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Thursdays at 8.30am presented by Mick O'Regan Thursday 30/5/2002 The folks that hoax Summary: Media hoaxes, or why you can't always trust the key-note speaker. If groups as prudent as trained accountants, international lawyers and the odd Canadian parliamentarian, can be hoaxed by media subversives, what hope is there for the rest of us? A trick of the tale this week on The Media Report, Thursday at 8.30am. Details or Transcript: Mick O’Regan: Hallo, and welcome to The Media Report. Mick O’Regan: Well, after the circus comes the seminar. The Board of the ABC has opted for safety, and chosen Russell Balding as the Corporation’s new Managing Director. Mr Balding, the ABC’s former Chief Financial Officer, has been Acting Managing Director since the departure late last year of Jonathan Shier. In the aftermath of that controversial period, stability seems to have been the key attribute the Board pursued in their search to find a new Chief Executive. Even so, the search itself has provoked debate within and outside the national broadcaster. For example, Board member, Michael Kroger has been critical both of the length of time taken in selecting Mr Shier’s replacement, and more generally, what he sees as institutional bias at the ABC. So, what will Russell Balding bring to the top job? He spoke to Mark Colvin on the ‘PM’ program, where he was asked what kind of management the Corporation required. Russell Balding: The ABC needs management that is appropriate for the times, and the particular decisions. Strong management means taking tough decisions, but also being compassionate when you need to be compassionate. Mark Colvin: What do you think of the idea that the ABC needs really radical reform, that there’s a stable here that needs to be cleaned out? Russell Balding: Look at Senate Estimates of Monday this week, I rejected the allegation that the ABC is biased, it is not biased, we reject that allegation. At times, like other organisations, we do make mistakes but we seek to correct those mistakes as soon as possible in the most appropriate way. In respect of radical reform, no, I don’t believe the ABC does need radical reform. The Corporation must be doing something right; it was commented our audiences are very, very strong at the moment across all three platforms. Television is experiencing terrific audiences, our radio is at record levels, and our online platform continues to grow. Mark Colvin: Is that going to be very much then the stamp of your leadership, that you will be governing much more collectively, much more in consort with your Executive? Russell Balding: Yes, I’d like to think so. And we’ve been doing that for the last six months, and the ABC’s got on with its job, and it’s now been reflected in our on-air performances. Mark Colvin: Well Alan Moran from the conservative think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, suggested that the ABC had become a sort of co-operative, and was leaderless in this last six months; how do you deal with that? Russell Balding: Oh well, everyone’s entitled to their comments. Mark Colvin: But has it been leaderless? That’s been a frequently levelled accusation in the last few weeks, hasn’t it? Russell Balding: No, it definitely hasn’t been leaderless. There has been an Acting Managing Director who was appointed by the Board, and that is a position that is provided for under the legislation, and we have a very good executive group working together. So it definitely hasn’t been leaderless. Mark Colvin: If you are going to be working in concert with your Executive, as you say, what’s going to happen when some members of your Executive actually are at daggers drawn, because one side wants a lot more money, because Drama says that it’s being bled by News and Current Affairs, for example? Russell Balding: Well these are issues that executives will have to work their way through, and they have been working their way through. We’re going through our budget process at the moment. There are big issues that we need to address and we are addressing, but we will be doing it collectively as an Executive. Mark Colvin: Is television looking all right now? Russell Balding: Television is looking good. Again, look at its on-air performances, the schedule has been refreshed, we are bringing audiences back to television and the audiences are staying there. But we’re doing it as what we used to do previously: as a public broadcaster. Mark Colvin: But lots of people are saying, and in the public prints as well, that the ABC is running far too much British content: The Bill, and British sitcoms. Russell Balding: Well everyone’s entitled to their opinion and comments again. Mark Colvin: But isn’t one of the ABC’s charter roles to produce a lot of locally produced content? Russell Balding: Well one of the things I’d like to be doing is adding first of all to our Australian content, and that would obviously involved drama. What I’d also like to be doing is to take in more local content, both for the local audience and for a national audience. One of our other strengths is our reach in respect of regional and rural Australia; we’ve got some tremendous resources out there, both in infrastructure and people, and we should be using those. Mark Colvin: Can you do what you want to do with the existing pie, or are you going for a bigger pie, like Jonathan Shier said he was going to? Russell Balding: Well I don’t think you’ll find anyone arguing that the ABC is over-funded. What we need to do is put a proper case to the government, which we will be doing