 1990s, and its viewers are now materially older than the population, a gap that has widened in every measurement since 2010.

The corporation’s response has been to build its own streaming service, to make its archive available, to commission for platforms it does not control, and to argue at each renewal that its remit should be measured by reach rather than by share.

The streaming service is free at the point of use, carries no advertising and requires no subscription, which follows necessarily from the funding settlement and which the commercial sector regards as the most serious distortion in the market. It is the corporation’s most-used product by a wide margin and its most expensive per hour of content, and its economics are the reverse of broadcasting’s: a transmitter costs the same whether one person or ten million are listening, and a stream costs more the more people take it. The ABC’s cost base now grows with its success, which is a position the Charter’s drafters never contemplated and which the corporation has raised at every renewal since 2004 without result. Its critics reply that a broadcaster funded to gather the Realm cannot claim success on the basis of having been available to it. Both propositions are defensible and the argument is not resolved.

The corporation’s practical difficulty is that its statutory identity and its actual behaviour have come apart. The Charter describes a broadcaster with a transmission network and a schedule. The institution now spends a growing share of its budget making things that are never broadcast at a fixed time to anyone, distributed by systems it does not own, to an audience it cannot count in the way its obligations are written to be counted. Its regional services reach more people than they ever did and fewer of them at once. Its news is read far more often than it is watched.

Nobody has yet drafted a Charter for that institution, and the 2034 renewal will be the first at which somebody must try. The corporation’s own submission, published early and in draft in accordance with the 1974 rule, proposes that the reach obligation be restated in terms of availability rather than transmission and that the ceremonial and emergency duties be left untouched. The commercial networks have opposed it, the Broadcasting Commission has not taken a position, and the parties have said nothing.

News and current affairs

The newsroom

News is the corporation’s largest single operation and the one on which its Charter case rests. It maintains bureaux in every polity, a foreign service that reports from abroad without broadcasting to it, and a rolling channel that exists chiefly so that it can be there when something happens.

Its editorial method is unusual in two respects. It attributes rather than asserts, so that a viewer is told what a source has said and who the source is, and it corrects on air rather than in a note, at the same length and in the same programme as the original error. Both practices are slow, both are unpopular with reporters, and both are the reason the corporation’s news is trusted by a margin the commercial networks have never closed.

The newsroom is also structurally unusual. Its correspondents are the corporation’s own employees rather than contracted freelances, a rule dating from Linden which costs a great deal and means that a reporter cannot be dropped for filing something inconvenient. And its editorial chain terminates in a single person: the Editor-in-Chief carries final responsibility, there is no committee behind which a decision can be hidden, and there is no chief executive who can be leaned on instead. Its foreign service reports from abroad without broadcasting to it, so its correspondents work without the diplomatic standing that an external service confers and without the suspicion that attaches to it. The corporation maintains permanent bureaux in Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Peking, Delhi and Mexico City, covers London through the British Broadcasting Corporation under the exchange arrangement, and has for most of its history been the Realm’s principal source of independent reporting from the Russian Republic, a posting its correspondents describe as the hardest the corporation offers and one it has never left unfilled. For fifty years every report from Moscow ended by saying that it had been read by the Russian authorities before broadcast, and on the night of President Yermolov’s decree, 23 to 24 October 2028, when the reading officer did not come in, the correspondent told the audience on air that she would not say it, because it was no longer true (Russia’s Two Days).

ABC World News

ABC World News is the corporation’s international news channel, launched in 1957 as a nightly bulletin on the national network and carried abroad as a continuous channel since 1991. It is distributed in most of the world, is the ABC’s only outward-facing operation, and is the exception that proves the corporation’s rule about external broadcasting rather than a breach of it.

The distinction on which it rests is the one the corporation has drawn since 1927 and states at every renewal. The ABC has no World Service and World News is not one. A World Service, in the sense the corporation refuses, is an outward broadcast funded by the government of the day, and the objection to it has never been about reaching foreign audiences but about who pays for the reaching. Money voted by a ministry to broadcast abroad gives that ministry a legitimate interest in what is broadcast abroad, and a corporation that accepts the interest in one direction cannot credibly refuse it in the other.

World News therefore takes no public money at all. It is operated through a commercial subsidiary, funded by carriage fees paid by foreign distributors and by advertising carried outside the Realm, and it is ring-fenced in both directions: not a penny of the endowment or the parliamentary grant reaches it, and its revenues are not counted on to support the domestic service. Viewers inside the Realm see no advertising on it, because the domestic feed carries none, and the channel’s accounts are published separately for exactly that reason.

