Journalism

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Vol. 10(4): 411–430 DOI: 10.1177/1464884909104948

ARTICLE

Politics, radio and journalism in Australia

The influence of ‘talkback’

Graeme Turner
University of Queensland, Australia

ABSTRACT

This article draws on a research project examining the influence of talkback radio on
politics in Australia, which focuses on the manner in which talkback formats have
displaced the more conventional news and current affairs formats once prominent on
the AM band in order to discuss the consequences of this change. An important con-
sideration here is the fact that radio journalism has given way to the talkback host or
entertainer at precisely the time when the political influence of the talkback format
has become most pronounced, and when the regulatory control of that influence has
become least effective. The result is a form of entertainment that mimics the forms
and practices of journalism but which performs quite different social and political
functions.
KEY WORDS ethics influence journalism media radio talkback

Talkback radio and the Cronulla riots

In early December 2005, in a pleasant beachside suburb of southern Sydney,

there occurred what can only be called ‘a race riot’. The Cronulla riot pitched
local, largely Anglo-Australian residents (that is, Australian citizens from a
British background), against Lebanese-Australian youths from the mainly
working-class suburbs of Sydney’s middle west. According to the most credible
reports, it expressed tensions that had built up over a long period among
Cronulla residents about what they regarded as the offensive behaviour of
these western suburbs youths on the beachfront. The youths were accused of
harassing young women, of aggressively occupying large areas of the beach to
play football, and of provoking fights with the locals. The flashpoint came after
two Cronulla ‘lifesavers’ (volunteer lifeguards) were hospitalized after an alter-
cation with a large group of Lebanese-Australian youths; it was alleged that
the lifesavers were the victims of an unprovoked attack. Police were accused
412 Journalism 10(4)

of ignoring calls for assistance from the Cronulla community because of pol-
itical sensitivities about being seen to be victimizing Lebanese-Australians.
Inflammatory reports in the print and the electronic media, a vigorous burst
of text-messaging to mobilize participants on both sides of the dispute, and
some opportunistic interventions from local politicians resulted in a large
crowd of Anglo-Australians rallying at Cronulla beach on 5 December 2005.
Eventually, fuelled by alcohol, they sought out and attacked anyone of Middle
Eastern appearance they could find. Only police intervention prevented
serious injury to those targeted. Reprisals followed almost immediately with
carloads of Lebanese-Australian youths arriving from the western suburbs,
physically attacking residents and trashing the shopping centre and suburban
streets of Cronulla over several days.
This event shocked Australians; few could have witnessed anything like
it before. It shocked the state government too. Since the 1970s, Australia has
actively pursued a range of immigration and cultural policies, most with tacit
public acceptance and many highly effective, with the objective of assisting
the inclusion of non-Anglo migrants into a multicultural community.
A formal commission of enquiry was established, chaired by a former assistant
police commissioner, Norm Hazzard, to work through the various accounts
of what happened at Cronulla and why. When the Hazzard report was tabled
in the New South Wales (NSW) state parliament, it included an analysis of
the role that the media, specifically ‘talkback’ programs on commercial radio,
had played in inflaming community concerns and in disseminating the mis-
information that had fed community frustrations leading up to the riot.
This section of the report, prepared by University of Sydney media
academic Catharine Lumby,1 concluded that ‘some elements of the media
fed public debate about ethnicity, religion and antisocial behaviour in ways
which undoubtedly encouraged, if not actively caused, the perception that
Anglo-Australians were under attack by Lebanese/Middle Eastern gangs and
that the police force was unable to protect them’ (Strike Force Neil, 2006: 35).
Crucially, Lumby finds, it was this perception which encouraged the view that
the community needed to take some action of its own, leading to the rally to
‘reclaim the beach’ which precipitated the riot on 5 December.
Prominent among those ‘elements of the media’ was a talkback host on
Sydney AM station 2GB, Alan Jones. As we see in the account I develop later in
this article, talkback programs have largely displaced more traditional forms of
current affairs journalism on Australian radio, their hosts taking on some of the
roles but few of the responsibilities of the journalists they replaced. Jones is a
particularly influential figure in Australia, with close ties to both the federal
and the NSW governments, and he has run campaigns against public and
 Turner Politics, radio and journalism in Australia 413

political figures in the past.2 As the top rating breakfast show host in Sydney,
he has been credited by the former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard,
with determining the outcome of the 1996 federal election; although there
is little evidence to support this view, the claim has achieved mythological
status and is indicative of the seriousness with which his political influence
is regarded.
This influence has had its commercial as well as its political dimension.
In what came to be called the ‘Cash for Comment’ inquiry in the late 1990s,
the regulatory agency at the time, the Australian Broadcasting Authority,
found that Jones – despite his characteristic invocation of a journalistic inde-
pendence – had broadcast supportive editorial comment on his program in
return for millions of dollars in fees paid by major corporations such as
banks, telcos, and airlines (Johnson, 2000; Turner, 2003). The finding, like the
numerous defamation cases which have been resolved against him, did not
matter to Jones’ core audience: indeed, the more he is brought to the atten-
tion of the regulator and the law, the more of a people’s hero he seems.
It is not surprising, then, that there should be close scrutiny – from pol-
itical commentators, legal authorities, academics, and the police – of Jones’
handling of public comment on the events leading up to the Cronulla riot.
In examples quoted in the Hazzard report, Jones read with approval an email
from a listener who suggested commissioning ‘bikie gangs’ to meet ‘these
Lebanese thugs’ at Cronulla station and ‘send them scurrying back to their
lairs’. Jones also indicated tacit approval to the caller who said that these
people needed ‘a rifle butt in the face’, and laughed when ‘an old digger’3 sug-
gested ‘if you shoot one, the rest will run’. Although there were occasions
when Jones advised listeners not to take the law into their own hands, there
are also occasions when the opposite message was sent. The racial vilification
of people of Lebanese background included one comment that implied
that Lebanese youths were responsible for all the rapes being committed in
Western Sydney.4
Initially, the fact that the Hazzard report had been completed was denied
by the NSW police minister – he claimed it was still in the drafting process –
presumably to protect the government against upsetting an influential
broadcaster. When this statement was revealed to be untrue, the minister con-
cerned, Carl Scully, was forced to resign for deliberately misleading parlia-
ment. It was a spectacularly high price to pay for attempting to protect a
commercial broadcaster who had behaved in a way that was highly likely to
be found in breach of the Broadcasting Code – if not also in breach of the
recently introduced anti-terrorism laws that criminalized similar behaviour.
When the report was eventually made public, those it had criticized vigorously
414 Journalism 10(4)

