Sack Sean Plunket and risk sacking the audience

 Who knows if there is any truth to claims by gossip Keith Lynch that:

Sean Plunket's future at radio station Magic Talk is uncertain, Stuff has learned.

 It is understood Plunket has been asked not to return to the station, but that he may fight it.

It was easy enough for them dispatching John Banks who had only two more days to see out before the return of Peter Williams. But on what grounds could they sack Plunket?

It certainly wouldn't be for incompetence or failure to fulfil his work objective to lift ratings.

Plunket is mercurial (subject to depressive bouts by his own admission) and takes energy to listen to. But listen I do, sometimes intently. He goes, and I'll go.

Not to their competitor talk channel. It'll be to their competitor's new music channel  Gold which I am partial to. 

If we can't have free and frank talkback then there's no point in the medium.

Update: Chris Trotter has written a perspicacious piece on this subject.

"It is very hard to believe that MediaWorks’ advertisers were unaware that Magic Talk Radio had pivoted right, away from RNZ National’s demographic and towards Newstalk-ZB’s. It is equally hard to credit that Sean Plunket and Peter Williams were not presented to them as powerful magnets for the folk who were missing Newstalk’s arch-conservative host, Leighton Smith. Surely, they would have understood what sort of political discussions their ad-breaks would be interrupting?

What are we looking at, then, when we see corporations threatening to pull their ads from programmes whose listeners come from the very demographics they are targeting? Are we witnessing an intra-corporate triumph of woke PR mavens over hard-working marketing grunts?

The answer is, almost certainly, “Yes”. Overwhelmingly, the graduates pouring out of this country’s “communications studies” courses and into corporate PR are young women who, for years, have been schooled in the uncompromising dogma of social radicalism – especially feminism and anti-racism. When they learn (via Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) the awful truth about the latest shock-jock’s racist outrage, their first instinct is the get their employers’ brand as far away from the perpetrators’ “toxicity” as possible. Failure to “get ahead of the problem”, their bosses are cautioned, will lead directly to consumer boycotts. The “Roastbusters” precedent will be cited. To date, their bosses have demonstrated little need for further persuasion... 

If the New Zealand news media persists in the folly of “cancelling” all those listeners, viewers and readers who fail to pass ideological muster, then we will see the emergence of our own version of Fox News – with all that entails for the health of our country and its democratic institutions. Who would lead it? Do we have a Hannity, or a Tucker Carlson, waiting out there in the wings? Where to start looking for a talented right-wing contrarian, boasting years of professional broadcasting experience, who is currently between jobs?"