Editorially it is not separate at all. World News is part of the news division, works to the same guidelines, is fed by the same bureaux in Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Peking, Delhi and Mexico City, and by the British Broadcasting Corporation in London, where the ABC keeps no bureau because the exchange arrangement lets it draw on the BBC’s correspondents, and answers to the same Editor-in-Chief. A correspondent files once and the material runs on both, which is the arrangement’s whole economic logic and also its editorial safeguard: a channel that made separate journalism for foreigners would very quickly be making different journalism for foreigners.

Its method is the newsroom’s, applied to material the audience cannot check. It attributes rather than asserts, it distinguishes on air between what a correspondent has seen, what a correspondent has been told and what a government has claimed, and it states plainly when it is reporting from a country in which it is not free to report. That last practice, adopted in the 1970s, requires the programme to say so at the head of an item rather than in a caption, and it is the reason the corporation’s coverage of the Russian Republic is trusted well beyond what its access would justify.

The channel is banned outright in four countries and restricted in a dozen more, which the corporation reports annually and treats as a performance measure rather than a problem.

Complaints and correction

The corporation operates a published complaints procedure that ends, if a complainant persists, in a finding by a committee of the Court of Governors which is published in full whether or not it favours the corporation.

The procedure is slow and its findings are unenforceable, in the sense that no external body can compel the ABC to do anything. What makes it work is that the findings are published and the corporation broadcasts the ones that go against it. The convention that a serious upheld complaint is read on air, in the programme complained of and at comparable length, was established in the 1960s and is the mechanism by which the ABC’s impartiality obligation is actually enforced. It is enforced, in the end, by embarrassment, which the corporation’s critics regard as an inadequate safeguard and its defenders regard as the only kind that has ever worked on a broadcaster.

Election nights

The ABC’s election coverage is a national institution in its own right. It begins with the national anthem, runs unbroken until the result is beyond argument, and is built around a forecast the corporation publishes at the close of poll and then defends or retracts in public for as long as it takes.

The forecast has been wrong twice. On both occasions the corporation broadcast an account of why, in a programme of its own, within the month.

The mixed-member count makes the coverage harder than it looks. A constituency result is a fact and can be reported; a polity’s top-up allocation is an arithmetical consequence of every constituency in that polity and cannot be known until the last of them is declared, so the ABC spends much of an election night explaining that a party’s seat total is not yet a number. The corporation’s practice is to report constituencies as they fall and to withhold the top-ups entirely until a polity is complete, which is slower than the commercial networks and has twice left the ABC an hour behind on the overall figure and correct when the others were not.

Election night is also the corporation’s largest single ceremonial event that nobody classes as one. It opens with the anthem, it is presented from a set built for the purpose and used once every few years, and it is watched by people who do not otherwise watch the ABC at all.

The record

The moments on which the news division’s reputation rests are not, on the whole, its scoops. They are the occasions on which it declined to broadcast something: the casualty figures it would not carry on May Day, the invasion date it knew and did not report in 1944, the name of a suspect it withheld through a week of national fury in 1998 and which proved to be the wrong name; and, on the night of 25 September 2028, the King’s presence aboard the missing royal flight, which it withheld for sixty-nine minutes after every other national broadcaster had reported it, until Government House confirmed it (The Search for the King).

The corporation’s own official history observes that an institution is remembered for what it says and trusted for what it does not, and that the two lists have almost nothing in common.

The record is not clean and the ABC does not present it as such. It was slow on the civil rights enforcement of the 1950s and 1960s, treating a moral question as a balanced one for longer than it should have, and its own retrospective review said so in 1998, finding that the corporation had applied a duty of balance to a question on which the Realm’s own courts had already ruled, and had thereby treated the enforcement of the American Rights Act as a controversy rather than as law. It carried government briefings during the Cuban crisis that it had not independently verified. Its coverage of the Realm’s Indigenous nations was, until the 1970s, conducted almost entirely without Indigenous journalists, and the corporation’s Native-language services were for two decades staffed by translators rather than by reporters, which the services themselves regarded as the difference between being spoken to and being covered.

The networks

The national network

The national network carries the news, the ceremonial broadcasts, the principal drama and the sport, and it is the tier that the phrase “the ABC” usually means. It is broadcast identically across the Realm and is the thing the corporation exists to be: the one service that every citizen receives in the same form at the same moment.

