A lame pun, a divided world and hope: Joe Hildebrand takes on the news
“For better or worse, I don’t think anyone has ever managed to censor me, and I wouldn’t really know how to censor myself.”
Joe Hildebrand isn’t worried that his new podcast for Nova, Four The Record, will have to be toned down. Despite the first episode contemplating the start of World War III, he tells Mumbrella, “it’s all good fun.”
Four The Record is a weekly podcast “based on an incredibly lame pun” dreamed up by Nova’s Tim Blackwell, one third of the country’s most-listened-to Drive show, Ricki-Lee, Tim and Joel.
Blackwell picks a topic in the news headlines and fires four questions at Hildebrand, who provides answers which act as a launching pad on the topic. A new 15-minute episode will come out each Thursday, and will appear in the same podcast feed as Blackwell’s Drive show.
The pair have been friends for over a decade, after Blackwell met Hildebrand’s wife in a baby swim class for their eldest children. They were both FM Drive hosts at the time, with Hildebrand on Triple M and Blackwell on Nova. “He was slightly more successful,” Hildebrand recalls. “I lasted for one year and then was abruptly fired, whereas he is the highest-rating drive show in Australia.”
Hildebrand and Blackwell
Hildebrand sees Four The Record as being a natural springboard from his other Nova podcast, The Real Story, which launched in May 2024.
“Maybe we’ll get a third podcast to go alongside the Four The Record podcast, to go alongside the Real Story podcast,” he jokes. “And then we’ll just have endless layers of podcasts like Inception.”
Anyone surveying the media news landscape in 2025 can indeed detect a Inception-style break with reality. Hildebrand’s take on the current situation is bleak – but oddly hopeful.
“I think anyone who’s been around in journalism or the media for a long time feels …” His phone alarm sounds, which he takes as inspiration. “Let’s say I feel a little bit alarmed,” he says.
“It’s obviously going through a huge upheaval and that presents exciting opportunities, but also real worries and challenges. So, I guess, it’s like being a little boat in the middle of a stormy sea. You just try to hold on and hope you find a nice promised land at the end of it.”
Hildebrand extends this attitude to the subject matter of the news, as well.
“We’re on the cusp of potentially world peace or World War III. And you’ve got to just assume that it’s going to be okay, because the alternative is unthinkable.”
He likens the current media situation to the panic around any emerging technology. He notes the attitudes around the printing press half a millennia ago, and the belief “TV was going to make all our eyes turn square.”
“I mean, it’s the message, not the medium, isn’t it? Marshall McLuhan was wrong,” he declares, referencing the famous media theorist. “If you’ve got good, solid ideas, if you’ve got people who are interested in getting to the bottom of things, and finding out what the truth actually is, and if you’ve got people who are always willing to read against the grain, and not get swept up.”
Hildebrand with Matt Tilley, at Triple M in 2014.
Not that he is overly optimistic, by any means.
“If you want to get really serious and apocalyptic, I think the biggest threat to human civilisation is — in a world where people can collide and interact with each other, pretty much without limits — if you have the same kind of segmentation happening that you had a thousand years ago, when people couldn’t quite do that, you have a capacity for people to be completely locked in their own tribal identities and think they are the sole possessors of the truth — and everyone else is a bigot or a fool, or is trying to take over the world and remake it into some sort of horrendous utopia slash apocalypse.”
Hildebrand sees this currently happening on both the left and the right “and everywhere in between”, pointing out such tribalism is dangerous in a time period when your village can “easily go to war with another village on the other side of the earth”.
“So, I like the idea of a kind of broad mainstream media where everybody’s kind of talking about the same things.
“In the old days, you know, you might have the Daily Telegraph, the Sydney Morning Herald, the six o’clock news, and they might have different angles on the same story, but at least they’d be running the same stories, and they’d agree on what those stories actually are, on what happened. Even if the interpretation of them was different.
“I think the worry with social media, especially just over the last decade-and-a-half, has been that you can create these completely alternate realities.
“I mean, if you read the Daily Mail and then you read The Guardian, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’re living on a completely different planet. It’s like nothing that happens on one, happens on the other.”
When these two audiences meet outside their silos, Hildebrand says, “instead of just a difference of opinion, it’s actually reality shifting.” This leads to conflict over not only ideologies, but the actual facts of how society operates.
“You know, both the hard right and the hard left think that the other lot’s in charge,” he says. “One thinks it’s a bunch of evil capo fascist bigots. The other thinks it’s a bunch of commie cultural Marxists who are taking over our schools and universities.
