From Mumbrella - How 2UE airbrushed 2GB out of the picture

Mumbrella is a website that says this about itself - everything under Australia's media, marketing and entertainment umbrella.

I think it's picked up on a quite significant point here.   It's run a story about 2UE airbrushing out the logos of its radio competitors - a picture tells a thousand words:

I have long felt that our radio stations are such an important and limited media channel - and yet often those stations don't seem to "get" the importance of their place in broadcasting news - and in providing a record of who said what and when.

The example above is a pretty clear case of a commercial operation not wanting to promote its competitors.   It's pretty small beer - but the principle is important.   It's a change to the public record, the news of the day.   Let yourself do that for "commercial interests" and where do you stop?  Next thing you'll be pulling stories because powerful people don't want them told.

I have a particular bugbear about interviews that I know have taken place with public figures over the years - and which arbitrarily disappear from the public record.  Some-one has had to make that decision - keep this, get rid of that.   Data storage is so relatively cheap now that I think it's a fantastic time for radio stations and their websites as the "go-to" repository of who said what and when.

But radio stations won't build that "broadcaster of record" reputation if they put base salesman driven commercial interests before the truth of what happened.  When radio stations or their individual presenters rubbish a story "because it wasn't invented here", when they remove from the public record all of a particular broadcasters interviews with public figures "because it might advantage him and he's still dining out on it" they put their petty small-beer interests ahead of their duty to the community.

Getting the airbrush out to a competitor's logo might seem sensible if your world view is  30,60,90 day cash-flow forecasts.   But a few individuals and their blokey pride will be the only people made happy by that - and radio can be so much more for the whole of us.