“Dial-In Democracy”?: Forty Years of Talkback, From Andrea To Kyle – Bridget Griffen-Foley

Associate Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley primary research focus is in the history of Australian media. She is the Director of the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University, the Convenor of the ARC Cultural Research Network’s Media Histories node and the Australian Media History Database. She is presently working on the production of A Companion to the Australian Media. Following the publication of her most recent book, Changing Stations – The Story of Australian Commercial Radio (UNSW Press), Bridget Griffen-Foley addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 2 December 2009.

“DIAL-IN DEMOCRACY”?: FORTY YEARS OF TALKBACK, FROM ANDREA TO KYLE

BRIDGET GRIFFEN-FOLEY

“You know, it’s fine for you to carry on here as though climate change is a hoax and anyone who believes in it is an idiot. In that case, the … whole world is run by governments led by idiots”, fumed Malcolm Turnbull in an interview with Alan Jones.

Sydney’s breakfast radio star might believe that human-induced global warming is a hoax, but his exchanges with Turnbull had been heating up. For months Jones had been needling the Opposition leader over the issue of an Emissions Trading Scheme (or “tax”, as Jones preferred to call it). By 2 November, Turnbull was no longer prepared to attempt to placate the bombastic 2GB broadcaster. The pair traded blows and talked over each other, with one ABC commentator subsequently remarking that the “jock” had been “shocked” by Turnbull’s bravura.

After Turnbull attempted to push an ETS agreement through the Liberals’ party room on Tuesday 24 November, Sydney’s top-rating commercial AM station joined – perhaps led – a campaign to stir up the conservative heartland. Chris Smith, the host of afternoons, and Jason Morrison, the host of drive time and Jones’ heir apparent, urged listeners to let Senators, particularly in New South Wales, “know what you think about the carbon tax”. Senators’ contact details were published on 2GB’s website. According to one report, a backbencher received a phone call to his office every 30 seconds.

On Friday 27 November, Jones’ show conducted a poll with the question: “Should the federal Opposition be supporting the government’s ETS legislation?” Ninety-seven per cent of respondents reportedly said “no”. That morning, Tony Abbott was interviewed by Jones and declared his intention to challenge for the leadership if Turnbull did not reverse his support for the ETS. By Saturday, all the “Hot Topics” and “Video Comments” on Jones’ webpage concerned the ETS. Smith’s webpage published “A KILOMETRE OF ATMOSPHERE – WHY AN ETS IS NONSENSE”, failing to acknowledge that the equation had first beenbrought to the attention of Australians by 4BC’s Michael Smith and the Herald Sun‘s Andrew Bolt, a vocal climate change denier and a regular guest on Jones’ program.

Talkback radio has been big news this year. Before the Alan Jones and 2GB meltdown, came Kyle and Jackie O’s stunt with a lie detector, in which the teenage interviewee claimed that she had been raped. This episode in July led to Kyle Sandilands’ suspension from Austereo, followed by another shortly afterwards. When the Australian Communications and Media Authority launched an investigation into whether the Commercial Radio Codes of Practice need to be tightened to protect members of the public taking part in live segments, the industry’s peak body, Commercial Radio Australia, tried to insist that programs produced with a seven-second delay didn’t actually constitute “live radio”.

In this address I am going to present a short history of commercial talkback radio; discuss the nexus between talkback radio and politics in the 1960s and 1970s; and consider the maturation of talkback radio and its role in Australian politics. Running throughout the talk will be the figure of the “Golden Tonsils”: John Laws, who began his radio career as a 20-year-old on 3BO Bendigo in 1955, and retired in 2007.

A SHORT HISTORY OF TALKBACK RADIO

Controversy has long dogged Australian talkback radio. Indeed, before 1967 the recording and re-broadcasting of telephone conversations was illegal. Since the 1920s, the Postmaster-General’s Department had forbidden any broadcasting of messages that might compete with postal and telegraphic services. In the 1950s and 1960s, Australian commercial radio executives, some of whom had studied the success of “conversation” programming in the United States, increased their lobbying efforts to build audience participation centred on the telephone into programs to compete with the threat of television.