defended themselves and attacked, in turn, its authors. Listeners joined in,
arguing that the talkback hosts had performed a public service by expressing
what so many others had thought but were afraid to say due to ‘political cor-
rectness’. Another of the radio hosts concerned, Ray Hadley, told his audience
that criticism from an academic such as Lumby was something he ‘wore like
a badge of honour’.
Over the following year the media regulator, by this time the Australian
Media and Communications Authority (ACMA), investigated formal com-
plaints about Alan Jones’ broadcasts during the period leading up to the
Cronulla riots. Their task was to decide whether he had breached the Broad-
casting Code of Practice, which is one of the regulatory requirements upon
broadcast licencees under the current legislation. On 10 April 2007, ACMA
announced that it had found against Alan Jones on two of the complaints.
It found that Jones had broadcast material which was ‘likely to encourage
violence or brutality and to vilify people of Lebanese or Middle Eastern back-
ground on the basis of ethnicity’ (ACMA, 2007). Jones, his employers, and
many of his listeners were outraged, personally attacking the members of
ACMA and challenging their authority to make such a judgment.5
While most media commentators applauded the findings, there was also
significant editorial support for Jones. Although its specialist media colum-
nists all saw it as a ‘fair cop’, the editorial in The Australian for 13 April 2007
(p. 15) characterized the regulator’s action as an infringement of free speech –
a line which was also taken in the accompanying op-ed piece written by one
of Jones’ most well-known supporters (ironically, the former head of the pre-
vious media regulatory authority) (Flint, 2007). What was most surprising was
the fact that the then Prime Minister, John Howard, did not choose to sup-
port the regulator his government entrusts with ensuring that the media
serves the public good. Rather, he offered his support to Alan Jones. ‘Alan
Jones’, he said, was an ‘outstanding Australian’, unlikely to ever incite vio-
lence; indeed, his great value to the Australian community, Howard said, was
that he is able to ‘articulate what a lot of people have thought’ (Bodey and
Karvelas, 2007: 1). The phrase ‘dog whistle politics’6 has been used to describe
this kind of statement, and it is a tactic Howard had used in the past: that is,
to covertly indicate a degree of personal sympathy with the cultural and racial
intolerance still thriving in sections of the Australian community.
Given the seriousness of the event under examination, and the clear
evidence it provides of an alarming socio-political schism within the Australian
community, such a response is extraordinary. The nation’s Prime Minister had
chosen to defend a commercial broadcaster properly found to be in breach
of a government code of journalism practice instituted to protect the public
 Turner Politics, radio and journalism in Australia 415

interest – actually, in this case, the rule of law. Clearly, it was adjudged more im-
portant that Howard maintain good relations with Alan Jones (and, of course,
Jones’ audience) than it was to support his own government’s authority. It is
a dramatic demonstration of the power that this host and, I go on to argue,
talkback radio in general have achieved in Australia. In what follows, I want to
provide a synoptic account of the character of what is now the dominant
format through which current affairs is presented on Australian radio before
then discussing its political role as the medium of choice for most Australian
politicians.

The shape of talkback radio in Australia

The overview presented in this section is drawn from a four-year research

project examining the history, audience, content, and political influence of
talkback radio in Australia. The project involved historical and media re-
search, a large-scale content analysis of sample periods of four metropolitan
talkback programs, as well as a number of interviews with talkback hosts and
producers. Its findings also feed directly into the discussion of the political
influence later on in this article.
‘Talkback’ in Australia is a radio format in which the primary content is
generated by listeners’ responses to the invitation to phone in and talk ‘live’
with the host and their audience. There is evidence that Australian talkback is
both far more extensive as a format across the broadcasting sector there and
also far more thoroughly embedded in the political process than its counter-
parts in comparable countries such as the UK (although not at the level ex-
perienced in the USA). Talkback programs on the AM band lead the ratings
surveys in most Australian metropolitan markets at prime time and talkback
components are becoming increasingly common in FM popular music formats
as well. Talkback has been a feature of the Australian media since 1967 when
it was first legalized; its introduction was delayed by concerns about privacy
issues as well as the perceived inadequacy of the available technologies to
ensure inappropriate comments could be bleeped before being broadcast.
When talkback did arrive, it was initially aimed at a predominantly female
market. It also had an implicitly democratizing mission in that it broke with
generations of media convention by taking the views of the average person
seriously enough to put them to air: its earliest producer, John Brennan, has
described the format as ‘God’s great leveller’ (Bodey, 2007: 15). After experi-
encing mixed success in the 1970s – the initial enthusiasm resulted in a satur-
ation of the market that in turn led to a significant reduction in the number
of programs using the format (Gould, 2007) – talkback eventually became
416 Journalism 10(4)

