That ABC TV news is dying is not in dispute.

The remaining question is whether to switch off life-support or let the news offering drift in and out of consciousness until the final moment comes. Sensibly, the BBC has set a date for the shutdown of its flagship television news ‘service’ – moving entirely to online services.

ABC audience diehards – a rapidly dwindling but persevering lot – will have noted the correlation between junk ABC news and current affairs broadcasting, and the numbers of people producing it. There’s more of both.

Having committed to staff reductions the ABC headcount has, predictably, increased over the past year despite pleas for greater funding.

Blather, babble, and blah have long been staples of ABC programming, but ABC TV news and current affairs have now taken the art-form to new levels. It’s thrown in drivel for good measure.

The broadcaster’s disturbing obsession with Australia’s powerfully dull federal politics and its various campaigns on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, gender fluidity, and the concerted trashing of the productive sectors of the economy dominate the airwaves – show there’s more than enough content to fill every 24-hour cycle.

Since we’re paying for this ‘high octane‘ dross, let’s examine what’s going on.

From the mid-1990s, courtesy of the internet and the transparency revolution, the vast majority of ‘talking heads’ occupying airtime on ABC TV and radio are those overtly peddling a theory, an ideology, a product, service, or just themselves.

Provided you are politically ‘sound’ (meaning hard-left, centre-left or just left), you qualify for an on-screen spot.

Look no further than the astoundingly poor show The Drum for evidence. It’s crammed full of chancers, self-promoters, and hacks all wanting their moment in the ‘taxpayer-funded’ sunshine. It’s shamelessly ‘low-rent’ television where guests do the work and the ‘anchors’ make fools of themselves.

The Drum is publicly-funded television at its worst. One presenter, in particular, seems to regard it as ‘show time’ for her – while she conducts an orchestra of hand-picked activists, campaigners, and political hopefuls with all the subtlety of a naked acrobat.

The show is an insult to thinking people actually interested in current issues – both local and global. It’s not current affairs and it’s not television.

Our political representatives, who spend most of each day pretending to ‘do’ things rather than actually ‘doing’ things, make for wonderful ABC television ‘talking head’ fodder. These people honestly think doing a television interview equals a day’s work. Given that so few members of our national Parliament (and none of our state or territory MPs) say anything worth hearing – the fixation is mysterious, puzzling, and dispiriting.

While the nation struggles with indigestion from ‘pollie–speak’ overload – the ABC pumps out federal government media releases like ammunition from a self-loading firearm. Once in a while, reporters may glance at statements from the Opposition too, but only occasionally.

The vast majority of ABC bulletins carry up to three ‘government issued’ stories as if the nation is somehow unable to function without the dead-hand of Canberra steering us to enlightenment on every issue from what we eat, drink, or how we work.

The ABC has apparently fashioned a task for itself as the national chronicler of everything that is said by federal MPs and all that occurs in the Canberra firmament. ABC programmers then feel duty-bound to convey this ‘info garbage’ to us. Once in a while a federal government action is significant and ought to be reported … but this is not often.

Remaining audience members will be well aware of the ABC’s thrust on trust – and the tagline that if you want to ‘think bigger’ only ABC Radio National will enable one to do so.

ABC executives are fixated on having us believe the news service is the most trusted in the country. Bizarre, when we have no independent data to support the assertion while at the same time noting ABC TV news rates well behind 9 and 7. Channel 10 rates so poorly it hardly matters.

The under 30s tuned out of the ABC years ago and now only the bored and bewildered keep watching and listening. This raises some interesting questions about the future ABC audience – the most obvious being – will there be one?

The cold, hard reality for all television news services is that everyone already knows the news before the television bulletins start. We know what’s happened. We know the weather, the financial market results, the interest rate movements, the retail sales figures, and the sporting gossip long before the TV producers hit their control panels. The networks tend not to focus on this uncomfortable truth – but know it’s true.

In other words – the glory days when television news and current affairs could enthral, enlighten, inform, and entertain are long gone. We know it, they know it and curiously programming continues as if nothing has changed.

As is so often the case with the twilight years of things we once held dear – standards start to fall, care and maintenance become rudimentary and decay starts to set in. In short, decrepitude is setting in at ABC headquarters and the consequences are evident to all.

Too many faces on ABC TV news are not full-time ABC staffers – but who use the taxpayer-funded platform for self-promotion. Needless to say, this sorry trend blocks the progression of younger ‘up-and-coming’ reporters and serves only the (financial) needs of the individuals involved.

Staffers frequently write books or articles for other publications on ABC-time and then use the network to mercilessly promote their work. Why the ABC continues to make a virtue out of the patently untrue policy of ‘no advertising’ is hard to fathom. Advertising is rife across the various platforms of the corporation in full contravention of the ABC Charter.

ABC Q&A is a highly choreographed artifice that pursues agendas as far as the eye can see. With credibility having long ago abandoned Q&A – the show is a tedious amalgam of the banal, the trite, and the inconsequential.

7.30 is a show which strays between the rarely interesting to the blatantly partisan. During the summer programming its presentation standards sank to new lows.

ABC television news, once the flagship of ABC’s offering, is now an embarrassment to all cognitive viewers. It is dull, tedious, repetitive, and expensive. The news is already known to viewers. These are not the touch-points giving rise to innovation, knowledge or deep thought. You’d reckon someone might mention to Laura Tingle that television presenting is a stand-alone skill over and above merely reporting.

The ABC is peddling a tired, clapped-out product that was relevant and vibrant in the 1970s – more than 50 years ago.

Remember too, if watching ABC television news has caused concern for you or anyone you know – stop watching it. Tens of thousands of other people have already done so and they have observed major health and wellbeing improvements.