Radio leaks: Presenting and contesting leaks in radio news broadcasts

his paper analyzes the discursive construction and contestation of ‘leaked’ stories in news broadcast programmes. Drawing on a sample of BBC Radio 4 news programmes recorded between May and June 2000, we analyze four items of news presented as leaks about upcoming events. We suggest that these examples highlight the leaking of information as a valuable newsworthy commodity in that it not only allows news organizations to report what is going to be news before it happens but also enables speculative discourse as to the meaning of the event yet to happen. However, in order for a story to be accepted as a leak it must be seen to fulfil a number of criteria. With this in mind, we identify four features accompanying the introduction of the news items as leaks in the process of authentification: secrecy, authorship/ownership and future orientation. The article then discusses how these features are used when contesting the status of a news story as a leak, and how temporal play contributes to downgrading the content of the leak and, hence, its relevance, immediacy and newsworthiness.

Enacting cultural diversity through multicultural radio in Australia

Australia is second only to Israel in being the world’s most culturally diverse nation, based largely on high levels of immigration in the second part of the 20th century. From the 1970s onwards, Australia formally recognized the massive social changes brought about by postwar immigration, and provided legislation to incorporate cultural diversity into everyday lives. One such ‘legislative’ enactment saw the establishment of multicultural broadcasting in Australia, as arguably a world-first, both in its comprehensiveness and diversity. Today, Australia has a public sector corporation, the Special Broadcasting Service, administering five radio services in 68 languages. Also, the Community Radio sector produces multicultural programming in 100 languages through a number of its 330 broadcast and 207 narrowcast stations. This article examines the relationship between radio and its communities. It argues that despite the ‘profile’ of SBS television, radio is much closer to its constituent communities, and therefore plays a greater role in enabling those communities to speak their own histories, beyond the confines of a consensual Anglophile paradigm.