pwning the media

Media markets have been transformed by the internet but calling new media new is a category error mistaking markets for  products they trade.

Calling new media new lets it off whatever hooks media were formerly hung on to dry as mistakes or excesses or controversies about it were aired. Worse, in the best traditions of labels signifying the exact opposite of what they are attached to, the so-called social new media can be anything but.

While a series of flame wars engulfs the Australian Twitterverse, the spectre of a facebook-based consumer boycott is haunting the average business.  Trust in the old ways of doing things seems to have ebbed to a new low. The consumer-led boycott of businesses advertising on Sydney Radio 2GB is not unprecedented - the American War of Independence began with a boycott of tea - but the Macquarie Radio Network`s capitulation to it is.

Time was the average media proprietor would stand up to bullying. Kerry Packer never minced words defending his turf.  The Macquarie Radio Network caved to an email campaign almost straightaway, complaining in part of a lack of regulatory zeal in bringing new media to heel. Of course the delicious irony of the owner of 2GB complaining about bullying is lost on almost nobody. But the rhetorical separation of media into old and new seems to have passed unremarked, and it shouldn't.

Calling new media new implies it is above old-fashioned criticism when it isn't. Media markets have fragmented but there is no good reason for media proprietors to go to pieces as well.  Where are the Media Buyers explaining run of station advertising and the absence of choice small advertisers have in where their commercials are placed? Where are the proprietors defending their people?

Instead there are calls for greater regulation, a sure sign of panic from an industry already grown fat from statutory monopolies. Get the government involved, that's sure to work.

Media owners need to find their voices, not silence others, now they are but few amongst many.

The old communications monopolies are gone. Media markets have been flattened by the internet, which flows like an incoming tide around the hierarchies of distribution and production that kept mass media profitable for so  many years. But  more regulation to prop up aging media silos will only prolong their, and our, pain.

no news is good news

Right now the grand-sounding new Australian National Cultural Policy is sitting in some desk drawer in Canberra waiting to be announced, and that is not a bad thing. The last one I remember, the Keating Government's Creative Nation announcement, was a disaster for many small studios who were "incentivised" to produce material on CD-ROM at the very moment the internet came of age. They went to market with products nobody wanted and when the seed money ran out closed by the dozen, leaving behind broken dreams and tens of thousands of CD's nobody wanted to buy.

If the new Australian National Cultural Policy remains spectral it left a trace on the Victorian state budget, with millions earmarked for "major Victorian companies" to support innovation and leverage additional (but unannounced) Commonwealth Government support. There are rumours that a fund for artistic excellence will be established, to fund innovation in the performing arts. When I heard about it I asked Minister Crean's office if it would fund (for example) Stelarc's extra ear implant, and got a vague answer about "culturally significant institutions", so I guess not.

The Federal budget allocation for the arts is quite impressive. SBS will be saved with an injection of capital, provided it supports the National Indigenous Television Service, an initiative supported up to now by the Australian Film Television and Radio School and some dedicated individuals. Commercial TV broadcasters get a discount on their license fees, provided they keep producing local dramas. Fox studios gets millions to assist in the production of the new Wolverine movie. Allowing for inflation the Australia Council's budget has been cut, and Screen Australia's has been hacked. Film producers will have to find more development money from the private sector by 2016. All this without the benefit of a policy announcement.

When it does come the new Australian National Cultural Policy looks like maintaining the status-quo. Hey, isn't that the one thing artists are supposed to rebel against?

Thoughtcrime?

