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Influence of
talkback radio

The latest controversies generated by Australia's two most powerful
talkback radio hosts, Alan Jones and John Laws, have demonstrated just
how powerful these two men have become. But as media analyst Graeme
Turner reports, theirs is a medium about which little is understood or
known.

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Once it was regarded as a banal diversion for bored housewives; now it
is the medium of choice for politicians seeking to make direct contact
with the electorate. With the social and political prominence of
talkback hosts such as Alan Jones and John Laws, talkback radio has
developed a degree of influence that must have seemed unthinkable when
it first began with Mike Walsh on Sydney's 2GB in 1967. If you want to
sell political ideas to the Australian public today, the most direct
means is via talkback radio. The current crop of politicians has
clearly accepted Paul Keating's advice: 'If you educate John Laws, you
educate Australia'.

The influence wielded and used by Australian politicians is the
provocation for a study, now in its second year, of talkback radio in
Australia which aims to fill crucial gaps in knowledge about this most
influential of media formats. It will produce analysis of talkback's
content, of its audience and caller appeal, how it is produced, and its
social, cultural and political influence.

The rise of the talkback format in Australia is, in part, an accidental
consequence of the deregulation of Australian commercial radio in the
Broadcasting Act of 1992. By the end of the 1980s, commercial radio was
in dire financial straits as a result of a major upheaval of media
ownership, the regulatory structures installed with the government's
National Radio Plan, and the excessive prices paid by AM proprietors to
convert to the FM band. Since at least some of these factors were the
direct result of poorly coordinated government policy, the government
had some responsibility to attempt to retrieve the situation for the
commercial sector.

Among the deregulatory measures adopted to assist the survival of the
commercial operators was a reduction of some of the public service
obligations upon the licensees. The provision of an independent local
news service was among these. As a result, independent news gathering
is no longer a core activity for commercial radio and current affairs
programs produced by journalists have almost entirely disappeared from
the sector. On the AM band stations, already committed to talk formats
as their means of competing with the wall-to-wall music programming on
FM, the space vacated by news and current affairs has been filled by
talkback.

Underpinning the deregulation of radio in 1992 was the assumption that
radio no longer played a significant political role. As the commercial
sector expanded, it was assumed that no one radio station could
exercise a significant influence on public opinion and therefore they
should be free of any unnecessary regulatory oversight. TV and the
print media were regarded as the most important avenues for breaking
new stories and for public debate.

This has proved to be a mistake. Increasingly today, the print media
follows up on stories broken through interviews broadcast on talkback
radio. Similarly, with television: where once we might have seen our
politicians in doorstop mode on the nightly news bulletins, now we are
more likely to see them inside a radio studio, headphones on, talking
to the listeners.

Some of the influence of talkback is more insidious than this, however.
The Cash for Comment scandal revealed how comprehensively commercial
interests are integrated into the roles played by talkback hosts, and
how the blurring of the line between the journalist and the entertainer
enabled unethical practices to thrive within mainstream commercial
radio. At the same time, it is also true that for many of its
listeners, talkback operates as a substitute for the backyard fence in
constructing a positive sense of community and enabling the sharing of
information and debate.

These are things we need to know more about. In comparison to
television, there has been very little research on radio - particularly
on the talkback format. This is a little alarming, given talkback's
apparent influence and reach: John Laws, for instance, has access to
over 60% of the Australian population every weekday through the
networking of his program. We know little, though, about what is done
with this access. We don't know how much and what kind of influence
talkback has on Australian political and cultural life.

Crucially, too, we know very little about the kinds of satisfactions
listeners get from talkback. While talkback radio is routinely regarded
as the preferred location for the expression of a narrowly conservative
range of social views, we don't actually have research which
demonstrates that this is the case - or, if it is, what are the reasons
and the implications for our society. The social function of talkback
certainly seems significant yet we know almost nothing about it. That
is about to change.

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Prominent media studies author and academic, Graeme Turner, is director
of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of
Queensland. The three year study of talkback radio is funded by the
Australian Research Council and assisted by the media monitoring firm,
Rehame.