The regional services

Beneath it sits a regional tier in every polity, which is the part of the corporation that the polities themselves care most about and the part that is cut first whenever the grant is squeezed.

Each polity’s service carries its own news, its own current affairs, coverage of its own legislature, and the local material that a national network cannot carry and a commercial licensee will not: agricultural prices, road and river conditions, court lists, school closures, and the proceedings of bodies that only a few thousand people follow and that those few thousand people must be able to follow. The regional newsrooms are also the corporation’s recruiting ground, and the present Director-General came from them.

The character of the tier varies with the polity. In the Grand Duchies the regional service carries the ceremonial life of a reigning house as well as the business of an elected ministry, and ABC Michigan’s coverage of the Summer Audience season from Mackinac Island is the closest the corporation comes to a court circular. In Nebraska, where there are no parties at polity level, the service has had to invent a way of covering a legislature in which every member is an individual and no whip exists, and its solution, a nightly account of who moved what and why, is the most detailed legislative reporting anywhere in the Realm. In Louisiane the regional service operates in a polity whose government speaks one language and legislates in another, which it manages by broadcasting proceedings in the language they were conducted in and explaining them in the language the audience thinks in.

The regional services also carry the corporation’s largest political vulnerability. They are the most expensive part of the operation per head of audience after the language services, they are invisible to the metropolitan press, and they are the first thing proposed for reduction whenever the grant is squeezed. Every reduction is opposed by the polity affected, in terms that make the point the corporation cannot make for itself: that a polity whose legislature is not covered is a polity whose legislature is not watched.

The services

Every polity has a service and every service carries the corporation’s name followed by the polity’s, in the form ABC Arizona, ABC Arkansas, ABC Massachusetts Bay. The convention is rigid and was settled early, on the reasoning that a listener should be able to name the service without being told it and that no polity should have to accept a regional label invented for administrative convenience.

The name follows the polity rather than the geography, which produces a few results that surprise visitors. The March of Arizona’s service is ABC Arizona and not ABC Southwest, though the March runs from the Imperial Valley to the Llano and takes in the Las Vegas Basin and El Paso. The Grand Duchy of Michigan’s is ABC Michigan, and it broadcasts to Toledo. The Lower Counties on the Delaware are served by ABC Lower Counties, which is what the polity is called and which nobody outside it has ever found natural.

Fifty-one services operate. Forty-nine serve the constituent polities, one serves the federal capital district, and one serves the Territory of Loreto.

ABC Loreto is the newest and the only bilingual polity service, broadcasting in Spanish and English as the Territory’s administration is conducted in both, and it is the only service established since 1954. Its position is awkward in the way everything about Loreto is awkward: the Charter’s obligation runs to the polities of the Realm, the Territory is not one, and the service accordingly operates under a direction of the Court of Governors rather than under the Charter itself, renewed annually, pending the settlement of the Territory’s status.

ABC Philipsburg is the smallest service in the corporation by a wide margin, serving a single chartered city that returns no members to the Commons, and it exists because the Charter’s obligation is to the polities and Philipsburg is one, whatever its parliamentary arrangements. The corporation has twice proposed folding it into a neighbouring service and has twice been refused, on the Free City’s argument that a polity which gave up its members of Parliament for its autonomy did not give up its right to hear itself.

ABC Columbia District is the odd one. The corporation’s whole national operation is in New Westminster, so the District is the one place where the regional service and the network share a building and a staff, and the service exists to do the thing the national network cannot, which is to cover the District as a place its residents live in rather than as the seat of the Realm’s government. Its audience regards it as chronically overshadowed and is correct.

The minority-language services

Beneath the regional tier sits the part of the corporation of which it is proudest and which no commercial broadcaster would ever have built.

ABC Wisconsindeutsch broadcasts to the German-speaking country of the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin. Its most-attended programming is not drama or music but the weather, the road closures and the plough report, delivered in a dialect that survives on utility rather than on nostalgia, and the service’s own view is that this is the point: a language stays alive by being used for things that matter that day.

ABC Louisianais broadcasts in the native French of Louisiane, and it occupies a position within that polity’s unresolved argument about its own language that the corporation has never been comfortable in. The service broadcasts in the heartland spoken form. It does not attempt the legal French of the Grand Duchy’s statute book, and it is criticised from one direction for that and from the other for broadcasting at all in a form with no settled orthography.

