Saturday, March 20, 2010

Everyone's ABC (unless you're interested in politics)

Right now it's Saturday night, the night of the SA and Tasmanian elections. Posting here from Victoria there is exactly one outlet to view coverage of this election - Sky News.

The ABC has four different channels which they could use, ABC3 is all kids programming and ABC1 and 2 are currently pandering to the nursing home demo, they would surely be covering these elections in their respective state markets - so why not show that coverage on ABC2 or even the HD channel?

ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has been carpet bombing the media for the past year about his ambition to create a 24 hour News Channel to compete with Sky news - but he can't even give people out of the state an opportunity to watch election night coverage on two very precarious and interesting contests?

The results of these elections will have national implications on the continuing viability of COAG, not to mention the affects on Kevin Rudd's mooted commonwealth takeover of state hospitals. It's not difficult to imagine that there would be people outside of SA and Tasmania interested in following the count.

Epic Fail Mr Scott, when a cable channel run on a shoestring budget does a better job than the well-funded ABC - you've got real problems.