RN Breakfast presenter Patricia Karvelas has interviewed people from all sides of the constitutional recognition debate and has met ABC editorial responsibilities throughout that coverage.
Ms Karvelas put forward the arguments of opposition leader Peter Dutton on several occasions during the interview with Noel Pearson.
Previous editions of RN Breakfast have featured interviews with senior Coalition MPs and other prominent figures including Julian Leeser, Paul Fletcher, Barnaby Joyce, Sussan Ley, Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe and business advisor and commentator Warren Mundine.
Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has been invited onto the program on numerous occasions. She is yet to accept that invitation.
It should also be noted Mr Dutton was interviewed just prior to Mr Pearson on the AM program.
RN Breakfast, along with other ABC programs, will continue to canvas all sides of this discussion, as audiences would expect.
EDIT: The Guardian Australia’s Amanda Meade also saw the email and briefly mentioned it in her Weekly Beast column today.
Simmering anger over some staffers being stuck on the middle grades because of a glut of senior employees boiled over in the form of an emotional email sent by a departing journalist to everyone at Radio National.
The email addressed the “deeply unfair” system which meant you couldn’t move from band 6 to band 7 without “very high approval” because there were too many senior producers above you.
The departing journo said the “toxic” atmosphere of unfair pay grades was creating psychological damage and humiliation and she urged colleagues to “set a timeline and leave” because they will never be able to afford to buy a house in an eastern state on ABC wages.
Just had a quick read of that article but i don’t quite understand their argument. Perhaps older employees are earning more because they are more experienced and have worked up the ladder. 20, 30, 40 years ago, those same people would have been at the lower tiers that the young staffers are at now. Are the young ones with less experience now expecting older staff to be bumped off and then to be taken express to the top?
It feels like it’s an easy swipe at the ABC, but the matter at hand could be equally seen in a broad number of businesses and industries.
There is a generational thing going on here too - younger staff are often more than happy to express their frustration/unhappiness at a situation rather than letting it fester or accepting it.
To judge RN Breakfast’s performance solely on its average audience figure, based on a quarter hour, grossly misrepresents its listenership and how that listenership engages with the program over three hours each morning.
RN Breakfast continues to be hugely influential, reaching just over 300,000 listeners in the five capital cities across each week. Once you factor in its total national broadcast audience, that figure rises to around 430,000 people.
Of all the ABC’s radio networks, RN has been the most successful in growing its on-demand and podcast audiences.
On demand listenership at 480,000 streams weekly is not captured by GfK ratings and now make up just under half of the station’s total streams on ABC platforms. Furthermore, RN also delivers 2.3 million podcast downloads weekly across ABC and third-party platforms like Spotify and Apple, further displaying its strength on digital, thanks to its flagship programs, including RN Breakfast, leading this growth.
Overall, RN reaches around 860,000 people nationally across the week.
Sources: GfK 5 City Metro + Canberra, Gold Coast/Tweed, Newcastle + Xtra Insights. Digital sources: GA 360 and ABC Podcast Ranker, Survey 3 2023 period.
ABC Radio National is welcoming Australia’s best and brightest young minds
The ABC has selected the pick of Australia’s dynamic early-career research talent for its 2023 TOP 5 media residencies. Five successful applicants in Arts, Science & Humanities will spend two weeks “in residence” at ABC Radio National, working with some of Australia’s best journalists and broadcasters. The ABC TOP 5 is a unique opportunity for talented young researchers to go behind-the-scenes with the ABC’s expert communicators.
The Chair of the ABC, Ita Buttrose, sees the TOP 5 as an important project in a changing media landscape. “We are undergoing a revolution in the way we make and access news, but some things don’t change. Facts remain important, as does trust and the way we convey a story.
“For the ABC in our reporting across TV, audio and digital, we often need to distil complex concepts and ideas, and it’s in this that the ABC TOP 5 plays an important role. The project gives academics the opportunity to be leading communicators about their field of research, while also enabling us here at the ABC to better serve our audiences with unique stories and specialist knowledge.”
The Manager of ABC Radio National Cath Dwyer is looking forward to welcoming the researchers: “The TOP 5 is one of the highlights of our year, as we assist these outstanding early-career academics to communicate in a way that con be understood by all Australians”.
Professor Emma Johnston is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Sydney, one of the TOP 5 project partners and is thrilled to see the ABC’s Top 5 program in action again: “This is an important way to support our early career researchers to translate some of the vital work going on in universities into the public domain. By nurturing media awareness in emerging thinkers, it helps the researchers contribute to informed debate and communicate their research to a non-academic audience.”
The Australian National University also partners with the TOP 5. Professor Kiaran Kirk is the Dean of Science, and believes communication is key to helping Australians understand the complex challenges of our time: “The ABC TOP 5 is one of the best ways our brilliant minds fulfil that mission and show how research improves our lives and the world each day.”
Another project partner is the University of Melbourne. Professor Emma Redding is Director of the Victorian College for the Arts and is proud to support the next generation of artist-researchers through an ongoing partnership with the TOP 5 Arts. “This year’s recipients showcase the richness and diversity of creative practice and research in Australia.”
The fourth key partner for the TOP 5 is the Australia Council for the Arts. Dr Georgie McClean is Executive Director, Development and Strategic Partnerships: “The Australia Council is thrilled to partner with Radio National to build the media skills of these exciting new voices and to deepen audiences’ engagement with arts and culture through rich fields of research and creative practice.”
Today’s editorial in The Australian (‘The ABC of institutional bias: The questions Sally Scales wasn’t asked’) seeks to lecture RN Breakfast Patricia Karvelas and her program about journalistic standards.
This is just the latest example of The Australian personally targeting an ABC presenter and journalist to pursue its own agenda.
Patricia Karvelas is one of the country’s most experienced political journalists and broadcasters. Her career is characterised with breaking news stories and detailed examination of national policy issues.
Her interviewing is skilled, balanced and rigorous, and always conducted with the aim of eliciting the most relevant information for audiences, not just to support one side of an argument or pursue an agenda.
There have long been discussions about this as RN has just become a shell playing out podcasts these days. It really isn’t used to a proper potential. I agree, a news/politics national radio station makes so much more sense. More shows like RN Breakfast and Drive with arts shows etc. also on the station in the evenings.
The other AM license could be used for Classic Radio and then they could launch a reformatted Double J on FM.
Yes. If you know your radio history then you’ll know that much of the impetus for FM broadcasting came from fine music aficionados. Shunting ABCFM to AM (ABCAM?) would be retrograde in the extreme!
That’s hilariously bad, what a basic gaffe, would have to be very very silly or plainly don’t care to say all that near a telephone/microphone.
Laughably, on Monday’s program, Vanstone was complaining of the largesse of Vietnam’s corrupt dictators and saying that she felt sorry for the wider population and how poor they are when she was a minister and visiting the country. That was joke enough.
RN Breakfast presenter Patricia Karvelas has done an outstanding job covering the complex, unfolding situation in Israel and Gaza.
As part of a lengthy, detailed interview with Federal Minister Tony Burke on Friday 27 October she put to him the usage of the word “genocide” — which is being widely discussed, for example in a UN statement last week — and asked for his thoughts on its usage.
Yep - to be fair, it’s not hard to find someone who’s not happy with the coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict at the moment and willing to make a scene about it.