towards the end of this calendar year, because that’s when we’re putting in our triennial funding submission. Mark Colvin: But how are you going to get through that process after this extraordinarily bruising political process? Russell Balding: We will get through it. Again, it will be a team effort, the Board is very much on side in respect of taking the ABC forward. Mark Colvin: The whole Board? Russell Balding: The whole Board. Mick O’Regan: Russell Balding, the new Managing Director of the ABC, speaking with ‘PM’s’ Mark Colvin. So how will the community, the media industry and potential competitors see this appointment? Joining me now are Professor Stuart Cunningham from Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries Faculty; and Terry Laidler, the Director of CIRCIT, the Centre for International Research into Communications and Information Technology. Welcome to you both. Stuart Cunningham, why is this safe decision for the ABC do you think? Stuart Cunningham: Well Michael, I think that it’s a very safe decision; it’s been taken from within the Executive. I think it’s probably the exact opposite of what they were trying to do in appointing Jonathan Shier. Shier was the Man from Mars, as it were, the person who’d come from European Pay television to turn the culture inside out and one of his silliest moves was to announce it from the very start, that that’s exactly what he was going to do, and he obviously got those within the organisation’s backs up, and very quickly got a lot of other very powerful and influential people’s backs up as well. So they’ve really gone to the other side, the other extreme in choosing someone who is absolutely tried and tested. It seemed to me that some of the other identified candidates possibly had better track records of at least articulating a vision of managed change, and a future for the ABC that wasn’t simply business as usual. Mick O’Regan: Well as Jonathan Shier said previously, this is a critical time in media and technologies, with the arrival of whole new platforms to deliver content. Apart from the sort of management debate that’s going on around Russell Balding, if we looked at this issue of content, how big a challenge is contemporary content in the various platforms of the ABC going to be for Russell Balding? Stuart Cunningham: I fundamentally agree with Russell Balding in arguing that the ABC doesn’t need radical change, I think that would simply create even more chaos. I think it needs to lever its potential, and its potential is truly huge. The ABC is unique in this country in that it can multi-platform across television, radio, online, and does that already very well. In fact it’s the country’s leader in multi-purposing content. But it needs significant injections of cash from wherever, whether it be by government appropriation of by other means, to take that to the next stage, that is, to be able to be a leader in the emerging broadband and digital television environment. I’m now talking five to ten years out. This is where the planning should be in the ABC, to be a leader in this area, and to garner the resources required to be a leader. Mick O’Regan: Now given that that’s a five to ten year schedule that you’re positing, is it more important to have a vision of where that process has to go, or is it more important to simply be aware these are the technical and creative capacities we need to marshal, therefore we have to get the money. Is vision as important as money in the next five to ten years? Stuart Cunningham: I think vision is always as important as money, whether you’re talking short-term or longer term, because otherwise if you’re not swimming forward, you’re simply going backwards. The ABC made very brave and very innovative movements into online, and that was led by a vision, five, seven years ago. They were absolutely out on the bleeding edge at that time, and now look at what ABC Online is. It’s one of the most heavily trafficked sites, it competes very effectively in, as it were ‘ratings terms’, with the big commercial sites, it’s a genuine innovative leader in multi-purposing content and it’s been done within a budget envelope that has been seriously challenged for a decade or more. So I think that vision is as important as money, from vision comes money. Mick O’Regan: Well Terry Laidler, to turn to you, now not only are you the Director of CIRCIT, but you are also a prominent member of Victorian Friends of the ABC. From a community lobbying point of view, what’s your response to the appointment of Russell Balding? Terry Laidler: I almost agree wholeheartedly with Stuart, except I’d use a different word. I don’t think this is in fact a safe appointment, I think it’s quite a radical appointment, because it involved the Board actually changing its mind. I think what we had previously was a Board captured by a dominant ideology that public broadcasting was something very like commercial broadcasting, and that ideology has been in critics’ mouths a lot over the last few weeks. I think what the Board has actually done in this appointment is said it believes in public broadcasting and I congratulate them wholeheartedly on it because I think it’s a radically different beast from commercial broadcasting, not least of all in its economic structure. The job of a commercial broadcaster is to gather audience to sell to an advertiser; the job of a public broadcaster is to deliver quality, independent, equitable broadcasting services to its owners, and that’s the taxpayers of Australia. And I think Russell Balding is a real vote by the Board for that sort of