AM’s premier format, providing the sector with its best means of competing
against the newly introduced FM music stations in the 1980s.
The process of product differentiation that followed led to the develop-
ment of a breed of what are commonly called ‘shock-jocks’; although these are
to some extent in the American mould, they lack the more extreme dimen-
sions we might associate with such exponents as Rush Limbaugh. Figures such
as Alan Jones are far more easily located in the mainstream of the media than
the American ‘shock-jock’ would be. Largely, the Australian ‘shock-jocks’ are
‘personalities’ or entertainers rather than journalists, often drawn from out-
side the radio industry, and concentrated in the Sydney market,7 although
some were networked to other cities and regions. Their function was to pro-
voke callers by a mix of controversial views aimed at polarizing their audience,
shamelessly aggressive and rude treatment of those who called to disagree
with them, and a populist line on all political and social issues. These hosts
deliberately set out to be ‘bad’ – to shock, to provoke, and to insult – and to use
the aural spectacles their confrontations generated as a means of entertaining
their audiences. In a crowded market, even a successful program will not reach
a particularly large audience and so it is not imperative to generate broad
mainstream appeal. The economic model for these programs understands,
then, that the talkback host can afford to alienate half the population if he
attracts another couple of percentage points from the core audience as a result.
Hence, the investment in selling opinion rather than impartiality.8
Brennan likens the shock-jocks’ behaviour to that involved in ‘profes-
sional wrestling, just really big acting’ (Bodey, 2007: 15). At times the acting
has been too ‘big’, and at such times the regulatory authority has stepped in
to issue warnings. Under earlier regulatory frameworks, the individual broad-
caster could be fined or taken off the air. In today’s comparatively toothless
system, the regulator only has the authority to level sanctions against the
radio station as holder of the broadcasting licence, not the individual pre-
senter. That raises the bar against intervention considerably; punishing large
and powerful corporations with suspension of their operating licence, or the
insertion of restrictive conditions into that licence, is not likely to happen
without considerable litigation. As a result, the power of the most recent for-
mation of the regulatory body the ACMA has yet to be properly tested – hence
the pivotal nature of the findings against Alan Jones on Cronulla.9
The talkback format has many iterations in the Australian market, how-
ever, and it needs to be said that most of them do not set out to be the ‘bad
boys’ of the media industry. The vast majority of programs on the ABC, the
publicly funded equivalent to Britain’s BBC, or Canada’s CBC, are locally
and community-based talk programs which operate very much as a virtual
backyard fence for the sharing of gossip, opinion, and local concerns. The
 Turner Politics, radio and journalism in Australia 417

majority of regional (that is, non-metropolitan) programs on commercial radio

are like this, too: relatively low key formats hosted by journalists, grounded in
local issues most of the time, and conscious of the service they are providing
to communities who may be quite isolated in terms of their access to media.
Many of the markets served by these regional programs would not have a
locally produced television news bulletin, for instance, or a daily newspaper
that dealt with their particular local issues. Radio is the one medium to have
maintained some degree of localism in the journalism provided to these
areas. Unfortunately, even that is under significant commercial pressure, neces-
sitating amendments to a new raft of media laws which hope to limit some of
the worst effects of metropolitan media concentration by mandating a mini-
mum level of local content in such markets. Interviews with the regular callers
to these programs1 0 revealed a high degree of support for the broadcasts as a
politically empowering, democratizing, and community-building mechanism.
There is usually a news and current affairs core to such programs, but the facil-
itation of a community conversation seems to be at the heart of the audience
appeal of this version of the talkback format.
The metropolitan markets largely spurn such a grassroots or neighbour-
hood focus as well as their essentially journalistic function. Their distinctive
operation of the format includes a number of quite different models. Among
them is what I call the ‘celebrity host’. Celebrity hosts gather an audience
whose primary goal is to make personal contact with them – achieving access
to the world of ‘media people’ and thus leaving ‘the ordinary’ behind (Couldry,
2003: 143), or pursuing their parasocial relation with a public figure (Turner,
2004: 23–4). Consequently, the celebrity hosts tend to have a large cast of
regular callers who themselves become part of the broadcast community of
the program. Calls to these programs frequently commence with the caller
fulsomely complimenting the host on his (it is usually his) program or his per-
sonal attributes; almost 20 per cent of the calls to one of the celebrity hosts
my research examined were what I ended up calling ‘fan calls’. The agenda of
topics surveyed each day by these hosts tends to vary significantly over time
because it is driven almost as much by the callers as by the host. Politics is not
usually the most popular category of topic and most of the talk is about the
callers’ personal lives: one of the leading celebrity hosts, Sydney’s John Laws,
has a sentimental self-empowerment theme that is referenced in his sign-
ature phrase – ‘keeping the dream alive’.
Notwithstanding its personal focus, the commercial objective of the Laws
program is fundamental. Laws is renowned for what have become known as
his ‘live reads’ – his highly developed capacity to read an advertisement for a
product in a conversational manner, articulating some kind of genuine con-
nection with his own life so that the product convincingly carries his personal
418 Journalism 10(4)

