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.