broadcasting, and it’s about time we had that vote from the Board. Mick O’Regan: Does it send a signal to you that this is a more independent Board, or a Board overtly declaring its independence? Terry Laidler: I think there’s a real problem with the composition of the Board generally. The parliament in the ABC Act gives a typical composition of the ABC Board where it has strong commercial and financial skills, but also strong technical skills and strong public broadcasting skills. And I think we’ve seen a series of appointments to the Board over time that has left it deficient in two of those areas. So there’s a problem with the Board anyhow I think that needs to be addressed, and the issue of how the Board gets appointed and what sort of scrutiny by the parliament to make sure that the appointments conform with the legislation it enacted is a real big ticket issue at the moment. And the other thing I think I’d like to say is that it’s about time now everyone got back to doing their jobs, it’s not the job of politicians to tell the Board how to appoint a Managing Director, it’s not the job of the Board to interfere in the internal programming, the program making decisions of the ABC, and it’s not really the job of ABC Management, in a sense, to have that meticulous attention to programming detail that some people have been claiming it should have. I think if we can get back to high quality programmers making high quality programs, inspired by a vision set by their management, and especially by their Managing Director, and funded well enough to do that, then we might see the ABC start to recover to be the internationally-respected public broadcaster that it’s always been. Mick O’Regan: Terry Laidler, thank you. And finally, Stuart Cunningham, very briefly, what do you see as the key challenge? What do you think Russell Balding should take on first? Stuart Cunningham: Well I suppose taking on first is to bed down the stabilisation process that I suppose they’ve started in the last six months, and I think he’s right, that there have been improvements that have come through stability and everyone breathing I suppose, a huge sigh of relief over the last six months. But longer term, if Russell Balding wants to put his mark as a productive and constructive public broadcaster leading the organisation, then I would argue, as I said earlier, that the ABC has a base to lead Australian media and Australian society into the digital future, and I think that’s what he should do. Mick O’Regan: Stuart Cunningham, thank you very much. Professor Stuart Cunningham from Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries Faculty; and before him, Terry Laidler, the Director of CIRCIT, The Centre for International Research into Communications and Information Technology. Coming up next, the power of misinformation, or what you can do with a good hoax. Mick O’Regan: Six days ago, a Canadian MP, John Duncan, demanded answers from his government about the impact on Canada’s agriculture and timber industries following the reported announcement of a decision of the World Trade Organisation that it was going to cease operating. Now the question generated some confusion, understandably. Regulating international trade is a very big deal. The answer is, of course, that the WTO is not planning to cease its operation. Mr Duncan was the victim of an elaborate media hoax perpetrated in Sydney by a group opposed to the WTO. It was the latest in a series of hoaxes and followed the pattern of previous stunts in Europe. Speaker: So, our concluding speaker is the distinguished gentleman, Mr Andreas Bichelbaum from Vienna. He has been a representative of the WTO since 1988, speaking on trade matters before a variety of fora, and is one of the authorised voices within the public relations sector of the WTO. Without further ado, Mr Bichelbaum. Andreas Bichelbaum: Thank you very much. It’s a great pleasure to be here in Salzburg, and I’d like to thank the organisers, the other hosts, and everybody who’s taken the time to listen, even for an hour, to the messages of the WTO. Mick O’Regan: Andreas Bichelbaum, a well-dressed young man, with an apparently profound understanding of global trade issues is presenting a speech to an attentive audiences of lawyers in the Austrian city of Salzburg. However, he’s not always Andreas Bichelbaum, sometimes he calls himself Charles Cussens, and sometimes even the more exotic Kinnithrung Spratt. Regardless of his alias, his message is constant. He’s explaining what’s wrong, in his opinion, with the current state of world trade and how globalisation disadvantages the world’s poorest nations. Andreas Bichelbaum: I represent it basically anywhere that it needs to be represented. Whenever it requires somebody to speak about broad policy matters. Man: But wait a second, does this guy really look like he should be representing the WTO? Mick O’Regan: Bichelbaum, or Cussens, or let’s call him Kinnithrung Spratt is a member of The Yes Men, an anti-globalisation activist group whose modus operandi is to pose as WTO employees, and infiltrate business meetings around the world, including last week in Sydney, to present a message entirely at odds to that of the real World Trade Organisation. So, do people realise that Mr Spratt is an impostor? Andy: Well unfortunately no, people listening to it actually think that it’s really the WTO speaking to them, and this caught us by surprise the first time when we responded to an invitation to go and speak to a conference of lawyers specialising in international trade in Salzburg and we expected them to react