The Americans call them copy editors; the English and Antipodeans call them sub-editors. Whatever you call them, they are traditionally the most under-valued and under-appreciated people in journalism. And with Fairfax’s latest bout of self-mutilation, they take one step closer to extinction. (more…)
With television increasingly dominated by the Outrage Business and shamelessly exploitative and cheap ‘reality’ shows, the 1976 Sidney Lumet-directed Oscar-winning movie ‘Network’ looks increasingly prescient. In this bitter satire of the effect that intense commercial competition has on broadcast standards, Australian Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a TV demagogue so appalled by the profit-driven amorality of the network that employs him that he urges his viewers to turn their sets off. (more…)
As in drama, conflict drives the news business. The more black and white the conflict is portrayed as, the greater the passion the issue raises, the greater its confected ‘news’ value. Once a savvy media organisation works out what gets people worked up, it’s a fair bet it will go out of its way to construct narratives around those very issues. (more…)
Five hundred years ago, English capitalist farmers began a process known as “enclosure of the commons”, the forced and wholesale appropriation of public land – formerly used by villagers for arable farming. Now corporate forces, led by Rupert Murdoch, and agents of the political Right are attempting a similar manoeuvre on public broadcasting – the broadcast commons. The ultimate price is our democracy. (more…)
First it was the nightly weather, then the finance report and now it’s politics. There is a creeping conspiracy in television news of people standing in front of charts, taking the daily temperature – of meteorology, of markets and of members of parliament – and trying to persuade us that it all means something. (more…)
A truism about journalism is that it consists of applying six basic questions to issues of public interest: Who, What, Where, When, How and Why. In breaking news, journalists often will deal with the first four questions fairly readily. The last two are sometimes harder. Decades ago, public broadcasting sought Read more…
The concept of “churnalism” – the idea that newspapers and broadcast media are increasingly dominated by PR-originated content – has gained a high profile in the UK in recent years. Given the same practices are evident in the Australian media, why aren’t we seeing a similar debate here? (more…)
Sydney’s Sun-Herald this weekend runs a piece featuring former politicians of all colours decrying the rotten state of our politics – from the relentless dumbing down of issues, to the fake polarisation of views to create opportunities for adversarialism, to the rehearsed spin, to the chronic inability to undertake real reform and, as we are seeing now, to the blatant trolling of emotive issues about race and religion to garner cheap votes. (more…)
On the day the nation’s federal and state leaders met in Canberra to thrash out a new deal on health reform, the ABC’s website ran with this headline: ‘Desperate’ Gillard Set to Push Health Reform. Once again, our national broadcaster chooses as its preferred angle the Opposition’s interpretation of the story rather than the facts of the proposed reforms themselves, a baffling tendency this blog has explored before here.
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