Are we royally stuffed by the coverage of the Queen’s death rites? Or should anyone who wants to carp stay under the couch? Analysis from MWM‘s man on the ground Callum Foote and one-time staunch republican Mark Sawyer.
The ABC’s coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II is a bonanza for the national broadcaster. According to a spokesperson the ABC has seen “a daily peak so far of 2.9m users of the website and 741,000 users of the app” with “18 of the top 25 ABC News articles published between Thursday and Sunday related to the Queen’s death.”
The broadcaster published 52 articles about the Queen’s death between last Thursday and Saturday which generated 16m page views – or “45% of total article page views over this period”.
The ABC News listen app is getting as much traffic as it was on post-election day and ABC TV is experiencing a modest increase in viewership, a high of +3.9 points or a total of 2.8 million viewers reached on Sunday.
So, is it over-the top? Get on Twitter and you won’t be wondering too long.
“I suspect the ABC has misread its audience,” tweeted Barrie Cassidy, a longtime ABC host. ”If you want wall to wall royalty you can get it elsewhere in spades. The ABC is better when it offers an alternative to populism”.
I suspect the ABC has misread its audience. If you want wall to wall royalty you can get it elsewhere in spades. The ABC is better when it offers an alternative to populism.
— Barrie Cassidy (@barriecassidy) September 12, 2022
The argument is gaining ground that the ABC’s coverage of the Queen’s death has diverted too much of the corporation’s resources. This is a broadcaster that lost real funding and suffered a fall in staffing during the Coalition government’s term.
MWM identified a total of 29 ABC staff members are on the ground covering the events surrounding the Queen’s funeral, 27 of who have been flown into the UK from Australia. The big names include Sally Sara, Virginia Trioli, Richard Glover and Raf Epstein.
ABC radio has sent three presenters and three production staff while ABC News has sent a veritable contingent of journalists and production staff. Twelve journalists and nine production people have been flown from Australia and elsewhere to produce live and packaged content for the broadcaster’s digital, radio, TV and on-demand programs.
An ABC spokesperson also highlighted to travel of two other journalists, one of which is former chief foreign correspondent Phil Williams, who were already in Europe when the Queen died.
It appears a meaningful proportion of ABC’s Brisbane office has been turned towards coverage of the events in the UK with even the ABC’s F1 sports reporter changing rounds to cover the monarch’s death.
Michael Rowland, co-host of News Breakfast who arrived in London on Sunday, declined to comment when asked whether he flew business or first class to London or on the accommodations booked by the ABC.
.@BreakfastNews live from London this morning (or evening over here..). pic.twitter.com/ViDN6LQYYR
— Michael Rowland (@mjrowland68) September 11, 2022
An ABC media spokesperson declined to comment on enquiries about whether any ABC staff members were flown business or first class to the UK, replying only that “All travel meets our guidelines”.
The ABC also declined to reveal the budget for the coverage. The spokesperson would say only that “Special coverage of critical events is factored into our budgets. We don’t break down operational costs.”
It is unclear how much the ABC has set aside for “special coverage of critical events” or whether the cost of supporting nearly 30 journalists and production staff in London for over a week will be freely revealed to the taxpayer.
Currently, return flights to London from Sydney and Brisbane are going for around $2225 through Virgin Airlines and upwards of $6000 through Qantas and partner airlines. The ABC declined to comment on which airline was used.
The expenses, whatever they may be, are worth it for the broadcaster which has revealed that early statistics on viewership show a high engagement with the content generated by the UK teams.
But the broadcaster has set its priorities. Since 2014, the ABC has had to cut 640 jobs, from 4704 staff to 4064 according to research undertaken by independent thinktank The Australia Institute.
In 2020, another independent thinktank Per Capita estimated that funding cuts to the ABC totalled $783m since 2014 in research for progressive lobby group GetUp.
Product differentiation
The backlash is not confined to social media, of course. On Wednesday novelist Thomas Keneally let fly in The Guardian under the headline: ”Hollow, cloying veneration greeted the Queen’s death. Now history calls on us to get an Australian head of state.”
While the author of Schindler’s List and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith was generally respectful of the monarch, his piece conveyed a sense of disbelief at the reaction to her death. ”Though Elizabeth II outlasted and undid our republican impulses, it’s astonishing to see the nonstop public piety in operation,” the write-off to Keneally’s piece stated.
Perhaps Keneally, for all the considered arguments he mustered, relished the chance to pull one of the media’s most charming gambits: condemning all the hoopla by adding to it. A variation of that gambit was a selling point for The Independent, a British newspaper that boasted that it only rated a news brief for the birth of one of Prince Andrew’s daughters.