My son sent me a link to a recent article by John Pilger entitled You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it? Pilger states that because Echelon exists and identifies words associated with terrorism that we may all be considered terrorists if we use any of these words in our electronic communication with others. This is such old news! I remember in the 70s provocatively using the word 'bomb' or 'explosion' in my telephone conversations, knowing full well that any intelligence system in place would have to be going on more than words to identify someone as a potential threat to the security of a country or people. We are NOT all suspects as Pilger suggests! Basically he uses emotive language to attack America, to defend the actions of Julian Assange and to criticize Julia Gillard -  again, old news.
But it's not any of the above which concerns me, it is his question What are you going to do about it? that fills my thoughts. He gives absolutely no clue as to what the ordinary, everyday person can do and if even they really want to 'do anything' about such surveillance systems, instigated to protect them against potential threat of those who wish to cause damage to person and property & who would, if allowed, destroy personal freedoms by disrupting our hard won, peaceful life. Fact is, that what Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) says in A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner,1992) is true: 'We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns'. I'm not saying that I like living in this kind of world, I'm just stating facts.
Newer weapons in the arsenal against our real or perceived enemies include surveillance systems. However,regardless of the thousands of CCTV, video surveillance systems, spy satellites and signals intelligence systems operating to monitor human communication and behavior, if you're not a terrorist and not planning to commit a crime then there's nothing for you to be concerned about. Sure, it might be a bit unnerving to think that a mechanical instrument can track your movements and take a photograph of that pimple on your nose from space, but other than that, this 'Big Brother 'world is not going to go away anytime soon and no amount of signing petitions on Face Book is going to make any difference!
I think the worry is that many of us have read 1984 (George Orwell) and we think, like Winston that we might be arrested and persecuted for 'facecrime': 
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. (Book 1, Chapter 5).
I for one am glad that large shopping complexes have CCTV, which can help identify an individual who has unlawfully absconded after abducting a small child, or the security mirrors in place so that you know that you can go to an isolated toilet area and a least feel that you have a level of safety. But really, we cry about our lost freedoms, but we bought into the convenience of EFPOST, even though it records electronic information about our location when we made that financial transaction and would, if necessary, aid police officers if we suddenly went missing. We enjoy our email, social media sites, new technology, iPhones, GPS tracking devices, but cry out that our personal freedoms are being infringed upon! Give me a break!
Pilger writes his article amidst a background of person freedoms, when he knows full well that we already have limited personal freedom. We can't just do what we like, especially since our behavior impacts on the welfare of others.However, having said all this, if we ever get to a time, described in 1984 in which thoughtcrime is punishable, then I'll be careful to avoid surveillance and start wearing a mask!

A NOT NEW AESTHETIC

Thought I'd buy into, just briefly, this discussion on the notion of the new aesthetic, which is purported to address images created through the use of various technologies and saturated into social media and other sites on the Internet.  I'm not going to include the address of the blog or any of the other links to the conversations because I don't believe that there is such a thing at this present time as a new aesthetic, but agree to a certain extent with Steve Middleton's statement: Despite the dazzling array of new electronic media objects available, new media of itself is not avant-garde.  He further explains:
We did not so much abandon old culture as allowed its amputation. New culture was thought to signify how clever, how creative, we had become. Inevitably, inexorably, new culture became a prosthesis; for lack of the old. Now we are asked to engage in the onerous task of mourning the loss of the archive, something that formerly we thought we no longer needed. Calling new media new was a mistake of the kind identified by both Frege and Wittgenstien. We see that critical theory should have alerted us to that mistake, but as critical theory itself became subsumed by the hypertext our critical faculties seem lost in, and subsumed by, mechanical specifications of bodies and culture. It is clear now that conceptualizing media as new created a kind of corporate schizophrenia brought about by irrational imaginings of ourselves as being outside history. We betrayed our cultural heritage the moment we decided it was old, and now we feel abandoned by it. Critical theory is now itself in need of restoration and repair. Critical theory should abandon its technological entanglements and turn again to human experience as a guiding principle in the search for truth (Vital Signs: Creative Practice and New Media Now, RMIT University, 2005). However, having posted this slice from Steve's article I do believe that what may be new is that current technologies allows anyone, even those without an art sensibility or training to make what appears as 'art' and what I mean by this, is that art deemed so simply by virtue of the fact that it was created through a particular technology is not dissimilar to images that can easily be made by any member of the public using the same technology. For example, Instagram software confines photos to a square shape, similar to Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid images, in contrast to the 4:3 aspect ratio typically used by mobile device cameras and with its numerous filters users may construct what appears as a new aesthetic, but in fact relies heavily on an older one.
Perhaps after all the question is not whether there is a new aesthetic, but a new kind of artist, since as someone said (or was it many) - anyone can be an artist or musician using new technologies, that is, of course if they have access to high end computers, application programs, Internet access and other equipment & resources necessary for them to explore their ideas. No longer the artist as genius, but the elite artist of technologies. You may produce a video or artwork that has a million hits on YouTube - it used to be that everyone had 15 minutes of fame, now you can be famous for a few minutes, for as YouTube says: 'broadcast yourself', but that doesn't equal creativity, it just means that for that particular moment in time you were noticed; a few minutes later the flock that circles you will move on screeching and crying for something else that's NEW.

