If it
wasn’t so pissant, it’d be ghoulish. Instead it’s plain pathetic. A memo is
doing the rounds of ABC Local Radio bods for a promotion based on road deaths. It seems to stem
with an email from Deborah Leavitt in Western Australia to radio boss Michael
Mason:

I pitched an idea to Mornings this week along
your vision of agenda settling cage rattling program content. I suggested that
we take the Morning Program to a black spot on our roads and broadcast on the
Thursday before Good Friday and Easter Weekend highlighting the need for
improved road safety. We are chasing the Police Commissioner and the Police
Minister as well as Justine doing some poignant packages on the white crosses
and personal stories of families effected (sic) by road trauma. We won’t dwell
on the morbid but rather we’ll focus on solutions to our dreadful road stats.
We’re looking at mounting a listener driven bumper sticker campaign. We’ll ask
listeners to suggest clever slogans for our bumper sticker linking smart road
sense with ABC Local Radio. These stickers will have a long shelf life at OBs…

OK, so
marks for raising an important issue – but this whole episode smacks of
desperation to be popular. Tacky desperation to be popular.

Bumper
stickers with “a long shelf life”. So that’s what’s radio’s all about? Not
content?