Abstract
Over 75% of media audiences in Australia attend to commercial radio and television, so commercial current affairs programs — along with commercial news programs — are probably watched by a majority of people. Yet no systematic studies of these current affairs programs exist. This paper analyzes the content, style and relevance of Brisbane's two commercial current affairs programs. The two programs were found to be remarkably similar in most of their aspects. Both used human interest stories more often than any other type of story — 42% of the week's stories on one program and 52% on the other, were in this category. Both devoted over a third of their stories to local issues — 37% of one and 43% of the other program's stories dealt with such issues. There was a marked contrast between the producers' and the researchers' perceptions of the programs.
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