Nothing new under the sun?

As an addendum to today's blog entry... the ABC is probably well and truly inured to being the whipping post for just about every Australian federal government of the past 3 or 4 decades?

Witness, the accompanying cartoon which appeared in the November 1985 issue of Graphix, (a printing industry newspaper), as an illustration in support of an article chronicling a 'troubled' ABC reeling in its efforts to regain credibility as the 'national broadcaster'... following savage budget cuts dealt it by the Fraser government in its dying days. Many elements of society were critical of the resultant programming dilution as the ABC's top man Geoffrey Whitehead struggled to make ends meet.

Strangely, the press reaction was the opposite of recent times. The Australian had commented ... the cultural calibre of ABC TV's prime-time programming has become as imaginative, varied and worthy of the offerings that come from BBC2 or from the public service Channel13 in New York. That's pretty good in world terms...' On the same day, the Age said...'the corporation's television offerings remain effete, bland and deplorably foreign. They also represent an abrogation of the corporation's charter.'

Being the 'national broadcaster' clearly isn't as simple as ABC?