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The Andrew
Olle Lecture 2005
Presented
by John Doyle
Friday, October 7, 2005
 It
was during the bombing of Baghdad that I reeled in shock, awe and disbelief when
I saw Fox news coverage. Two immaculately dressed presenters were genuinely excited
by the pictures they were seeing. One of them shouted ‘I want to see the
Moab! [The mother of all bombs.] Bring on the Moab!’ And I thought it’s
come to this. The news had degenerated into watching people wank at a snuff film.
They were the new type of journalists. The fact is, rarely has there been a more
important time for truth in journalism.
I should begin by putting my journalistic
credentials on the table – I have none. As a radio presenter I once managed
to conduct quite a long interview with John Howard who was then a shadow minister
in the Downer shadow cabinet, and covered a lot of ground without extracting any
indication one way or the other that a leadership challenge was on.
Whichever
corner I tried to box him into, he deftly changed from a solid to a gas, only
to reappear as a solid on another part of the canvas, with me clumsily smoting
the air. Within a few days he was Opposition leader, within twelve months, Prime
Minister and, on paper, the most successful one in living memory. As a television
presenter I had quite a productive if unfocussed interview with the then Deputy
Prime Minister Tim Fischer in which we extensively canvassed his future and the
future of the National Party. Within an hour of finishing the interview he announced
his resignation and retirement. It’s clear that while we were talking he
knew what he was going to do, but all I could wheedle out of him was that it was
‘steady as she goes’. Again a no-contest. In short, I’ve been thrashed
by both champions and plodders. And the boxing metaphor is apt. The media is charged
with aggression. Newspapers battle newspapers, radio stations spit at each other
and the Television networks hate each other’s guts. And journalists joust
with politicians and journalists claw at each other, and politicians even on the
same side of the street do likewise. It’s a cold, cold-hearted world out
there. Look at the way Mark Latham treated his Labor family. Look at the way the
Liberal family treated John Brogden. To state a truism politicians and journalists
need each other, feed each other and form marriages of convenience. I remember
working with a high profile journalist on a commercial network a few years ago
who stated that his ambition was to work as Peter Costello’s press secretary
when he assumes the Prime Ministership. His newspaper column has been nothing
but full of praise for the Treasurer ever since.
As a means of preparation
for tonight, I had another look at some really engaging lectures delivered on
previous occasions in this forum by some pretty heavy hitters in the industry
and there have been some outstanding insights into the media. Kerry Stokes talked
of the need for different voices, different perspectives and diversity of opinion
and how vital this was for the health of the media and therefore the health of
democracy itself. I notice that this year has seen Seven’s Today Tonight
and Nine’s A Current Affair put to air the same story at the same time on
the same night. As nearly as I can tell the programs are the same: same old foot
in the same old door philosophy, same mock outrage at feuding neighbours and total
dependence on losers, or sad losers, or violent losers, or losers ripped off by
shonky gold tooth rat type losers. They now make the ABC’s brilliant 90’s
farce Frontline look less like parody and more like reality television. Both current
affairs shows depict a world where it’s not only not safe for anyone to leave
their home, it’s not safe to live. And the commercial news services are carbon
copies of each other as well. If one uses a blue background, the other will follow.
If one uses a cityscape as a backdrop, the other will follow. Testament to the
superficial nature of news as news is seen in whatever happened to Jim Whaley.
Jim had been groomed to follow Brian Henderson – the former host of Bandstand,
but it began to go wobbly when people started to watch Nine’s Ian Ross over
on Seven instead. It was decided Jim might have been scaring the viewers a bit,
so they began moving the camera back making Jim appear smaller and therefore seemingly
less scary. But then Jim was disappearing altogether and by that stage it was
all too late. Enter Mark Ferguson a bloke who looks about nineteen, who is then
marketed as the man with the experience. Unlike Jim apparently, who has, to my
knowledge, been seen in the flack jacket more times than any bloke ever to read
a bulletin. So forget diversity of opinion – it’s out there on the margins.
