Peter Saxon speaks to MFW founder Jennie Hill.
Ever since the advent of social media, a radio station’s non-listeners have had a far greater impact on its content than its actual listeners.
For the most part, regular listeners to Kyle and Jackie O in Sydney have no problem with the risqué nature of the show. After all, that’s why they listen. Those who don’t listen don’t care because they don’t know… until someone else tells them. It could be The Daily Mail, Sydney Confidential in the Tele, or The Guardian online that serves up the goss and whips up confected outrage among their readers who love nothing more than to be fed something to be outraged about. Within minutes the story goes viral.
For the most part, no one gets hurt, it’s just entertainment. After all, all publicity is good publicity, right? The online outlets get the clicks, Kyle and Jackie O get free publicity which serves to define their brand to potential listeners who may well be attracted to their show. Those who are left unimpressed, would likely be outside the KIIS target demographic anyway and wouldn’t listen even to a sanitised version.
Everyone’s a winner! What could possibly go wrong?
Enter The Mad Fucking Witches.
If you’re willing to look past the irony of an organisation that wants to clean up the air-waves while defining themselves with an expletive in their calling card, then you might be attracted to some of the causes they champion to help “make the world a better place.” Among other things, the MFW website suggests that if you want to help “Rid the world of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and all similar forms of hate and bigotry (including) misogyny” then you’re welcome to join their coven, regardless of gender… except if, as one might assume, you identify as a misogynistic male.
I should point out that I’m not here to judge the appropriateness of Kyle’s content for FTA radio, the MFW does a more than adequate job of that. Whether I personally like their show or enjoy on-air discussions about penis sizes is irrelevant. In commercial radio, what is relevant is the size of a program’s audience. As of the latest GfK Survey, despite a slow start in Melbourne, K & J, have more listeners (in cumes) than any breakfast show in Australia. But, in commercial radio if you can’t adequately monetise those listeners… there’s not much point in having them. Or, for that matter, paying exorbitant sums to the talent whose job it is to generate them.
I should also point out that I wish neither to endorse nor dis-endorse the MFW. I’ll say this much though: Whilst I mostly agree with their aims, I’m not entirely comfortable with their method of achieving them. Blackmailing advertisers into boycotting radio stations smacks of vigilantism. I’d rather the proper watchdog, the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA), dealt with matters such as these.
The trouble is, of course, that the ACMA can take several months to rule on an alleged breach of its decency codes only to hand down a relatively puny fine along with a few compulsory training sessions for management and staff to help them do better next time. On the other hand, the threat of an advertiser revolt that can run into multi-millions of dollars in lost revenue will bring a station’s C-Suite to its knees within 24 hours – with an emergency meeting of the board held the next day.
More than 530 advertisers witchdrew from advertising on Alan Jones’ radio show before he left the station. This took five months to achieve, but it only took a couple of days of similar action to have other racist or misogynistic media commentators including Pete Evans, Eddie McGuire, Chris Smith and Donald Trump Jnr. removed from their platforms.
Taking on Rupert Murdoch is harder, but we’ve already had more than 500 advertisers witchdraw.
It’s time to take it nuclear.
While this expedited form of justice as meted out by the MFW seems highly effective, it lacks due process and fairness.
It is one thing to voice your opinion on your own media outlet as to how you feel about someone else’s opinion on another. And you can shout it to the world through social media and buy advertising if you can get the funding. That’s called free speech. You are also entitled to follow the process as set out by the ACMA to first contact the station with your complaint and if it is not settled within the allotted time, then you can lodge your complaint with the ACMA who will determine the outcome.
That may not suit MFW’s agenda, but we live in a society of rules where we abide by those rules as set by the statutory authorities whose job it is to enforce them. If we disagree with those rules, we can lobby the body or the government to change them. What we can’t do is make our own set of rules or set up a scheme to circumvent the ones we don’t agree with.
Most “authorities” are way short of perfect, but the answer is to strive for a better police force, not take the law into your own hands.
I put these concerns and more to Jennie Hill, Founder of MFW.
You can listen to the raw, warts and all, audio is below. Or scroll downn for the transcript – slightly edited for readability.
ARN declined to comment.
Saxon: What is your organisation’s main complaint with Kyle and Jackie O?
Hill: Most of us are Victorian based, although we do have people all around the country.
So, even though we’d heard of Kyle Sandilands before, obviously we weren’t fully aware of the depths of how bad his commentary is until he decided that he was going national and started up in Victoria – at which point we decided to listen because there was a lot of people in Victoria who were unhappy with that. After we started to listen to the broadcasts, we realised, just how disgusting it is. If I can try and sum it up in a nutshell, obviously there’s a lot of things I could say about the commentary, but the thing is that we don’t believe Kyle is personally a violent or physically violent person. And, you know, obviously Jackie’s almost certainly not either. But what they do on radio every morning is that they legitimise, mostly men, who are physically violent. They give them credibility. Those people (are given) credence for having those kinds of views in terms of the disgusting, demeaning, objectifying things that they say every day about women. And not just about women, about black people, about LGBT people, and about disabled people. And if you want to take it to the enth degree, there’s also a lot of stuff demeaning of older people. He sort of runs the whole gamut of whoever he can insult.
