{"id":13339,"date":"2026-05-25T05:13:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T17:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/?p=13339"},"modified":"2026-05-23T20:31:49","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T08:31:49","slug":"australian-broadcasting-corp-backs-away-from-radical-partnerships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/?p=13339","title":{"rendered":"Australian Broadcasting Corp. Backs Away From Radical Partnerships"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>By Michelle Pearse\/Australian Correspondent.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The&nbsp;Australian Broadcasting Corporation&nbsp;has finally ended its memberships with several diversity and inclusion organisations, including&nbsp;the Aids Council of NSW (ACON) Pride in Diversity program.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For a national broadcaster, these relationships raised obvious concerns from the outset, and they should not have been allowed to continue for as long as they did.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ABC was paying to be part of organisations that also assessed and ranked it, in some cases linking that to its editorial output. This is a clear conflict and not acceptable for a publicly funded broadcaster.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And over time,&nbsp;these concerns had a real impact on how stories were, or&nbsp;weren\u2019t, reported.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ABC gave&nbsp;very little&nbsp;attention to the closure of the UK\u2019s Tavistock gender clinic, despite how significant that story was globally. It&nbsp;didn\u2019t&nbsp;report on the case of&nbsp;Keira Bell, a&nbsp;detransitioner&nbsp;who raised&nbsp;serious questions&nbsp;about the use of puberty blockers for children. The ABC also admitted to editorial lapses in its coverage of transgender athletes.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the same time, the ABC was&nbsp;maintaining&nbsp;paid relationships with advocacy organisations working in these same areas.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These organisations were activist-led programs embedded in the same issues the ABC is meant to report on independently, dressed up as \u2018harmless\u2019 workplace initiatives.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once activism is relabelled as a workplace initiative, it avoids the scrutiny it would otherwise receive.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ABC will also exit partnerships with the&nbsp;Australian Disability Network&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Diversity Council of Australia, which&nbsp;operated&nbsp;in&nbsp;a similar way.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is the right move from the ABC. It just&nbsp;shouldn\u2019t&nbsp;have taken this long.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The question we now must ask is how many of these so-called \u2018workplace initiatives\u2019 across our business, media, politics, and healthcare are just activism in disguise?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\">About the Author: <em><strong>Michelle Pearse<\/strong>\u00a0serves as the Chief Executive Officer for the\u00a0Australian Christian Lobby.<\/em><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Michelle Pearse\/Australian Correspondent. The&nbsp;Australian Broadcasting Corporation&nbsp;has finally ended its memberships with several diversity and inclusion organisations, including&nbsp;the Aids Council of NSW (ACON) Pride in Diversity program.&nbsp; For a national broadcaster, these relationships raised obvious concerns from the outset, and they should not have been allowed to continue for as long as they did.&nbsp; The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13340,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43],"tags":[327,1220,212],"coauthors":[979],"class_list":{"0":"post-13339","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-2","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-broadcaster","10":"tag-lgbtq"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ABC.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13341,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13339\/revisions\/13341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13339"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=13339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}