Turing test for the ABC

Say a prayer for Queensland Liberal senator Santo Santoro (and try saying 'Senator Santo Santoro' three times really quickly, especially if you've been drinking). He wants to try to prove that the ABC is 'riddled with bias'. This is like trying to prove that water is wet: as long as you've got someone like David Marr standing opposite you, insisting that, no, water is dry, you'll never get anywhere.

Richard Alston tried to do this, some time ago, armed with a stopwatch as Don Quixote had a lance, and got exactly nowhere. Bias is not a matter of quantity, it's a matter of perception. The real test for ABC bias would have to be something like the famous 'Turing Test'. Genius mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing proposed a simple elegant test for establishing whether a hypothetical computer could think: have a conversation with it, via some means that would screen its non-human nature (he suggested a kind of telex keyboard - the Internet is of course the perfect solution). If the person communicating with the computer could not tell, after a certain time, whether they were talking to a human or a machine, then you would have to accept that the computer was 'thinking'.

Similarly, pretend that everything you hear on ABC tv and radio is written by one person. Listen and watch for a few days. Then make a judgement about that politics of that hypothetical person: it's not hard to do, we all make judgements like this everyday. If you judge that ABC person to be a leftwinger, then, yes, the ABC is biased.