Native-language services carry news, weather and emergency bulletins in Iñupiaq, Yup’ik, Diné and a dozen further languages to the Kingdom of Alaska, the Navajo Republic and the treaty nations of the interior. These services are the corporation’s most expensive per listener by a wide margin, they are the first thing every efficiency review identifies, and they have survived every review, on a principle the ABC has defended since Linden: a citizen is entitled to hear the Realm speak to him in the language he thinks in, and a broadcaster that gathers only the speakers of the majority language is not gathering the Union but only the majority, and calling it the whole.

The services are not identical in kind and the corporation has learned not to treat them so. Wisconsindeutsch serves a community that is large, settled, prosperous and in no danger, and its service is accordingly a convenience and a courtesy. The Native-language services serve communities in which the language is under real pressure and in which the ABC’s broadcasts are, in several cases, among the largest bodies of recorded speech in the language that exists. The corporation’s language staff regard the second kind of service as documentary work as much as broadcasting, and the material feeds directly into the Regional collection of the Archive.

The corporation’s practice since the 1970s has been to staff each service from the community it serves rather than to translate centrally, a change forced on it by the services themselves and resisted for two decades on cost. The difference it made is the difference between a bulletin about a community and a bulletin from one, and the ABC now describes the earlier arrangement as the clearest failure of its language policy.

The language services are named for the language rather than for the polity, which distinguishes them at a glance from the regional tier:

A further set of smaller services, several broadcasting for less than an hour a day, operates in languages with a few thousand speakers or fewer. The corporation publishes their hours annually and does not publish their audiences, on the settled position that it does not hold the number and would not use it if it did.

The Navajo Republic is the only body outside the forty-nine polities with a service of its own. It has no seat in the Commons, sends no members, and is represented federally through the March, and it is nonetheless served directly rather than through ABC Arizona, an arrangement made in 1971 at the request of the Navajo, four years before they constituted the Republic, and one the corporation regards as the correct treatment of a treaty nation rather than as an exception to anything.

The services are also, in practice, emergency infrastructure. In much of Alaska and the interior nations the ABC’s transmitter is the only means by which a warning reaches a community at all, and the corporation’s obligation to maintain them is written into the Charter rather than left to its own discretion, on the insistence of the polities concerned at the renewal of 1989.

Programming

Drama

The corporation’s drama has been, for most of its life, the Realm’s most reliable producer of serious work for the screen, and its characteristic form is the serial adapted from a novel with more care than commercial economics permits. Its house style is deliberate, literary and slow, and it is regularly accused of being all three.

The corporation’s drama has also done a specific constitutional job that nothing else in the Realm does, which is to dramatise the Realm’s own history in a form people watch voluntarily. Its serials on the Four Year War, the rebellion of 1861 and the Kansas territorial collapse are how most citizens have encountered those events, and the corporation is correspondingly careful about them and correspondingly attacked whenever it is not. Its 1996 series on the loyal slaveholding polities produced formal complaints from three polity governments and a debate in the Commons, and the ABC broadcast the complaints, defended the series, and made a documentary about the argument.

The ABC also carries the obligation nobody else will take, which is drama from and about the polities that are not New York or California. The requirement to commission a fixed proportion outside the two metropolitan centres was added at the renewal of 2004 after sustained complaint from the interior, and the corporation now meets it, having spent a decade explaining why it could not.

The corporation’s most durable dramatic form is not the adaptation but the long-running series set in a single place, of which it has produced four since 1955, each running for decades and each set in a polity outside the metropolitan centres. They are not much exported and are not much respected by critics, and they are watched by more people than anything else the ABC makes. The corporation’s own view, stated at successive renewals, is that a Realm this large learns what its other parts are like chiefly through fiction, and that a serial set in a mill town does more gathering than a documentary about one.

Comedy

The corporation’s comedy has an uneasier history. Linden thought comedy beneath the institution, his successors thought it necessary, and the ABC has oscillated ever since between producing the Realm’s sharpest satire and apologising for it at Charter renewals. Its satirical programmes have been the subject of ministerial complaint in every decade since the 1960s, and the corporation’s practice is to defend them in public and review them in private, which satisfies nobody and has preserved them.

The satirical tradition dates from a late-night programme first broadcast in 1962 which treated ministers as fit subjects for ridicule rather than deference, and which produced the first serious ministerial demand for a Director-General’s resignation since Linden. The demand was refused, the programme ran for four years, and the convention it established, that the corporation’s comedy may be as rude about a government as that government’s own supporters are in private, has survived every subsequent complaint.