Film Review - Unstoppable

Tony Scott's 2010 film Unstoppable (Twentieth Century Fox, 2010) stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as two downtrodden railway employees trying to stop a runaway train.

Frank (Washington) and Will (Pine) are respectively driver and conductor of a railway train on a routine journey. A mistake by the youthful and inexperienced Will puts him at odds with the experienced Frank and places them both in jeopardy when a driverless train is discovered speeding their way.

The monster locomotive and its load of toxic chemicals, accidentally unleashed from a railway yard by an underperforming worker, hurtles at breakneck speeds toward the small town where Will’s estranged family lives. As the remote and dysfunctional railway management unsuccessfully attempts to stop the half-mile long behemoth, the two workers must overcome the odds, their managers, and mutual antipathy, in a last-ditch bid to avert disaster.

Unstoppable is a film about working class heroes. With only days to enforced retirement the experienced Frank first saves his own train and then takes off in pursuit of the runaway. "You would risk your life for us?" an incredulous manager asks. "not for you", Frank replies.

The film presents a workplace - perhaps a whole economy - in chaos. Experienced workers are dumped a few years before retirement, on half benefits, and replaced by high-tech equipment and enthusiastic but inexperienced younger men. Under pressure, the inexperienced workers make a series of small mistakes with giant consequences that leave two trains hurtling toward each other on the same track. It is up to the divided workforce, symbolized in an evolving relationship between Frank and Will, to do what management cannot, and to save a small town from high tech disaster.

The characters are carefully drawn by writer Mark Bomback. Frank has two daughters, waitresses at a saucy Hooters restaurant franchise "working their way through college". Will’s estranged wife and young son are caught up in a fuss over suspected sexting, a hint of domestic violence, and an intervention order. New ways are colliding with the old, and the characters must accommodate those and overcome their own prejudices and fears before they can collaborate to stop the unstoppable.

The management types are barely drawn stereotypical offcuts from modern management manuals. A top company man speculates on the railway's share price from a golf course. Galvin (Kevin Dunn), the operations manager in a high-rise corner office, completely ignores his staff - including the competent but female local manager Connie (Rosario Dawson) - in favour of high tech outsourcing and expensive and big-noting contractors.

Hope springs only when the workers place their bodies between the runaway train and the small town it is hurtling toward.

Breathtaking stunts, stunning arial photography by Ben Seresin and seamlessly integrated CGI provide vivid panoramas for the story to unfold in. A half-mile train lifting its wheels from tracks as it speeds around a curve is a suitably impressive spectacle, especially with Denzel Washington leaping from carriage to carriage as Frank and Will attempt to avert catastrophe.

Unstoppable is a thoughtful film based in part on real events but in part also in the zeitgeist of modern economics and workplace restructuring and change. Those seem unstoppable, unless the old and new combine to produce something more. It is this something more that is evident in the story, and which lifts it above the ruck of the average disaster/disaster averted movie.

First Casualties

Occupy Melbourne protesters October 21: We are the 99 per cent.

indymedia.org.au October 21: There is a big lie being perpetrated on the Australian people.

Police Assistant Commissioner Fontana October 21: We have concerns that state wards are hanging around.

Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle October 21:

Traders are suffering and events planned for the square have been disrupted.

Occupy Melbourne spokesperson Nick Carson October 21: People will be arrested.

Police Assistant Commissioner Fontana October 21: They are consuming alcohol and we are concerned that will lead to violence.

Erin Buckley Occupy Melbourne legal support team

October 21: Our observers have witnessed and been told of numerous incidents of excessive force and violence against the peaceful protesters...

Melbourne Age website October 21: Hundreds of people, including school children, are now lining Swanston and Collins streets watching the drama, with some chanting "the whole world is watching".

Unnamed policeman, to Melbourne Herald Sun October 21: Now they know we mean it. No more Christine Nixon stuff.

Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle October 22: A mindless shriek of protest.

Melbourne Herald Sun October 22: victory for the boys in blue was never in doubt.

The Australian Editorial October 22: There is no meter running on freedom of expression. The internet and social media have their place, but, historically, the town square is in part a space for public expression.