We’ve listened from since early May, going back many months. So, we’re very clear in that he does the same thing every day, that Jackie listens to it, backs it up, and sometimes even joins in. People ring up on purpose to say disgusting things on air. We know that one of his largest audience segments is young teenage boys, and even younger than that. So, those boys and teenagers are being indoctrinated into those kinds of views, and we object to that, and we want it off the air.
Saxon: Have you complained to the radio station?
Hill: We’ve got about 200,000 followers. We call them, you know, we call them witches. They call themselves witches. Um, which is just a silly thing. Obviously not witches. A lot of those people off their own bat have complained to the radio station and to ACMA. The reason that we haven’t encouraged people to do that en-masse is because when our big campaign was against Alan Jones, and at that time we did a whole quite lengthy procedure of getting people to do really correct, well planned, protest to ACMA. We actually had a lawyer draw up because, you know, I don’t know if you I’m sure you probably know more than me about how to complain to ACMA.
Saxon: The A.C.M.A. (is what) they like to be called.
Hill: Okay A.C.M.A.
Saxon: And the “M” doesn’t stand for “Mad” either. But anyway… go on.
Hill: As I’m sure you know, you have to complain to the radio station first. Then when you get a response from them, you have to do it all, using very specific wording and all the rest of it to make a complaint to A.C.M.A. in great detail, using a lawyer with very specific instructions to all our witches. We know for a fact that, and we don’t know exactly how many, but we know that several thousand put in a complaint, and we know that the A.C.M.A. came back a couple of months later and dismissed the complaint against Alan Jones, saying Jacinta Ardern should have a sock shoved down her throat, and should get a couple of backhanders. And they stated that they’d had a couple of hundred complaints. And the difficulty for us, obviously, is we can’t prove that it was a lot more than that. But we know it was thousands just anecdotally from how angry, our witches were. So, we don’t have any faith whatsoever in the station doing the right thing in (or) the A.C.M.A doing the right thing in any one in government, doing the right thing. So, the only choice that we really had left is to do what we’re doing, which is running a consumer boycott against the advertisers.
Saxon: Now, most people would have no issue supporting the MFW’s aims. I mean, who could argue with wanting to tackle misinformation about climate crisis. And what thinking person wouldn’t want to make the world a better place and rid the world of sexism, racism, homophobia and similar forms of hate and bigotry -including, of course, misogyny. (I got) all that from your website. And you’re right, you know. But I’m not so sure that everyone agrees with warning off the station’s advertisers as a method of doing it. Doesn’t it smack of vigilantism?
Hill: That’s an interesting question. People talk to us about cancel culture. Aren’t you trying to cancel Kyle and cancel men or people that you don’t agree with? The funny thing is, is that the people who’ve always been cancelled throughout history are the people who don’t have a voice. Women, black people, gay people, disabled people, very young people and very old people. They’re the people who’ve never had a say. And people like Sandilands with an enormous golden microphone, and Alan Jones and other people like them, they’re the ones who’ve traditionally cancelled everyone else. So as soon as someone gains some power by using social media to effectively unionise a group of people, which is what we’ve done and fights back, we’re suddenly labelled the bad guys. We’re not the bad guys. We’re the people fighting the bad stuff. And that’s a reaction to abuse. Reacting to abuse is not abuse. So that’s how we’d probably frame that argument.
Saxon: I mean, justice delayed is justice denied. And it’s very easy to get frustrated with the authorities because, when you go to the A.C.M.A, it usually takes them six months to find a finding, you know. You start with the radio station, go through the process and it could be a long, long time before they find anything. And even if they do find something to go after the station, it’s usually by comparison, a slap on the wrist. Um, and it must be very frustrating. On the other hand, when the mad fucking witches get involved, within 24 hours, you can have a station’s C-suite come to its knees with an emergency board meeting the next day, wondering how many millions is this going to cost? Is that…
Hill: All they have to do is stop. It’s all they have to do. I mean, we’re not even calling for Kyle Sandilands to be sacked or Jackie. And we never called for Alan Jones to be sacked. What we’re calling for is for the behaviour to change. So, if the behaviour changes and the terrible things that they do stops, then we’ll leave them alone. So, the ball’s really in their court. I mean, if they’re frightened of or worried about what we’re doing, all they have to do is stop doing it.
