It is indeed unfortunate that bean counters are permeating the higher echelons of our esteemed institutions. This has happened in many industries, many of which were started by people with passion for their particular medium.

As for the jargon..."Changes to the 2009 schedule are necessary as ABC Radio National looks to the future to ensure that its radio line-up is focused not just on traditional content genres but on contemporary intellectual discourse in Australia and worldwide."

This sounds like a sentence constructed by someone totally unsuited to communication of any sort.

Probably close to being on the money. Don't reckon ABC management is post modernist. More likely their influences come from Milton Friedman.

I don't have a problem with management - only bad management. How many times have we seen new management move in with pledges of new ideas only to go back after six months to trying to reintroduce old ideas that have failed?

it is time to resque that abc
their calls for ideas cannot be taken seriously
only boys from the boys club may join

we should be served an alternative[to general broadcasting]
but are fed pap
and the same murder sport cooking [cheap programing]
mind cccrap all the other stations give

take news radio
broadcast on the specrum of a perpetual hum
i cant recieve it clearly, the buzz is EGSACTLY on the same specrum

but i can hear horse racing
on its own broadcast spectrum ;perfectly
[think why this is]

we have mindless QUIZ shows [and panel shows, and book shows [passed off as australian content]

abc should be a treacher [home schooling ]history, govt reporting]law order [not policing]how to resque the abc[join it to sbs]sacxk al the sell outs selling us entertaintmeant

get back to core duties serve to educate and inform us [in the areas the others wont touch

give us the deebates
[the complete picture
[not programing ,nor simply reporting but investigation analyse

put the archives [in full]on the web

rent the footage
or pay for download
colate the stories by subject]

sell off sports, sell off the sucesfull shows
[to make new programs ,made with apprentices ,not expensive 'staRS'

the core stuff should all be onsold
[on the condition of its on air contiunuance]
that reverts back to abc [once its on air ends]

BUT IM SICK OF GIVING THEM MY IDEAS FOR FREE
the buzz on my NEWS?radio
confirms evil is deliberatly dumbing us down

BUT im free to make a gamble
even then the WORST gambelers gambell stock in companies too big to fail ,knowing we will be advised to bail them out

abc should have fully taught its lisyteners the stock scam years ago
it didnt because it IS deliberatly DUMBED DOWN by sellouts selling us the boys club spin[sack the lot]abc needs NO STARS [just the facts maan]

So true John.As already noted the type of management now saddled on the ABC also burdens the health, education and transport sectors. Mostly, those on air presenters and their producers who can adapt to the current management style or lack of it get to live another day.
Sadly for me it has come to listening to RN AM and then switching to ABC News Radio, mainly because I do not want to hear dull and safe analysis. It is increasingly difficult to avoid the determined mediocrity that the ABC seems determined to present and which it calls mainstream. I think the flight to mediocrity is a poor response to lack of leadership and risk taking.
And what is this program on Howard all about? So far nothing we didn't already know, but it is being presented in a moral vacuum in a superficial, sloppy and half baked format.
Bruce Haigh

Nothing new under the sun - we, the older generations are eagerly sidelined by the newer generations who are saying in their own way, "hurry up, this world is not yours any more, time to vacate it and leave it to us".

I am not surprised to read this article of outrage over the axing of a predominately ‘right’ concern was first published in the "Australian”. Hardly a bastion of reasoned independence or representative of the public's reality. Like most commercial media it's focus is on profits that unbiased analysis.

Notwithstanding this there maybe an argument to maintain a core of programs however the wholesale name calling attack on the ABC is poor journalism and thinly disguised ideological rant. The pejoratively intentioned label “post modern” is a means of avoiding uncomfortable/unfavourable analysis while enabling root and branch without reasoning. An extension of the age old left/right antipathetic power struggle that the conservative have with the ‘pervasive lefties conspirators’ who make up the ABC.

Definition: Leftie etc is anyone who doesn’t agree with the “business is best” mantra of the “right”. Reality dictates that neither side has a monopoly on good sense or the public.

Ironically one could prognosticate that the root cause is most likely due to the line-up of political board appointees and political interference be that overt or simply financial hobbling.
What seems to be missing is any recognition of:
• The fact that the public doesn’t come in only two flavours the ‘Right’ or the wrong one.
• That the ‘for profit media’ isn’t satisfying public needs as well as it thinks it is or wants to.
• That the ABC is there to offer alternative perspectives. Shock horror that many Australians harbour ‘leftist’ views, what is this country coming too?
• That the culture has changed and left/right stance is no longer representative of the public.
This article doesn’t present reasoned arguments that are meaningful to the public. in short "More heat than light."