Occupy Melbourne protesters October 22: Occupy Melbourne is part of a worldwide movement against the growing disparity between rich and poor, austerity measures and corporate greed. It is a movement for economic and social justice and real democracy. The richest 20% of households in Australia have 60 times the wealth of the poorest 20% of Australians. CEOs are getting huge pay increases and banks are posting record profits. We want a fair share for all Australians. The camp where Occupy Melbourne has been for the past week has been dispersed, but the movement against inequality will continue tomorrow.

Melbourne Age Editorial October 23: Really Lord Mayor?...Peaceful gatherings of this kind shouldn't be broken up in such a heavy handed manner.

Occupy Melbourne protesters October 23: We are the 99 per cent.

Time to rattle the chains

Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains - JJ Rousseau

There is no better time than now for us all to stand up for the rights of people everywhere to say things we don't like.

Australians ought to at least have the right to get it wrong. When we talk about freedom of speech we often mean the right to speak freely about what is true. But what about when we get it wrong? Shouldn't we have the right to get it wrong? And what about stuff we don't like? Shouldn't newspapers have the freedom to print stuff we don't like?

As I write this today Melbourne's Herald Sun website is reporting

THE assumed right of unfettered freedom of speech was trumped by laws protecting against racial vilification this morning after the Federal Court delivered its decision on the controversial "white Aborigines" case of Pat Eatock v Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt.

I would normally link to that, but in a kind of newspeak News Limited websites are increasingly reframing and even deleting articles. News speak, I guess. Is that unfettered freedom?

The right of unfettered freedom of speech doesn't exist in Australian law, or in Australian common law. Why on earth would the Herald Sun assume it does? I knew a Melbourne writer who was imprisoned over a book he wrote. Remanded in jail during a criminal libel trial in 1950, he was eventually found not guilty by a jury and freed. Libel trials in the state of Victoria have been in civil courts ever since. A few years before that trial Australian author Max Harris faced charges of making obscene publications in a South Australian court. He was acquitted.

I knew someone whose dad was fond of libel proceedings against the news media. The family backyard contained the Packer swimming pool, the Murdoch Tennis court, and so on, all built with damages won from the respective media organizations in libel trials. Those media organizations had committed the grave, and expensive, sin of getting it wrong.

Since the seventeenth century English, and later Australian newspapers, have claimed the privilege to publish without submitting their copy for censorship. Instead, publications carry the name and address of publishers, who bear the brunt of any private or state interventions.

There is no such privilege for other Australians.

Of course anything broadcast on radio or television is subject to retrospective moderation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, a Federal body established to regulate those media after a campaign by, guess who, Australian newspapers.

Australian artists and film makers are expected to submit works to state censors prior to publication. My own work has been referred to censors for classification, because that's what you have to do before screening a film in Australia. An Australian senate inquiry recently recommended funding more censors, in more places, with stricter censorship guidelines affecting larger jurisdictions. The defense of artistic merit to obscenity charges has been dismantled in many jurisdictions after a campaign by newspaper columnists against Australian artist Bill Henson.

Almost everybody who works in Australian media has been affected, one way or another, by laws restricting free speech. I had to make excuses to the television regulators more times than I remember. I have been questioned by police twice, but never charged, after print and electronic media I was involved in came to the attention of authorities. Once after a conservative radio broadcaster complained long and loud.

There should be no mistaken assumptions here. Australians should have the right to speak freely, and to get it wrong. But we don't.

In the vast echo chambers that characterize Australian media websites the Australian media are doing everything right. And their constant opinion polling is telling them people want to hear exactly what they say. But clearly something is going very wrong for them, when freedom of expression is under siege at every turn.

It is time to rattle the chains. It is time for Australian newspapers to stand up for the unpopular but necessary right to get it wrong. It is time for newspapers to stand up for the rights of individuals to say unpopular things. It is time for newspapers to stand up for the rights of people to exhibit photographs some find obscene.

It is time for Australian newspapers to rattle the chains. But, gripped by populism, and conflicted about free speech, even to save themselves, will they?

winter of discontent made glorious spring

I was sorry to read radio MTR is in a bit of trouble, with its audience sinking to around a two percent share. Melbourne Talk Radio is the new kid on the radio block in Melbourne, established less than two years ago.