endorsement. The practice enters murky regulatory territory because the line
between what could be understood as personal opinion and what would be
understood as paid advertising – a distinction the Broadcasting Code insists
must be preserved – is deliberately blurred. As a result, Laws became entangled
in the same ‘Cash for Comment’ controversy that snared Alan Jones in the
late 1990s. Laws’ ‘live reads’ were found to be indistinguishable from his
opinion pieces at times, and Laws was found to have deliberately masked the
commercial origin of the opinions expressed. In some of the instances cited
during these hearings, the opinion pieces were directly related to political or
public policy issues. In such cases, Laws presented views that met his con-
tractual obligations to his sponsors (an airline and a trucking lobby, among
them) in a way that was clearly aimed at influencing political decisions
in train or, at the very least, the context of public opinion in which these
political decisions were to be made. Laws’ defence, when called to present evi-
dence in the ‘Cash for Comment’ hearings, was that he was an entertainer,
not a journalist, and that therefore he was not governed by the ethics that
constrain journalistic practice. As he put it, his job was to sell products, and
it is to this task his talents were best applied (Johnson, 2000). On the subject
of his possible political influence over his audience, Laws’ view was that his
audience was perfectly aware of the difference between an advertisement
and his personal opinion and thus was not vulnerable to the deceptive
behaviour that the regulator accused him of adopting.
There are other talkback hosts who set out to use the format in ways that
do, however, acknowledge the pertinence of the ethical assumptions under-
pinning the profession of journalism. Their sphere of activity is the provision
of news and current affairs, not celebrity or opinion. As noted earlier, one
of the by-products of the dominance achieved by talkback formats over the
last 20 years in Australia is the virtual eradication from commercial radio of
what were once conventional news and current affairs programs. Under an
earlier regulatory structure, radio licensees were required to maintain an inde-
pendent newsroom, and to provide an element of local current affairs cover-
age as part of their licence conditions. When radio was deregulated in the
late 1980s, these requirements were relaxed as part of a package of measures
promulgated in order to assist the licensees deal with a crisis of rising costs;
some of these were the result of poor government policy and thus consti-
tuted a political liability (Miller, 1997: 65–9). As a result of the introduction of
a new self-regulatory regime, radio stations were allowed to lower their invest-
ment in news and current affairs – reducing their staffing levels, networking
their news or sometimes even sharing newsrooms with competitors, or merely
subscribing to a ‘rip-and-read’ service.
 Turner Politics, radio and journalism in Australia 419

The result was that by the mid 1990s, current affairs – that is, the trad-
itional form of current affairs programming involving journalists, an editorial
structure and an attempt to relate stories to the news of the day – had more or
less disappeared from Australian commercial radio. Since talkback did appear
to deal with politics and the current issues of the day, and since talkback was
thought to be more entertaining than conventional current affairs formats, it
became the obvious candidate to fill the space vacated by current affairs pro-
gramming. Indeed, the ratings success of talkback formats, particularly in the
metropolitan markets, reinforced the industry trend against conventional
current affairs programming and accelerated its progress.
That said, some of today’s talkback programs, such as that hosted by Neil
Mitchell, the ratings leader for the morning slot in Melbourne, still manage
to effectively perform the functions of current affairs journalism. The Neil
Mitchell program works closely to the news agenda of the day, its producers
follow up stories and pursue lines of enquiry in much the way journalists
in other media might do, and the program sets out to inform as accurately
as possible by canvassing alternative sides of an issue. Mitchell does not
encourage regular callers, there are virtually no fan calls, and he explicitly
excludes doing ‘live reads’. As he puts it, doing live advertisements in the
middle of a program he wants people to regard as serious journalism will only
‘demean the authority of the voice’ (personal interview, 10 November 2006).
A former print journalist, Mitchell accepts that the change of medium does
not excuse him from the ethical and moral responsibilities he accepted in his
previous role. Like a number of other hosts working in this iteration of the
format, Mitchell says that his audiences use the program as a kind of ‘filter’: a
trusted means of sorting through the mass of information available to them
today in order to establish which bits of information are important (per-
sonal interview, 10 November 2006). Given that description of the audience’s
interest, the talkback host here is taking on a significant social responsibility.
While hosts such as Mitchell contribute to a flow of information that
can be described as socially useful, there is another, larger genre of programs
which also deal with news and current affairs topics but whose objectives
are quite different. These are the ones we have called ‘shock-jocks’ – as we
have seen, a disparaging label that probably misrepresents some of the less
shocking exponents but is best exemplified for our purposes here by Alan
Jones. The common element linking the shock-jock programs is that they all
deal in opinion rather than information and use their opinions as a means of
attracting notoriety, headlines and audiences. The opinions themselves tend
to be the product of an opportunistic and highly contingent populism, rather
than a set of principled political positions. While this may appear to con-
stitute something like a democratization of media content, given the access
420 Journalism 10(4)