JC are you messianic enough to turn the tide of the ABC's inexorable dumbing down of the airwaves?
When I was 15 I listened avidly to the pop music on 3XY, then followed JJJ, RRR etc. As I got older I became interested in listening to Radio National, not 3LO like my parents generation did every morning. I won't listen to 3LO because of the tired old personalities like Red Symons and Richard Stubbs whose interviews are all about them not the subject. Phillip Adams is nearly as bad.
I don't read the newspaper - the typeface is too small, The Age is out to frighten mothers of young children and the other newspapers are the mouthpieces of News Corporation and express the views of their very rich American owner.
Yes - I will be disappointed to see the ABC dumbed down.

Any organisation that employs an egotistical twit like Phillip Adams
needs to be squeezed, like a pimple, to get rid of the rubbish.

The ABC should have made John Laws the CEO of radio national, 10
years ago. Could have got some sense into it, by now.

Yes, that's right. Blame the demise of the Religion Report on postmodernists, cultural theorists, bean-counters, atheists etc etc. Very easy, eh?

Perhaps we might care to look at who was actually happy to see the program axed?

Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forsyth said he was "heartened" by the decision because "specialist units can run the danger of becoming too close to their subject matter and present a partisan and narrow viewpoint." Especially if they give airtime to viewpoints opposed to Archbishop Jensen. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/abc-radio-cuts-draw-a-religious-sermon/2008/10/21/1224351253374.html

But of course we don't need to look to churches to find a culprit with a motive. Cos it was postmodernism wot dun it, innit?

Another almost dead person wanting to roll the clock back to good old 1950. Get over it your silly unpopular radio show was axed to make more funds available to radio programs that people listen to. I listen to the radio all the time and funy enough I don't own a radio. I download what I want to hear. That is the future of radio and look at what is being downloaded, that dumbed down science stuff not religious gossip.

kenny I listen to the radio while I am driving in commuter traffic or long distances. Funnily enough I don't use my computer while I drive and I think its illegal. You might be the sort of person who spends hours in the record shop pouring over CDs or have a vast library of music. I don't and I can't see me planning my listening to the extent of downloading 10 - 14 hours of podcasts a week. In fact Radio National don't put up that much new material a week. Also my car radio doesn't have an iPod connection and I hate wearing ear buds, they hurt.
If John Laws was at Radio National I would turn it off.
Kenny do you listen to Radio National?

Like it or not any radio station is useless without listeners.

Good programs bring in listeners and dull programs make them change channels and not come back.

Toxic programs like the religion report drive down listeners, and ad revenue.

A voice in the wilderness is not heard.

Good grief! The ABC is crap, and has been for many years now. All they do is bland or stupid (left wing). If they were forced to pay their own way by including advertising in their programs nobody would listen to them. Best to shut the whole useless organisation down. I'm sure many of our hospitals could put to good use the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on the ABC.

I would start the rehabilitation of the ABC by clearing out the Howard plants (and THEIR plants) from the Board and programming areas.

ABC journalists wear the same spots as Fairfax journalists. The latte-left has a stranglehold over content.

These grey-haired old men and women, who still believe that Gough is God and Germaine Greer isn't mad, still seem to be campaigning for the end of the Vietnam war! Lets do the time-warp again!

Yes, Melbourne's "Middle Age" and the SMH "Sydney Middle-Aged Herald" live up to their names! I saw a group people recently in the Fairfax Foyer. My initial thought was "what are all these retirees doing in the foyer?" Then I asked, and was told that they were journalists at union meeting!

What do old people do? Like an episode of "Grumpy Old Women", oldies go on and on, writing long, indulgent articles, berating the kids of today for not being "leftie" and "feminist" and "radical" as they should be!

By prescribing yesterday's solutions and values to today's problems are doing tremendous damage to our society and policy!

Our kids futures are limited by leftie-postmodern education, the NT intervention could have been the beginning of the end of Australian Apartheid, bit they have campaigned for more and more watering-down. Our sons are failed out of school by 'girl-friendly' teaching pedagogies and curricula, (so that nearly two-thirds of uni students are girls!), our men suicide at the highest rates in the western world due to feminist supremacism... and another generation of children have their fathers stolen from them by the Feminist Court. All this harm is the result of latte-leftie control of the media.

There is hope!
The internet has allowed a profusion of 'sources' and blogs. forums that these powerfull, old lefties can't control. Sadly, as Mark Scott said recently, it means a splintering of media, but that is the cost of renewal when the oldies control the meainstream media so tightly

It's all about the lefties ain't it?

These are "bland or stupid", "latte-left", "grey-haired old men and women...teaching pedagogies" and "feminist supremacism" as part of their "latte leftie control".

Ooohh can we have some more?