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‘Money can’t buy me love’ - Australian media at the crossroads

By Michael Meadows - posted Monday, 14 May 2007


Australia’s mainstream media have become fixated on the looming federal election, with almost anything now likely to become “an issue” - anything, that is, except the media themselves. But this is nothing new both locally and globally. Why should organisations that rank among the most powerful corporations in the world engage in a critique of their own practices? And therein lies the problem. Media are quick to move in for the kill when “big business” is implicated in corruption, conveniently forgetting that they are themselves, big business.

It is one of the paradoxes of western democracy that the concept of media as “the fourth estate” - alongside and apart from the executive, the parliament and the judiciary - also separates media from their audiences. Apart from a few token blogs and highly mediated talkback radio or letters to the editor pages, mass media audiences have been effectively silenced when it comes to determining what they want from “their” media.

Of course, it is not “their media” at all. Commercial media is not about providing programs for expectant audiences - it is about delivering audiences as consumers to advertisers in easily digestible portions.

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So what’s new? Plenty, actually, and it’s not all bad. But let’s start with the bad news.

The federal government’s recent relaxation of media ownership laws has raised barely a ripple of discontent across Australia’s mediascape. For many journalists, it seems, it’s just another story; another way of filling airtime or column centimetres.

The journalists’ union - the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance - is one of the few media organisations to attempt to raise awareness among members and supporters of the parlous state of Australia’s media policy environment.

The Alliance’s annual report on censorship and control of the Australian media highlights the speed with which the federal government moved to introduce draconian anti-terrorism laws and to re-enact 19th century sedition laws in an effort to toe the conservative line laid down by its international overlords, the United States and the United Kingdom. Restrictions on journalists’ reporting of anything that hints at the “T” word and secrecy around any intervention by Australia’s spying agencies has a chilling effect on the communication processes of a claimed “free” society.

The hypocrisy evident in federal government rhetoric on this aspect of the democratic process when compared to its actions is astounding. But where are the critics’ voices in the mainstream media?

The Howard Government argues that the decision to remove limits on foreign and cross-media ownership in Australia will be balanced by the myriad opportunities available through an expanding digital spectrum. The unanswered question is, of course: opportunities for whom? The representation of digital technologies as a panacea seems remarkably naïve, yet curiously similar to the euphoric hype which has accompanied virtually every technological innovation since Marconi’s invention of radio more than a century ago.

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Another thing is constant: democratic principle remains subservient to commercial advantage. At the same time as the federal communication minister and her choir of disciples sings the praises of a diverse digital media future, the only truly independent television services in the country are being squeezed off the airwaves.

Community television began in Australia in the early 90s and has struggled in an uncertain policy regime ever since. And although a handful of stations around Australia now have limited licences, their audiences continue to dwindle because the stations all currently broadcast on the analogue spectrum. As Australians switch to digital set-top boxes and in-built digital tuners in their LCDs - albeit at a much slower rate than techno-boosters have predicted - community TV is being left languishing.

A parliamentary committee set up to explore community broadcasting in Australia in 2006 made an urgent recommendation in March this year for federal government funds to be set aside to enable community television to migrate to the digital spectrum. At the time of writing there had been no formal federal government response.

It is one example of the disdain federal governments - of either persuasion over the past two decades - have shown Australian media audiences.

And now for the good news: Australian audiences are fighting back! A series of research projects over the past seven years centring on Australia’s burgeoning community broadcasting sector offers a glimmer of hope. Australia has the largest per capita listenership to community radio than any comparable country. Something unique is happening here and we are only just beginning to understand what it is.

Two national surveys in 2004 and 2006 established beyond doubt that community radio, in particular, captures about 25 per cent of Australians aged 15 years and above - that’s four million listeners across the country in an average week. This compares with about seven million weekly listeners to national, publicly-funded broadcasters, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), and almost 11 million who tune into commercial radio. Not bad for a sector whose entire turnover in 2006 was $51 million - a fraction of the annual allocations to the national broadcasters. And small change for the commercial broadcasting sector with an annual expenditure of more than $4 billion!

Assuming that all 16 million Australians over age 15 watch commercial television and listen to commercial radio, the commercial sector spends around 30 times more per head than the community sector to attract listeners and viewers.

It conjures up the catchcry, “Money can’t buy me love” - or should that read audiences?

So why is this happening? A Griffith University research team - of which I was a member - has completed the first in-depth study of Australia’s community broadcasting audiences. Over a two-year period, we organised almost 50 focus groups and undertook hundreds of face-to-face interviews with the multifarious audiences for community radio and television.