What the ABC has never solved is the regional problem in comedy. Its satire is written in New Westminster by people who live there, about a political culture most of the Realm experiences at a distance, and the corporation’s own audience research has said for forty years that its comedy plays best in the places that least need it explained.

Music

The ABC maintains orchestras, commissions new work, broadcasts the Realm’s principal concert seasons, and runs the popular music services that are its largest single audience among the young. The last of these is the most contested part of the corporation’s output, on the argument that a public broadcaster funded from the public purse should not be competing for an audience the commercial sector serves perfectly well.

The corporation’s answer has two parts and it makes them in a fixed order. The first is that its popular music services do things the commercial stations do not: they play new work by musicians nobody has heard of, they maintain regional music with no national market, and they record live sessions that become the only recording a particular group ever made. The second is that a public broadcaster which surrenders the young audience entirely will, within one generation, be an institution that nobody under fifty has any reason to defend at a Charter renewal. The second argument is the one the corporation believes and the first is the one it makes in public.

Sport

The corporation holds fewer sporting rights than it once did and has lost most bidding contests since the commercial networks were licensed. What it retains is the listed events: a schedule fixed by statute of occasions that must remain free to air and available to the whole Realm, which cannot be sold exclusively to a subscription service.

The list is short, it is fought over at every renewal, and the argument about it is the one place where the ABC’s case and the public’s instincts most clearly coincide. The corporation’s position is that an event which the Realm regards as belonging to it in common cannot be placed behind a payment, and that the test of whether an event is such an occasion is whether people who do not follow the sport nevertheless watch it.

The list presently comprises the national championship finals of the Realm’s principal sports, the international fixtures in which a national side represents the Realm, and the Crown’s own sporting occasions. It has been extended once, in 2004, and the corporation has failed to extend it three times since.

The losses matter more than the corporation admits. Sport was for fifty years the thing that assembled an audience which then stayed for the news, and the ABC’s loss of most of it to the Continental Network in the 1990s removed the largest single reason for a household to be watching the ABC at all on a Saturday. Several of the corporation’s difficulties with the young audience date precisely from there, and its own strategists say so internally without saying so at renewals.

Children’s and educational broadcasting

The corporation has broadcast for children since 1932 and for schools since 1935, and both obligations are written into the Charter.

Schools broadcasting was for two generations a genuine part of the Realm’s educational infrastructure. Its programmes were timetabled into the school day, its printed materials were distributed to every district that asked, and in the rural polities, where a small school might have one teacher across eight years of pupils, the ABC’s schools service was in practice a second teacher. The polities’ education departments and the corporation negotiate the curriculum coverage jointly, and the arrangement is one of the few in which a federal institution and forty-nine polity governments have cooperated for ninety years without a serious quarrel.

Children’s programming is the corporation’s other unambiguous success and its most politically protected activity. The ABC’s children’s output carries no advertising, which is not a policy but a consequence of the funding settlement, and the Realm’s parents have defended it at every renewal with a vigour that has surprised successive ministries. A proposal in 2004 to reduce the children’s budget was withdrawn within eleven days.

The National Music Archive

The ABC keeps the National Music Archive, the Realm’s principal collection of recorded music and spoken sound, running to more than forty thousand recordings.

Its holdings are organised in five collections. The Royal collection holds the ceremonial music of the Crown and the recordings of state occasions. The Military collection holds the marches, the regimental music and the recorded sound of the Realm’s armies. The Memorial collection holds the music of mourning and the recordings of the Realm’s observances, including the May Day material. The Parliamentary collection holds the sound of the Commons and the Lords, complete since 1978 and partial before it. And the Regional collection, much the largest and much the least catalogued, holds the field recordings the corporation’s regional services have been making since the 1930s: ballads, work songs, dialect speech, church music, and a very large quantity of material recorded from people who are now dead in languages that now have fewer speakers.

The Regional collection is the one scholars care about and the one the corporation can least afford to maintain. Its digitisation has been under way since 2003 and is not half finished.

The Archive’s legal position is unusual and awkward. The corporation holds the recordings but does not in every case hold the rights to them, and a great deal of the Regional collection was recorded from people who consented to a broadcast and not to a permanent public archive. The ABC’s practice since 2011 has been to seek the consent of communities rather than of individuals where the individuals are dead, to withdraw material on request without argument, and to publish a register of what has been withdrawn and why. Several nations have asked for material to be restricted to their own use, and the corporation has agreed in every case, which is a settled position that took twenty years and one public quarrel to arrive at.

