“Win a Wife” A New Low For A Radio Station Already In The Gutter

The Rock is a generic pop-rock station who's major advertisers include a company offering a 'patented nasal delivery technology' cure for erectile dysfunction. You can tell from that statement this isn't exactly high-brow entertainment. The non-music content is about as good as you'd expect from a station that's the aural equivalent of spam email; mornings include the 'seen with a hein' segment where listeners call in to talk about “heinous” women they're friends have had romantic encounters with. Once a week is 'Wind up your wife Wednesday' where callers play prank calls on their wives (or occasionally husbands or other family members) for the princely sum of $500. The old shock-jock staple of the prank call has met the reality show culture of debasing yourself in exchange for money. The MediaWorks owned station has a captive audience due to its 'no repeat work day' play list making it the station of choice in many New Zealand workplaces.

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Their latest promotional stunt is a competition with the prize of flying to the Ukraine for 12 nights, with $2000 spending money, and choosing a bride from an agency. Former Green MP and social activist Sue Bradford has slammed the contest for its commercialisation of marriage, and feminist blog The Hand Mirror (THM) has said there are “no words besides 'gah' and 'argh'” to use in response. THM quotes one of the questions that need to be answered to enter the draw;

All women are nuts, but what can you tell us about your craziest Ex that sets her apart from the other nut-jobs?

This question has since been amended on the Rock website to “Some women are nuts” (I'm sure the feminists will issue a retraction any moment now...) Maia of THM states that “The internal contradictions of a masculinity which hates women but requires hetrosexuality are so stark that whenever I try and think about it my brain short circuits.” Sue Bradford has made similar comments; “It's like there's this encroachment of 'laddism' and chauvinism and misogyny which seems to be pervading our media more and more.” indeed “win a wife” seems to be symptomatic of the 'political correctness' backlash which kept a bigot on television for so long and provides content for that other MediaWorks property, conservative talk back station Radio Live.

There is more going on here however, moral outrage over 'win a wife' is probably anticipated by The Rock, their marketing team figuring that all publicity is good publicity. But those of us who are outraged perhaps shouldn't tune out, we should turn in and think critically about what we're hearing. While the music favoured by The Rock is a bit to 'edgy' to be heard at the mall, it still fits a 'safe for work' quota that makes it politically suitable as a soundtrack to factories and construction sites (as Dick Lucas of the punk band Citizen Fish sang “You'll never make the chart tops, if you sing about repression”). Then there is their editorialising and summarising of the news, shaping the way the days stories will be talked about by those who didn't pick up a newspaper, but heard the headlines on the radio as they worked. Add to this the aforementioned shock-jock 'seen with a hein' and 'wind up your wife' segments, and we see an emerging picture of a medium which has a huge, but not immediately visible, influence on our culture and society. Commercial radio is in need of the analysis that has been given to news media (in books like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media) and films and fictional television (in books such as Michael Parenti's Make Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment). The hegemonic role of commercial radio is an area waiting to be explored.