ANALYSIS: Morrison's love of Murdoch has left ABC in the dust

By Jeremy Epstein | 18 May 2022, 5:00pm | comments |

Scott Morrison has refused to take part in ABC interviews, favouring conservative right-wing media outlets instead (Image by Dan Jensen)

Scott Morrison has shown an aversion to appearing in ABC interviews, preferring to be represented by the right-wing mainstream media, writes Jeremy Epstein.

PRIME MINISTER Scott Morrison surprised the fine folks over at the national broadcaster recently by turning down their invitation for a pre-election debate with Labor Leader Anthony Albanese, instead choosing to have all three of his televised debates take place on commercial channels.

I have also made the casual observation over the last three years that Morrison makes few appearances on Aunty in general, compared with the commercial alternatives, particularly Sky News (which I personally have never watched directly and have no plans to, but I've seen plenty of clips of Morrison on Sky repeated on the ABC and elsewhere).

This led me to do some research, to find out how often Morrison has taken part in ABC interviews during his tenure so far compared with his predecessors.

I compiled my findings and this is what they show:

Morrison's ABC interview frequency compared to his forebears (Graph supplied)

It's official — Morrison has, on average, taken part in fewer ABC TV and radio interviews than any other prime minister in recent Australian history.

I hope you find my humble dataset useful. Apart from illustrating Morrison's disdain for the ABC, there are also tonnes of other interesting analyses that could be performed on the data and tonnes of other conclusions that could be drawn from it.

My findings are hardly surprising, considering Morrison's flagrant preference for sensationalism, spin and the far-right fringe. I leave it as an exercise to the reader, to draw from my dataset what conclusions you will regarding the fate of the already Coalition-scarred ABC should Morrison win a second term.