ABC changing editorial policy after Rinehart furore prompts concerns of overreach from academics and advocates

Managing director says guidelines will ensure no individual will ‘be the subject of comedy that is violent in its description in our programming’

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A pledge by the ABC managing director, Hugh Marks, to change editorial guidelines on satire and violence after the broadcaster aired a program featuring offensive comments about Gina Rinehart , has sparked concerns about overreach.

The four-minute film, titled A Very Relaxing Video, ran on documentary-reality show Race Around the World on 12 July and sparked a furore over comments made about the billionaire.

The segment concluded with the film-maker, Kate McGuinness, stating: “When the revolution comes will you hide under the bed or will you know exactly how to shove a stick right up Gina Rinehart’s butthole, stirring it round, mixing her guts up nice and smooth, to make one big sausage roll to make something out of nothing?”

After sustained backlash in News Corp and The West Australian, and threats of legal action from Rinehart, Marks issued an apology last Thursday.

He said while the ombudsman, Fiona Cameron, had found that the film didn’t breach editorial policies on harm and offence , it fell short of “community expectations”, and the ABC would change its editorial guidance.

On ABC Radio North Queensland last Thursday, he said the ABC’s guidelines will now demand that “no individual should be the subject of comedy that is violent in its description in our programming”.

“And I think the ABC has to hold itself to a higher standard and I think it’s really important we make that change.”

Journalist and professor of communication at Deakin University, Matthew Ricketson, said it was poor satire but once McGuinness had apologised for the joke, as she did on 30 July , that should have been “the end of it”.

“It’s a very ill-advised move,” he said of the promised change. “It’s virtually unenforceable … and it’s literally throwing fuel on to the News Corp fire. They will bank that and they will move straight on to the next demand which will be a curtailing if not the abolition of the ABC.”

The ombudsman initially received eight complaints about the program in the week after was broadcast. A further 988 complaints were made after criticism from “several media outlets”, it said in its report.

News Corp’s major mastheads have published 46 articles critiquing the program since it aired, and The West Australian has published 15.

The ombudsman found “a reasonable audience member would be likely to understand the remarks as part of a satirical and exaggerated commentary” rather than encouragement of violence.

The former editorial director of the ABC, Alan Sunderland, agreed with the ombudsman’s findings, which didn’t discount that the joke was in “poor taste”.

He said he wasn’t “perturbed” by the ABC reviewing its guidance, which could help program makers interpret editorial principles if it wasn’t enforceable. But he said “if it’s more elaborate than that then you start to get into problems”.

“You wouldn’t be able to put much [satire] to air,” he said, pointing to Aunty Jack in the 1970s, who threatened to “rip yer bloody arms off” if viewers didn’t watch the next week.

Sunderland said it was a “repeated pattern” to see ABC content picked up and “amplified” by some media and politicians, thereby giving it a “second life”. “Broadcasters can and do apologise without the world coming to an end,” he said.

Journalist, author and academic, Dr Margaret Simons, said Marks was right to apologise but rewriting editorial policies “wasn’t necessary”.

“The problem here is that either somebody didn’t make a judgment call or they made the wrong one,” she said. “I would have thought it was self-evident that a threat of violence, even a satirical threat, is a pretty serious matter.”

Simons said the ABC’s editorial policies required carefully judged decisions, and explicitly stated that contentious decisions should be upwardly referred to an appropriate level.

“My main question is, were the ABC policies followed in the sense of upward referral? Did anybody actually stop to look at this before it was broadcast?” she said.

“If it wasn’t … that in itself is arguably a breach of editorial policy. If editorial policies are substantially rewritten in the light of what I suspect is a failure of the ABC’s internal processes … that’s not good.”

An ABC spokesperson confirmed the changes would be amended “soon”, with approval by the ABC board. It didn’t respond to questions on whether the program had been upwardly referred.

On Saturday, Hancock Prospecting said it would “wait to see long overdue changes to the ABC’s ‘editorial standards’” and accused it of normalising “violent torture against a woman till death”.

“Satire needs to be funny, what the ABC approved to be aired for 25 days, in its violent torture until death content, was not,” it said. “We await a detailed account in relation to who approved this unacceptable piece to be aired, and who approved the long delay in its removal. The buck stops with the heads of the ABC.”

The president of ABC Friends, Cassandra Parkinson, said the ABC had “overreacted in trying to appease Ms Rinehart”.

“I can understand that the ABC issued an apology to avoid a costly legal action, but it’s difficult to understand the rationale for this new rule,” she said.

“Regardless of our views about the ‘joke’ in question, it’s important that the process that follows involves close scrutiny. It’s essential that the ABC hold firm against this sort of external pressure and that it uphold the independence laid out in its charter.”

McGuinness has also apologised over the segment, saying it wasn’t her intention to promote violence.

“My writing is cartoonish and always satirical. Unfortunately, jokes do not land with everyone. Its purpose was never to be taken literally,” she said in a statement uploaded to the ABC’s website.