Ceremonial broadcasting

The ABC holds the Realm’s ceremonial calendar, and the obligation is written into the Charter rather than negotiated.

It carries the sovereign’s broadcasts, the state opening of Parliament, Charter Day, the Realm’s observances of remembrance, and the occasions of accession, marriage and death.

The sovereign’s broadcasts are the oldest of these and the most carefully bounded. The King’s address is delivered on fixed occasions, is written by the sovereign’s household and not by the corporation, and is transmitted without comment before or after. The ABC does not preview it, does not brief on its contents, and does not analyse it until the following day, a self-denying practice adopted in the 1950s after a Director-General concluded that a broadcaster which frames the Crown’s words is a broadcaster interposing itself between the sovereign and the Realm. Commercial networks may take the feed and most do.

The corporation’s ceremonial obligation also extends to the polities. It carries the openings of polity legislatures, the accessions of the reigning houses of the Grand Duchies and Kingdoms, and the installation of Governors and Lord Lieutenants, in each case on the regional service of the polity concerned and on the national network only where the occasion is of Realm-wide significance. Judging which occasions those are is a permanent minor grievance and the corporation has never got it right to everyone’s satisfaction. It carried the Crown into the broadcast age: Ernest IV is remembered as the Broadcast Sovereign because his voice was the first that the Realm as a whole heard regularly and knew, and the relationship between the monarchy and the corporation dates from that.

The corporation’s ceremonial practice is governed by a single rule, arrived at by long habit rather than by instruction: the ABC does not narrate what the pictures can carry. It is the reason for the May Day silence, it is the reason its funeral coverage is largely wordless, and it is the most widely imitated thing the corporation does.

The ceremonial obligation is also the corporation’s most delicate editorial position, because a broadcaster contracted to transmit the Crown’s occasions is a broadcaster that appears, for the duration, to be speaking for them. The ABC’s answer is a strict separation: its ceremonial unit is not part of the news division, its commentary on state occasions is written by people who do not report on politics, and its news division covers the same occasions separately and is free to be critical about them. The arrangement is invisible to viewers and is the reason the corporation can broadcast an accession in the morning and a report on the cost of it in the evening without either being compromised.

The commercial sector

Two national commercial networks operate under licence from the Broadcasting Commission, which is independent of both the ministry and the ABC and which sets and enforces the conditions of licence.

The Continental Network, licensed in 1959, is the Realm’s most-watched broadcaster by a considerable margin and takes the greater part of the advertising market. Its entertainment output is what most of the Realm watches most evenings, its sport is extensive and expensive, and its news division is competent and conventional.

Meridian, licensed in 1966 on a regional franchise model, is smaller, and its regional documentary and current affairs work has repeatedly been better than anything the ABC produced in the same period. It is chronically under-financed and has been in and out of ownership disputes since the 1990s.

Both are bound by the licence conditions of the 1959 settlement: a minimum of news, a minimum of regional production, and the listed events. The commercial networks’ standing complaint is that they are required to carry public obligations while competing against an institution that is paid to carry them. The ABC’s standing reply is that the licence to broadcast to the Realm was never offered on any other terms and that both networks bid for it knowing exactly what it cost.

Beneath the two networks sits a large polity-licensed and municipal sector: local commercial radio in every city of any size, community stations, religious broadcasters, and the university stations that are the last survivors of the pre-1927 scramble and that the Charter deliberately exempted rather than absorbed. The Broadcasting Commission licenses these on lighter terms, and the sector is where most of the Realm’s broadcasters actually learn their trade.

Subscription and streaming services are outside the licensing system entirely, which is the largest unresolved question in the Realm’s broadcasting policy. They carry no news obligation, no regional obligation and no listed events, they compete for the same audience and the same production capacity, and the Broadcasting Commission’s jurisdiction over them is contested and thin. Every party’s position on the matter is under review and none has published one.

The corporation as employer

The ABC employs some tens of thousands of people, is among the largest single employers in the Columbia District, and maintains production centres in every polity, which makes it one of the few federal institutions whose physical presence is felt everywhere.

Its staff are not civil servants and its employment is not Crown service, a distinction insisted upon at the founding and defended since, because staff who could be moved or disciplined through the machinery of government would be staff a government could reach. Its unions are strong, its industrial relations have been poor in roughly every third decade, and the strike of 1981, which took the corporation off the air for nine days including a state occasion, remains the most serious interruption in its history.