it provides for ordinary people to express their point of view (the ‘God’s
great leveller’ argument), there is a long history of concern about the anti-
democratic potential of this kind of populist opinion in the media. Over 50
years ago, Richard Hoggart highlighted the rise of ‘opinionation’ (1958: 201)
as a substitute for analysis and judgment, singling it out as a worrying popu-
list tendency in the media and public life. This tendency was particularly
evident, he argued then, in the embattled tone and the ‘well-known cant of
‘‘the common man”’, employed by newspaper columnists and leader-writers.
Hoggart attacked this tactic as ‘a grotesque and dangerous flattery’ (1958:
179) – dangerous because it substitutes a rhetorically constituted ‘“people” for
genuine democratic participation’ (Moran, 2006: 560).
Such a danger, in the present circumstances in Australia, is exacerbated
by the fact that these hosts focus so heavily on politics – even more, in fact,
than formats which operate according to the more traditional version of
current affairs. My research found that while the proportion of topics related
to politics on Neil Mitchell’s program was 21 per cent, in the Jones program it
was 52.5 per cent.1 1 Moreover, where the Mitchell program deals with political
topics by seeking input from those concerned (including authorities such as
the police or government ministers) in order to establish an information base
before seeking callers’ contributions, Jones’ method is quite different. He
introduces topics himself through a lengthy monologue in which he outlines
his opinions; in his first hour of broadcasting, when he reviews the issues of
the day, Jones does not normally take any calls at all. Apart from news updates,
traffic and market reports, and advertisements, his opinions fill the entire
hour. The agenda set by this opening burst will then be pursued through
calls from authorities or the relevant minister, and from listeners. Unlike
most of his competitors, Jones will run with an issue for weeks if necessary,
mounting a campaign directed towards what he has nominated as the appro-
priate political outcome. Often this campaign will establish a narrative that
reaches its denouement in an interview with its target on the Friday program.
The securing of this interview, the behaviour of those interviewed (usually
highly conciliatory) and the manner in which Jones conducts it (often
highly aggressive), reconfirms the audience’s impression of Jones’ power and
importance.
Crucially, this impression is the product of a highly skilful rhetorical per-
formance that is not necessarily based upon accurate information. Masters
(2006) argues that Jones’ intervention into a progressive process of police
reform in NSW, an intervention that eventually stalled the process, is typical
of the broadcaster’s participation in such policy debates in that it was both
ill informed and indefatigable. The curious thing about the shock-jocks is
 Turner Politics, radio and journalism in Australia 421

that, despite their disinclination to seek information in the structured and

disinterested way a journalist might, they tend to behave as if they have
personal access to privileged information, their delivery marked by the same
markers of authority we would normally associate with the discourses of
journalism. The bogus nature of that authority does not seem to lessen the
audience’s respect for their opinion. As long as the host enjoys a significant
personal following, whether he is well informed or not, the evidence would
suggest he has the power to act almost as if he is a primary definer of, rather
than a commentator upon, social or political issues. The responsibility with
which this power is used then becomes a significant social, political, and
regulatory issue.

The politics of talkback

Given such a context, the issue of talkback’s political influence has been a
continuing theme in the research I have conducted over the last four years.1 2
It should be acknowledged that while the Jones example is of concern and
I return to it later, it is not typical. There certainly are cases where the cele-
brity host has sold his or her voice to advance a political or commercial
cause, but most often the influence of talkback radio has developed through
its progressive industrial integration into the normal, everyday, operation of
the news media. News stories broken by talkback appear routinely, if often
unattributed, in the print media and are picked up increasingly for the tele-
vision news bulletins and evening current affairs programs. Where talkback
itself picks up stories from elsewhere in the media they can gain a new set
of ‘legs’ through being given a run on the radio; from time to time, this
prolongs the life and extends the provenance of a story (see example in
Turner et al., 2006). There is another, more structural, industrial aspect to this
which enables talkback radio to exercise a shaping influence on the news
agenda of the day for television, in particular. It is becoming less customary
for Australian politicians to provide dedicated interviews for television; even
‘doorstops’ have declined in frequency in recent years. In fact, it is possible
to say that when Australians saw John Howard (Prime Minister from 1996–
2007) speaking on television, it was most likely to be in a short grab that had
been shot while he was in a radio studio.1 3 Television’s demand for current
vision means that producers have had to become increasingly accustomed to
following politicians into the radio studio and shooting their footage while
the politician is there, either answering callers’ questions or responding to the
radio host (the radio host is almost never visible, nor do we hear them asking
the question the politician answers). In this way, radio has the capacity to
422 Journalism 10(4)

control what vision is available to television and thus, to some extent, what
television will cover on its evening news.
The factors contributing to talkback’s political influence do not only
derive from the media industries, however. What has become extremely
clear over the last decade or two in Australia is that politicians – particularly
federal politicians – have a strong preference for presenting their views to
the public via talkback radio. The previous Australian Prime Minister, John
Howard, in power for the whole of the research period for this project, pro-
vides a compelling demonstration of this. Over the years 2003–6, talkback
radio interviews were the second most numerous genre of interviews the
Prime Minister provided to the electronic media. The most common genre
was in fact the formal press conference, and this is affected by the necessity
to hold such events every time a foreign dignitary visits Australia as well as
by the convention of presenting new policy initiatives with a formal launch.
The number of dedicated television interviews over one four-month period
surveyed was less than a third of the number of radio interviews, and not
one of the television interviews was on a prime time local or national current
affairs program (indeed, only one was on a national free-to-air network).
This occurred at a time when at least two metropolitan talkback radio hosts
had arrangements to interview the Prime Minister on their programs on a
fortnightly basis (Turner et al., 2006). Patterns such as this will vary, of course.
In 2007, when Howard came under serious challenge from a newly elected
and highly popular opposition leader who chose to appear frequently on
television, Howard suddenly became much more available for television
programs to interview.
Nonetheless, the politicians’ preference for talkback radio as a platform
for communicating with the electorate is such a well-established feature of
the Australian political landscape (Ward, 2002) that we now focus on under-
standing the reasons for this and its effects, rather than on whether such a
preference actually exists. One of the most obvious reasons for the preference
is that in most cases it enables politicians to put their case without submit-
ting to the challenges of a well-prepared interview with a political journalist.
As noted earlier, many talkback hosts are entertainers rather than journalists,
and all are charged with keeping the program moving and upbeat, and so a
careful, probing interview is difficult to accommodate in the talkback format.
Compared to the kind of grilling likely to accompany a current affairs tele-
vision interview, and given the fact that any discomfort the television inter-
view generates is likely to be visible to the audience, a cosy chat on the radio
is a much softer option. Even on those occasions when the host may be less
than cosy, the talkback interview usually has the added benefit of facilitating
direct conversation between the politician and their public. This public may
 Turner Politics, radio and journalism in Australia 423

