Locality Switch

Try and define the current community standards for decency. It’s pretty hard, maybe even impossible. Where do you draw the line on what is acceptable to say and do on radio, and what isn’t? How do you know what your boundaries are, when they aren’t clearly set out.

Both Community and Commercial radio have clauses in their relevant codes of practice to explain that programs broadcast must meet certain standards of decency.

1.5 (a) All program content must meet contemporary standards of decency, having regard to the likely characteristics of the audience of the licensee’s service.

[ Commercial Radio Australia - Codes of Practice & Guidelines ]

3.2 We will attempt to avoid censorship where possible. However, in our programming decisions we will consider our community interest, context, degree of explicitness, the possibility of alarming the listener, the potential for distress or shock, prevailing Indigenous laws or community standards and the social importance of the broadcast.

[ Community Radio Broadcasting Codes of Practice ]

But what is deemed acceptable? Let’s take swearing as an example. What words would you anticipate you couldn’t say on air? I would think that almost all swearing would be a no-go, except for the lightest swear words. When I tuned into a commercial station last week, heaps of songs in their countdown program contained meny words which I wouldn’t thing were suitable to broadcast in the early evening. I’m sure this isn’t the first time their music contained these words – it must have been happening for a while.

But yet I don’t hear a public outcry about it.

Nor did I hear a huge amount of whinging about the woeful contents of Kyle and Jackie-O’s brekky show, until that fateful morning containing a lie detector. Media Watch must have been the only media outlet I saw complaining about their stunts. So, does that mean most people don’t have a problem with it? Or just don’t care?

All of this must mean that people think swearing is acceptable for broadcast. Yet, whenever we have an incident of someone saying a naughty word on air on 2CCR, a flood of complains ensues. Something’s up? What’s so different?

The answer, it seems, is: “audience”. The audience your station has determines what you can get away with. If you have an audience consisting primarily of those in their twenties, you can get away with heaps. But, if your audience is filled with families or slightly older people, you can’t get away with anywhere near as much.

This still doesn’t answer my question about community standards, but I don’t think it ever will be answered, unless we turn into a communist state.

In radio, one size never fits all. What is suitable for one station isn’t suitable for the other. Just because you hear swearing and questionable content on one station doesn’t mean you can get away with it on another station. There’s no role models in radio – everyone has to be unique.