After the ‘beep-a-phone’, which allowed telephone conversations to be recorded and put to air with a short delay to prevent the broadcast of offensive remarks, was introduced to Australian radio in 1964, the files of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB) bristled with sharp assessments of what individuals and topics could legitimately be heard on air. Broadcasting conversations with “unseen telephone caller[s] whose bona fides have little chance of being properly assessed” was thought inappropriate. Airtime should not be given to irresponsible and “poorly spoken” individuals like “Fred of Coburg”. The topics discussed on Norman Banks’ I’m on Your Side – including happy marriages and birth control – on 3AW did not merit “serious consideration as news”.

In the first half of the 1960s, listeners to 3AW and its sister station in the Macquarie Network, 2GB, could hear new recruits like the journalist and socialite “Andrea” (Dorothy Gordon Jenner). Market research showed that her program was “almost a substitute for a daytime serial” and appealed most to people over 35. She and her counterparts – Eric Baume, Carolyn Bernstein, and the young John Laws – were, in the Bulletin‘s vernacular, “talk jockeys”, occupying a middle ground between established radio news commentators, disc jockeys and talkback hosts.

Another former newspaper journalist, Ormsby Wilkins, worried that the Top 40 format had turned commercial radio into a “juke box for the kids”. He was broken in at night on 2UE, where he learned “to attack, to arrest the listener, to take a stance”. Each year 6KY presented What the Announcers Think, with hosts encouraged to vent their feelings on whatever took their fancy and argue among themselves.

After relentless lobbying by the commercial radio industry, the PMG’s Department announced that the recording and re-broadcasting of telephone conversations would be allowed using its equipment from 17 April 1967. Such was the associated hype that the telephone lines of one capital city were jammed after midnight.

The ABCB’s officers hoped that talkback would contribute to the diversity and entertainment value of programs if it was suitably “serious”. Norman Banks’ “well balanced, intelligent” secretary was said to assess the suitability of callers, weed out people who might be hoax callers, and seek a balance of views. Officers monitored the programs to ensure that the panic button was effective and that sensitive subjects were handled responsibly. “Gimmicky, teenager participation” was disliked. John Laws, who hosted Party Line on 2UE, was criticised for allowing a call from a young boy to initiate a discussion about suicide, and for taking a call from a woman who seemed to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

However, there were already signs that broadcasters and their managements saw opinionated, at times hectoring, styles as good for business. By June 1967, Macquarie’s 6IX was promoting itself as “ADULTS ONLY: DARING. PROVOCATIVE. CONTROVERSIAL. REVEALING”. In 1968 Laws admitted that his rudeness was deliberate, explaining that his show had “died” in its first few months because he had been too patient: “Now I tell people to go to hell.” When John Pearce took over mornings on 2GB that year, he adopted a “Mr Nice Guy” persona in contrast to Ron Casey on 2SM. But after Pearce lost patience with one caller (“you damn bore”), he was summoned to an executive’s office and told they were “on to something”. Pearce was transformed into one of the most curmudgeonly talkback hosts on air until his death in 1996.

“Really good station personalities” in “conversation radio”, remarked 2GB’s astute general manager, Des Foster, were “exceedingly rare”. A solution for some stations lay in poaching established personalities. In 1969, for instance, Ormsby Wilkins was lured from 2UE to 3AW.  Soon after, Laws also left 2UE, joining 2UW on $50 000 a year for five years.

Early talkback and drugs

As the title of Wilkins’ program on 3AW, Power Line, suggests, there was always a close nexus between talkback radio and politics. Two premiers were at hand just after midnight on 17 April 1967: Sir Henry Bolte took calls from Pat Jarrett’s listeners on 3DB, and R.W. Askin was heard, probably on 2UE.

Talkback arrived during a transitional period in Australian politics. The long Menzies hegemony, which had come to an end the previous year, was followed by leadership instability. A series of stories and issues made Canberra news more prominent.

After Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared in December 1967, Barry Jones conceived the idea of having the leadership aspirants appear on his 3DB program. With Jones’ guidance, Senator John Gorton, whom he had known for years, came over as attractive and direct, while the other candidates appeared pompous or equivocating. Wilkins boosted his own profile and bargaining power in 1969 when he played on air recordings of his telephone conversations with Prime Minister Gorton following an incident with the visiting American singer Liza Minnelli.

