Against a backdrop of calls from Liberal Party members to privatise the national broadcaster, Sinclair Davidson, an RMIT academic and adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, claimed ABC employees were five times more likely to be Greens voters than other Australians. He also said ABC journalists tended to be centre-left. Professor Davidson's claim is flimsy. In making the claim, Professor Davidson referred to a study published in 2013 which surveyed 605 journalists from a variety of organisations on their voting intentions. Fifty-nine of these journalists were from the ABC, and only 34 of them answered the question on voting intention, with 25 either undecided or electing not to answer. But experts told Fact Check that the ABC sub-sample was too small and the rate of undecided and non-response too high to be able to draw accurate conclusions from the survey on ABC journalist voting intention, let alone voting intention of all ABC employees. Upon releasing the findings in 2013, the author of the study himself, Folker Hanusch, inserted numerous caveats about using sub-samples of the survey, including that the margins of error would be larger than those for the total sample. Professor Davidson neglected to include any of these important caveats in making his claim.
Verdict: Flimsy