ABC’s political programme Insiders is the national broadcaster’s only current affairs show to grow its audience as viewers continue to leave traditional broadcast television.
As reported by The Guardian, the Insiders grew its audience by 4 per cent between 2019 and 2022, compared to Q+A which dropped by 36 per cent and Four Corners which dropped by 19 per cent.
In this sense, the show has largely bucked the trend when it comes to viewers watching current affairs shows. Australian Story dropped by 16 per cent between 2019 and 2022, whilst Foreign Correspondent dropped by 22 per cent and 7.30 dropped by 4 per cent.
This was according to an internal presentation that was shown to The Guardian.
The trend for falling current affairs numbers is not unique to the ABC. Nine’s 60 minutes was down by 25 per cent since 2019 and Ten’s The Project is reportedly down by 20 per cent since 2019.
For the ABC, Q+A is the show that has seen the biggest drop within that time period. It has dropped 36 per cent in the last three years and 58 per cent since 2016.
The Insiders’ success means that its staff is likely to be saved from ABC’s latest round of redundancies.
According to The Guardian, the show, hosted by David Speers since 2020, was not targeted in last week’s major round of redundancies.
Instead programs such as Four Corners and Australian Story will be impacted as it moves towards an “integrated digital operation”.
The news department lost 41 of the 120 jobs which were targeted for redundancy across the organisation.
Interestingly the numbers from the internal presentation show that the declining audience number for current affairs shows is not being offset by the growth of digital.
More people are watching news programming on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and ABC online, however these channels are not growing fast enough.
