Politics is a television medium. It has been for nearly 50 years. But TV has changed in that time. Artifice in the aid of the entertainment was formerly tolerated. Now, thanks to the ‘reality’ TV phenomenon, we seek out representations of ‘authenticity’. Guess what happens to politics?
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A US court’s $2.5 million ruling against a blogger for defaming a businessman has sparked a flurry of new attempts to define journalism in relation to blogging. My view on what constitutes journalism is similar to what someone once said about por**graphy – I know it when I see it.
While this won’t help the judges, you can be certain that earnest attempts to define a journalist in legal terms will lead to nothing but confusion. The Americans, with their black letter law pedantry, just love debates of this kind because it keeps much of the legal profession in business.
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It’s 11pm at a Coffs Harbour sports club. The lone gambler is $400 down and still waiting for the feature. This particular poker machine, The King of the Nile (pictured), is his favourite. When the coveted 15-free-games feature appears – all too infrequently – any winnings are trebled. Even better, Read more…
OK, it’s not Newspoll or AC Nielsen or Essential….it’s not even a Morgan poll. But the Failed Estate is proud to unveil results of its first ever readers’ survey. We polled your attitudes on party politics, economics, refugees, climate change and the media. Here are the (dubious) results.
On political leanings, five per cent of our respondents characterised themselves as former bleeding hearts turned grumpy conservatives. This is a category your host can identify with, except he is so old he has gone full circle from wet liberal to flinty conservative and back again – left, right, left. (more…)
Why go into journalism? The industry that employs you is in decline, the on-the-job training is virtually non-existent, the business model is broken, the hours are long, the work involves endless and mindless churning of pregurgitated material, and the pay is lousy. Most of the population rate you just above used car salesmen and now the major media companies are farming off jobs to sweatshops.
Yet people are spending more time with news than ever as the technology that enables the creation, distribution and reception of news grows every more sophisticated. It’s just that no-one can work out how to make money out of it. (more…)
Over at Club Troppo, Don Arthur has run a post titled ‘The Blogosphere’s Delusions of Grandeur’, regurgitating the now ritual meme that pits the apocryphal self-aggrandising blogger in pyjamas (usually venting about the meeja) against the hard-working professional investigative journalist risking everything for his readers. (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 Twitterverse, fingers poised on keyboards and 140 characters at the ready, has been excitedly awaiting the resumption of the ABC’s hit current affairs panel show, Q and A. The usual suspects are being primed to play their customary roles on either side of compere Tony Jones, the constable in this televisual Punch and Judy. (more…)
The possibility of instant global publication, the growth of social media and the commodification of facts are accelerating the media’s drive to offer ‘analysis’ around news events. More ominously, and knowing reporters are looking for a point of differentiation, agents of power now routinely use social media to manipulate the official record in their favour before the facts are clear.
Of course, the problem with this is there is little evidence that asking ‘why’ before the traditional questions of ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘who’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ are answered is a recipe for good journalism. But commercial pressures, such as they are, encourage reporters to explain before they describe. And there are plenty of voices out there feeding them lines to help them meet those pressures, while generating more heat than light. (more…)