When the Rolling Stones first toured Australia in the summer of 1965, The Sydney Morning Herald described the boys as a “blatantly wild bunch” who ought to be banned. “They’re shockers. Ugly Looks, Ugly Speech, Ugly Manners,” the paper said.
Those with a musically encyclopedic mind could write volumes about the shenanigans of rock stars, among them the Stones’ Keith Richards, the Doors’ Jim Morrison and the Who’s Keith Moon.
Music in the 1960s, accompanied by outlandish antics, served up a two-fingered rebuke to a previous era that was boringly pleasant. Then, when rock snobs looked down on the new genre of disco in the ’70s, Donna Summer released a 20-minute musical sex bomb – Love to Love You Baby – replete with orgasmic moans and slow, sexy moves. Turning the phrase “disco sucks” on its head, so to speak, the queen of disco delivered her own retort to the musical orthodoxy in the ’60s.
It’s one thing for the stodgy SMH not to understand that provocative, spellbinding waves of music counterculture were a series of reactions to stultifying, po-faced norms of the previous era.
After all, Rogan and others like him represent another counterculture revolt against the tut-tutting self-righteousness at many of our institutions, including in the media – and most certainly at the ABC.
Williams’s gut reaction to Rogan – describing his podcasts as “deeply repulsive” for preying on people’s vulnerabilities – explains in a nutshell why Rogan and others like him are media sensations.
The more Rogan and co are misunderstood and disparaged, the more successful they become. Lame critics give them so much material to work with.
If Williams read The Australian (or The Times) just a few weeks before he dissed Rogan at the National Press Club on Wednesday last week, he would have come across James Marriott explaining: “One discovery of the US election is that the left’s much-vaunted cultural hegemony is not as total as many believed.”
Pointing to “tear-stained Oscar night pleas for progressive causes, faultlessly diverse Disney films” and “innumerable actors and singers” turning out for Kamala Harris, Marriott said: “The highly visible liberal dominance of the old entertainment industry … has tended to obscure a rightward shift in popular culture.”
Even some left-leaning media organisations did a modestly good job of trying to understand the meaning of bro-culture YouTubers, podcasters and other influencers where men mostly interview other men.
Writing before the US election, Politico reporter Ian Ward found the long-form “casual, testosterone-soaked banter” in this new podcasting genre revealed sides to Donald Trump and JD Vance that traditional media never could.
In his interview with Theo Von, Vance, for example, revealed his attachment issues – saying he has trouble trusting anyone, even family and friends. That Trump’s running mate was “openly admitting that he struggles to trust the people he’s closest to” might interest voters, wrote Ward.
Soon after Trump’s triumph, Jon Caramanica in The New York Times explored how the manosphere upturned the left-liberal assumption that a “coherent cultural tent” would lead to a Harris victory.
Williams appears to have completely missed this cultural shift. His default denunciation of Rogan was one heck of an own goal for him and the ABC. À la the Queen of Disco in 1975, why didn’t he try to at least fake some interest? Instead, many saw an uninquisitive new chairman reinforcing a lack of curiosity downstream at the public broadcaster.
Perhaps pompous old Aunty has become a victim of her own early success. Radio National once distinguished itself as a podcasting trailblazer. As the edgy innovator, the ABC served up popular and polarising podcasts that swerved left.
One of the early starters was shrinking violet Phillip Adams, whose online CV describes his former show Late Night Live as “Australia’s most successful ‘podcast’ program, both in Australia and around the world” – with 13 million downloads in 2008.
Matt Bevin’s Russia, If You’re Listening was another popular and polarising podcast. Its early success involved a whole series devoted to peddling what turned out to be a hoax – that Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin – later disproven by the Mueller report. (The public broadcaster didn’t follow up with a similarly in-depth follow-up accounting for its airing of this misinformation.)
When Williams accused Rogan of peddling “fantasy outcomes and conspiracy theories”, the ABC chairman may have overlooked the ABC’s own misinformation shenanigans.
Today most ABC podcasts are boring. The most popular, edgiest podcasts – such as Rogan’s – make fun and make money from left-liberal sensitivities.
And a clueless Williams fell right into Rogan’s trap by demonstrating how reactionary the ABC has become.
As one ABC insider told The Australian, despite the early popularity of some of the ABC’s podcasts, “now everyone else is catching up – and the ABC can’t keep up. Some of their podcasts barely attract 100 listeners.”
There’s little to crow about at the ABC any more. Its influence is a thing of the past. Sure, some ABC journalists might get a laugh out of doubling down on airing their progressive inner-city fetishes. But for listeners the ABC’s hectoring programming is up there with death and taxes.
It’s bad for the ABC, too. As Marriott wrote a few weeks back: “How much of an achievement is a long march through an institution if the walls of that institution are crumbling down?”
The ABC is not just losing audiences. It’s losing good people too. Having resigned from the ABC last year, Tracey Holmes minced up some ABC sacred cows when she appeared on Q&A in May this year.
Censoring Elon Musk is religious doctrine at Aunty. When asked about it she said: “I don’t agree with any kind of censorship in a general sense.” “I don’t think Elon Musk is contributing to any social cohesion split inside this country,” Holmes added.
Holmes’s independent thinking is probably as unwelcome in Williams’s large corner office as a steak at a vegan restaurant. After all, she could have been addressing his hysterical claims about Rogan when she said the mainstream media and politicians bore much of the responsibility for stoking fear in the community.
It’s probably true Rogan and other so-called bro podcasters make a decent buck from firing up this political divide, especially between the sexes.
But this is not a chicken and egg conundrum; media organisations such as the ABC have been doing it long before Rogan rose to fame and glory.
Normal programming at the ABC means a smorgasbord of ill-informed, unquestioning stories about bad men (toxic masculinity) and poor women (gender pay gaps). The $1bn-plus annual direct transfer from taxpayers to the ABC doesn’t stretch to employing a single contrarian journalist to question this constant diet of sanctimonious lectures at the ABC.
The overpaid geniuses at the ABC could do worse than listen to a few Rogan podcasts. If Rogan is “appalling” – as Williams claims (though he says he’s not a listener) – put it down to an equal and opposite reaction to a puritanical decade that preceded Rogan’s rise to fame and fortune. The ABC’s business model of po-faced institutionalised taking of offence is dying.
No one cares if Williams detests the wild and unruly Joe Rogan Experience. It’s just a shame the new chairman of the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster appears uninterested in a cultural trend that helps explain the ABC’s waning influence.
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