The Importance of Trust for Public Broadcasters

Brisbane.
We're now in the final session of ANZCA 2009, which starts with a paper by Mary Debrett. Her interest is in the politics of accountability and risk-taking at the ABC, and she begins with some reflections on the social value of trust - it serves as social glue, generates social capital, manages social complexity, acts as a solution for risk, and is a prerequisite for forming self-identity. Trust and authority are constantly being raised, invoking active trust in which trust is always contingent.

Trust is an especially important point of difference for public service broadcasters , of course - they need to be seen as independent from vested interests, as delivering fair and independent news, reflecting national culture and identity, serving diversity through representing minority voices, and adressing audences not served by commercial media. Public broadcasters position themselves as trusted brands in the media landscape.

However, online media are implicated in the crisis of trust - media serve citizenship and enable the public to talk back to government, but that role is under threat in the crisis of journalism that is driven by a conglomeration in media ownership, a non-accountable online media, and the rise of PR and media management. Against this, citizen media is similarly problematic as a dominant media and journalism model. Public service broadcasters are not immune from this (as is evident for example in the context of the BBC's implication in the Hutton scandal a few years back).

Responding to persistent accusations of leftist bias from the conservative side of Australian politics, the ABC has instituted internal mechanisms for combatting internal bias, but this has resulted in what some have described as a careful blandness in its reporting and has damaged the quality of its news coverage. It has also had an effect on its programme commissioning practices well beyond the area of news and current affairs. And of course it also affects its status as a trusted institution.

The role of ABC Online needs to be examined in this context. Online media contain a number of anomalies for public service broadcasters, too - online spaces carry a different level of trust from broadcast services, and user involvement and linking to external sources is more easily possible, placing these sites in a very different context. The ABC has recently clarified its moderation practices through newly launched guidelines, a first step to developing its approaches to such spaces. Commissioning content in concert with commercial partners is also problematic here.

The ABC needs to retain its institutional scale to maintain its independence from government, then; it needs to retain its connection to the independent sector for diversity; it needs to build its interactive relationship with the public online, for accountability; and it needs to promote transparent moderation of different audience interactions online.

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