This is from Andrew Bolt and it is a sensation. How is it that the folks over at the ABC are so completely lacking in self-awareness that they happily answer these questions so that the rest of us can know just how politically naive they are. Who would buy a political opinion from such a bunch as these?

I have over the past few weeks been thinking about a solution to the problem caused by the ABC. And while privatisation might be a nice idea I don’t think it would work out very well. But what would in my view be just as good is for the next Coalition government merely to say to the ABC that within five years, 90% of your funding must be raised through advertising revenue. And having grown up in Canada, there is a precedent. I don’t know what the proportion of its funding must come from its own revenue sources but whatever it might be could be our own target.

I like it because it will still remain “our ABC”. I like it because we can allow the ABC to help the rest of us finance all of the social programs it believes the government ought to finance. And I like it because it should be more commercially oriented so that it is no longer allowed to compete in the market at a zero price.

And I especially like it because this is not the 1930s. We can get cable across the country. There is no one locked out of reception that only the ABC can reach (and if there are such places, the government can provide the subsidy out of the ABC’s new revenue stream).

And then, of course, there is this from Blazing Cat Fur in Toronto who notes how the CBC audience has diminished almost to the vanishing point:

If the share of CBC TV was just over 5% in prime time, it is below 5% on a 24 hour basis; CBC daytime schedules have traditionally performed poorly compared to CBC’s prime time. Making matters worse is that the audience to about half the U.S. TV stations available in Canada are no longer being measured by the ratings company and neither are services such as Netflix or Apple TV, meaning that CBC’s share of all TV viewing is actually lower than the numbers suggest. This is the lowest audience share in CBC’s history and yet there is no hint of the severity of the TV network’s situation in the quarterly report. CBC TV audiences are sold to advertisers and with less audience to sell, 2012-13 revenues, shown in the table above, are almost $40 million less than at the same point the previous year, creating a revenue shortfall that, when added to federal cuts, may be crippling.

There has been some public debate about whether or not CBC is in crisis. The CBC’s latest report confirms that many programs on the main TV service, despite efforts to be more ‘popular,’ have fallen to audience levels not much greater than many specialty channels. Those who deny the crisis fail to realize that Canadians prefer Duck Dynasty to most CBC shows, including the national news. The most important and costly CBC service has an audience crisis and CBC needs to respond to it. Is it time to rethink the role of CBC TV?

Maybe if the ABC were made to think about advertising revenue it might perhaps end up a tad more central to community views than it now is.