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

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.