The ABC has been exhaustively criticised in The Australian for failing to “reflect the mainstream”, both in staff culture and broadcast content. This implies that journalists should be demographically average, and that news and opinion should be shaped by statistics about what the public already knows and believes, rather than considerations like accuracy, rigour, importance or morality. That’s market research, not news.

Tim Groseclose, author of “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind”, offers a solution of sorts to what we are frequently told in The Australian’s opinion pages is a problem with ABC bias.

In an interview on the Freakonomics website, Groseclose ascribes such bias to “something in the DNA of liberals that makes them want to pursue careers like journalism”. He adds that a media proprietor can “counteract this by trying to hire more conservatives, but he will have a hard time trying to find conservatives who want to be journalists. He’ll either have to pay conservative journalists more or be willing to hire conservative journalists who are not as good at reporting as liberal journalists”. A kind of genetic engineering, if you will.

So the ABC could solve its “problem”, as The Australian presumably has already, by raising costs or lowering standards. I prefer the problem to the solution.

Brenton Minge (The Australian, Letters, 24/12) attempts guilt by association, once removed, outlandishly dismissing the ABC’s broadcast partner Al Jazeera as “Osama bin Laden’s broadcaster of choice”. Minge should try not to be put off by its scary Arabic name, as Al Jazeera is in fact a highly esteemed broadcaster whose reputation is growing rapidly, in the words of Hilary Clinton, “because it’s real news…instead of a million commercials and…arguments between talking heads…which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners”. We would know a great deal less about the Arab Spring without Al Jazeera and the ABC’s partnership with it.

Nick Cater (“Our cash pays for the ABC’s comment”, The Australian, 22/12) coins the term “Ultimo Spring” to describe what we are told is a spontaneous “public uprising” against the tyranny of left-wing slant at the ABC, albeit mostly confined to The Australian’s opinion pages, which Cater edits.

We learn of an insidious form of this oppression imposed by the angle of a presenter’s eyebrow, which conveys imbalance even when “the transcript offers no evidence of bias”. Cater insists that the ABC alone must pass this “eyebrow test”, because some “paying customers” prefer them horizontal.

But I also contribute to commercial media advertising revenue every time I pass through a checkout, and I can’t change that even by voting. I therefore demand that all the Australian’s journalists keep their eyebrows directly above their eyes at all times.

The IPA’s Andrew McIntyre (“For normal viewing lean left”, The Australian, 20/12) resorts to cherry-picking and misrepresentation to confabulate hard evidence of ABC left-wing bias.

He cites the thirty-year old Dix Report, which refers only to the “range of viewpoints”, not any particular bias. He similarly misrepresents Professor John Henningham’s studies, which show an unsurprising progressive leaning amongst journalists as a whole. McIntyre cunningly implies that this referred to the ABC in particular by interspersing his own comments about the ABC amongst Henningham’s findings. Henningham did find a perception of ABC bias among journalists, but other studies of actual published bias, which McIntyre prefers to ignore, do not find any.

McIntyre lists half a dozen conservative pet issues that the ABC does not treat as he would like, daring them to cover “mainstream ideas”. I have some (unbiased) news for him: the economic libertarian ideas of the IPA are not mainstream in Australia.

Grant King (“ABC bias is hard to see from within the organisation”, The Australian,  Letters, 17/12) is wrong to suggest that it is only internal investigations which have failed to find bias at the ABC. For example, Gans and Leigh (2007) analysed multiple news services over several years, finding only very slight bias on ABC TV – toward the Coalition.

More tellingly, even the Howard Government’s Mansfield review could find no such bias. Of course, this did not budge their preconception that it existed, nor prevent them from breaking an election promise with vengeful cuts and disastrous interference. Like those letter-writers and columnists in The Australian that are “generally agreed” with King, they did not let the facts get in the way of a good story.