Source The Australian: TEN years after the infamous “cash for comment” hearings, which embarrassed the radio industry and saddled it with rafts of disclosure rules, there is new hope that the regulatory burden may be about to be eased.
Then again, maybe not. The answer lies with the media watchdog, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and reading its mind is frequently harder than making sense of chicken entrails.
The issue of regulation is of vital importance to radio stations and their presenters – who say the rules are costly to enforce and overly prescriptive – and ACMA, which must monitor compliance and manage public complaints.
But it is clear the public couldn’t care less. In the past decade, there have been just nine complaints to ACMA about advertising, disclosure or compliance standards and just five of those have been upheld. In an industry comprising 260 stations, one guy stepping out of line each couple of years is hardly a threat to the world as we know it.
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