First, Michelle Guthrie, the managing director they loathed, disappeared unexpectedly. Then Justin Milne, the chair of the ABC Board, also went. What followed was revelation after revelation of bad behaviour, bad choices, bad politics.

So ABC staff, who’d campaigned for Justin Milne’s removal because he wouldn’t know a charter of independence if he fell over it, were breathing freely.

Surely things would improve.

But in the last few weeks, the legacy of the deadly duo is still seeping into the organisation. As that old saying goes, a fish rots from the top and some of the poor values and worse decision-making are still having an impact.

Two very strange things have happened at our beloved public broadcaster while we’ve been distracted by leadership shenanigans and they are manifestations of the problems Guthrie and Milne left behind.

Strange thing one: quite public – and that’s the poor way the ABC dealt with the visit of ACTU Secretary Sally McManus on Wednesday. It was on again, off again, a hundred competing stories about why McManus was visiting and whether she should be allowed to speak to staff. In the end, McManus’s low key lunchtime speech to members of the media union (MEAA) and the public servants union (CPSU) was delivered without a hitch in the beautiful Eugene Goossens Hall.

Reports of the numbers vary but maybe 150 as it started and fewer as lunchtime ended and staff had to return to work. But at least one attendee was not a member of either union - instead she was from human resources, watching the meeting and, apparently, taking notes. Which is weird really. Someone from management in a union meeting.

When McManus left the meeting to head up to do an interview with ABC Business on the lack of wage growth, HR tried to head her off at the pass telling her that she was meant to be off the premises by 2pm. There were many and varied interpretations of what happened and good on both McManus and ABC management for finally coming to an accommodation. But the public spat made workers feel as if their autonomy had again disappeared. It is not a demonstration of a lack of independence to attend a union meeting or even to attend a speech by Australia’s union leader. It’s the opposite, it shows a commitment to work, a passion for the workplace and an abiding dedication to the culture of one of Australia’s most important public institutions.

Strange thing two: not quite so public. The obsession with popularity continues. Popularity is not a bad thing – all journalists want their work to be widely read. But at least one team at the ABC, the Specialist Reporting team, is now being set targets for the number of readers each story gets. The inside story is that this is a pilot for a rollout across the institution. The key performance indicator is being set as an average of 80,000 page views across the team’s output. At least one reporter says that in the middle of a month, if page views are down, they are being discouraged from writing stories that might not get high impact.

Of course it’s important to consider audience – and I’ve always thought the ABC did exactly that. But my own experience of journalism is that sometimes the most important stories you ever do are the ones which struggle to get much of an audience. A few years ago, I wrote a story on the rate of hospitalisation as a result of family violence. The figures were frightening – at least one every three hours and the researchers suggested that was probably only half the problem. Absolutely nobody read it. I was devastated. Truckloads of work yet nary an eyeball. Stories where I make a personal revelation or might be angry or upset or writing about something very newsy get plenty of hits. But serious work with numbers often struggles to get traction.

Both these strange events are causing disquiet in a workplace that is already beset with misery. Fresh from the Hunger Games where staff members had to compete against friends for a smaller number of jobs, fresh from upheaval at the top which is probably set to continue, fresh from cuts to government funding.

In May this year, the ABC’s director of news, Gaven Morris, speaking at the Melbourne Press Club, was pretty clear about the impact of those cuts: "Make no mistake, there is no more fat to cut at the ABC . . . any more cuts to the ABC cut into the muscle of the organisation."

Successive governments have somehow misunderstood the role of a public broadcaster so let’s make this clear: a public broadcaster is not the same as a state broadcaster. A public broadcaster should be fair and independent. A state broadcaster is just a parrot and we have enough of those. This government’s decision to starve the ABC of funds so it will become compliant is terrifying – and the obsession with audience metrics is just one of them.

Our ABC must be brave and bold. It must defend its journalists – and that’s not just the ones who have a public profile such as Emma Alberici and Andrew Probyn. It must also defend the – mostly – young casualised reporters who work online and for whom those average required page views feel as if someone is constantly looking over their shoulders, waiting for a reason to sack them.

Michelle’s metrics brought from Google shouldn’t be a measure of what matters. What’s in the public interest isn’t always popular.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology and a Canberra Times columnist.