You might know Tom Elliott as a broadcaster for 3AW and a columnist for the Herald Sun, but you more likely remember him for that time he was trolled by someone pretending to be rapper 360 last year – something 360 himself picked up on and noted on social media.
Following that embarrassing encounter, he’s apparently developed beef with the Australian music scene, specifically Australia’s national youth broadcaster, triple j, which he’s now slammed in an op-ed for the Herald Sun, via FasterLouder.
His editorial starts off reasonably enough, with a dissection of what he considers the ABC’s “Labor-Green/anti-conservative” slant. Elliott is hardly the first to make the observation and many agree it’s an important issue.
Elliott argues that since the ABC is a taxpayer-funded entity, it’s wrong for it to have a political bias either way and that unlike his 3AW show or the Herald Sun, Australians are effectively forced to pay for the ABC’s content.
Sounds fair and reasonable, right? But then, as is often the way with conservative pundits, things take a turn towards crazy town and Elliott begins railing against triple j’s playlist in typically myopic and totally misinformed fashion.
While he concedes that ABC Radio does a “pretty good job” in rural and regional Australia, providing residents with local news, weather reports, and entertainment, ABC Radio’s role in cities like Melbourne and Sydney is “far less obvious”.
“Why, for example, do we pay Triple J to play youth-oriented pop/rock music when several commercial FM networks already cater to that audience?” he asks. “The same argument can be made against the ABC’s AM band talkback stations; commercial entities (such as 3AW) already fill that niche.”
Uh, we’re not sure if he’s ever actually listened to triple j or the “commercial FM networks” he talks about in his op-ed, but they are absolutely nothing alike. We think the director of ABC Radio, Michael Mason, would agree.
“I think we provide a slightly different market need,” Mason recently told Radio Today. “But we know people come to triple j as a place to pick up on musical tastes, someone who can inform them of what to listen to and what to buy.”
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“I think it sits at a nice, different position and allows the commercial sector to really play in a very commercial space with broad appeal music and allows triple j to absolutely make people satisfied with radio as a product and a platform.”
We really couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Sorry to break it to you, Tom Elliott, but you’re simply never going to get what triple j provides out of a commercial station and we even have the ratings to prove it.
While it’s reasonable to question whether it’s appropriate for a tax-funded media outlet to harbour political biases, Elliott totally missed the mark with his attack on triple j, which is one of a very small handful of Australian radio stations servicing the local music industry.