That same year, with some American stations favouring hard news over “heartline” talkback, Des Foster and the experienced broadcast journalist Brian White devised an innovative format for the latter’s afternoon program on 2GB. The compere was to dial out to key figures on issues of the day and the show would behave more like a newspaper. Newspaper journalists came to recognise the need to monitor Today with Brian White‘s penetrating but sometimes light-hearted look at politics in case a politician made an important statement.

Talkback radio quickly attracted political indignation. In 1968, Labor’s Senator J.A. Mulvihill complained to the ABCB that Andrea had “indulged in a farrago of nonsense” about Whitlam’s relations with South Vietnam and demanded a right of reply. Nevertheless, a study commissioned by Labor in 1971 showed that women, in particular, were greatly influenced by talkback.

At the very time the ALP was seeking to exploit talkback’s utility, it was resolving that a “fairness principle” should be incorporated in broadcasting legislation to enable opposing viewpoints an opportunity for expression. With debates underway about matters such as the long-overdue introduction of FM radio, and the possibility of a Labor victory in 1972, Commercial Radio Australia’s predecessor, FARB, developed a Fairness Code for Broadcasters. The fairly anodyne document was produced in 1973, and promulgated by FARB “as a PR activity”.

Smaller parties also took radio seriously. Before the December 1972 election the DLP dissected Melbourne’s radio ratings, determining that morning talkback programs on 3AW and 3DB appealed to about three times as many women as men, and Gordon Barton’s Australian Reform Movement worked the medium keenly, especially in Sydney. John Laws himself was becoming more interested in politics, guided by former Ben Chifley press secretary and 2UW news editor, Don Rodgers. Although no socialist, Laws felt that Whitlam played the media brilliantly, emerging as “pro-radio and pro-me”.

At around the same time, talkback radio began attracting scholarly attention, but there was little consensus about the genre’s merits. In 1973 a postgraduate student, Rosemary Creswell, reported that Senator Doug McClelland had his press officer listen to all Sydney talkback shows for five weeks of the election campaign. The staffer’s assessment was not encouraging: “trivial” issues attracted most interest, and the hosts were misinformed and misleading. Creswell herself was perturbed to see some stations describe callers as “a beautiful piece of copy” or “bad material”.

A contemporaneous academic assessment was more positive. Don Aitkin and Ann Norrie estimated the audience for open-line programs in Sydney as 200,000 in the mornings (one third of the total Sydney radio audience, with women constituting two-thirds of the callers), 100,000 in the afternoons, and 40,000 in the evenings. They were impressed by the volume of political discussion, and talkback’s capacity to provide a means of direct access to people in power.

Some talkback presenters, like an earlier generation of radio news commentators, including Colonel J M Prentice and Charles Cousens, tended to infantilise their listeners (and callers). The notion of the talkback host as a kind of ombudsman developed early. Norman Banks, who had presented shows like Voice of the People and I’m on Your Side before venturing into talkback in Melbourne, referred to his audience as the “Little People”. The biggest shock of his life had been discovering so many people who “simply lacked the knowledge, confidence, courage and/or initiative to stand up for themselves” and deal with officialdom, he wrote. According to John Laws, callers became more articulate and thoughtful as talkback developed.

Talkback programs were never far from controversy, adding to the commercial radio industry’s sense of siege during the Whitlam years. In 1973 the Liberal Party’s John McLeay referred to them as “wretched programs”, while Labor’s Laurie Wallis maintained that programs in their home state of South Australia were invariably anti-Labor. During the 1974 federal election campaign Joh Bjelke-Petersen used The Premier Speaks, his weekly program on 4BH, to slam the ALP, leading to the “angry young” Labor MP for Gympie to demand and receive a right of reply on a Macquarie affiliate, 4GY.

Women hosts were involved in some of the biggest radio contretemps of this period. In 1974 4BH’s Gabby Horan, a member of the Liberal Party and president of the Queensland Housewives’ Association, resigned in protest the station’s decision to give a right of reply to the federal Treasurer, Frank Crean, following remarks she had made about taxation. Claudia Wright brought to 3AW the same bravura that had cost her a position on the Melbourne Herald. She aggressively interviewed politicians and captains of industry, and broke new ground in discussing feminism, civil rights and the environment. In addition to her own morning program, “Claws” had a daily dust-up with Ormsby Wilkins and Norman Banks that was compulsive listening for many Melbournians. Former Prime Minister Menzies, who was a frequent target of Wright’s vitriol until she quit the station in 1977 following a controversy involving the Catholic Church, abhorred her.