turn out to be antagonistic or rude, but even so the politician who can deal
with this without anger or disrespect is still going to emerge with credit. If
they can also ‘educate’ some of their audience to their point of view – former
Prime Minister Keating once claimed that if you ‘educate John Laws, you
educate Australia’ – most would believe it has been a worthwhile invest-
ment of their time.
More important, however, in explaining the political preference for
talkback radio is the often repeated industry mantra that politicians believe
talkback radio reflects public opinion. My research tells me that talkback
reflects a diversity of opinion, but the accepted wisdom may not simply rest
on a view that there is a statistical correlation between the dominant views
expressed on talkback and those expressed through the ballot box. In the
programs I surveyed, the callers were not as conservative as one might have
predicted, given talkback’s populist reputation; they were, however, volatile.
What I suspect talkback picks up quite effectively, and very rapidly, are sig-
nificant shifts in public opinion. These may reflect only small percentage
movements in public opinions on a particular topic, rather than tracking the
building of a majority position. Nonetheless, when elections are decided on
precisely such a small percentage swing – between 2 per cent and 4 per cent
usually – that might be a crucial movement.
Rather than being representative of the bulk of public opinion, then,
perhaps what talkback reveals are the shifting positions of the swinging
voter. John Tebbutt argues that the political influence of talkback radio is not
simply traceable to its representing a specific demographic (which had been
the conventional view until quite recently), but rather that it operates as an
‘apparatus that galvanizes a particular form of reaction’ (2002) – that is, it is
extremely good at mobilizing social disaffection. This may occur across a rela-
tively narrow band of the population, it is true, but perhaps it is precisely this
sector of the audience that politicians wish to capture. Whatever the case may
be, the daily monitoring of talkback opinion is today one of the standard pro-
fessional tools of political research in Australia – along with surveys, phone
polls and focus groups.
Tebbutt also makes the point that the influence of talkback is not neces-
sarily reducible to the personal influence of the talkback host, and in general
I think this is an accurate observation. However, there is at least one case, that
of Alan Jones, where I would want to dissent from Tebbutt’s generalization.
This is because, in my view and unlike most of his counterparts, Jones actually
sets out to exert political influence and does seem to be effective. Where
others might see their job as producing an entertaining program, Jones seems
to see his job as developing his political purchase and public mythology;
the program is simply an instrument to that end.
424 Journalism 10(4)

The extent to which Jones actually does exercise political influence has
been the subject of much debate in Australia in recent years, particularly
in response to the controversial biography written by television journalist
Chris Masters and subtitled ‘the power and myth of Alan Jones’ (2006).
Jones’ audience is not particularly large, numerically, because although he
is Sydney’s top rating broadcaster in his time slot, the Sydney market is
crowded and the audience shares slice very thinly. Some believe that Jones
himself is responsible for creating the myth of his political power through
his own public utterances (Salter, 2006). Jones’ program is riddled with self-
regarding synopses of his own views and interventions; he will replay his
own comments from previous programs as a means of returning to an issue
or campaign, and remind listeners of his own impact on these issues. That his
program’s primary focus is political is beyond question. Unlike that of any of
his counterparts in the industry, Jones’ program privileges politics as the pri-
mary category of topic. That Jones is interested in advancing his own views is
also beyond question; he takes a partisan position on more than 62 per cent
of the topics he discusses, and he occupies the microphone for almost 75 per
cent of the four hours he is on air. Even when taking calls from listeners, Jones
talks more than they do (Crofts and Turner, 2007)!
None of this proves influence, of course, although it certainly indicates
intent. The Masters biography cites many instances where Jones has attempted
to influence NSW state political processes – off air – but I can’t provide
evidence of this from my own research as I dealt only with the broadcast
material. However, analysis of this material did reveal something that helps
to establish the nature of Jones’ influence over his audience. Jones will
routinely adopt particular phrases for issues he deals with on the program
and repeat them relentlessly each time the issue comes up. Sometimes these
are quite complicated formulations, at other times they are short mantras
providing a quick reminder of the opinion he is advocating. In developing
the content analysis of the transcripts of Jones’ program, Stephen Crofts and
I (2007) found that over time his callers started to use these signature phrases
and formulations themselves as a way of situating their own point of view on
the issue concerned, using these phrases as signals of their alignment with
the Jones view. What we concluded from this pattern of behaviour was that
Jones was successfully establishing the discursive framing of these events for
his audience; it is also highly likely that this influence extends beyond his
audience, including those with whom his audience discusses these events.
This is possibly the clearest evidence of political influence over the audience
that one is likely to find. That such evidence comes from the output of a broad-
caster who has proven willing to sell his opinions to commercial interests,
 Turner Politics, radio and journalism in Australia 425

while disregarding even the most minimal of public interest obligations,

underlines the need for a less forgiving, independent regulatory framework.

Conclusion

The story of talkback radio’s rise to dominance in Australia is a mixed one.

