Can you ever truly be yourself in the media anymore?
Spoiler – the answer is no. But, as in all parts of your life there’s light and shade about what you play, hold and fold (thanks Kenny Rogers).
Marty Sheargold stepped over an invisible line last week in sharing his opinions on women’s sports and health issues. That line is moving all the time. A recent powerful example was Arj Barker asking a breastfeeding mother to leave one of his comedy shows. Initially it was stacks on Arj, with a couple of really uncomfortable radio interviews who jumped from a great height onto the pile. But the community heard Arj’s valid reasons and then simply forgot about it.
Marty, and his team for that matter, including Troy Ellis, Whitney Plowman, Will Ralston and Matt Thomson, haven’t yet had that right of reply. They were audibly caught on the hop by Marty’s opinions on endometriosis and, all of us know and have had that moment where, if we’d just had a little longer, or been prepared, we would have known exactly what to say. But that’s not an option for any of them.
Former 2Day FM breakfast host Em Rusciano will be at the Sydney Opera House this Sunday for an International Women’s Day event. She spoke to the Herald Sun (subscription required) about the realities of radio:
“The 4am alarms, the relentless grind, the pressure to be “on” even when I was barely functioning – it felt like running a marathon every single day with no finish line in sight.
Add in the politics of commercial radio, the lack of creative control and the expectation to suppress my true opinions for mass appeal?
It was exhausting. I was burning out, physically and emotionally, but pushing through because that’s what we do, right? I learned a lot, but I also lost parts of myself in the process.”
Ray Hadley also contributed in a different way via a heartfelt video about his three-year-old grand daughter Lola‘s leukemia battle:
Ray is an excellent communicator on difficult topics and Ray would tell you that what you heard on air was always authentically him. But, he too had limits to what he could and couldn’t say which is why he was now free, at the end of the video above, to clearly state how he felt about the upcoming Federal election. That wouldn’t have been allowed at 2GB.
Whether by omitting, forced oversharing, being pushed to have an opinion where you have no understanding or not being allowed to when you do, it all builds up in a person. In the media, business and personal lives, that can eventually result in mental health issues and unexpected emotional explosions.
Re Marty’s Matildas‘ comments, I ran a voiceover course the weekend beforehand and wrote up a current news bulletin which, by chance, included the Matildas’ loss to Japan in the SheBelieves Cup. I’d spoken to them about removing opinion from a factual news read, but, when we are talking about sport, and “our team”, be it national, state or local, there is a place for a deserved adjective – a miracle win, a disastrous loss for example.
The invisible line is crossed when you go one step further to say you’d prefer a nail in your appendage than report or hear any more about it. I didn’t have that frame of reference at the time, but my students all knew this innately.
We are forever on the journey to get to know ourselves. Those who engage in any ongoing live performances will retrospectively go back and find parts of their youth are unfamiliar or out of date. If it were you, you’d want others to allow you the grace to learn, grow and change.
Let this not be its own invisible line for live and local radio.
Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo. Email: [email protected]