If you really want diversity go to the ABC or SBS.
Then I watched Jana Wendt’s
excellent address where she spoke candidly about the immense difficulties of providing
popular quality journalism on any commercial network. And she was right. But in
the end you can take the girl out of Mary Magdelane’s world for a time, but
it’s very hard to take the Mary Magdelane out of the girl completely. And
then we had Jana usher Sam Chisolm into the Logies Hall of Fame and suddenly Sam’s
back at Nine, and while middle management now have to call him Mr. Chisolm and
wear suits, Ray had to lose the suit and loosen the tie in promoting A Current
Affair. It was to give people the impression Ray had been at it all day at the
coal face tracking down the spivs, the plastic surgeons and the weight loss miracles.
The fact is, as Lachlan Murdoch pointed out in his address here, the media
is a business, and if going low sells, then let’s mine really low. Lachlan’s
remarkable thesis seemed to be that elite opinion is to be avoided at all cost.
What is preferred is opinion that fuels nationalism. And profits made serve to
improve the systems of delivery of information to consumers – colour printing
and the like. What is overlooked is that, in the end, delivery and delivery systems
are meaningless. Content is all that matters. Rubbish is still rubbish be it on
an old 21inch black and white HMV or in high definition through the digital set
top box. The Beatles and the Stones sounded great through the crystal set attached
to the iron frame of my bed as a ten year old. As for elites: well it’s best
to encourage worship at the feet of sporting elites, for those who dabble in elite
thought may well come to conclusions that are at odds with the prevailing wisdom
within the culture of the organization. And while on the one hand the Murdoch
organization bleats on about its abhorrence of political correctness and the need
to enshrine freedom of speech and opinion, on the other, when dealing with China,
is quite sanguine about removing the BBC channel from its Star service because
the opinions expressed might upset the burghers of Beijing.
But to give it
its due News Limited is digging its heels in regarding Freedom Of Information
laws. And is supportive of two journalists who are under threat of gaol for not
revealing their sources over a leaked government document. Maybe the time has
come for a bill of rights.
I think Jana is right, Lachlan is wrong and Kerry
seems to be living in a parallel universe.
I come to this forum as a consumer
of media and as someone who’s been fortunate enough to sit a little on the
inside and observe aspects of how it appears to work. At my first real job at
the Small Arms Factory in Lithgow I bought the Daily Mirror every afternoon on
my way home. I used to savour the football and cricket think pieces from the likes
of Phil Tressider and Ian Heads and Geoff Prenter and they brought me up to speed
with the notion of cliché. At the time I had no idea that this would be
my career-making preparation allowing me to express moments of life in terms of
a traditional softening-up period, forwards stamping their authority on the match,
players having either good hands or quick hands or both, being able to sell a
dummy or sell a dump or both, being able to bundle people into touch with either
a grass cutter or ball and all tackle while second rowers hunted in packs or made
busts up the middle or the hard yards before creating something out of nothing
and being able to score from anywhere on the paddock while you could throw a blanket
over the defence. Players could have the ball on a string in a moment of individual
brilliance or weave their magic in a desperate bid requiring courage and commitment
in the trenches in a game played in two halves where both teams were a credit
to themselves with one player being an ornament to humanity in a match where the
game was the ultimate winner. In thirty five years about the only new contributions
are American ones: this rookie stepping up to the plate, could end up a hall of
famer at this level. Yet despite the tightly spin doctored homogenized responses
of sports stars and commentators there is still the odd surprise. Ray Warren suggesting
at one stage that the ball popped up like a plume of molten lava or Benny Elias
on SBS saying it’s like comparing apples and apples, you just can’t
do it.
I’ve always loved radio. Mornings was Gary O’Callaghan and
Sammy Sparrow until pop meant the 2SM Good Guys introduced the songs that would
become the diary of adolescence. Many years later, what’s changed? Talkback.