While in some ways it has empowered its audiences by acknowledging their
voices, in other ways it has reduced the quality of their access to the infor-
mation a functioning democratic society needs. On the one hand, the develop-
ment of talkback formats in regional radio has created a new platform for the
construction of community as well as for reclaiming some of the news and
current affairs content lost to competing commercial imperatives. In some
metropolitan markets, too, a small number of talkback hosts has maintained
an ethical commitment to the provision of accurate and informed current
affairs journalism. On the other hand, while metropolitan talkback’s creation
of the celebrity host and the populist shock-jock has made radio entertaining
in new ways, the format’s profiting from the demise of traditional news and
current affairs programs has generated a democratic deficit. The large-scale
replacement of the kind of information generated by professional journalists
with that generated by an Alan Jones does not serve the Australian community
well. This, however, is what the market has produced as a result of industrial
shifts over the last two decades, within a context that has been funda-
mentally shaped by the gradual dismantling of a socially responsive and inde-
pendent regulatory regime in favour of a more commercially responsive
self-regulatory regime. The product is a highly volatile, at times even irrespon-
sible, format which has effectively transformed the genre of current affairs
journalism into a format for opinion and entertainment. As we have seen, this
has presented an opportunity to Australia’s politicians and they have taken
it; the sector is now the primary outlet for the promotion of political policy
to the electorate.
Let me return here to the situation I started with – talkback’s role in feeding
the tensions that eventually resulted in the Cronulla riot. The talkback an-
nouncers named in the Hazzard report were indignant at what they regarded
as accusations of racism. To some extent, that indignation is understand-
able because, from their point of view, they were simply doing what any
populist would do – reflecting a view of the situation which implicitly
favoured the information from their listeners against that provided by the
police and other authorities. Their inflammatory behaviour possibly had more
to do with their routine privileging of the views of their constituency against
those they call the ‘cultural and political elites’ than with their own opinions
426 Journalism 10(4)

on Lebanese-Australians or their rights to occupy the beach. There is no evi-

dence that Jones, for instance, is a racist. While I contend that their behaviour
did have an impact on the events leading up to Cronulla and afterwards, these
were, in a sense and from the broadcasters’ point of view, collateral effects. The
primary interests pursued by these broadcasters, in this case as always, were
commercial: those of the broadcasters themselves, their programs and their
employers. Those interests were focused on generating an audience, and
upon maintaining the performance of a particular persona as a means of con-
tinuing to generate that audience.
If broadcaster Neil Mitchell is correct, the talkback audience relies on
figures it has learnt to trust in order to filter out the important information
from the unimportant information, and these figures range from the most
professionally disinterested to the most demagogic. The prominence of pol-
itics in the content of so much talkback now increases the importance of
this process, while at the same time the manner in which so many hosts deal
with political debates does not encourage much confidence in its accuracy
or independence. Significantly, and to make matters worse, there is now a
more narrow range of other media resources available to help the audience.
Commercial television current affairs programming in Australia has largely
abandoned the serious examination of politics and society as the two leading
prime time programs race each other downmarket with stories on back pain,
cellulite treatment, cosmetic surgery, unemployed youth, bad neighbours,
fad diets, and hidden camera scams (Turner, 2005). This places additional
importance on the quality and legitimacy of the information provided
through those sources that remain. Unfortunately, other than the influence
available through its choices in the marketplace, there is no longer any formal
or statutory means through which the community is able to exercise any
significant influence over such considerations. The fact that the regulatory
authority now has relatively little oversight of, and few opportunities to
influence, the content of broadcast programming, in particular, means that
it is simply unable to protect the community interest in relation to an event
such as Cronulla. Rather, it seems as if the power available to talkback hosts
has grown in inverse proportion to the power of the regulatory constraints
upon its use.
Over the period of talkback’s rise, coinciding as it has with an increasingly
market-oriented regulatory regime, the public access to informed and inde-
pendent analysis of social and political issues in Australia has diminished.
I have written elsewhere about the decline of television current affairs (Turner,
2005), and about the decline in the credibility and authority of Australian
journalism as it has become more thoroughly embedded in the commercial
 Turner Politics, radio and journalism in Australia 427

entertainment industry. This decline, paradoxically, has not inhibited those

involved from calling on journalism as a source of authority for what they
do; indeed, they tend to represent their version of journalism as more demo-
cratic, closer to the people and thus as a legitimate corrective to the media
of the ‘cultural elites’. In prime time commercial television current affairs
and in the programming of the shock-jocks, the forms and practices of jour-
nalism have been captured, disarticulated from their ethical, fourth estate,
foundations and successfully put to work for commercial ends rather than
for the public good. As we have seen, although talkback has played its part in
this process, there are plenty of instances in its current range of operations
that suggest it could still play a positive role in reversing that trend. However,
without significant regulatory reform that winds back some of the latitude
now available to broadcasters in favour of a more principled and responsive
protection of the public good, that is unlikely to happen. ‘God’s great leveller’
has turned out to have elevated the unprincipled few at the cost of the many
and, at present, it seems there is little the Australian public can do, or perhaps
even wishes to do, about it. The quality of Australian radio’s engagement with
political affairs is only one casualty of this.

Notes

1 I am also named as a consultant in this report.

2 One of the more chilling examples cited in Chris Masters’ Jonestown: The Power
and Myth of Alan Jones (2006) is the resignation of the reformist NSW Police
Commissioner Peter Ryan who had been put under sustained pressure from
Jones’ program.
3 This is a vernacular term used to refer to Australian soldiers, particularly those
who fought in the two World Wars in the 20th century.
4 The background to this is complex, but there had been a sustained moral panic
about a series of vicious and apparently racially motivated rapes in Western
Sydney some years earlier. When the perpetrators, Lebanese-Australian youths,
were given unusually harsh sentences, community opinion was divided be-
tween those who applauded this outcome and those who felt it was a response to
racialized community pressure and thus contributed to a demonization of those
from Lebanese backgrounds. Jones’ comment came in response to a caller who
suggested that there could be two sides to the Cronulla issue and it may not
simply be the fault of people of Middle Eastern appearance. Jones replied with
the (inaccurate) claim that ‘we don’t have Anglo-Saxon kids over there raping
women in Western Sydney’.
5 In one statement, Jones noted indignantly that he had been a referee for ACMA’s
chair, Chris Chapman, in a number of job applications; the selection of this
detail seemed to imply that Chapman owed him his loyalty as a result and that
his subsequent behaviour was rank ingratitude (Bodey and Karvelas, 2007: 1–2).
428 Journalism 10(4)

