BOTW: When punditry meets politics; Radio becomes the top news source; Sexist robots

Mar 10

Welcome to Best of the Week, written on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning at an autumnal Sisters Beach, Tasmania. Whilst my friends in Sydney were sweltering, I lit the fire for the first time this year.

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Today: When Twitter, broadcasting and politics collide; Mumbrella takes on Campaign Brief; radio’s news renaissance and a great IWD project.

Today’s writing soundtrack: Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division.

Happy World Plumbing Day for tomorrow.

When Lineker scored

On occasion I turn to SBS for my breakfast viewing. SBS’s 7am bulletin is in fact the BBC’s domestic 6pm bulletin, broadcast in the UK two hours earlier (following so far?)

This morning, the BBC’s top story was itself. In an episode that has plenty of parallels with the ABC’s fraught relationships with social media and the government, the BBC is in meltdown over something one of its sports presenters tweeted.

Gary Lineker, the former England striker (his equaliser against Germany in the 1990 World Cup semi final, ten minutes before full time, guaranteed he’d never need to buy a drink in a British pub for the rest of his life) has hosted the BBC’s Match of the Day for the last 23 years.

Unless you’ve lived in the UK, it’s hard to grasp what a gleaming thread MOTD is within the fabric of British life. Generations of Brits have come home from the pub on a Saturday night, or woken up with a hangover in time for the repeat on a Sunday morning, to catch the day’s goals and the punditry that goes alongside it. Combine The World Game with the Footy Show, The Front Bar and Offsiders and you might just begin to get a sense of the show’s place within British culture.

Not tonight though. While we were sleeping, the BBC suspended Lineker from the show, and his co-presenters, former footballers Alan Shearer and Ian Wright, both subsequently ruled themselves out of filling his chair. MOTD will go to air this evening as a highlights package without any presenters or pundits.

It’s the only news story in the UK right now, even for the broadsheets.

You might reasonably assume that Lineker tweeted something pretty terrible for the BBC to find itself in this pickle.

Gary Lineker 💙💛 @GaryLineker

Good heavens, this is beyond awful.

Home Office @ukhomeoffice

🗣️ “Enough is enough. We must stop the boats.” @SuellaBraverman, The Home Secretary. https://t.co/Ni4nhuh44b

In fact, he was passing comment on the British government’s new “stop the boats” policy to prevent asylum seekers from crossing from France into the UK. Did I mention the parallels with Australia? Rather than Nauru or Christmas island, the UK plans to send its unwanted refugees to Rwanda.

It comes against a backdrop of a public service broadcaster which has been increasingly cowed by its fractious relationship with the British government. During Boris Johnson’s brief and chaotic period as Prime Minister the government announced a plan to end the licence fee, which is the way the BBC is funded. Licence fee rises were also frozen, effectively meaning a drop in funding, leading to cuts across the organisation.

Again there were parallels with the ABC which saw its funding frozen during the Coalition years.

And often it’s the fear of offending the politicians which does the damage to the organisations. The ABC’s moment of meltdown came in 2018 when the organisation’s new (and not very good) managing director Michelle Guthrie took down chairman Justine Milne after he sacked her. She revealed Milne had been seeking to appease the Turnbull government by trying to sack presenter Emma Alberici who had been critical of tax policy.

Arguably the ABC has never recovered from that moment. Guthrie’s successor David Anderson is an ABC lifer who steadied the ship but has shown none of the charisma, innovation or change making practiced by predecessor Mark Scott.

Instead the ABC is trapped in a spiral of shrinking audiences on television and radio, with no obvious strategy to reconnect with anyone younger than 30.

It’s become inward-looking, with an embattled press office that looks for fights. This week the ABC press office sought to police the Daily Mail and news.com.au’s journalism. Both outlets had covered the disgraceful treatment ABC News Breakfast presenter Lisa Millar receives on Twitter. The press statement from the ABC condemned them for amplifying the comments. Commentating on other outlets’ editorial choices, as opposed to challenging their accuracy is way outside what a press office shound be doing.

Indeed, it was a week of everybody policing each other. Mumbrella took Campaign Brief to task for some of the anonymous reader comments it was choosing to publish alongside an article on International Women’s Day.