That’s all. Commercial radio now: AM. Bandwagon talkback, water cooler drivel
as talkback thought starters, competitions, finance and weather, quizzes, traffic,
more talkback, then an inflammatory lunatic with talkback. FM. Whacky clubs or
Crews, old music or a balance of old music with unthreatening new, competitions,
requests, racy talkback with swearing and repetition. All programs are substantially
written by the daily newspapers. Breakfast and Mornings used to have a deal –
Breakfast got the stories on the odd pages and Mornings got the ones on the even
pages. The quirky stories are good for the Crews – often they are survey
- based stories. Four out of every ten Swedes prefer briefs to boxers. ‘Come
on guys, what do you prefer? Give us a call.’ ‘G’day Brian, love
your show. I wear briefs, mate.’ The Crew might ask blokes who freebag to
phone in. One of the Crew will have an insight. ‘I always freebag in my trackies’.
‘You’re wearing your trackies now’. ‘Bloody hell!’ –
much hilarity and that becomes a promo sound bite for the next month. And don’t
be scared to use the Melbourne chuckle. That’s when everything is so funny
you can hardly speak for laughter.
Sadly I've only caught John Burgess on
radio once: the grab I heard was ‘and we’re coming up to the bottom
of the hour, so let’s just ease our way through with a little Anne Murray.’
Perfect.
Least forgivable is the program that begins with ‘Why don’t
you just give me a call and tell me what’s on your mind’. It’s
dead air space with a host.
As are TV shows like The Up Late Game Show on
Ten which may be telling us what TV will be like down the track when the digital
revolution gives us thousands of channels – all with nothing on them.
For
some reason or other as an immediate response when first approached to speak at
this occasion I wrote down the word Symmetry. This is the tenth Andrew Olle lecture.
Like many I can remember where I was and what I was up to when the shockingly
sad news arrived. I last saw Andrew in the canteen at Gore Hill at lunchtime on
a Thursday. We chatted in the sandwich queue. Not long before he’d worked
on a Four Corners special entitled ‘What’s wrong with the Liberal Party?’
a program that ended with Andrew angrily railing at the panel of John Howard,
Robert Hill and John Moore for being in denial. I talked about work, his work,
and he wanted to talk about anything but work. He looked and was exhausted. He
was doing mornings on 702 and The 7:30 Report at night. He had every reason to
be exhausted.
Andrew was very generous to me when we were working at the same
station. He always offered story ideas, wry observations and encouragement. I
did afternoons and it was the only time of day apart from midnight to dawn when
nobody seemed to give a bugger about what you did. There was no minute by minute
scrutiny that Breakfast in particular has to endure. One of the traps with radio
is that it caresses the ego in the most dangerous manner imaginable. The first
skill to leave is the ability to listen – when someone else is speaking you
are automatically forming your next thought. The long-term affect must be a specific
type of narcissistic madness. The trade is in part about finding a performance
mask that can be slipped on and can evenly disguise days of euphoria or despair.
Andrew was helped on radio because we knew what he looked like. He had a natural
elegance and an interesting mask that really exposed itself on television: he
had a look of almost permanent skepticism brought about by the asymmetry of his
face. Science tells us we are attracted to symmetry. Symmetry equals beauty equals
biological success so the argument goes. Yet there was Andrew, a sort of walking
proof that the exception can also be true.
I’d see him annually at the
NSW Tennis Open at White City. Here he presented as a sort of ‘what ho’
Bertie Wooster type with attractive slacks and lemon sweater casually draped across
the shoulder with the picnic basket in the boot of the Audi parked on the lawn
courtside. Yet in the background was this tearaway kiddie from Queensland who’d
terrorized neighbourhoods and missed out on gaol by the skin of his teeth. His
mask of performance had obliterated this part of his life completely as nearly
as I could tell. But I never had a night on the tiles with Andrew and I suspect
a few good reds might have allowed a different spiritual genie out of the bottle.
