The ABC’s new public comment guidelines, which replace its existing “personal use of social media” policy and follow the debacle of the Antoinette Lattouf affair, have been portrayed by rival media organisations as “a crackdown”, “a gag order”, “a hit” on ABC employees, and other such alarming epithets.

None of these reporters and commentators seem to have noticed that, under the new guidelines, Lattouf could not have been summarily taken off air, as she was, without even being given the right to defend herself.

“Public comments that do not meet the standards set out in these guidelines”, they say clearly, “will be managed by line management, in consultation with People & Culture”. That’s the ABC’s HR department, which was not consulted at all when Lattouf was taken off air.

If the public comment in question is judged to breach the ABC’s Code of Conduct, that breach “will be dealt with in accordance with the relevant ABC employment contract and/or enterprise agreement” – which the Federal Court found did not happen in the Lattouf case.

At least one object of the new guidelines is to prevent senior management from getting the ABC into the mess that followed its panic during the Lattouf affair.

To my mind, the new guidelines are an improvement on the old.

They make clear that high-profile, on-air employees and contractors, and senior managers, will have the rules applied more strictly to their public comments than anonymous employees in the payroll section or the reference library.

They make clear that it is not only on social media that those senior workers need to bear in mind the possible impact of their utterances on the ABC’s reputation. Book launches, writer’s festivals, interviews with journalists from other publications, even — though rarely, I would guess — WhatsApp groups are all fora where what they say may be repeated to a wider public.

Frankly, none of this is new. Veteran ABC staff have always known that anything they say in public can be taken down and used against the ABC. And ABC chair Kim Williams made clear in his first week in the job that staff who do not accept the ABC’s legal obligation to report impartially should look for work elsewhere.

If I have a quarrel with the new guidelines, it is that they are too vague about what is acceptable and what isn’t. The ABC, they say, expects “that you will not make any comment that… undermines the independence or integrity of the ABC or any ABC editorial content.”

Well, “independence and integrity” are pretty vague words. In most of the cases that have become causes celebes, the problem has been that a public comment by a prominent ABC person has undermined not so much the ABC’s independence or integrity as its claim to impartiality.

If I had been ABC editorial director Gavin Fang, who authored the new guidelines, I’d have tried to ensure that “impartiality” was in there somewhere.

But, sensibly managed — and as the Lattouf affair demonstrated, that’s a crucial proviso — the new guidelines should leave ABC workers, and the public, clearer about what’s expected of them, and what will happen if they fail those expectations.

They will rarely, if ever, I suspect, result in anyone losing their jobs.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.