This article explores the connections between reality television and older print and electronic media formats. It surveys the history of audience participation in the media through a series of case studies drawn from Britain, Australia and the United States: periodicals featuring significant contributions from their readers in the 1880s; confessional magazines in the 1920s; mass-market women’s magazines during the inter-war years; talkback radio since the 1960s; and the emergence of ‘real life’ media genres in the 1980s and 1990s. The article argues that media producers have, for more than a century, been blurring the notion of the passive media consumer.
This article explores the intersections between Australian party politics and commercial talkback radio from 1967 to 1983. It considers the eagerness of individual politicians such as John Gorton and R.W. Askin to exploit the possibilities of ‘dial-in’ radio, addresses how political parties came to view the usefulness (and the dangers) of talkback radio, and assesses the political interventions of Brian White, Ormsby Wilkins and John Laws. In doing so, the article traces the radio industry's campaign against the ban on pre-election comment, the evolution of the Fairness Code for Broadcasters, and the relationship between media monitoring and talkback radio.
This article examines the first forty years of religious broadcasting on commercial radio in Australia, a subject largely neglected by historians of Australian religion and the media. It reveals the diversity of religious broadcasting on Australian commercial radio, the ambiguities of the regulatory framework within which it operated, the influence of American religious broadcasting in Australia, and the challenges confronting religious broadcasters, particularly in the decade between the introduction of television and the emergence of talkback radio. The article concludes in the second half of the 1960s, when religious programming faced mounting commercial pressures, as well as a new opportunity in the shape of “talkback” radio.
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