Marr reported that the media monitor Rehame found that, for every fifty calls deploring the execution as barbaric, there were sixty commending Nguyen’s death. The ‘ugly message’, Marr wrote, was confirmed by public opinion polling in the last days of Nguyen’s life.

The SMH’s subeditors laboured the talkback issue even more. The two-sentence pointer on page one to Marr’s story focused on talkback. The same page on which Marr’s article began featured a pointer to Natasha Stott Despoja’s diary of her week, in which she remarked that ‘shock jocks and members of the public’ jumped on her for condemning Prime Minister John Howard’s intention to host a cricket match shortly after the execution.

Are talkback calls and public opinion polls truly representative of what a nation’s populace thinks? Aren’t the findings of public opinion polls determined in part by the size and demographics of the sample and the actual question, or questions, asked? Interestingly, Marr pointed out that the ‘public response’ (as measured by talkback) to the execution did not represent a simple clash between humane Australia on one side and cruel Singapore on the other; Singaporeans, he wrote, rang in to deplore the actions of their own country. But he could have gone further, as he did in his analysis of a Roy Morgan poll. What about the basic demographics (gender and geography) of the calls? Were there significant statistical differences between ABC and commercial callers? How were incoming calls filtered by people on the switch, in the production booth and behind the microphone? Is it possible that some callers were ringing in to challenge the views of the actual talkback presenters? After all, people are usually more inclined to make the effort to oppose, rather than support, the views of others. In the United States, David C. Barker’s research has demonstrated that Rush Limbaugh has much less success mobilising support than he does mobilising opposition.

As host of Media Watch, David Marr did much to stimulate Australian interest – regulatory, public and possibly even academic – in commercial, particularly talkback, radio. His work building on the efforts of his predecessor Richard Ackland in exposing ‘cash for comment’ focused on talkback presenters. While Marr’s SMH article was obviously designed to focus on public reaction to the Nguyen case, it would have benefited from at least passing reference to the views of talkback presenters. ‘Talkback radio’, as the name suggests, entails a dialogue, a two-way process.

So what were commercial radio talkback presenters in Sydney, Marr’s hometown, saying? John Laws displayed little sympathy for Nguyen and, so far as I am aware, little opposition to the principle of capital punishment. But what about his stablemates at 2UE, Mike Carlton (mornings), John Stanley (afternoons) and Steve Price (drive)? All spoke out publicly, and often, against the death penalty; Carlton also used his weekly column in the SMH’s News Review – the same section in which Marr’s article appeared – to advance his views. The week before the execution, I heard Price sadly wonder what on earth he would say when he had to go on air just hours after the hanging. The top-rating Alan Jones used both his 2GB breakfast programme, as well as his spot on the Today show, to deplore ‘judicial killing’ and assert that he would not even support the death penalty for Saddam Hussein.

In Melbourne, Neil Mitchell asked in the Herald Sun: ‘Australia, where is your soul? Has this become such an unforgiving country that a large percentage of the population is willing to gather like some bloodthirsty cheer squad, urging the death of a poor stupid young man who at worst was a bit player in the evil of the international drug trade?’. Mitchell was clearly unnerved by what he was obviously hearing from a number of the callers to his own morning programme and his station, 3AW.

What position on Nguyen was taken by Ray Hadley and Stan Zemanek, Bob Francis and Howard Sattler? I’m not sure, but neither, I suspect, are few people other than their loyal listeners. The implication in the SMH, and indeed in most commentary on (especially commercial) talkback radio, is that it is invariably redneck territory. The reactions of Mitchell, Jones and several of his counterparts in Sydney suggest that the world of Australian talkback radio might not be quite as straightforward or predictable as commentators are inclined to suggest. Some would argue that the involvement of an Asian country in Nguyen’s execution made some talkback presenters more inclined to describe the policy as ‘barbaric’. As I write, the role of the media – particularly Jones and Price – in inciting violence on Sydney’s beaches is being hotly debated. The work of Liz Gould on the history of Australian talkback radio, and Graeme Turner on the content, audience and influence of contemporary talkback radio in Australia, cannot come soon enough.