As Chris Davis, in a letter to the national daily, The Australian, put it, Jones
apparently thought he had Chapman ‘in his pocket’ (Davis, 2007) and was
furious when he found out he hadn’t.
6 The phrase is used to describe a political utterance that ‘involves sending a
particularly sharp message which calls clearly to those intended, and goes un-
heard by the rest of the population’ (Poynting et al., 2004: 153). In this instance,
the hidden message is support for a discriminatory view of Muslim-Australian
cultures.
7 While talkback itself is relatively ubiquitous, it does seem as if certain markets
are more receptive to the shock-jock format; Sydney has the highest number of
them in prime time, but Melbourne has proven resistant to them. Sydney shock-
jock Stan Zemanek was tried in a prime daytime slot in Melbourne, but only
lasted a year.
8 I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers of this article for bringing
this point to my attention.
9 Recourse to criminal law might actually prove more effective; in the case of one
host in Adelaide, his comments to one caller were so offensive they resulted in a
successful prosecution that put him briefly behind bars.
10 These were not part of a formal research process, but an opportunity that arose
during a series of on-air interviews with talkback hosts. The hosts responded to
questions about callers’ motivations by asking their regular callers to phone in
and discuss it with me on air; this eventually became an opportunity I requested
from them and most of the hosts were happy to cooperate.
11 The content analyses of the various programs from which these figures are
drawn are available on line through the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
at the University of Queensland website. Follow the links from http://www.cccs.
uq.edu.au to Graeme Turner’s research page.
12 The project referred to was funded by the Australian Research Council. Among
the outcomes of the project are Turner et al. (2006), Turner (2007), and Crofts
and Turner (2007).
13 As noted earlier, Howard gave very few television interviews during our research
period – sometimes going for months without doing a dedicated network
television interview. In their place, television news services would source vision
of his appearances in radio studios. Over the four-month period during our
research when Howard gave only the one network interview, he was nonetheless
routinely featured in the evening television news most nights. In most of the
occasions this occurred, it was vision sourced from a radio studio, sometimes
without audio content; the next most frequent location was in a grab from a
formal press conference, and then the occasional doorstop. This changed dra-
matically in 2007 in the lead-up to the election. For further discussion of this,
see Turner et al., 2006.

References

Australian Communications and Media Authority (2007) ‘Breakfast with Alan Jones,
broadcast by 2GB on 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 December, 2005’, Report No. 1485, URL
(consulted April 2007): http://www.acma.gov.au
 Turner Politics, radio and journalism in Australia 429

Bodey, M. (2007) ‘Four Decades of “God’s Great Equaliser”’, The Australian, 19 April: 15.
Bodey, M. and P. Karvelas (2007) ‘Guilty Jones Attacks Media Watchdog’, The
Australian, 12 April: 1–2.
Couldry, N. (2003) Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge.
Crofts, S. and G. Turner (2007) ‘Jonestalk: The Specificity of Alan Jones’, Media Inter-
national Australia 122: 132–49.
Davis, C. (2007) ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Australian, 13 April, p. 15.
Flint, D. (2007) ‘Inquisitors Curtailing Freedom of Speech’, The Australian, 13 April: 14.
Gould, L. (2007) ‘Cash and Controversy: A Short History of Commercial Talkback
Radio’, Media International Australia 122: 81–95.
Hoggart, R. (1958) The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Press.
Masters, C. (2006) Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones. Sydney: Allen and
Unwin.
Miller, T. (1997) ‘Radio’, in S. Cunningham and G. Turner (eds) The Media in Australia:
Industries, Texts, Audiences, pp. 47–69. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Moran, J. (2006) ‘Milk Bars, Starbucks and The Uses of Literacy’, Cultural Studies 20(6):
552–73.
Poynting, S., G. Noble, P. Tabar and J. Collins (2004) Bin Laden in the Suburbs:
Criminalising the Arab Other. Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology.
Salter, D. (2006) ‘Who’s for Breakfast, Mr Jones?’, The Monthly May: 38–47.
Strike Force Neil (2006) Cronulla Riots: Review of the Police Response, Vol. 1. Sydney:
NSW Police.
Tebbutt, J. (2002) ‘Hosting Politics: Disaffection and the Genealogy of Talkback’,
unpublished paper, Australian and New Zealand Communications Association
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Turner, G. (2003) ‘Ethics, Entertainment and the Tabloid: The Case of Talkback
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pp. 87–99. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, G. (2004) Understanding Celebrity. London: SAGE.
Turner, G. (2005) Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television Current Affairs in Australia.
Sydney: University of NSW Press.
Turner, G. (2007) ‘Some Things We Should Know about Talkback Radio’, Media
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Ward, I. (2002) ‘Talkback Radio, Political Communication, and Australian Politics’,
Australian Journal of Communication 29: 21–38.

Biographical notes

Graeme Turner is Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, Professor of

Cultural Studies, and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He has published widely in media and
cultural studies, and his most recent book (co-edited with Jinna Tay) is Television
430 Journalism 10(4)

Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era (Routledge, 2009).
He is currently completing The Demotic Turn: Ordinary People and the Media, to be
published by SAGE at the end of 2009.
Address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, Level 4, Forgan Smith Tower,
University of Queensland, Q 4072, Australia. [email: graeme.turner@uq.edu.au]