Kim Williams wonders what could have been if he’d stayed at ABC, criticises drama and doco output and labels print ‘doomed’
Kim Williams still wonders what might have been if he had stayed at the ABC where he could have become the boss, the media executive has revealed in his new book.
Williams – who was ousted as CEO of News Corp just over a year ago – spent three years at the national broadcaster in the early 1990s before leaving to join News Corp’s Twentieth Century Fox to create Fox Studios in Sydney. He has also slammed the ABC for not performing better in its drama and documentary output.
Stating that his time at the ABC was unhappy, he wrote: “The ABC was confronting for me as it has a strong ‘antibody’ culture to new and unwelcome intruders. However for aspiring leaders a period of being an outlier teaches you to think before you speak.”
Williams revealed: “When I declared my departure from the ABC to new Managing Director Brian Johns in March 1995, he offered me the role as his deputy and potential successor. I declined and have occasionally wondered what might have happened if I had taken him up on that offer, which was made generously and enthusiastically.”
Elsewhere in the book, he added: “It has always fascinated me that the media in Australia is so brutal in delivering judgement and yet so singularly sensitive in receiving any criticism. Australian media is staggeringly punitive. It smashes people up and would appear to frequently enjoy doing so”
Sound familiar mumbrella?
I think it’s a good thing that someone who can’t come up with a better book title than the bland and meaningless “Rules of Engagement” is no longer running a major media company. Seriously, he might as well have called it “Title Goes Here.”
Forsooth! Who ghost wrote this for him? Charles Dickens?
Turgid prose manifestly reposes!
Kim, like many before him (yes, you Eric) has a moment as favoured newbie before Rupert simply allowed the hounds to tear him down.
Williams was probably right when he identified News Limited was badly run. However the changes he enforced did not make the place run better. All he did was replace long-term stuff up with new stuff up. Looking at what he did, it would be reasonable to assume he did not understand what journalists do and how news gets into newspapers.
Given the flak fired at Williams one can only assume that the bosses at news are not comfortable with any threat to their world view. Which explains very many things. Including their miserable financials.
Not really any shocking revelations in there. Everyone knows News has a glass jaw and an averstion to inconvenient truths (cheekiness inteded). Saying it aloud would have hastened his depature there but you can’t exactly call it a bad career move, It’s kinda like getting sacked from the crew of the Titanic just before it heads out for it’s maiden voyage.
If this represents Kim’s application to be the next MD of the ABC, it should be enthusiastically embraced by any genuine “friend”. Then the ABC would have a chance get back to it’s real Charter responsibility to “inform and entertain”. By comparison, right now the incumbent is increasingly desperate to turn the ABC into (in his words) a “news organisation” even telling students recently that “the Charter identifies news as a core service” (it doesn’t). The average Australian taxpayer doesn’t want to fund another “news organisation”, it wants an “Australian Broadcasting Corporation”.
Sorry CJ but the average Australian taxpayer wants the ABC to remain what it always has been – the ABC.
Nice one Lindsay. A bit like saying you would like the liberal party to be liberal? CJ was making a fair point. Though I doubt Williams is the man myself.
And another thing CJ, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983, which contains the Charter of the Corporation, also outlines the responsibilities of the ABC Board. One of them is the requirement for the gathering and presentation by the Corporation of news and information that is accurate and impartial according to the recognized standards of objective journalism.
Kim Williams again used a huge pile of words to say next to nothing.
He really is good at that!
He’s right about the ABC. It has abandoned documentary for docu-soap, producing dramas which barely rise above soap, poorly conceived entertainment formats and arts programming increasingly marginalised. The ABC should be about excellence and intelligence and it has declined markedly. You can blame the CEO, the programmer who now has a level of influence far surpassing competence and dull and timid commissioning editors who have become time servers. Although Williams can appear to be a pompous elitist he is essentially right about the dumbing down and mediocrity of taxpayer funded ABC TV. The quiet achiever at the ABC has always been radio which despite increasing cuts has maintained a broad and diverse level of excellence which shames ABC Television. Sadly radio just isn’t sexy.
Dear Lindsay, are you a journalist? Please carefully read and respond to what was actually written, not your own version of it. Yes, the ABC Act contains reference to news (in s27), but no the ABC Charter (s6) does not identify “news as a core service” (which is what the current MD said). And yes, you’re absolutely right in agreeing with me that the average Australian taxpayer wants the ABC to remain the ABC – a full service, well-rounded broadcaster – not another “news organisation”.
Dear CJ,
Sorry if I miss understood you when you wrote “The average Australian taxpayer doesn’t want to fund another “news organisation”, it wants an “Australian Broadcasting Corporation”.” I assumed you were excluding “news” from the ABC when you said taxpayers did not want the ABC to be another news organisation.
As for the charter, I would have thought its requirement for the ABC to inform would have included news especially as it is required to (in part) “to transmit to countries outside Australia broadcasting programs of news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural enrichment”.