Talk Radio, Discourse
Radio was the first electronic mass medium. It became a prominent part in people's every day experiences and in the discursive practices of mass media that followed in its wake. Moreover, radio was instrumental in creating communities around it and it has a central part in the public sphere. Key features of radio discourse include: intentionality, sociability, performativity, interactivity, and liveliness. There are many radiophonic genres; foremost among them is the phone-in, in which an ordinary person calls in to a program to talk with a host in front of the audience. The structure and features of phone-ins are illustrated to demonstrate how an institutional setting is achieved. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
History of Media and Communications; 
language and social interaction; 
media and society; 
public participation; 
radio
Talkback, Community and the Public Sphere
This paper explores the relationship between the audience of commercial talkback radio and the actual existing democratic public sphere in Australia. Drawing upon Anderson's (1987) notion of an imagined community and Warner's (2002) discussion of publics, the paper suggests that two different but entwined modes of address operate around the talkback audience. The first centres on the active creation of an imagined community brought into being and maintained through host and caller interaction, whilst the second, which is dependent on this prior formation, involves the audience being treated as a political public within the public sphere.
Ethics, Entertainment, and the Tabloid: The case of talkback radio in Australia
In Australia In 1999, a group of conservative and commercially dominant talkback radio hosts – pretty much the epitome of ‘the tabloid’ in its local incarnation – were involved in a scandal which exposed widespread exploitation of their market power through secret paid endorsements for products, companies and political positions. The consequent official inquiry found it difficult to locate just what was the ethical principle being transgressed, partly because these were not (ethically bound) journalists but (ethically free) ‘entertainers’, and partly because of the general evacuation of such principles from the industry codes of practice. The privileging of commercial responsibilities and the gradual displacement of community responsibilities which have occurred over the last decade have, in effect, reduced the possibility that an ethical or democratic critique of mass media practice could now be effectively elaborated and understood. What we now know as the ‘Cash for Comment’ scandal presents us with a case where, in my view, the media's successful and unregulated pursuit of a mass audience took it beyond the reach of ethical appeal against its specific practices. Tellingly, in its defence, the media organisation concerned barely even pretended to acknowledge its responsibility to any broader community interests than those of the mass audience. The contest between commercial and community/democratic imperatives is at its most naked here; and ultimately at issue is the very relevance of an ethical regime within an entertainment-based, rather than an information-based, ‘tabloid’ media.