As is the case with many journalists.
Journalists like a drink. Often to excess
– it’s an occupational health hazzard. Robert Haupt became a regular
commentator on my show. He had tremendous style. And a mission to find truth.
But there were days when Haupty would have had a long lunch. And then it was different.
A rosy warm smile can make for difficult radio. Then he learnt Russian and went
to Russia as a correspondent because he thought that’s where it was going
to happen. And he was right. Many a time at awards do’s I’ve gaped in
awe as highly respected journo’s have slammed yet another one back and bayed
at the moon, or thrown a glass in anger, or picked a fight. At the Walkeleys,
fistfights are part of the card. I suspect drink in the journalist’s culture
might have something to do with massive overexposure to the darker side of human
nature.
I’ve always enjoyed reasoned commentators. I loved the sturdy
assuredness of Paul Murphy and now Mark Colvin. I lean forward when I hear Catherine
McGrath or Fran Kelly in attack mode. I love Kerry O’Brien getting angry.
I pull up a chair for any Chris Masters or Sally Neighbour Four Corners special.
I flick the page to the Paul McGeogh article. It’s the mixture of gravitas
and style. As a family in the late fifties we used to sit around the lounge room
at night letting Arch McKirdy guide us through Benny Golson or Oscar Peterson
or Charlie Parker. A cigarette company sponsored him. It might have been Ardath.
And with voice alone he fashioned the smokey atmosphere of a New York Jazz Club.
His live commercials for Ardath had him ignoring the copy and the ad would sometimes
be reduced to a pause, followed by the sound of a match being struck and an ecstatic
draw. And that was the ad. Arch always struck a warm yet authoritative tone. He
was a master of the medium having the easy confidence of one who has made the
time, the moment, his own and he knew his subject and somehow gave the impression
of having left the ego behind. John Cleary has a similarly elegant style. Andrew
also, despite his particular asymmetry, had reasoned objective balance. Which
leads us to Opinion. Suddenly the world is awash with Opinion. Sadly more Arch
Tambakis than Arch McKirdy. Newspapers too, are full of it. Any half-baked dickhead
who can string a few sentences together is given a go, particularly if the opinion
is inflammatory or somehow ratchets up the climate of fear or loathing –
simply and obviously because it sells more newspapers.
When I had a regular
radio show I was constantly astounded by the easy access to some of the great
minds of our time. It seemed to me that radio had such portability and potential
that there was no excuse just to throw the lines open. I had an American physicist
called George Smoot on once. He helped discover cosmic background radiation –
the echo of the Big Bang, the microwave image of which was given the title ‘The
face of god’. We pick it up as snow on our television screens. And he was
talking about String Theorists whose Maths had rewound the tape of time to escape
this universe and seriously postulate that the Big Bang was caused by a collision
of two other universes in a cataclysmic event. He said the Maths was pretty good.
I thought fair enough. Certainly the idea of other universes seemed redolent with
possibility.
Then I spoke with another American physicist, Robert Kirshner
who shrugged and said that in the end, a mathematical formula must have Elegance
to have truth and to his mind, String Theory still lacked elegance. And I’ve
wondered in wonder about Elegance in this context ever since. To me the doctrinally
unencumbered search for the big picture answers of where we came from, where we’re
going and how we might survive as a species are far more interesting, intriguing
and satisfying and more revealing of truth than Faith based examinations that
eschew proof and lessen us as humans. While the echoes of the Big Bang provide
the clues, the echoes of the Age Of Enlightenment remind us that we are but the
stuff of stars.