The ABC has also has its own problems policing the Twitter activities of its presenters in recent weeks. Anderson found himself having to explain to Senate Estimates last month the spat between veteran (32 years at the mic yesterday) Late Night Live presenter Phillip Adams and singer Kamahl over the use of the offensive phrase “honorary white”. And then had to correct the record when it turned out that the apology which he told Senate Estimates had been issued had never been received.

But getting back to the Lineker situation. One of the BBC’s problem is that although he is a high profile face of the organisation, he’s not actually a member of staff. He’s a freelance.

It’s not dissimilar to the local parallel of Craig Foster, another soccer player - turned pundit - turned human rights advocate. He was a long time face on The World Game, and came back to SBS as guest host for The World Cup last year. This morning he’s in Lineker’s camp.

Craig Foster @Craig_Foster

The problem is not that ⁦@GaryLineker⁩ challenged the demonisation of asylum seekers and the normalisation of the language of dehumanisation that has always preceded and legitimised hate and exclusion, but that too few have.

theguardian.comBBC to air Match of the Day without presenters after Gary Lineker’s suspensionDecision taken after corporation takes its highest-paid presenter off air and his fellow broadcasters refuse to appear in solidarity

There’s a further lesson from the affair. One reason the BBC has got itself into such a mess is that it did not act when Lineker first shared his views. If the tweets broke its rules on impartiality than that was the time to do something. Instead it waited until it became a big political story. And now it’s the political story.

News radio

On Wednesday we dug into the government’s Media Content Consumption Survey.

Unmade - media & marketing through an Aussie lens

How broadcast TV became the third place viewing medium

17 days ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Tim Burrowes

Our main focus was changing viewing habits. There was plenty more to explore.

There was quite a lot in there to cheer the audio industry too.

Thanks to the decline of linear TV viewing, radio is now cited as the number one means by which Australians get most of their news.

Radio is now level with commercial free to air, with 56% of those who say they consume news and current affairs saying they get it via the radio, which is up from 46% in 2021. In the same time those saying they get it from commercial FTA fell from 62% to 56%.

The decline in people getting their news from ABC or SBS via linear TV fell even more, down from 44% to 37%.

And as a print romantic, I’m sad to see that only 15% say they get their news from their local newspaper.

There was another new stat I haven’t seen before. According to the survey, 13% of people personally have a paid news and current affairs subscription. Although the survey analysis describes that as “quite low” it still amounts to an impressive number of Australians who are still willing to pay for their news content.

A billion dollars goes a long way on The Unmade Index

The Unmade Index of locally listed media and marketing stocks mostly set its own path on Friday despite the wider ASX dropping thanks to a poor lead overnight from the US. The Unmade Index only fell by 0.61%, despite the ASX All Ords falling by 2.2%

However, that number obscured some significant variances on the Unmade Index.

A savvy investor would now be able to buy Seven West Media and HT&E and still have change from a billion dollars. SWM fell by 3.49%, taking its market capitalisation to $653m. HT&E fell by 0.47%, leaving it with a market cap of $326m.

Meanwhile, Southern Cross Austereo’s week got worse, with a fall for a fourth day in a row, this time by another 2.6%. The company is now valued at just $226m.

Oooh Media saw its valuation fall back below $900m after a 3.74% fall.

Research company Pureprofile saw a jump in price yesterday afternoon, taking it up by 6.9%. The move coincided with a cheery presentation from CEO Martin Filz to the ShareCafe Small Cap “Hidden Gems” webinar.

Campaign of the Week: Gender bias in AI

Each Saturday our friends at Little Black Book Online to highlight their most interesting marketing campaign of the week.

One Green Bean Uncovers Alarming Gender Bias in AI Platforms

LBB Australia’s MD Toby Hemming writes:

Chat GPT, Midjourney, the subject of a thousand words and opinions that would have previously been taken up with Blockchain, NFT, Metaverse or Web 3 - our industry loves to jump on the coolest new jargon and AI may be seen to be just the latest shiny toy in the box.

However on International Women's Day, One Green Bean had perhaps the most original idea in town.

One Green Bean asked Midjourney to generate images based on the job titles of three members of the global leadership team – Managing Director, Executive Creative Director, and Head of Public Relations EMEA. The results revealed a clear male gender bias.

The results are fascinating, and apply a timely context to what can often be a vacuous conversation.

You can read the full story at LBB Online.