It seems pretty clear to us that what they do is they just dig in, as 2GB did with Alan Jones. This is groups of powerful white men who will not accept that the world with the advent of social media and women gaining more power and education than they used to have, um, we can take part in these decisions in the only way open to us. I mean, there should be women on the board at KIIS-FM or ARN – at least half women on the board. Half women presenting on the station. Half women employees. who would be telling them the same things we’re telling them: that this is unacceptable. But because powerful white men have commandeered all the control of or most of the control of Australia’s media, then people like us have to take a stand in the only way that’s left open to us, which is doing something like this – which I totally agree from the outside or from people who disagree with us, it looks a bit strange or out there, but it’s really the only way that’s left open to people like us to take a stand.
Saxon: I guess the point here is that most authorities, say, like the police and the courts, are way short of perfect. That’s true. But isn’t the answer to strive for a better police force rather than take the law into your own hands? I mean, what you’re doing is not illegal, but the question is whether it’s ethical, because the people who actually bear the brunt of major disruption like that, first of all, is staff, because they then let go a lot of employees and say, well, Jones cost us $6 million, or Kyle and Jack cost this much or that much. And I’m not I’m not arguing (with your objections). I’m not here to tell you that Kyle and Jackie O is sanitized. That’s not my that’s not my business because we’re about the business of radio. And if you look back to the Kyle, to the Jones staff, we’ve had plenty. I’ve had particularly plenty of stuff to say about Jones and the rest of it. And it’s very effective what you do. But that’s the thing. There’s a there’s a point where the revolution kind of, as you say, you’ve gone from (the name) Mad Fucking Witches to a more corporate name in MFW.
By the way, the last time I spoke to someone at the station (KIIS), which was a few weeks ago, about this issue, and they didn’t want to say much other than, they’ve already toned the program down. That was about four weeks ago. Have you noticed any change?
Hill: There has been a slight toning down, but, um, nowhere near enough to to solve the problem from our point of view.
And just on your previous point with the Alan Jones issue, there was a producer who used to call us up once a week saying that there was staff being laid off, and we were damaging their profits and all the rest of it. And again, our response, myresponse to him was: You’re damaging your own profits because you’re allowing a man to broadcast live on air who is damaging and demeaning at least half the Australian population. So it’s your problem to solve, not ours.
Saxon: And in the end, they did, didn’t they?
Hill: Well, they had to sack him because he wouldn’t change, and they wouldn’t change him. So that’s not a punishment or that’s a consequence. It’s a consequence. All we’re here to say is you can’t. If we can, we will prevent you from doing this in future. So yes, we’ve heard Kyle tone it down. But if you look back through some of the memes that we’ve published, just in the last few weeks and the transcripts we’ve published, you can actually see that there’s still an enormous amount of unacceptable content that’s going to air.
Saxon: Just one more thing… social media, for example. I mean, free to air media is sort of the only one that the government controls in any way, shape or form. In your opinion, not strongly enough. But if it forces those advertisers to go into online media, social media and things like that… good luck with (threatening a boycott on), say, Facebook or worse still, X. Do you, do you have campaigns against them?
Hill: Well, we’re not very happy with them. And we have a lot to say about them, but I guess we can only campaign on what we have some control over. There’s a few things to say about that. Firstly, one of Kyle’s biggest audiences is 10 to 17 year olds, and a large proportion of those kids are not on social media – not until they’re older teenagers anyway. So that’s a big concern of ours.
Another big group that’s listening to Kyle is young men who are not in the most active groups on social media, but they’re listening, listening to radio at work and things like that. Kyle’s show is – and Kyle’s admitted this himself, that he’s talking to people that he considers similar to him. You know, young men, that type of person. And they’re attracted to listening because he speaks to them. But whether he speaks to them or not, the things that he says influence young men to behave towards women and towards minority groups in ways that are unacceptable in 2024. So, you’re right that, yeah, there’s lots of things to be angry about and lots of things to criticise and have a go at. Um, and social media is far from perfect, especially since Elon Musk bought Twitter, which has been a huge disaster, for him though, as well as for the people on the site. But all we can do is fight the fights that need fighting.
The other thing we’d say is if we can, hold the mainstream media to account to a certain extent, which is what we’re trying to do, then that flows through to all other forms of media that kind of raising the bar in terms of what’s acceptable. It starts to change the culture in a number of, hopefully – I mean, we’re not overstating what we’re what we’re doing here at all. But, um, uh, if you can kind of raise the bar a little bit in terms of what’s acceptable, then hopefully that flows through to all kinds of media and all kinds of public discourse.
I don’t think Tony Abbott would stand in front of a “ditch the witch” sign today. But back in 2010, or whenever that was, nobody raised an eyebrow about that. So, we’re kind of moving forward towards a world that’s a little bit fairer.