”When The Independent was launched in 1986, we decided to give brief coverage to royal news,” its inaugural editor, Andreas Whittam Smith, reflected in 2000. ”There was lots of other interesting or amusing stuff to cover. Newspapers had become unduly besotted with the Royal Family. And relentless attention imposed a great strain which some individual members evidently found difficult to handle. Who would not? As editor at the time, I had a private bet with myself – that a successful newspaper could manage without royalty.”
Whittam Smith lost his private bet. The Independent was unable to generate enough readers to justify its existence as a printed production. The printed version closed in 2016. ”As a matter of fact, for good commercial reasons, national newspapers as a whole cannot any longer manage without daily coverage,” Whittam Smith lamented.
It might be a little cynical to suggest that in having Ita Buttrose as its chair, the ABC was always going to be royal family central. Among many significant assignments, Buttrose was editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly, which rode the royal family for blockbuster sales in the golden era of magazines. But the ABC’s coverage of the Queen’s death clearly involved great preparation well beyond Buttrose’s ken, kicking into gear in the wee hours of Friday as soon as news came from Buckingham Palace.
What the heart wants
The best journalists don’t mindlessly follow the crowd, but they also recognise there are times like these – in times like these the heart wants what the heart wants. During one of the royal weddings of the 2010s, a media commentator lamented that the event had generated countless millions of views, while a massacre in Congo had received about 400 hits on the BBC website. Staying in Africa, MWM was one of the few (if any) Australian outlets to mark the death of former Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos, whose 38-year misrule impoverished the nation.
The world won’t listen: African dream died long before a despot
Getting mad about the coverage of the Queen is one thing. But few of us can say we are indifferent to this event. Ultimately, it’s a question for us all whether the attention given to a story is over the top. Is the Queen’s death an epoch-making event, as can be reasonably argued, or is it worth a couple of days of handwringing like, say, one actor slapping another actor at the Oscars? A US massacre will generate more coverage than one in Africa. What’s happening in Syria these days?
Dos Santos died on the same day former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe was shot dead. The previous day, UK prime minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation. Those stories rated. Public care factor regarding the plight of Angolans who have chafed under 500 years of colonialism and misrule? Zero. Which is why the media care factor was as close to zero as journals of records will allow themselves.
So, did the ABC misread the national mood in any way beyond riling up the Twitterati? Or is the media-savvy class of tweeters, in fact much of the ”politically aware” (insert air quotes) class, just getting a charge out of smashing an easy target? Speaking as someone who high-tailed it out of London to avoid the hoopla surrounding the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, I (Sawyer) recognise the feeling. But getting your jollies that way might also be smashing the feelings of people who are feeling a keen sense of loss.
Those people are not just the tearful subjects of the Queen who queued to see her coffin in Scotland and London. They are the people – in the UK, Australia and elsewhere – who don’t have a keyboard at hand, or the luxury to muse on social media forums, even if they have all the time in the world. The frail old people in nursing homes, the ones who get no visitors week in and week out. The ”hollow, cloying veneration” of the Queen would be a low-key hum on televisions in those institutions today, even if it reminds these lonely people of the only big event that awaits them.
Not only them, but the people who serve the least fortunate in our society. It was often said (in a patronising tone) that the royals added a touch of glamour to dishwater-grey lives. Whatever the Queen meant to the rest of us, she seems to have meant something to the people who don’t sing out their thought bubbles every day. And how can we ignore the way women (at least of past generations) were the target of sneering from republicans because of their regard for the monarchy. Royalty has been a staple of women’s mass-market magazines, which was slyly mocked in more ”serious” media.
”The Queen for me is my female role model,” a mourner in London told Alexandra Humphries, one of those 29 ABC representatives. Another woman told the ABC’s Sally Sara that her thoughts, after six hours waiting to see the Queen’s coffin, were with her late mother. Mock away, superior folks!
Back to Thomas Keneally. In 2019 he joined the victory celebrations for independent candidate Zali Steggall in the seat of Warringah. It was a big night: Steggall had ousted a former prime minister from his electorate. News footage records Keneally asking Steggall whether she minds getting the support of an old leftie. She graciously responds that her campaign is a broad church.
Steggall won a second victory this year on the back of what might be called an emphasis on one brilliant individual. Supporters greeted her at one event with a song on the boombox: ”Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer.” Campaign exuberance, right? Surely not cloying veneration.
Mark Sawyer is a journalist with extensive experience in print and digital media in Sydney, Melbourne and rural Australia.
Callum Foote was a reporter for Michael West Media for four years.