I remember reading some years ago about the series Dallas
being beamed in to the New Guinea highlands. It was being viewed by mountain tribal
people who were just a generation removed from First Contact, people who’d
had little or no connection with European society at all apart from the odd Christian
missionary. Tim Flannery recalls seeing a burial service in the highlands whereby
the deceased was picked up and swung over the grave with the family and onlookers
solemnly chanting the incantation ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son
and into the hole he goes’. What were they to make of Dallas? A highly camp
styled vacuous rich oil family living the life of Reilly in a bed-hopping fun-filled
soap operatic adventure, laced with stylized irony. Probably the highlanders saw
it differently - a lifestyle that was heaven on Earth. Irresistible. Vast houses,
huge cars, heated pools, money, booze, guns and loose women. And no morality to
speak of. Ancient and modern cultural universes brushing against each other. Again
a cataclysmic event.
The truth is that in the belly of any society there’s
a violent brutal core that exposes itself when the thin veneer of culture is stripped
away. The recent Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico partially revealed the
feral world that snuggles so closely within the first world. And there are web
sites that explain that the shape of the hurricane was that of a womb and that
while ever the US continues to allow abortion, God will rein such punishments
down. Without doubt there are other web sites that suggest the shape is that of
a bum hole and is a warning against the legalization of gay marriage. And others
suggesting this is simply Gaia attacking the oil industry. The fact is New Orleans
has been known to be a disaster waiting to happen for decades. Being in denial
about global warming is to court disaster. And Tokyo is a disaster waiting to
happen – the earthquake is already 250,000 years overdue.
Welcome to
the age of infinite Information. Small cataclysmic events are happening all the
time at the speed of light. The Internet allows anyone anywhere to access information
that might be true, might be false, but you can find whatever information you
need to prosecute any argument you want. Conspiracy theories abound. History can
be written any way you wish. In the past, information bound culture. There was
a shared sense of a gradually expanding library of sensible and responsible scholarship
whereas now information is serving more to fracture culture. The future of information
is with bloggers. And who knows what the blogging implications might be of a generation
aching for the steely coldness of Grand Theft Auto San Andreus and other games
involving cyber murder, cyber torture and on line sex and anonymous chat rooms
and bomb-making instructions and clubs dedicated to nihilism and terrorism and
all manner of misguided madnesses designed to accelerate Rapture.
The genie
of limitless spin and unlimited market power has been unleashed. The result is
to squeeze the commercial lemon shamelessly with a never-ending stream of services
offered that come with the tacit irresistible message of the promise of the good
life. And somehow people spending 150% of what they earn makes for a robust economy.
And then there’s the promise of globalization which has still done little
for the Asian sweatshop worker being paid fifty cents an hour to build the shoes
for the golfer who is being paid fifty million a year to wear. Never before have
we been aware of just how obscene has become the remuneration amongst our top
company executives. Five to ten million a year seems to be unexceptional –
whether successful or not. And nobody bats an eyelid. We’re becoming a nation
of acquisitors: special interest, real estate and the stock market.
Changi
and Marking Time were written as companion pieces examining the Australian Character
– the sweet and sour journey towards the hardening of its heart. It’s
fitting that we are now exporting our homegrown Aussie version of Christianity
to Europe that comes with the powerful message that Jesus wants us all to be millionaires.
Paul Keating commented almost as an afterthought that without Reconciliation,
we’re just here for the view. Speaking of which, it’s amazing to think
that Reconciliation was so recently a part of mainstream public debate. Mention
Reconciliation now and there’s a generation of Australians who haven’t
the least idea of what you are talking about. If it doesn’t affect the economy,
it’s not on the radar. The economy is everywhere. Paul Keating made it pop.
He was so successful at it that Peter Costello has modelled his parliamentary
performance mask entirely on Paul Keating’s: he is walking proof that imitation
is the highest form of flattery.
God almighty. The economy.
It’s
assumed that everyone is now a shareholder, everyone has a portfolio – many
with those T2 shares just sitting there as a reminder of how close to gambling
the stock market really is. But it’s a source of celebrities. There’s
always someone from Comsec bobbing up in an audition piece on Channel Ten’s
news, or Karen Tso on Nine or Alan Kohler on the ABC. And when it’s budget
time, Bill Evans or Saul Eslake. They are as predictable as Phil Koperburg appearing
when the temperature reaches 34 degrees in summer. Then there’s Koshie who
bears all the hallmarks of one having loomed out of the dismal science.