I don't listen to it regularly, talk radio is a little strident for me in the mornings and MTR's afternoon schedule was Sydney-centric, the last time I did. I hope MTR's format continues under new ownership because it provides an Australian voice that might otherwise go unheard.

Australian media audiences have been fragmenting for at least two decades. New entrants to a broadcast media market find themselves on a playing field that is anything but level. The broadcasters with the most channels will do best because they can deliver a diverse range of programming simultaneously. New Digital television multi-channels are revitalizing a television industry that commentators were writing off a decade ago.

Two percent is about the audience share of so-called for-and-by programming - MTR"s morning schedule is described as in your face conservative by conservative commentators - in all the Australian capital cities. The only way a single channel can make inroads into a new market is by capturing pent up demand for the type of programming it offers at the expense of other more established broadcasters' audiences.

Modern media markets offer more media, more choice, more competition for smaller audiences and more programming tailored for those smaller audiences. Smaller per schedule audiences mean smaller revenues per schedule, and perhaps MTR's failure to capture a larger market share reflects those market realities. Politics is not a favourite of Australian audiences, and media organizations must look to subsidizing news and political comment from revenues derived from other programming with greater audience appeal.

It has been a big couple of weeks for the Australian mass media. The media convergence review is finally underway, with the Australian Press Council kindly stepping up to offer to regulate blogs, and the Australian Communications and Media authority basically recommending it had failed its mission to regulate Australian broadcasters and should therefore be wound up in favour of another body with greater regulatory powers over a larger proportion of Australian media.

A relentless campaign against News Limited and its founder Rupert Murdoch continued with a ferocious attack on the Australian newspaper by Robert Manne In the latest edition of the Quarterly. I would review the essay but it cost ten bucks and an hour and a half of my time to read that I'll never get back, a price I wouldn't wish upon anyone else.

I wrote about broadcaster Alan Jones' attack on working journalists at an anti-government protest rally in Canberra a couple of weeks ago. Following up as best I could I found out that Mr Jones' friends had been delayed at the NSW/ACT border for about three minutes while they sought directions from police. The kindest comment was "Mr Jones appeared at the rally as a private citizen". Everyone else seemed rather exasperated with the eponymous broadcaster. "It was misinformation", one protest organizer offered.

Three journalists were sacked, and one resigned, from the Nine television network's Brisbane newsroom over the so-called choppergate affair. "We rightly demand accountability and high standards of others and we must meet those expectations ourselves", Nine general manager Jeffrey Brown said, adding that the newsroom had failed to meet its own standards.

Spring in Melbourne is as always a wonderful assault upon the senses. Bright sun like honey dripping from pink and white and orange-yellow blossoms, everywhere the scent of Jasmine and budding fig, olive, cherry and pear. Spring brings a promise of renewed hope, and this year's spring seems especially abundant after years of watching gardens parched by unremitting drought struggle to survive. No matter what size a plasma screen is, or how high fidelity, the media's dim glow can't compete at all with the bright promise of abundance and growth finding its way through the heaviest curtains and warming the most shadowed corners.

smaller than they appear

I was not surprised to see someone announce to a book launch this morning that they had eavesdropped on an editorial meeting at a Melbourne newspaper and learned that the newspaper was out to get them.

Newspapers out to get people, by fair means or foul, has got Publisher Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation media empire into the news lately.

Rupert Murdoch is one of my heroes. A crusading editor in the day and bold businessman who innovated markets long established media empires floundered in. If Rupert Murdoch had not campaigned so ardently for so lang for education reform in Australia I might not have one

Rupert Murdoch is a ferocious competitor, and so are his executives. Last August Australian News Limited CEO John Hartigan told he Future Forum of the Newspaper Publishers Association his newspapers are

...moving from setting the agenda every day to owning it all day, every day

Mr Hartigan was talking up his company's move to internet publishing, especially on pads, phones and other mobile platforms. But Jan Rezab, from CandyTech in Czech Republic, told the same forum that articles from The West Australian newspaper, part of Kerry Stokes media group, owned the agenda more. Nearly one million of its online articles a month were shared electronically on Facebook compared with a half million Facebook shares for the most shared News publication, the Herald Sun.

