Tech giants must be pursued for a share of their substantial revenue to fund journalism to fight misinformation and “navigate the dangerous world”, ABC chairman Kim Williams has said.
Last week, a parliamentary committee recommended that the government impose a technology tax on companies such as Meta and Google, as well as establish a fund to help traditional media outlets.
Williams, who replaced Ita Buttrose as president in March, said that with Facebook and Meta taking in 70% of digital advertising revenue, pressuring them to cut is a “dominant democratic imperative.”
“I urge all parties to continue pursuing the digital titans to get a fair share of the revenue drained from mainstream journalism, the loss of which hurts regions even more than cities,” Williams said in his speech. Menzies Prayer in Ballarat on Wednesday night.
Funding locorregional news and public interest journalism was essential in a world “where the misuse of information and the distortion of culture pose such a serious threat to democracy,” Williams said.
“The tech giants will complain, of course, but contributing to the common good is a small price to pay for the highly profitable privilege of running media organizations in free and democratic countries with modern infrastructure.
“Without truth there can be no democracy.”
Like most big media companies, ABC received money from Meta and Google through the news media bargaining code that allowed the broadcaster to hire 60 journalists in regional centres.
Facebook has announced that it will no longer make payments under the code, but Williams has guaranteed that those positions will remain.
Williams said the ABC lacked the resources of CNN or the BBC but had to set the standard for broadcast quality, journalistic ethics and objective news.
The government allocation for the ABC was $941.3 million in the 2023-24 financial year, according to the annual report tabled in parliament on Tuesday.
The corporation received an additional $196.3 million for transmission and distribution.
Williams called again for better funding of the ABC to “combat the organized lying of the enemies of democracy”.
He said the ABC, like all media organisations, was not perfect but should strive for “the tenacious pursuit of truth” and always control its biases.
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The public broadcaster cannot be “left” or “right”, but must focus on quality, creativity and truth, he stated.
“I do not hold the fashionable position that bias is acceptable and inescapable and that journalists have the right to express their personal political beliefs and pursue their personal political causes in their work as objective journalists,” he said.
“That 'alternative' vision may seem progressive or liberating, but, as I have argued, it is ultimately detrimental to our freedom.”
Williams, former chief executive of Information Corp Australia, acknowledged the ABC had critics without naming them.
In August he told Guardian Australia that Information Corp's obsession with the public broadcaster was “unbalanced and at times finta unhinged”.
He said ABC's critics tended to be right-wing and he took them “very seriously.”
Williams said he could not ignore the reality that a significant number of those in power “think something is wrong” with the public broadcaster.
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