Religion
too, has again become a source of celebrity. Archbishop George Pell is probably
at the top of the tree with the Jentzens jockeying for position now Peter Carnley
has exited stage left, and the Rev. Doctor Gordon Moyes has almost become invisible.
But bobbing up on the inside is Sheik alHilali who came out of nowhere during
the Doug Wood incident. Well almost out of nowhere. There was an incident involving
an unregistered vehicle and an unlicenced driver and some plumbing supplies that
were protruding precariously from one of the windows. I don’t know what the
upshot was. But the Mufti and Kaiser Trad have become Australia’s Islamic
odd couple. And if they seem a little like rabbits caught in the spotlight or
appear to be treading on eggshells with their speech, bear in mind how difficult
it is for anyone in the Muslim community to put their heads up in 21st century
Australia. And the media doesn’t help when it depicts quite falsely Australian
youths of Arabic background supposedly claiming an unwillingness to ever integrate.
Mercifully some media does attempt to reveal truth and if it wasn’t for the
excellent work done by Lateline this year with the ABC Investigations Unit, I
doubt whether the Rau or Sarlon cases would have appeared at all on the radar.
Let alone the exposing of what has been described as an overarching cultural problem
within DIMEA. And I think it’s fair to say that in days gone by under our
Westminster system, any Minister who oversaw such a rancid cultural climate within
a department would have been expected without question, as a minimum requirement,
to fall on his or her sword.
It’s not always so great for a society when
God turns up. Reason is often the first thing jettisoned. Evolution is back on
the agenda in the United States – which means here as well. Creationists
want what they are calling Intelligent Design incorporated into the curriculum
and it’s meant to be treated seriously. But it doesn’t surprise me.
Battles won in the past are having to be won again. And as long as within the
media elite opinion is reviled, untested populist positions will prevail. I can
only imagine what the cost was of the burning of Constantine’s great Library
in Alexandria: so much knowledge of Astronomy and Maths and all manner of literature,
history and art: universal truths that had to lie dormant until rediscovered by
another purple patch of human intellectual endeavour. The sadness of today is
that the truths are still with us, sitting side by side with uninformed nonsense.
Do we need to revisit through individual work contracts the factory life of Dickens
for collective bargaining to grow again? And while ever the media allows truth
to be bended, more old battles are going to have to be re-won. Humans are not
related to chimps. Astrology has answers. There is no connection between Iraq
and the increase in terrorism. The earth is flat. The holocaust never happened.
To be born in poverty is your own fault. A society is safer when human rights
are compromised. There is no such thing as greenhouse gases. Certain races are
not as intelligent as others.
And now there’s Terrorism. Will it become
common, a sort of angry graffiti?
It’s complicated. The same political
figures who today kiss the hem of Nelson Mandela in a time not so long ago were
happy to see him rot forever on Robben Island. Saddam Hussein was the friend of
the West, and armed by the West in the war against Iran. Somalia and now Zimbabwe
can go to hell in a hand basket because their lack of resources has no affect
on the West. And there’s the overarching issue of sustainability. To imagine
that everyone on the planet can aspire to the lifestyle of JR Ewing at the cost
of the global environment and the resources of other nations is to live in a fool’s
paradise. Arm poverty and ignorance with moral rectitude and hang onto your hats.
We live in interesting times.
If commercial radio is so slight because it
is under resourced, so too is Television. And if more channels are allowed then
the resources will be even further stretched. As it is the ABC has been cut to
the marrow and can no longer afford to do much Drama, and commercial networks
have decided Drama is too flakey and expensive. Meanwhile our very fine drama
schools are pumping out scores of new young actors each year and there is nothing
for them to do. The lucky ones might get to appear in a Holden advertisement or
survive for a season in the Bell Shakespeare Company. So our local content is
reduced to game shows, dancing shows, lifestyle shows and talent quests all creaking
under the weight of diminishing returns. Think of something mindless, rope in
a couple of celebrities and there’s your show.