A couple of weeks ago the Australian reported

Two former Supreme Court judges will oversee an internal review of third-party payments at News Limited in Australia as the company addresses concerns raised by the News of the World phone hacking scandal in Britain.

Half of the respondents to the last weekly Essential Research online poll said the federal government should not allow one company to own the majority of Australia's major newspapers. Forty-eight per cent also supported the need for more media regulation, and fifty-one percent expressed rising concern about phone hacking after scandals in England revealed the now closed News of the World UK newspaper had published stories gained from hacking mobile telephone voicemails.

Mass media is, above all, mass entertainment. Newspapers commonly print what their readership want to hear. They are, after all, a business. Right now, newspapers are in the business of surviving the assault on their revenues by digital media. News Limited's grip on the Australian media, and the Australian political agenda, is perhaps not as tight as its opponents imagine, given that millions of Australian Facebook users, at least, show a preference for newspaper articles from News Corporation's competitors.

There will probably be a Parliamentary inquiry into the concentration of media ownership in Australia. There hasn't been one for a while, and the Australian Parliament is quite entitled to inquire into and possibly regulate companies doing business in Australia. But it won't change a thing.

Newspapers run stories, and people complain about them. They always have. Meanwhile, only ten percent of people believe what they read in the newspapers anyway. The most believable media by far, according to media academics, is broadcast media. Fourteen percent of people believe what they see or hear on radio and TV.

Hardly a ringing endorsement of either the press or its critics who accuse the media of unduly influencing public affairs.

It is a great shame we are stuck debating the extent to which media should be regulated, and not the limits of free speech.

Ears gone temporarily deaf

Sometimes a dissenting voice wavers of its own accord. Sometimes it falls on ears gone temporarily deaf.

There is no guarantee of free speech in Australia, and while not wishing to engage with why that is right now, the way is, I feel, is sometimes unjust.

When I heard that a Sydney radio broadcaster was being investigated by Australian media regulators over its coverage of a political issue I kind of shivered a little as I recall myself telling fifty people or so at a function years ago that (radio personality) John Laws was unfairly accused and unjustly condemned.

Laws, my all time favorite voice, was being investigated by the media regulators over, for want of a better description, commercial product placement on his radio programs. Every producer I knew dreamed of doing product placement deals. It seemed so unfair - I guess it was my very own "Leave Britney Alone" moment.

Nobody is above the law, but I did think that John Laws was on the pointy end of some arbitrary muscle-flexing. I guess you have to take your lumps when you get them, but he always was an entertainer, never claimed to be a journalist.

You could have heard a pin drop in this place.

I had another very different kind of experience of a sudden move in an unexpected direction by the broadcast media regulators which seemed to me equally unjust, in the day. Years before, Melbourne 3MBS-FM, the volunteers broadcasting some wonderful music from the Arts Centre here had to restructure the way the radio station paid for itself. It was an issue to do with the station's playlist, which came with a subscription, which made it somehow less egalitarian than had been intended, the regulator suddenly decided. It caused a great deal of stress, was very technical, it seemed to me, for very little value, to ordinary people just trying to do good.

MBS happily eventually survived, and so did John Laws. And so did I, that awkward moment when I guess I said something nobody wanted to hear.

Today I am looking at a transcript of a radio broadcast that caused all the fuss going on now. I can't get the Sydney broadcaster on my radio, but I sure would like to hear some exchanges on Melbourne radio which are as straightforward as this:

David Karoly: I am receiving a travel allowance to cover the costs of going to meetings of the Science Advisory Panel and I am receiving a small retainer which is substantially less than your daily salary.

Alan Jones: So you're paid by the Government and then you give an opinion on the science of climate change. Have you ever heard about he who pays the piper calls the tune?

It looks like a real lively radio exchange between passionate people to me , and I love the way this Jones guy sucks the reference to his salary right up.

Broadcasters have enforceable agreements with the media regulators that I don't think prohibit asking a straightforward question. Thank goodness somebody still is. I go to sleep listening to Melbourne broadcasters, and while that is sometimes appropriate, at others I would appreciate a wake-up. Please.

Broadcast media regulation in Australia is the way it is. I can't think of a better way myself, except that I admire the United States people greatly for their commitment to the principle of free speech, even if individual cases sometimes fly in the face of common sense. The law may overturn reason, but reason may not overturn the law.