The potential for stacking talkback lines was increasingly obvious. Doug McClelland, now Minister for the Media, thought that if stations were unwilling or unable to check the identity of callers against the telephone number given to the switchboard operator, callers should have to identify themselves on air. The anachronistic requirement in the Commonwealth Electoral Act (1918) that callers be identified was rarely invoked, although it did cause problems for the radio industry during the volatile 1975 election campaign. In 1987 parliament finally legislated to remove the requirement.

Malcolm Fraser used talkback extensively in 1975 and 1977. It allowed politicians to ignore difficult questions, focus on matters they wanted to raise, and refer to notes in front of them. Announcers were also usually less aggressive than print journalists. While one such journalist lamented that talkback radio had “become the town meeting of our times, albeit a largely menopausal meeting”, a coalition government minister, Senator Rex Withers, waxed lyrical about talkback’s “vital” role in “our democratic processes”. The ALP’s powerful NSW branch set out to cultivate John Laws. Neville Wran and his press secretary, Brian Dale, made sure Laws got “good stories” and “controversy”.

Talkback matures

It was not just the ALP and Bob Hawke, but John Laws who emerged victorious from the 1983 federal election. The cause célèbres of the campaign were gaffes by Malcolm Fraser (advising startled listeners to put their savings “under the bed” if Labor were elected), Paul Keating and Andrew Peacock on Laws’ program on 2UE. As Laws began referring to talkback as “dial-in democracy”, the broadcast media monitoring industry took off. The Hawke government finally removed the 72-hour pre-election blackout on election commentary on radio and television that had irritated the radio industry for decades.

Talkback’s increasing role on the airwaves, with talk merchants now hosting shifts of up to five hours a day, and in politics led to analysis and complaints. Thirty-three per cent of respondents to a study on the “foreground factor” commissioned by 6PR claimed to listen closely to talkback, compared with just 6 to 16 per cent to music programs. A considerable portion of an extant compendium of complaints handled by the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT) between 1984 and 1987 pertained to talkback and allegations of rudeness, bad language, bias, and derogatory remarks about Aborigines.

Race was now a hot-button topic for talkback hosts. The most provocative was probably 2KY’s Ron Casey, who in a heated interview with former South Australian Premier Don Dunstan in 1981 had remarked that Asian immigration should be monitored. By 1989 Casey had been suspended, and a panel operator sacked, following comments about Asians, Aborigines and multiculturalism. The ABT ordered 2KY to publicly reprimand Casey for two breaches of the Radio Program Standards, and to use a ten-second delay and employ senior staff to monitor the program. It was not long before Casey left the station.

A study of 6KY’s Eoin Cameron in 1984, at the height of the debate about Aboriginal land rights in Western Australia, found that he used colloquialisms which incorporated listeners into an imagined community of “battlers” and endorsed callers’ negative stereotypes of Aborigines. A regular feature of Howard Sattler’s program on 6PR was a character named “King Billy Cokebottle”, a drunken black fool acted out by a non-Aborigine. None of the complaints about Sattler was found to have breached the Radio Program Standards, with the ABT acknowledging that the frequency of complaints emanated from his “controversial style”, or to have satisfied the high test which the term “vilification” imposed.

There were other controversies. On 3AW Derryn Hinch’s crusades, mostly concerning paedophilia, not only helped earn him the “Human Headline” sobriquet, but contempt of court convictions. In 1986 it was revealed that the Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Chris Hurford, had written to Jeremy Cordeaux at 5DN offering to “break stories” on matters like budget issues and ALP discipline in return for “a quid pro quo such as a regular time slot in my own city or a larger audience with say John Laws”.

