Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Andrew Bolt really needs to get out more
Yet I can still spend whole days tuned to the ABC without hearing a single conservative ABC presenter.
I am a highly-educated Australian, left-thinking on most matters. Frankly, I don’t know, or care, if the ABC’s various non-fiction arms are left (or right) wing biased. I hardly ever listen to or watch ABC news/comment, because I’m too well-acquainted with its extreme bias in another direction – age.
If you’re under 40 (and a bit too old for Narnas in Jarmies), then there’s the 20-songs-or-so high-rotation playlist delights of JJJ radio (with actually some okay journalism in between songs, but not enough to remove the overall smell of rank payola) – and that’s it. In the high-flying career days of my late-twenties, I used to listen to Radio National. In hindsight, I was a dead-set aspirational media consumer (one of a minority back then, but in 2003 aspirational Gen X professionals, at least those still remaining in Australia, are viritually an extinct species).
Nowadays, I get a gag reflex from the shoved-down-the-throat demographics of the ABC audience – all home-owning, all securely employed (unless of course, they’re victims of “ageism”, a condition the ABC defines as only applying to over 55’s), and therefore with almost-unlimited time to debate and argue over small delicacies – little morsels of affluent angst, and never meatier realities like, say, “My 30 y.o. home cleaner has a PhD”.
Which means that if I wanted to get very angry, I could indeed tune into the ABC, like Andrew Bolt apparently does, for days on end. The difference between us is that one is just bitter, the other is a masochist – one has few choices in life other than the spectrum-dial and the “off’ button, the other is a languid connoisseur of rarefied spectrums that make him exquisitely angry.
Yet I can still spend whole days tuned to the ABC without hearing a single conservative ABC presenter.
I am a highly-educated Australian, left-thinking on most matters. Frankly, I don’t know, or care, if the ABC’s various non-fiction arms are left (or right) wing biased. I hardly ever listen to or watch ABC news/comment, because I’m too well-acquainted with its extreme bias in another direction – age.
If you’re under 40 (and a bit too old for Narnas in Jarmies), then there’s the 20-songs-or-so high-rotation playlist delights of JJJ radio (with actually some okay journalism in between songs, but not enough to remove the overall smell of rank payola) – and that’s it. In the high-flying career days of my late-twenties, I used to listen to Radio National. In hindsight, I was a dead-set aspirational media consumer (one of a minority back then, but in 2003 aspirational Gen X professionals, at least those still remaining in Australia, are viritually an extinct species).
Nowadays, I get a gag reflex from the shoved-down-the-throat demographics of the ABC audience – all home-owning, all securely employed (unless of course, they’re victims of “ageism”, a condition the ABC defines as only applying to over 55’s), and therefore with almost-unlimited time to debate and argue over small delicacies – little morsels of affluent angst, and never meatier realities like, say, “My 30 y.o. home cleaner has a PhD”.
Which means that if I wanted to get very angry, I could indeed tune into the ABC, like Andrew Bolt apparently does, for days on end. The difference between us is that one is just bitter, the other is a masochist – one has few choices in life other than the spectrum-dial and the “off’ button, the other is a languid connoisseur of rarefied spectrums that make him exquisitely angry.
