Another Scott response to Murdoch

In his McTaggart Lecture in the U.K. James Murdoch framed his attack on public broadcasting in general, and the BBC in particular, as a contest between creationism and evolutionism, a contest between a doddering nanny State and the fittest and strongest survivors of a life and death commercial struggle .  However the Murdoch empire, while certainly a survivor while others have failed, doesn't look as fit as it used to.

In what many will read as a response to Murdoch’s lecture ABC Managing Director Mark Scott, in the A.N. Smith Lecture yesterday, portrayed the formerly fit and successful entrepreneurs as declining emperors struggling the survive in a new digital environment.  He pointedly quoted from W.H. Auden’s evocative poem Decline and Fall, suggesting that in the new media environment old empires may find it difficult to survive.

Scott’s vision for the ABC involves a partnership with its audiences, no longer just listeners and viewers but also content makers.

 Scott suggested that the ABC would

seek and be excited about finding and working with people who might turn your organisation upside down. To sit in meetings with people half your age. And listen. And act. And those new partnerships may involve more than technological hook-ups. It may be around such fundamental things as consortiums of newspapers, broadcasters and non- profits. Working together to establish a critical mass required for real investigative journalism, as is emerging in the United States. To be part of something rather than owning everything.

However the ABC will always remain the editor (and the government, despite its current arms length oversight, editor-in-chief).  So how will the ABC manage its relationship with the government on the one hand, and its audiences/contributors/partners on the other?