In Sydney, Laws’ photograph was hung at the Machiavelli restaurant, a rare honour for a non-politician. Politicians thought that being called a “friend” by Laws was helpful, as was being invited on air to lunch. Laws’ good instincts and deceptively lethal style could entice politicians to drift into dangerous territory, as Treasurer Paul Keating found when he warned that Australia was in danger of becoming a “banana republic” in 1986, and Opposition leader John Howard discovered when he triggered a debate on Asian immigration during a 1988 interview. The more stories Laws broke, the more politicians clamoured to be on his program. Although the Liberal Party could not match the Reserve Bank briefing Keating arranged for the self-confessed economic “dunce”, Dr John Hewson, the shadow Treasurer and then Opposition leader, used Laws’ program to try to soften his image.

Howard went on to use talkback radio like no other prime minister. In 1996 he announced the coalition government’s revamping of the immigration program on Alan Jones’ program. He launched his 1998 re-election campaign on the same 2UE program. Afterwards, he established a studio in his Sydney office to easily chat with stations around the country. That election also elicited speculation that Jones’ support for Pauline Hanson had done much to build One Nation’s support.

The cash-for-comment scandal of 1999, in which presenters at 2UE, 3AW, 5DN and 6PR were accused of entering into commercial agreements with sponsors in return for favourable editorial comment, did not deter politicians from appearing on talkback programs.

Since the days of Barry Jones on 3DB and Douglas Darby on 2GB, the careers of Australia’s politicians and talkback hosts had been overlapping. Presenters who went on to elected office include Jones, Rev. Fred Nile, Steven O’Doherty, John Tingle and Eoin Cameron. Once their political careers were over, Graham Richardson, Peter Anderson and David Oldfield tried their hands at talkback. Darby, Jeff Kennett and Kerry Chikarovski moonlighted on radio while still in parliament. Kennett, who had led the Liberal Party in Victoria, ushered in the 1990s by moonlighting as a summer host on 3AW. In January 1990, he devoted one broadcast to conducting an interview with himself on whether he still harboured ambitions for the top job. This piece of vaudeville – surely the most mischievous use of talkback by an Australian politician, then or since – was enough to persuade many that he was merely biding his time.

It was hardly surprising that some presenters were drawn or headhunted to politics. Hosting talkback generally involved holding firm views, and being articulate, persuasive and high-profile. Alan Jones, whose bid for Liberal Party pre-selection failed, operated somewhat differently: in 1999 alone the self-styled champion of “Struggle Street” despatched 4500 letters, many on behalf of his listeners, to those in authority.

Although politicians such as Mark Latham privately fretted about the need to handle AM radio’s opinionated talkback hosts, few challenged them publicly before Malcolm Turnbull. In the build-up to the 2004 election Latham, then Opposition leader, preferred “light and fluffy” FM sessions to talkback. He was wary of being trapped by hosts who regularly talked to Prime Minister Howard, and feared that talkback would be stacked with Liberal stooges. He had at least some cause for concern: early in the campaign a call to a Perth station about Labor’s tax policy was exposed as emanating from a Liberal Party member; late in the campaign a satirist from ABC television’s The Chaser made a spoof, pro-Liberal call to Alan Jones.

Latham’s successor as Opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, cultivated FM and its younger audience during the 2007 election campaign, in which Howard’s age was an issue. In Melbourne, Rudd fronted Nova 100’s breakfast duo, Hughesy and Kate, and in his hometown of Brisbane he dealt with the Wheel of Inappropriate Questions on Labrat, Camilla and Sav’s program on B105 FM.

Conclusion

Australian commercial talkback radio has survived a string of controversies and debates: about the presenters’ sponsorship arrangements, their influence on political and policing matters, their specific role in the Cronulla race riots of 2005 and their general role in multiplying a culture of complaint. Some of the rhetoric and commentary about talkback radio – such as the term “shock jock” – has been rather indiscriminate. Talkback has different genres on the AM and FM bands.

AM talkback radio itself is not as uniform, or as predictable, as some suggest. And just what constitutes “talkback” radio? Politicians often appear on the programs of talkback presenters such as Alan Jones, Neil Mitchell and Howard Sattler without actually taking calls from listeners. A study by Stephen Crofts and Graeme Turner found that Jones talked more than his callers, and took the least number of calls of the talkback hosts they examined. When the Australian drug dealer, Nguyen Tuong Van, was on death row in Singapore in 2005, Jones, Neil Mitchell, Mike Carlton, John Stanley and Steve Price were amongst those to oppose the execution, defying the expectation of a law-and-order agenda on the part of commercial talkback hosts.

