(Not in words though …)

Over the last couple of weeks there’s been a new rush of experts telling the ABC what it ought to do to get its audience back. It all started with a question put to ABC chairman Kim Williams at the National Press Club on 27 November. ABC journo Jane Bardon asked her boss about what she called ‘the Joe Rogan effect’ and how the ABC might go about ‘capturing that kind of audience’. To which Williams replied that he thought ‘people like Mr Rogan prey on people’s vulnerabilities’. I happened to see it all, because I’d turned on ABC News 24 to watch while I had my lunch. It didn’t mean much to me at the time, as I’d never heard of Joe Rogan.

I’ve got up to speed now though, because it’s turned into a bit of a mini-sensation. Joe Rogan, it turns out, is some big popular podcaster in the USA. And Joe Rogan tweeted LOL WUT about what Williams had said. (Luddite as I am, I had to seek out a translation.) And then Elon Musk re-tweeted what Rogan had said, describing our Dear Aunty as Australia’s Pravda. (I know what Pravda is, LOL.) 

It went badly viral, and Williams got to experience a massive pile-on from all over. (Well now he knows what JK Rowling must go through every day.) 

So since then a cluster of pundits have been offering advice to Aunty about how to reverse the decline in its audience numbers. Now, we here at Women’sCooee have long had our own formula for that: the ABC, we reckon, should stop being a propaganda vehicle for gender-identity ideology, and break its thraldom to trans lobby ACON. You can see what we’ve said on this topic before here and here and here. 

As I drank my morning cappuccinos, I scoured the proposals that were rolling off the presses of the country. Would anybody agree with us? I wondered. Well, nope. One Taylor Lorenz, who writes for something called User Mag, suggested ABC journalism should be more ‘personality-driven’: audiences ‘want to see who is making their news’. The SMH’s Malcolm Knox referenced a puppy-wrangler tactic: ‘Sometimes to get a dog … to come to you, you have to stop calling it. Turn away …’. Parnell Palme McGuinness went for more ‘openness’ and more shows like Kitchen Cabinet. David Swan, of The Age, counselled Williams to ‘learn from what makes Rogan successful’. None of them, alas, were willing to lay a finger on the sacred cow of trans-extremism. 

Disappointing.  But, as they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words. Thank you, SMH cartoonist Simon Letch. 

Nailed it! 

Maybe someday soon some commentator will be brave enough to say it in words.