Notice how none of the supporters of the ABC have given any reason why anyone else should be forced to pay for them to have a media service? All we get is mindless ad hom. Let them pay for it themselves!

Note to David G: no-one is forced to pay for Murdoch's publications you fool.

The ABC should be sold off immediately.

The ABC is under staff capture.The only way to deal with this is to split the organisation up-firstly by separating tv,radio,orchestras etc and then doing it by state as well.The organisation is Sydney and capital city centric so that should be addressed as well.

I love it when all the right wing rednecks come out screaming their liberal brainwashed epithets.
It shows that there is a glaring need for a balance such as the dear old auntie ABC to keep thing straight and level.
Just imagine if you only had a choice of yank rubbish, pathetic game shows, hackneyed soapies with maybe the radio shock jocks having a segment on TV.
I am amused every time there is an ad for "freeview" and they tell us how lucky we are to have so many channels.
If they banned repeats, all of commercial freeview channel would be off the air.
It is only a platform to feed more ads to the proles.

Raw mustard sorry but you are quite mistaken. The net will not be the death of hardcopy newspapers.
Currently circulations are falling but advertising revenues are increasing.
While that is the situation the newspapers are proving to be a more effective vehicle for advertising than the net.
If you think people buy papers simply for the news you are dead wrong.

Kipp

What's 'Big Brother'? Is it some kind of socialist pantomine like ABC 24 propaganda?

Robert Le Page's post is telling in a number of ways:

Firstly, we see in it the born to lord-it-over-you-lot mentality of the friends of the ABC,and secondly, it demonstrates how ill-informed you get when you rely on ABC sources. Robert (and most other FOA) evidently see ads as synonymous with non-government run TV --only an ABC viewer could be so badly informed.

Actually if he was to watch CCTV --and CCTV here stands for CHINESE CENTRAL TV (and it has at least 17 channels.All of then owned and run by the Chinese government) Its channel are packed full of ads (restaurants, health remedies,beverages, cosmetics...[all private run enterprises by the way]). CCTVs format differs to ours in that it tends to run ads in blocks, so you'll get the program for 3/4 hour uninterrupted then you'll get a block of ads that may run for 15 minutes +/-.

Perhaps we could (re)imagine an ABC which had to sell advertisements to justify/fund its progressive leanings?