The controversies of recent months involving Kyle Sandilands and Malcolm Turnbull point to three continuing threads in the 40-year history of Australian talkback radio. The first concerns a debate about what members of the public can, or should, be heard on air. But while the ABCB’s views on the suitability of topics and voices for broadcast in the 1950s and 1960s seem paternalistic and elitist, it is difficult to see some of the stunts involving FM callers and competition entrants in more recent years as anything other than exploitative. The second continuing thread involves talkback’s role in political communication, with politicians present at the inception of commercial talkback radio, and now recognising that talkback is part of an around-the-clock media cycle. The third raises the question of whether talkback hosts, for all their boasts, and callers should ever really be equated with public opinion.

If, as the saying goes, “failure is an orphan and success has many parents”, Australian talkback radio might be thought of as a bastard child. Its birth was troubled, its parentage uncertain. An ambivalence about talkback is evident from broadcasters’ own reflections on the genre which transformed not just news and current affairs on Australian radio, but sports, religious, health and gardening programming. John Pearce takes credit for bringing back from San Francisco the idea of “two-way radio”. However, Barry Jones regrets his pioneering role in a genre which, he says, has “declined remarkably”. Buzz Kennedy, claiming to have been, on 2UW, the first talkback host in Australia, is an even less doting parent: “What a terrible thing to do and I am ashamed”.

Endnotes

For excerpts from the transcript: http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/11/06/2735953.htm For the full audio: http://2gb.com/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=5051

See, for example, a transcript of an interview from 2 October 2009: http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/Media/LatestNews/tabid/110/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/622/Interview-with-Alan-Jones-2GB-Sydney.aspx

Quentin Dempster on Stateline, 6 November 2009: http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/11/06/2735953.htm

Sydney Morning Herald, 28-29 November 2009, News Review, p. 1.

http://www.2gb.com/index.php?option=com_homepage&id=22&Itemid=259; http://www.2gb.com/index.php?option=com_homepage&id=5&Itemid=48

Sydney Morning Herald, 28-29 November 2009, News Review, p. 1.

http://www.2gb.com/index.php?option=com_yoursay&id=1067&task=view&Itemid=173; http://www.2gb.com/index.php?option=com_homepage&id=1&Itemid=44

http://www.2gb.com/index.php?option=com_homepage&id=5&Itemid=48

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/editorials/4840-a-hairy-way-to-visualize-the-atmosphere

Sydney Morning Herald, 30 July, 3 August and 8 September 2009.

ACMA media release, 11 August 2009. See: http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD..PC/pc=PC_311851

Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 2009.

Bridget Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009, pp. 344-6.

Liz Gould, ‘Cash and controversy: A short history of commercial talkback radio’, Media International Australia, no. 122, February 2007, pp. 81-2; Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 347-8.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 346.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 346-7.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 350.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 350-2.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 350-3.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 384-5.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 350.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 384.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 384-5.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 385; Brian White, White on the Media, Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1975, p. 138.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 386.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 386-9.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 388.

See Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 394.

See Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 394-5.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 327, 395.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 389.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 397-8.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 390.

Murray Goot, ‘Talkback radio’, in B. Galligan & W. Roberts(eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2007, p. 580; Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 391-2.

Bridget Griffen-Foley, ‘Talkback radio and Australian politics since the summer of ’67’, Media International Australia, no. 122, February 2007, pp. 104-6.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 387, 406-7.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 406-7.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 407.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 407.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 407-8.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 409.

Goot, ‘Talkback radio’, p. 581.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 413-14.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 410, 413-14.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, pp. 410, 412.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 413.

Stephen Crofts and Graeme Turner, ‘Jonestalk: The specificity of Alan Jones’, Media International Australia, no. 122, Feb 2007, pp. 135-6.

Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations, p. 416.

Buzz Kennedy, It was Bloody Marvellous, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 1996, p. 135.

Barry Jones, A Thinking Reed, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2006, p. 123.

John Pearce, For the Love of Mike: A Personal History of Radio in Australia, Ch. 25, available at: <http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/23405/200201310000/members.mpx.com.au/_encore/index.html>.