"Sometimes you get big news stories like some of the stories we've covered in the last year - that puts your costs under pressure and costs need to be brought back in."

Liberal Senator Eric Abetz quizzed Mr Scott over allegations of bias in the ABC's reporting of the debate over marriage laws.

Senator Abetz suggested ABC television news gave disproportionate coverage to a small same-sex marriage rally compared with a much larger event that was held in favour of maintaining the traditional definition of marriage.

He also raised concern about an episode of ABC TV's Compass program that dealt with the issue.

Mr Scott acknowledged the Senator's concerns, but said the ABC does not take sides.

"The ABC doesn't have a point of view, Senator," he said.

"I didn't see the program and I can't speak in any great detail on it.

"But I would suggest... the critical test is - are the arguments coming through in that conversation?"

Mr Scott also defended the ABC's decision to televise a satirical program about the Prime Minister.

The series, At Home With Julia, prompted strong criticism from some Federal MPs.

One episode showed actors playing Julia Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson naked, and draped in the Australian flag, on the floor of the PM's office.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-18/abc-defends-budget-cuts2c-gay-marriage-coverage/3577786

 

Of course, none of these senators (Abetz and Xenophon) are members of the government but they are part of the government's inquiry panel into the yearly funding of the ABC...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-20/clarke-and-dawe-on-the-economy/3581974

The Federal Government has terminated the tender process for the Australia Network.

The ABC currently holds the contract but is competing with Sky News to retain it.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the Government has received legal advice that significant leaks have compromised the process.

The Government has granted the ABC a six-month extension to the contract while the Government resolves the issue.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-07/australia-network-story5c/3650798?WT.svl=news0

When reviewing The Iron Lady on ABC 1's At the Movies earlier in December, Margaret Pomeranz also felt the need to declare that "most of us" thought that Thatcher's decision, when prime minister, to change Britain "wasn't a good idea at the time". David Stratton, the co-presenter of At the Movies, concurred. It was another example of an ABC program in which everyone agreed with everyone else, in a fashionable leftist sort of way.

The likes of Jenkins and Pomeranz and Stratton have a right to be heard. It's just the overwhelming voice of the public broadcaster is left-of-centre, or leftist, and so few right-of-centre, or conservative, voices are heard.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/abcs-leftish-drift-still-needs-to-be-corrected-by-its-deeds-20120102-1pi7q.html#ixzz1iLFW2KOt

RUBBISH... I totally disagree with Gerard Henderson... All he has to do is listen to some more ABC programs and be less bias-ly picky about what he hears or sees on the ABC network...
I have myself noted a strong shift towards the right of centre (sometimes extreme right) at the ABC as pointed out in these:
Dumb and Dumber
The bias sound of ABC
Love is on the Air
On issue such as global warming, the ABC is too shy and too "balanced"... often taking a bet each way... while the other media outlets, apart from the Fairfax stable (also often 50/50), are 80/20 (probably 85/15) against the concept of global warming — fighting 120 years of pure science on the subject. Disgraceful.
Not to mention also, the idiotic Media Watch...
see toon at top....

 

Which brings us to comedian (or “funny man” if he’s not your cup of tea) Lawrence Mooney. Who would have read the review of his show at the Adelaide Fringe festival except for a couple of hundred people – maybe – who were in the area and thought jeez that bloke who hosts the ABC’s New Year’s Eve coverage is performing. What’s he like?...

Now many, many more people have read the only vaguely damning three star review because of Mooney’s big, aggressive reaction to it. As far as scathing goes, the review wasn’t even anywhere near boiling point.

Traditionally there is no right of reply to a bad review – and fortunes and reputations have been lost on the back of a bad review by a powerful critic.

Your review is a piece of shit, your journalism is worse & your hundred word thesis on the difference between..sweet Jesus. @BellaFowler93

— Lawrence Mooney (@lawrencemooney) February 14, 2016

Social media (particularly the home of thin-skinned Twitter, recently abandoned by Stephen Fry over matters of alleged offence) gives performers a chance to strike back. So you can, like Lawrence, say that your reviewer is a “deadshit”, “amateur,” and an “idiot” and has “a tiny mind.”

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/18/bad-reviews-and-thin-skins-why-lawrence-mooney-was-wrong-to-criticise-the-critic

The author of this piece is deluded if she thinks "Traditionally there is no right of reply to a bad review".

She should read about the bum fights between various past authors including Lord Tennyson and Chekhov against their respective "critics" — in which author/critic relationship is like the Germans going through Belgium in a BlitzKrieg to bypass the Maginot line.... Critics have been described by their targeted fare as horseflies, legless men (before gender issues made it an offence, now it should read legless person), leeches, cut-throat bandits, tumble-bug (dung-beetle), louse in the hair of literature, dissectors, cheap, nasty, envious... the list of epithets describing critics is long.

Critics and their subjects are fair game to each others. As Samuel Johnson said:

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense...(meaning not very productive)

And as Gus says, there are no such things as "powerful" critics if you don't fear them. You just tell them to piss orf. A powerful critic is someone whose audience is cultivated not be bothered to think nor buy a ticket but can afford to buy the review... Wicked.

There is a gulf of difference between someone like Gus who exposes the ill-farts of humanity and a critic who has had a meal of beans before going to a performance.

Mind you the show could have been a lot of shit... Who knows. Not the "professional" critic though.
read from top.