The internal rule barring party membership for news staff, which Linden imposed and which has never been relaxed, is the corporation’s most contested employment practice. It has been challenged as an interference with the ordinary political rights of citizens, defended as the price of the newsroom’s standing, and upheld in the courts twice, most recently in 1996, on the ground that the restriction is proportionate to a genuine occupational requirement and that nobody is obliged to work for the ABC.

The ABC and the sister realms

The corporation maintains no World Service. It operates no government-funded outward broadcast and no foreign-language service directed abroad, and the Charter has never authorised one. Its single outward operation is ABC World News, which is commercially funded, takes no public money, and is dealt with above.

The absence is deliberate and was argued at the founding. An external service is an instrument of foreign policy, whatever else it is, and an instrument of foreign policy is a thing a ministry has a legitimate interest in directing. Linden’s position, which the Realm accepted, was that a corporation which broadcast on the government’s behalf abroad could not credibly refuse the government’s direction at home, and that the ABC’s independence was worth more than the influence it was giving up. The position has been reviewed at three renewals and reaffirmed each time, most recently in 2004, when the ministry of the day proposed a publicly funded external service and the Court of Governors declined to seek the power. The Court’s minute on that occasion is the clearest statement of the distinction the corporation lives by: that it is content to be watched abroad and unwilling to be funded to be watched abroad, and that the difference between those two is the whole of its independence.

Beyond the channel, the corporation’s foreign reporting is also made available to broadcasters abroad under exchange arrangements, on the same terms to everyone and with no editorial condition attached.

The corporation’s relations with the other Crown broadcasters are correspondingly informal and close. The ABC and the British Broadcasting Corporation are the two chartered broadcasters of the shared Crown’s senior realms, and they exchange material, share coverage of occasions involving both, and maintain a standing arrangement under which either may draw on the other’s correspondents. The relationship is warm at the working level and competitive at the top, each corporation privately regarding itself as the better one. The British corporation keeps Broadcasting House in London and the American keeps Continental House in New Westminster, and the separateness of the names was insisted upon in 1927 precisely so that the two would never be mistaken for a single institution.

Continental House

The corporation’s seat is Continental House in New Westminster, built between 1931 and 1935 and occupied ever since.

It was designed as a broadcasting building rather than adapted into one, which was unusual at the time, and its plan expresses Linden’s understanding of the institution with some precision: studios at the centre, insulated from the street; the newsroom on the ground floor with its own entrance, so that reporters could come and go without passing through the administration; and the Director-General’s office on the same floor as the newsroom rather than above it. The building carries the corporation’s motto over its door and nothing else, no royal arms and no ministerial crest, which was a deliberate choice and was noticed at the time.

The name was chosen in preference to Broadcasting House, which was already the British corporation’s, and the choice was made on Linden’s insistence that the two Crown broadcasters should never be mistaken for one another or thought of as branches of a single thing.

The corporation has outgrown the building several times and has never left it. Production moved out to a larger site in the 1960s, the regional operation was always elsewhere, and the digital operation occupies a converted warehouse two miles away. What remains at Continental House is the newsroom, the ceremonial unit, the Archive’s reading room and the Director-General, which is roughly the set of things the corporation regards as itself.

The corporation and the polities

The ABC is a federal institution operating in a Realm where almost everything else is a polity matter, and the position is more delicate than it appears.

Broadcasting is a federal competence, on the reasoning that a signal does not stop at a boundary, and the corporation’s national network accordingly operates without reference to polity governments. Its regional services do not. Each is negotiated in practice with the polity it serves, on matters ranging from the coverage of a legislature to the language of a bulletin to the location of a studio, and a polity government that is unhappy with its service has a range of informal remedies and one formal one, which is to complain at a Charter renewal in company with others.

The polities have used the formal remedy twice to real effect: in 1989 to entrench the minority-language services, and in 2004 to force the non-metropolitan commissioning requirement. Both were coalitions of small polities against a corporation and a ministry that had each assumed the small polities would not organise. The ABC’s institutional memory of those two renewals is sharper than its memory of any confrontation with a government, because a ministry can only be endured for a term and a polity is there permanently.

Criticism

The criticisms of the ABC are long-standing, largely unanswered, and made most sharply by people who would not abolish it.

It is metropolitan. The corporation’s senior staff are drawn overwhelmingly from a small number of universities and live overwhelmingly in one district of one city, and its coverage of the interior has been the subject of complaint, inquiry and formal undertaking for sixty years. The 2004 commissioning requirement was imposed because the corporation had not fixed the problem voluntarily.

