Unlike most people in Australia, I wasn’t aware of an event that occurred on Radio station 2Day FM until about an hour ago while I was talking with one of my readers through my Facebook page who was interested in kick-starting her own blog. However after urging her to turn to her keyboard, and doing some reading up of my own, I have decided to take a look at this as well.
Now I have never really liked Kyle Sandilands, not even in the slightest, while I have no issue with Jackie-O, I am getting sick of their TV ads, which have pretty much bored me to the point that I don’t think I would have listened to them even if I didn’t already.
Personally I would have jumped on the bandwagon to crucify Sandilands, but I tend to want to know why I am hating a person instead of just joining a mob for the hell of it, so I downloaded the freely available segment from my news feed and listened to it.
8:39am yesterday morning, as part of a stunt that even looking at it written down just smelled of ‘REALLY BAD IDEA’. I mean which part of drag a tween into the studio, strap a lie detector to them and then drill them about sex and drugs on live air sounds like a good idea to anyone really? Well it apparently sounded like a good idea to the Producers who decided to run with it.
The LieDetector segment ran for only 4 and a half minutes, but in that time, the entirety of the Australian Blogosphere has already painted a big red X on to of Sandilands squat head, though how exactly I missed that feed might have had something to do with the fact that I don’t listen to the radio, and most of my feeder blogs, are from the States, Not Australia.
For those of you who were as clueless to this as I was, lets recap. A concerned mother, drags her 14 year old daughter to the studio of 2Day FM, worried that her daughter was taking heavy drugs and was engaging in sex, and decides that the number 3 breakfast show is the perfect time in which to find out this information…
The setup for this segment involved the 14 year old girl being strapped into a chair and was asked exclusively by her mother a series of questions, starting with if she had ever skipped school, which she denied, giving off a false response from the detector, after continuing to deny this, her mother turned inquisitor asks the second and final question: "Have you ever had sex?"
There is a brief pause between question and answer, to which she replies: "I’ve already told you the story about this … and don’t look at me and smile because it’s not funny." there is a brief pause and then "Oh okay … I got raped when I was 12 years old."
Now, having actually known people, including close members of my inner circle, who have been sexually assaulted, I got this far in the recording and was amazed to find another minute and a half of recording, even though I was hoping to hear an abrupt, ‘lets go to Commercial’.
While there was a response it was not the one I was expecting.
Fifteen seconds later Kyle Sandilands asked, sounded aloof "Right … is that the only experience you’ve had?"
At that point I understood why people where calling for Kyle’s head, and I can understand, even I initially felt the same, until I heard the next pearl of wisdom from the girls, ‘well-meaning’ but obviously intellectually vagrant mother, who stated that she was aware of the rape, even BEFORE asking the question in regards of her daughters sexual activities, but when asked by Jackie-O, who appeared to be the only person in the booth who actually heard what the girl had said, asked the mother if the Police had been involved, which they hadn’t, and offered counselling to the girl, after quickly stating that she would ‘let the girl off the hook’ and that the Station would not have agreed to the segment had they been told about the rape incident…
2DayFM General Manger Jenny Parkes issued a statement after this travesty stating that "The moment we became aware of it was live on air and we shut it down as soon as we possibly could.”
Now this is tripe, as the live broadcast continued for another two minutes, so not only did the country hear about this poor girls assault, but now also became aware of the failings of the mother to protect her daughter, and a radio station chasing its tail to fix its own mess. I mean there was about two and a half minutes of damage control that didn’t need to be aired, following the whole minute discovery of the incident which should have been cut to commercial as soon as it was said.
On top of stating that they ‘shut it down as soon as we possibly could’ he also reiterated that the station was unaware of the situation, which might have been something they could have avoided had they either a) pre-recorded the segment to determine whether it was suitable for air, if simply not air it at all and b) simply cut the feed as soon as was supposedly motioned by the crew in the studio.
Considering the Electronic lynching of Sandilands, and the radio station in general, it appears unlikely that the two will be in operation tomorrow morning, however, to that same end, this seems to be the latest in a long string of outrageous stunts propagated by the station so you never know, he might still be on air tomorrow. Well this is one Australian who won’t be listening.