to the insane talk that we’d prepared with horror, and either drum us out of town, put us in jail, at least react. And when they didn’t and when they didn’t even notice that there was something fishy going on, we were rather taken aback. Mick O’Regan: Andy, how do you organise the hoaxes? Can you take me through the process by which you prepare and then convince your hosts that you’re going to be a legitimate person? Andy: Well generally we have this website; people go to the website, and invite usually Mike Moore, the Director-General of the WTO, to go speak at a conference, and we usually write back and say ‘I’m sorry, Mr Moore is not available, but he’d be happy to send a substitute to speak to your experts’, and they’re of course delighted, and then we go. Mick O’Regan: So instead of the New Zealand former politician, who heads the WTO, someone from The Yes Men, appropriately dressed, and sounding as though they’re bona fide, turns up and gives a hoax speech? Andy: That’s right. Mick O’Regan: What sort of organisations do you target? Andy: We don’t target any organisation so far. So far we’ve done it passively, we’ve received emails from whoever wants to hear the WTO and we’ve figured out what they should hear according to us, as good representatives, we think, of the WTO, and we’ve given them that speech. So in Salzburg we talked about legal issues, things that we thought lawyers would understand, like the idea of voting and how that should be loosened up so as to allow corporations to participate more. And in Finland, we spoke about textiles of the future, and one thing we did there was unveil what we called the managerial leisure suit, made of a very advanced textile and featuring an employee visualisation appendage, which was a 3-foot long golden phallus which inflated at a given moment. Mick O’Regan: Now what sort of reaction did you get from what I imagine would be a fairly conservatively dressed meeting of businesspeople when you were revealed in your golden leotard with a 3-foot inflatable phallus? Andy: They loved it. They laughed, they applauded, we did get a little bit of negative feedback for example from one woman who could barely speak to me, and when she finally did, she said, ‘Well you know, women can be factory owners too, and I think your choice of metaphor was really very bad’. So obviously the phallus was the wrong choice. But there was no issue taken with the content of the speech. Mick O’Regan: So does that surprise you? Because on one level, hearing you speak now the hoax would be so obviously a spoof, that from what you’re saying, the people in your audience didn’t receive it like that. Andy: It was very shocking, yes, it’s always very shocking when people listen to something that’s just insane and react that way. I think we’ve got a little bit used to it, and we keep pushing it further and further. The point seems to be that these audiences are willing to accept absolutely anything that you throw at them if you’re the WTO. Mick O’Regan: Now I’m presuming, Andy, that you want to get your message beyond the immediate audience of the businesspeople in the room; how important is utilising the media, and bringing the media in on the hoax or in fact fooling the media to the success of your operation? Andy: So far we haven’t worked on fooling the media. We’ve just revealed the story, and we’ve presented in the form of press releases basically what I just told you, that it’s shocking that people don’t critique what they hear if it comes from the WTO. And so who is it up to to make changes? It’s obviously not up to these groups of experts, it’s up to ordinary citizens, right? The media loves it, it’s a funny story, they enjoy it very much, and so it gets out there as a story. Man: Well it almost blew me out of the water, it was a total surprise and to some extent a shock what Mr Spratt had to say. We were expecting a talk on the general background of the World Trade Organisation, and yet we heard that the organisation is totally transforming itself. Man: And what was the transformation essentially? Man: Well the transformation essentially is saying We have learnt a lot of lessons out of the past, we’ve learnt that certain things that we thought would work are not working, and we’re going to go forward with a totally different focus. The focus is moving away from some economic rationalisation into looking at the real effects that trade has on people, and taking the UN Charter for Human Rights as being the foundation for looking at policies for world trade. Andy: So last Tuesday we spoke to a group of accountants at an organisation called CPA Australia. We had a totally different approach there. We didn’t want to fool these people, we didn’t want to show how ridiculous it was that they did agree, we wanted to see if we could take them on a little journey and have them see the other side of it, our side of it. What we did was, we gave a lecture about the WTO from the point of view of the WTO and said that over the course of the next few years of our existence, we had progressively seen that the policies that we stood for and that we promoted, were having the opposite effect that we intended, and therefore, because most of us came to this line of work because of concern for the poor and concern for the quality of life on earth, we were disbanding the WTO, and we were going to re-found our organisation along different lines, instead of worrying about corporate profits, and trade for the benefit of corporations, which benefit trade, in turn just focusing on trade, we were going to try to think about Hayden Opie: grade could be harnessed to benefit the poor of the earth, and perhaps we would found this new organisation along the lines of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example. Mick O’Regan: So how did they respond? Andy: They responded again very surprisingly, they had lots of ideas of how it could work. They gave us wonderful, very intelligent feedback on for example, one thing we hadn’t thought it would be, to relocate the headquarters of the WTO to a Third World country so that more Third World country members could afford to have an office there. They had plenty of ideas and they agreed completely even one fellow who said, ‘You know, I’m as right wing as the next guy, but it’s about time that we give something back to these Third World countries that we’ve profited from so heavily, otherwise there will be a revolution.’ Mick O’Regan: Andy, when will you actually, or do you reveal to them, that you’re not a person from the World Trade Organisation but you are in fact a person who’s hoaxing them? Andy: In general, we’ve let it happen. We’ve just let people find out through, usually through journalists, you know, we’ve let in one or two journalists at a certain point and then they proceed to call the conference people and say, ‘Do you know you were hoaxed?’ and they can never believe it. In Finland in fact, the fellow said ‘But they were so polite and they had such a large power-point presentation, how could they possibly be hoaxers?’ But this time, I don’t know, we got such intelligent, heartfelt response from these people at CPA Australia, that I think we owe it to them to a) not cast them as dummies, because they were the opposite, they were really quite intelligent, besides being very wonderful to us. So I think we’ll try to perhaps tell them ourselves what was up and what we intended with it. Mick O’Regan: I’m talking to – well in fact, I’m not exactly sure who I’m talking to. It could be Kinnithrung Spratt, it could be Andreas Bichelbaum, or it could even be Charles Cussens, but whoever it is, it’s a member of The Yes Men, a group of people who are engaged in elaborate corporate hoaxes. Just turning back to the CPA in Australia, will you actually apologise to them at some point to say that they were the target of an elaborate hoax? Andy: I think we will apologise to CPA Australia for any damage that we may have done. I don’t think we actually did any damage, I think the most effect that we achieved there was simply getting people to join with us on an elaborate fiction, imagining that the WTO was shutting down and that something more humane was taking its place, and in this exercise they performed wonderfully and humanly and very intelligently, and helped us to form this new organisation that will replace the WTO. Mick O’Regan: Andy, what about people sort of being angry after you’ve made your bogus presentation, has anyone, or any organisation tried to sue you? Andy: Not suing per se. The WTO has tried to shut down the website by contacting our provider of bandwidth and telling them what we were up to. Our provider of bandwidth however thought it was funny and didn’t see any legal problem with what we were doing that would endanger them, and so they let us continue. We’re very lucky that way, but I think that in general our defence against any really hard, heavy-handed tactics by the WTO is just that we can shame them, you know, when they do these things, like when they tried to interrupt our bandwidth we issued a press release immediately alerting everybody to this behaviour on their part, this rather heavy-handed behaviour, and they were laughed at in the press. And so I think they know that it’s not so much a legal question, it’s a question of what they can get away with in the public relations sense. Mick O’Regan: Do you think that people would be reluctant to take you on because in a way, they have to admit their own stupidity and suffer the embarrassment that that would cause? Andy: Well there is that for the targets of our things. I think they don’t want to call too much attention to it by suing us, and also it’s not clear that we’re breaking any laws. We’ve asked a couple of lawyers and the most they can do is shrug and say, ‘Well it seems like you must be, but I can’t really put my finger on it.’ Mick O’Regan: But not false advertising, or impersonating someone, or - ? Andy: Well we’re not really impersonating any particular person. Kinnithrung Spratt, who spoke at the CPA Australia doesn’t really exist as far as we know, so it’s not exactly impersonation, it’s not advertising because we’re not selling anything, we’re not getting any money from them, or even travel, we provide all that ourselves. So it’s hard to tell. Mick O’Regan: The man who wasn’t there. Kinnithrung Spratt, who’s also known as Andreas Bichelbaum, Charles Cussens, and also Andy. And they’re all of the group, The Yes Men, who are stretching the boundaries of disbelief in pursuit of a new trade agenda. Mick O’Regan: And that’s The Media Report for this week. However, before I go, two quick mentions, both of last week’s program and next week’s. On last week’s program we looked at the reality TV show, Big Brother and it seems that The Sydney Morning Herald’s popular culture writer, David Dale, and I, got it dead wrong. Evidence from emails and phone calls suggest that a large number of Radio National listeners are happily following the progress of that household with great enthusiasm. Guests on this program:
Presenter & Executive Producer: Mick O'Regan Producer: Caroline Fisher |
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