On World Radio Day, how does Australia stack up?

The UN celebrates World Radio Day on February 13, in recognition of the importance of radio as the most widely consumed medium globally, the medium most committed to the shaping of social diversity, and, at its best, a platform for democratic discourse. As a mass media technology, radio is low-cost, easily accessible, and it communicates with an intimacy and immediacy that enables it to do what other mass media forms currently don’t much care to do: make significant contributions to the construction of local communities.

A force for good in so many ways, but also a force that has often struggled, especially within the shifting conditions of the current media environment, to live up to the social and democratic ideals embedded in the UN’s celebration of its capacities.

Most Australians listen to radio — in some form or another

The Australian radio industry has proven remarkably resilient in the face of the series of competing technologies that have kept turning up over the years. When television arrived and snaffled radio’s staple formats of quiz shows, soap operas, and drama, radio turned to music and sport. When FM radio arrived and quickly dominated music broadcasting, AM radio turned to talk. With the arrival of the raft of digital and online alternatives, broadcast radio companies have begun to incorporate live streams, play on demand, and a stronger focus on direct interaction with their listeners. Their transition, though, is still a work in progress and the eventual outcomes for all sectors of the industry are hard to predict.

We can see, though, that the mass media is in decline as a social and technological formation, and this is posing a complex existential challenge for radio broadcasters into the future. Those who choose to listen to ‘the radio’ via traditional broadcasting stations, or even through a live app on their phones, are ageing and so that section of the market is shrinking. Some of the habits that supported broadcast radio listening are fading out as well; having the radio playing in the home as a companion runs against the grain of how younger audiences consume their media.

There is an expanding gap between the consumption habits of the over 60s and those under 25.  The under 25s are highly selective, happy to invest time into deliberate and complex patterns of choice. Mostly, too, those choices are made online and across an agnostic range of media formats — video such as YouTube, music streaming services, live programming, podcasts, social media chat and so on. Radio is having an increasingly hard time holding its place with this section of the market; the steep decline in the listening figures for the ABC’s ‘youth station’, Triple J, is just one of the indicators here.

Where radio still rules as a companion, and as a daily source of entertainment and information, is in the car. Something like 79% of adult Australians listen to AM, FM or DAB+ radio programming in their cars. Even there, however, music streaming services such as Spotify are serious competitors. The growth in the popularity of podcasts — initially a spinoff from radio in terms of genre, production and approach —‚ has been dramatic in recent years, too, and it is notable how a broadcaster such as the ABC has been quick to accommodate that mode of storytelling within the ABC Listen app.

There is, then, a complex media ecology unfolding with online and digital platforms blurring what now counts as ‘radio’ in much the way that the video streaming services and YouTube have changed what we now understand as ‘television’.

While there is a strong policy commitment to the maintenance of the powerful AM radio services — their community and emergency functions alone demand government support — it is not at all clear how the sector will look in five or ten years’ time.

Talk back, shock jocks & community radio

It is worth thinking, though, about the extent to which the contemporary Australian radio environment supports the UN’s expressed ambitions for radio — in contributing to diversity, developing community, and providing a platform for democratic discourse.

Twenty years ago, I led a research project which examined the political influence of talkback radio in Australia. On the positive side, the research found that talkback radio served an important pro-social function for many local communities, particularly in the regions where there was little else in the way of local media outlets which spoke directly to the interests of those communities.

But this was the era of the metropolitan ‘shock-jock’, where hosts such as Derryn Hinch, Stan Zemanek, and Alan Jones were paid to provoke anger, alarm and controversy.  Our research found that the shock jocks’ programming had the potential to be socially and politically corrosive. The period during which this research was undertaken happened to coincide with the period leading up to the 2005 Cronulla riots and to their immediate aftermath.

A group of police stand amongst a crowd in Cronulla, in 2005. In 2012, a court upheld a ruling that Alan Jones incited hatred against Lebanese Australians in on-air comments made in the lead up to the Cronulla riots. Source: Wikipedia.

Tapes collected from our monitoring of Alan Jones’ radio program were eventually used by investigators to determine whether these programs had played a part in fostering the racial hatred that exploded on that day.

Although there has been much discussion about the role now played by social media in generating fear and anger, we should remember that this didn’t just begin with social media.

While radio can certainly provide a platform for democratic discourse it also has the capacity, if poorly regulated, to provide a platform for anti-social discourses that undermine informed and responsible public debate. That potential does not just affect politics. It can have a broader social and popular cultural resonance as well.

The KIIS FM program hosted by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O, for instance, is widely regarded as having passed the boundaries of what the community should find acceptable, but it leads the Sydney market in the breakfast time slot. Their role in coarsening public discourses around sexuality and gender does not serve society well.

News — or opinion?

Commercial radio abandoned current affairs programming many years ago, but political and other news still features strongly in the content for their talkback formats. In these formats, however, ‘news’ becomes entertainment through the commodification of opinion. While this is a commercial strategy, broadcasters also defend the format’s social legitimacy by arguing that it provides its listeners with a voice, and creates a sense of community. Nevertheless, the fact that these voices and that ‘community’ is based upon the sharing of opinion rather than informed analysis and factual reporting means that commercial radio has created a significant news and information deficit as it has evolved.

This context underlines the crucial importance of ABC radio, and to a lesser extent the SBS. The ABC is the last one standing in defending the importance of current affairs and news reporting in Australian radio. Their position has become increasingly contested in recent decades, as the ABC has become the target of culture wars, funding cuts, accusations of bias, and bursts of harassment from political parties of all colours. A cowed and risk-averse institution will fail in its endeavours to serve as the independent source of information, news and analysis that radio, at its best, should provide and that the community requires.

The future of radio in Australia depends more than ever upon the maintenance of a courageous and well supported public broadcaster if it is to deliver against the ideals and potentials celebrated on World Radio Day.

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