Its impartiality is a procedure rather than a state. The ABC achieves balance by giving contending positions comparable time, which works when a question has two defensible sides and fails when it has one, and the corporation has been criticised in both directions and in the same decade for the same practice.

It is protected from the market it claims to be better than. The commercial networks’ complaint is real: the ABC’s grant is insulated by the 1959 settlement from the consequences of losing viewers, so the corporation can be unpopular indefinitely without penalty. Its defenders answer that this is precisely the arrangement’s purpose, which is true and is not a rebuttal.

Its accountability runs to the wrong people. The corporation answers to a Court of Governors appointed through Parliament and to Parliament at renewal, which means it answers to politicians for its treatment of politicians. There is no mechanism by which a viewer who is not a complainant, a member or a governor has any purchase on it at all. The corporation’s defence is that every alternative proposed would be worse, which is probably true and is not an answer to the objection.

It is accused of both timidity and arrogance, often by the same people. The corporation’s caution about being seen to take sides produces coverage that critics on every side describe as evasive, and its confidence in its own standards produces an institutional manner that even its defenders find insufferable. The ABC’s own former Directors-General have written about this more honestly than anyone outside it, and none has proposed a remedy.

And its independence is only as strong as the next settlement. The 1974 Charter protects the corporation against a ministry that moves openly. It protects it not at all against a ministry that simply declines, year upon year, to increase a grant in line with costs. Every Director-General since 1974 has said so; none has found an answer.

Assessment

The ABC was built for a problem that has changed shape rather than gone away.

The Realm chartered it in 1927 because a federation strung across a continent had no other instrument capable of addressing all of its people at once, and for fifty years the corporation was that instrument in the simplest sense: a single audience, assembled nightly, in a room the whole argumentative family stood in together. That audience no longer exists and will not be reassembled. The corporation’s own figures say so.

What survives is narrower and is not nothing. The ABC remains the place the Realm goes when something has happened that everyone must know at once, and the trust that makes it so was built by a series of decisions to say less than it could: the casualty figures withheld, the name not broadcast, the correction made at length on air. It remains the only broadcaster that speaks to the Realm’s peoples in their own languages, at a cost no market would bear and that no efficiency review has yet managed to end. And it remains, in the arrangement of 1974, the clearest demonstration in the Realm’s institutional life that a body chartered by the Crown can refuse the Crown’s ministers and survive.

There is a further reading of the corporation’s history that its own officials make privately and its critics make loudly, and the article records it because the record supports it. The ABC has been at its best when it was refusing something and at its worst when it was comfortable. Linden’s refusals, the 1942 broadcasts, the 1974 publication and the May Day silence are the corporation at full stretch, and each was a decision to do less than it was being asked to do. Its failures, by contrast, are almost all failures of complacency: the slowness on civil rights, the monopolist’s conduct in 1959, the thirty years of promising to commission outside the metropolitan centres and not doing it, the two decades of broadcasting to Indigenous communities in translation rather than employing them. An institution whose virtues are exercised under pressure has a structural problem when the pressure is removed, and the ministries of the last twenty years have removed it, not by attacking the corporation but by leaving it alone and underfunding it.

Its position is nonetheless weaker than at any point since its foundation, and the reason is the one its own officials name. The corporation is protected against the government that attacks it and exposed to the government that merely economises, and no Charter has yet been drafted that can tell the difference.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• ABC Reports: the May Day Broadcast: the corporation’s coverage of 1 May 2006, in transcript
• ABC Reports: the Abdication of the Grand Duchess of Wisconsin: two reports filed
• The Search for the King: the corporation’s coverage of the loss of Kittyhawk and the rescue of the King, September 2028, in transcript, with its report of the rescue
• Russia’s Two Days: the corporation’s coverage of 23 to 25 October 2028, from Yermolov’s decree to the Emperor, in transcript, with its report, and the night the Moscow bureau stopped saying its reports had been read
• National and Patriotic Music: the repertory the National Music Archive holds
• National Anthems: the ceremonial order the corporation broadcasts
• Wisconsindeutsch and Louisianais: two of the languages the corporation broadcasts in
• Parliament of the United Kingdom of America: which votes the grant and renews the Charter
• Institutions and Government

Categories

Institutions · Broadcasting · Media · Crown Institutions · Public Corporations · Culture