Former prime minister Paul Keating is the latest public figure to lay into the besieged ABC, saying it is failing as a news gathering organisation and was letting Australia down.
The ABC news covered too many tragic reports of no broader consequence, and the 7.30 current affairs program broadcast "too many hard-luck stories", he said.
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Paul Keating criticises ABC
Former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating was asked on Friday whether he agreed with indigenous leader Noel Pearson that the ABC is a 'racist' broadcaster.
"In the case of the ABC news, if you want to watch a good news service, watch SBS news, which tells you what's happening in Iraq, what's happening in the US election, what's happening with Donald Trump," Mr Keating said.
"What you get on the ABC is: 'A truck has just overturned on the Pacific Highway'. It's like in the 1970s. The ABC is letting Australia down in terms of news presentation."
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"In the case of the 7.30 Report it is a news magazine, instead of a hard news-breaking operation."
Mr Keating was speaking at Melbourne University on Friday, where he was asked whether he agreed with indigenous leader Noel Pearson, who this week accused the ABC of being "the country's miserable, racist national broadcaster: a spittoon's worth of perverse people willing the wretched to fail".
Mr Keating was acutely aware of the matter: Mr Pearson had delivered his incendiary critique while launching a biography of the former PM.
Mr Keating's appearance at Melbourne University on Friday was to discuss the biography, Paul Keating: The Big Picture Leader by Troy Bramston.
The former prime minister deftly avoided saying whether he agreed with Mr Pearson's withering views, but said Mr Pearson "has always taken the view that the ABC has always been hard on him".
"He's taken the view that Aboriginal people are best when they are able to earn their own income and live their own independent lives and that welfare diminishes their standing and inner confidence," Mr Keating said.
"It may be true to say — and I am not saying it — that the ABC promulgates the view that the shift away from the welfare basis was the wrong way to go."
Mr Keating's talk at Melbourne University ranged across much of his life and times as a politician, and showed he has lost little of his self-regard.
In the case of the ABC news, if you want to watch a good news service, watch SBS news...
Former prime minister Paul Keating
He confided that in deciding to challenge Bob Hawke for the prime ministership in 1991, he had advised the former prime minister that he was no longer any use if he wouldn't do his - Mr Keating's - bidding.
"If you are not any more useful to me, Bob, there's no point in you staying," he said he had told Mr Hawke.
"If you are not prepared to run my agenda, there's not point in you staying."
And he made clear he thought Gough Whitlam had been far too easily dismissed by governor-general John Kerr in 1975.
"What would you have done (to stop Sir John dismissing the government)?" he was asked.
"I would have arrested him," Mr Keating responded, though he did not expand on how he might have handled the full-blown crisis of a prime minister clapping the Queen's man in handcuffs.
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