Interviewers Who Don't Kill

Fran Kelly's just been put on the Breakfast show on Radio National, and has mentioned that the hours aren't so good on that shift. I hate early mornings too, unless I'm getting them from the perspective of going to bed late, rather than waking up early, so I can dig it.

We hope she is getting enough caffeine. Her interview ('Mothers Who Kill'; Breakfast, RN, Tuesday, March 22, 2005) with Dr Lynne Eccleston, a forensic psychologist in the Department of Criminology at Melbourne University, was very droopy.

It's worth listening to ... what a shame there's no transcript, and what a shame you can only listen to ABC RN in Real Media, which is really an unfortunate commercial choice of audio (why not Windows Media which most people already have and won't take over their computers?).

If you're able to cop a listen to Ms Kelly, note that Dr Eccleston does an Olympics-class backflip in mid-interview from asserting that when children are killed by a parent, it is very rarely the mother, to a new assertion that it is approximately 50-50 between fathers and mothers, then back to a position that women hardly ever do it. And when women do do it, there are heaps of mitigating circumstances, such as "depression", and "anger" ... which apparently are gender-specific because such mitigation wasn't mentioned for the male of the species.

One would have thought that such extremes of assertion -- from A to Not A and back to A -- would be just the sort of pounceable material a good interviewer only gets in their dreams. Of course, like I said, it is a very early shift.

Oh dear, now the dames will tell me and their friends I'm picking on the dames. Three stories already with the faces of female ABC stars. Honest, I'm not. Watch out, blokes and hermaphroblokes, one day, when you least expect it, a turtle will come up to you and say ... "Smile!" ...