Big Brother is such a
waste of an opportunity. The housemates live in a state of perpetual boredom,
unless they’re pissed. Why not engage them. A house of really smart gifted
young people from various fields: scientists, engineers, mathematicians, builders,
a Latin scholar, a poet etc and they have a problem to solve. With a shared incentive
of a few million dollars they have to find a solution to Australia’s water
problems in ten weeks – there’s a show.
To get on my hobbyhorse
for a moment. Because historically the ABC has been the powerhouse for new ideas
that are often taken up by the commercial networks, perhaps the time has come
for those networks to subsidize the ABC. After all, the ABC has been the training
and testing ground for the commercial networks for fifty years - it’s about
time the situation was redressed. What I would propose is a tax deductible levy
on pre-tax network profit of around 25% to 30% that is pooled exclusively for
ABC Drama. In return, the networks get second viewing rights and the right to
franchise any series on a rotating basis that is deemed commercially viable. The
fact is, it is only the ABC by virtue of being unencumbered by what is popular,
that is capable of taking risks. Why is there such a paucity of great locally
made drama? Because the ABC isn’t doing it. The Americans would hate such
a plan and see it as not being in the spirit of the Free Trade Agreement, but
so what? This isn’t cheese or rice we’re talking about. It actually
is Culture. A fully funded ABC Drama unit would be to the advantage of the commercial
networks. The ABC could become Australia’s HBO.
So, what has changed in
the ten years since Andrew left us? A conservative Labor government has been replaced
by a conservative Coalition government, and the organization he worked for, the
ABC, has had to steer through some pretty treacherous waters. ABC News and Current
Affairs has somehow survived the Shier era and the petty ideologically driven
hounding by former Minister for Communications Richard Alston. The ABC still provides
the best news services in the country and arguably services that could be described
as being among the best in the world. Radio National is still impossibly excellent.
ABC TV has too, somehow managed to survive with its current affairs programs intact,
loathed by Labor and Coalition alike, as it should be. And as it should be, it
still strives to put forward an alternative view. So that when the commercial
media is dictated to by myopic intrusive ownership and ill-informed populism,
is forced through thoughtless need to make irresponsible programs that lack both
style and substance, caresses inflammatory and cheap, nasty demagoguery that seeks
to marginalize the already marginalized, that describes the world in simple terms,
provides simple solutions to complex problems and is purely a servant to fiscal
outcomes, then the ABC will always seem to aggravate, annoy and frustrate and
it’s precisely when the ABC is doing this that it is serving its charter.
It’s preserving its skeptical asymmetrical mask.
Andrew missed out on
seeing the events of September Eleven, a blunt cleaver that questioned Western
certainty. One of the pilots of the first American Airlines plane to smash into
the World Trade Centre was Mohammed Atta. He spent his last hours on this earth
in Las Vegas roaming amongst the gambling dens and strip clubs theoretically to
further steel his resolve such was his loathing of the excesses of the West. The
quest for our media is to ask why it happened and why it’s continuing to
happen, to understand the motivations of those who are willing to end their lives
at a young age on the altar of sectarian anger. To join the dots between that
state of mind and the mindset of those in the New Guinea highlands cutting down
their pristine forests to feed the generators that provide the power for the television
to screen Buffy, or The OC or Joe Millionaire or if they’re on line, to power
the modem to any cyber freak show the mouse takes them. If this examination isn’t
exacting and truthful and without fear or favour, then this universe’s accidental
experiment with self-awareness and consciousness may well have been a total waste
of time. Provided
as a media release by the ABC at this
link Andrew
Ollie lecture index at the ABC: click
here
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