Ask a regular viewer of Sky News After Dark what they think of the ABC, and you’ll likely hear about left-wing bias, taxpayer-funded propaganda, and a media organisation that has declared war on traditional Australian values. Ask a devoted ABC listener what they think of Sky News, and you’ll hear about right-wing shock jocks, Murdoch influence, and a channel that exists to push the Liberal Party’s agenda.
Both descriptions contain a kernel of truth. Both are dramatic exaggerations. And the fact that millions of Australians hold these views with fierce conviction tells us far more about the state of our media ecosystem than it does about either broadcaster.
What Sky News Actually Is
Sky News Australia is a subscription and free-to-air television network majority-owned by News Corp Australia, the local arm of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire. Its daytime coverage is broadly conventional news — parliamentary broadcasts, press conferences, breaking news. It is in its prime-time opinion programming that Sky diverges sharply from the mainstream.
Hosts like Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin, and Alan Jones have built careers on a particular formula: a strong conservative viewpoint, a combative interview style, and a talent for identifying grievances that resonate with older, non-metropolitan Australian audiences. That formula has a genuine audience. It also has a genuine agenda — and pretending otherwise is naive.
What Sky does well: it covers stories the ABC downplays, it holds Labor governments accountable with genuine rigour, and it gives voice to perspectives that are genuinely held by a significant portion of the electorate. What it does badly: it has increasingly blurred the line between opinion and news, hosted guests with fringe or conspiratorial views, and allowed its opinion programs to become an echo chamber for conservative grievance rather than conservative argument.
What the ABC Actually Is
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a publicly funded national broadcaster with a statutory obligation to be independent and impartial. It is the most trusted news source in Australia by a significant margin, according to virtually every media trust survey conducted over the past decade.
It is also, demonstrably, staffed by journalists and producers whose personal political views trend significantly to the left of the Australian median. This doesn’t automatically produce biased coverage — professional journalists are trained to separate their personal views from their work — but it does produce blind spots. Stories that seem obvious and important to a progressive inner-urban journalist may seem less urgent to the ABC’s regional or socially conservative audiences. And the ABC’s instinctive defensiveness about criticism of its own bias has, paradoxically, made that bias harder to address.
What the ABC does well: it funds investigative journalism that commercial outlets won’t, provides essential regional and emergency broadcasting, and maintains genuine editorial independence from governments of both stripes. What it does badly: it has at times conflated advocacy with journalism, struggled to represent the genuine diversity of Australian opinion, and retreated into a cultural and political comfort zone that excludes a significant proportion of its ostensible audience.
The Real Problem: Bubble Thinking
The danger of Sky News and the ABC is not that either is simply “biased.” All media has perspective. The danger is that each has become a bubble — a media environment in which one worldview is so dominant that its assumptions are treated as facts, its preferred stories as the only stories worth covering, and its critics as either fools or villains.
Australians who consume only Sky News and Australians who consume only the ABC are not getting Australian news. They are getting a curated version of reality designed to confirm what they already believe. The centrist, evidence-based conversation that could actually help Australia solve its problems happens somewhere in the middle — and it’s getting harder to find.
The solution isn’t to split the difference between two flawed extremes. It’s to demand better from both — and to actively seek out journalism that prioritises evidence, complexity, and the full range of Australian experience over tribal validation.