“And so both these people live in completely, not just different, but opposite worlds – in which they think they are the victims who are being drowned out, and the others are in charge of all the most powerful institutions and coming to wipe them out.
“That is what we’ve got to watch out for. And, I think a good, strong, pragmatic mainstream media landscape hopefully irons out all those kinks and exposes the frauds, highlights the ridiculous, extreme excesses on either side, and puts them to the torch, while at the same time providing a cynical but not necessarily nihilistic eye on what’s actually really happening in the normal world that most people inhabit.
“Hope that’s not too Armageddon-esque for you, mate.”
Joe Hildebrand
It doesn’t exactly inspire hope. It does, however, act as a handy preview of the types of informed rants that Hildebrand is unleashing on Four The Record. Despite the dystopia laid out above, Hildebrand actually seems optimistic about the future of news media.
“I think the illusory nature of social media and the fanaticism of those who are still on it, is pretty quickly being exposed,” he says. “I think most people now see it for what it is, which is, you know, a place for crazies to go and vent, because they don’t have enough else to do in their lives. But enough about Elon Musk and Donald Trump …”
Perhaps this attitude comes from his own largely positive experiences working at a number of Australia’s biggest media companies.
“To be honest, I think I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been at most of the places I’ve worked, at a time when they were really good, fun places to work.”
He did his cadetship in 2000 at AAP’s Sydney office. “There was probably just no better place to be”, he recalls of his start in the industry.
“It was a good time. It was a time before workplaces and attitudes were horribly doctrinaire or censorious or prescriptive. So you could really have fun.
“Journalism was still a bit of a rogue’s game. So there was still a culture of going to the pub after work, and shooting the breeze and taking the piss. And there was a real sort of warmth to it.”
He arrived just as the office was replacing “the old green-and-black word processor screens” with modern PCs, but it was still a completely different landscape.
“We were just starting to use the internet,” he says. “We still had a giant library of books with the White Pages and the shipping news, and some atlas somewhere.”
He recalls those days fondly, but feels he enjoyed a charmed entry into a harsh business.
“I’m pretty sure if I had been at Channel 9 or something, it would have been a very different experience,” he says. “I’ve had friends who talk about the sort of ferocity and the competitiveness of being there. But AAP was really collegiate and the cadet program was really good. So I naively got into journalism thinking, ‘Oh, these guys are all fantastic. This is a really lovely, warm, supportive, fun place to work.”
He then moved into the imposing News Corp building on Holt Street, the Sydney headquarters of one of the biggest and most divisive media empires in the world, where he worked for The Daily Telegraph. Again, he found himself in the right place, at the right time.
“The Tele was just fantastic,” he recalls. “I just loved it. I loved the culture at the Tele. It was just fun. Everyone was smart. Everyone took the piss. Everyone’s a bit cynical. No one took themselves too seriously. And anyone who did, pretty quickly, you know, decided to work somewhere else.”
Hildebrand acts as his own agent these days, and still writes for the Daily Telegraph, due to the strong connections he has forged. “I love the people there. And I’ve made some of my best friends at both AAP and at the Tele. I’ve made friends for life. They’re the sort of places I’ll always work for, and always be loyal to, to the exclusion of everything else.”
“Conversely, I’ve done bits and pieces for other places,” he says, noting “how toxic some of the so-called progressive news organisations and news sites are.”
He wisely steers clear of naming names.
“It’s always the way. Whoever’s got in their Twitter bio: ‘Why can’t people just be kind to one another?’ is guaranteed to be the most vicious troll. The people who love lecturing others about how they should behave: they’re almost invariably the worst people, in terms of their own behaviour.
“I’ve certainly had experiences where — and I wasn’t very impressed by it — where you just have the sort of people who will just lie to your face and tell you black is white, and think you’re too stupid to know the difference.
“That happens as well. But I like to think that that’s in a minority of cases and hopefully those people end up meeting their maker, in this world or the next.”
Despite the doomsday narrative around the current and pending state of journalism, Hildebrand finds a great deal of hope from the bright-eyed cadets and younger reporters he meets when he drops into Holt Street.
“I’m just always massively impressed,” he says of the younger generation. “Whenever I start freaking out and thinking, ‘Oh, we’re all going to die, the future’s hopeless. Newspapers are dead. TV’s dead. The millennials are going to come and eat us and dance on our bones’ — then, I meet and hang out with all the new kids that are coming along to start their career in journalism. They’re always bright, they’re smart, they’re funny, they’re keen. And it just warms my heart.
“So I think that everything’s going to be okay.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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