South Australia is set to suffer collateral damage from the moronic media wars raging interstate.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, led by its cabal of commentators and editorial executives ensconced in leafy Sydney and Melbourne suburbs, has been fighting a relentless and tedious battle against the ABC.

Using his national broadsheet, The Australian, and syndicated tabloid columnists such as Melbourne-based Andrew Bolt, Murdoch has been using what remains of his media muscle to attack the national broadcaster at every turn.

Murdoch hates the ABC’s growing popularity as he sees it as a direct threat to his commercial interests.

As a result, he’s been campaigning to make it as easy as possible for Prime Minister Tony Abbott to break his black-and-white election eve promise not to cut SBS and the ABC.

It looks like the American billionaire is going to get his way.

Today, Tony Abbott casually broke his promise via his Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull – and all reports indicate the ABC in Adelaide is going to cop a fair whack of the pain thanks to the eastern states’ myopia of the ABC management.

READ MORE: ABC loses $254m from budget

Apart from the breathtaking insouciance of Abbott’s breach of faith, the most striking aspect of the national debate about the ABC is how irrelevant it is to South Australians.

While the conservative A-list and the inner-city trendies in Sydney and Melbourne duke it out over ABC bias and whether the corporation’s reach is damaging private commercial interests, South Australians shrug and keep watching and listening to the ABC in large and growing numbers.

As Premier Jay Weatherill pointed out this week, media organisations run out of the eastern states have little understanding of South Australian realities.

We’re different: calmer, more cohesive as community, and less tribal in our politics.

Whatever your view of the political predilections of national programs such as Q&A, I would defy anyone to identify systemic political bias in any Adelaide-produced ABC program.

The ABC’s most politically edgy local broadcasters, high rating breakfast radio presenters Matthew Abraham and David Bevan, could hardly be accused of giving Labor an easy run, or being trendy latte-sipping hipsters.

The ABC’s Adelaide television news bulletin and the weekly 7.30 SA are both even-handed to a fault.

The Murdoch media’s obsession with ABC bias might play nicely in the ugly cultural battlefields of the big eastern states cities, but here in Adelaide we have a general distaste of rigid political positioning.

In our State Parliament, plenty of MPs could sit comfortably on either side of the house.

Senior Liberals such as Steven Marshall and his predecessor Isobel Redmond are more socially progressive than half the Labor Cabinet.

Likewise, there are plenty of economic dries on the Labor side of the chamber. Tom Koutsantonis, for example, is a closer to big business – notably the oil and gas industries – than senior Liberals such as David Ridgway and Mitch Williams.

That’s not meant as a critique of any of these politicians, rather it’s an observation of Adelaide’s ecumenical political style.

Our two greatest premiers – one a flamboyant artsy lawyer, the other a down-to-earth cherry orchardist – are widely respected by South Australians of all political hues.

I like this quality in South Australia; it marks us as refreshingly different. It means we’re insulated – at least to some degree – from the vacant ideological tribalism that defines modern politics elsewhere in Australia.

All of which makes it more infuriating that the ABC’s South Australian programming looks set to fall victim to the combination of a nakedly political campaign and the concentration of ABC power in Australia’s insular eastern bloc.

While the combatants in Sydney and Melbourne are trading blows over the minutiae of Q&A’s guest list, in Adelaide we’re far more interested in what Jon Lamb is saying about the tomato season, or whether we know the person who took the night’s weather picture on the TV news.

A modest level of budget constraint shouldn’t be galling to anyone, but plenty of people are deeply concerned about the role of the Murdoch media in the Abbott Government’s about-face on ABC cuts.

Those in the know, like Media Watch host Paul Barry and local employees, believe that South Australia’s local edition of the 7.30 Report and all local TV production, except for the news, will be scrapped.

The national broadcaster has an obligation to serve the entire country, but it’s very rich of Christopher Pyne to launch a self-righteous campaign against the potential loss of local ABC production.

Perhaps he should have thought about that before his Government colluded with Murdoch in a relentless campaign to damage the ABC.

Perhaps he should have considered local jobs before his Cabinet colleagues axed the ABC’s Australia Network contract, thus blowing a hole in the work flowing to Adelaide.

Perhaps he should go to his Prime Minister and encourage him to keep his promise.

Perhaps he should tell his buddies in Government and the Murdoch media to take their boring and irrelevant eastern states culture war and shove it.

We don’t want it here.

David Washington is Editor of InDaily.