It seems likely that it is the first study of its type globally to investigate an entire media sector. It is clear from our analysis that a large proportion of the growing and committed audience for community radio and television across Australia has been turned off by commercial media here. How could this be when we are talking about a $4 billion annual spend by commercial broadcasters in an effort to create a consumer base?

Audiences have made it patently clear what they want - and equally clear that they are not getting it from commercial radio and television or the ABC and SBS to a lesser extent. The studies have taken account of the extraordinarily diverse audiences who make up Australia’s mediascape.

This includes the urban, suburban and regional centres where generalist, youth, seniors, or vision-impaired communities who manage to find an outlet for their ideas through community radio and television.

It includes listeners and viewers of Indigenous radio and television from capital cities to the most remote regions of this continent.

And it offers millions of multicultural Australians access to information and services unavailable through mainstream media channels. Both commercial radio and television have virtually abandoned sections of regional Australia. Indeed, in around 30 locations around the country, community radio is the only local radio available.

We’re not talking here about a cohort of left-wing radical groups hellbent on smashing the existing system of government in Australia. In fact, the majority of community radio stations in Australia, now based in regional areas, are politically conservative. And they vote!

So what do audiences say they want? First, it’s local news and information relevant to their lives. They have been abandoned by commercial broadcasters in regional Australia and the ABC’s budget constraints mean it has limited ability to serve local communities.

Community radio has become the first level of service for communities in times of emergency - examples in the past few years include bushfires at Tumut, floods at Katherine, and cyclones across the Top End. In all these cases, community radio was the only local service able to report reliable information to listeners. And it’s all done largely by volunteers!

Volunteers in the community broadcasting sector give up their time at two and half times the rate of Australian volunteers generally. This is reflected in an extraordinary level of passion among community broadcasting audiences that their mainstream counterparts can only dream about. It happens through the complex and multiple community connection roles played by stations.

It comes from being openly accessible to almost any local group or organisation with something to say and conveying it all in a style which causes audiences to feel as if the announcers they hear are “friends” or are “just like us” - a far cry from the repetitive, “professional” sound of commercial radio.

Listeners to community radio identify it as the major source for hearing Australian and niche music styles such as jazz and fine music. For most of the audiences we interviewed, it was the only place they could access such music. Several of the stations that feature these genres are among the most successful in the country.

One, 4MBS in Brisbane, organises and manages the largest annual classical music festival in Australia. Station manager Gary Thorpe observes wisely that 4MBS is not a community radio station: it is part of the local arts community. In that simple assessment, Thorpe identifies the philosophical gulf between community and commercial media.

Audiences identify community broadcasting as more accurately representing the diversity of Australian culture than mainstream media. It should be a sobering assessment. For Indigenous and many ethnic communities, community radio and television provide a first level of service. It has become their primary source of information about local events and the outside world, apart from word of mouth. It is a major medium through which people are able to identify as Australians while at the same time reinforcing their own local and international cultural links.

For refugee communities, local language radio programs, run by volunteers, have emerged as a primary source of information for them about support networks available here. As one focus group participant, a long-term Australian citizen, put it: “When I came to Australia, suddenly I was deaf and dumb.” For this man, hearing his own language on ethnic community radio enabled him to settle into the Australian community.

This growing body of research suggests that Australia’s mainstream media in general have failed to grasp the diversity of their audiences. Either that or they show scant disregard for citizens perceived to fall outside advertisers’ preferred conception of them as “consumers”. If this is so, then it is a short-sighted commercial decision that is costing them millions of dollars in revenue from as yet untapped audiences.

Fortunately, community radio and television offer such audiences a medium for expression and a philosophical approach more in keeping with a country that is quick to proclaim its democratic credentials. And they continue to reap some financial reward through program sponsorship. It is the growing community broadcasting sector that is offering these audiences an alternative to the globalised, homogenised content that dominates mainstream media.

Australia’s commercial media have failed because they have little will and few, if any, mechanisms to listen or to engage in some kind of dialogue with their increasingly alienated listeners and viewers. Financial constraints on both the ABC and SBS have severely limited their abilities in this sphere although fortunately, pockets of excellence remain.

The largest ever gathering of a network of International and local community media practitioners and scholars in Sydney in April, OURMedia, heard that the challenge for all media - if they hope to have a future - is to acknowledge people’s right to be understood. This basic tenet of the democratic process seems a world away from mainstream media processes which place more value on the latest ratings result than in genuine attempts to engage with their audiences.

As market zealots are quick to remind us, if people don’t like a program they can simply switch off. It seems significant numbers of Australians watching commercial television or listening to commercial radio are doing just that.

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About the Author

Michael Meadows lectures in journalism at Griffith University in Queensland.

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