Political Bias Associated with the ABC Current Affairs Program - The Drum

I have recently become more and more disgruntled regarding what I perceived as being a blatant right-wing bias in the selection of panellist for the current affairs ABC evening show the Drum.  To eliminate any confirmation bias on my part I went back over past episodes and assigned participants to various groupings.  The distribution of the 144 panelists is shown below:

The number of participants with direct political affiliations was 22.  These are:

This leads to the following distribution:

The ‘one’ ex-Labor affiliate was Emma Husar who left the party after on-going issues between Ms Husar and that party and this was the reason for her participation.  I make no judgement about the incidents that lead to her resignation but find it uncomfortable that she was the only representative of the second most dominant political party to be invited as a panelist.  In effect, there is mu labor representation on this show!

The Greens had no representation!

I contacted the ABC complaints department on Thursday, 8 July and they have assured me they have passed this on for examination.  I informed them I would wait until Monday before I went public with my findings.  To my dismay they had the Liberal John Pesutto on the Friday and Adrian Piccoli from the Nationals on the Monday.  Pesutto’s appearance meant that there were seven Liberals in the last ten episodes and Piccoli made that eight consecutive representations of coalition affiliates.  This is hardly a concession about my concerns.

I believe the evidence cited above provides evidence that this show is little more than a vehicle for the coalition government and does not fulfil the mandate of our ABC.