Public relations & the media : a new influence in "agenda-setting" and content

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Was there much blood kid? : cadet journalists in Australian media

This thesis established the ways in which novice journalists formulate their own professional ideologies and identified the key influences in this process. The research focused on the dominant oral traditions operating within newsrooms and established the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of the current systems of training young journalists.

Role of new media in Indigenous cultural micro-enterprises

This study examines the use of new media by organisations which represent the oldest culltures on earth, finding that new media have transformed the practices of Indigenous cultural micro-enterprises, by providing an inexpensive channel for global cultural profile, increasing efficiency and viability, and reducing social and geographic discrimination.

From despotism to democracy : reporting Iraq's January 2005 election in the Australian and Middle Eastern print media

It is only in recent times that the magnitude of Ancient Mesopotamia’s contribution to language, agriculture, modern thought and urbane society has begun to be understood. Most relevant to this study is the governance of Mesopotamia’s early city-states by a political system that Jacobsen has termed ‘Primitive Democracy’ where “…ultimate political power rested with a general assembly of all adult freemen” (Jacobsen, 1977; 128). Yet, despite this, the coverage of Iraq in the Western media since its creation at the end of the First World War and particularly since the first Gulf War, has tended towards Orientalism (Said, 1978) by trivialising this nation and thereby reinforcing the hegemony of the West over the ‘backward, barbaric’ East.

This paper examines this issue further by comparing and contrasting the representations of the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005 in four of Australia’s leading daily newspapers (The Australian, The Courier-Mail, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald) with four Middle Eastern English language papers (The Daily Star from Lebanon, Andolu Agency and Dunya both based in Turkey, and the eponymous Kuwait Times). In essence, it finds that while the Australian media posits democracy as a Western concept and asserts a discourse of US hegemony, the Middle Eastern papers are more contemplative, focusing on the impact that this election could have throughout the region.

The post-Saddam Iraqi media : reporting the democratic developments of 2005

The toppling of Saddam in 2003 brought with it the re-emergence of the free press in Iraq. This has seen Iraq shift from only a handful of state media outlets that served as propaganda machines, to a vast array of Iraqi-owned newspapers, radio stations and television channels which are being fervently produced and avidly consumed across the nation. This paper therefore reviews the developments in Iraq’s post-Saddam media sector and finds that it has been central to the return of an Iraqi public sphere which has openly debated and discussed the issues surrounding the nation’s shift from despotism to democracy. This is perhaps best evidenced by the role that the Iraqi media played in hosting a rich tapestry of debate, discourse and deliberation from a panoply of political, religious and ethno-sectarian factions throughout the elections and the referendum held across the nation in 2005. Despite their respective biases and particular persuasions, the net effect of such a rich media sector has been an Iraqi populace who are both concerned and informed about the nuances of democratic governance.

The sex factor : media representations of women and men in Australia

Guest edited and with an introduction by Janine Little, this collection of five scholarly articles deals with the Australian media's representation of women in coverage of some of the most controversial issues in contemporary society. The authors are from the disciplines of sociology, journalism and literary studies, with four from Deakin University and one from Flinders University, Adelaide. This enables the monograph to consider a range of phenomena arising from the way that Australia situates women and men as media subjects

One tweet does not a revolution make : technological determinism, media and social change

This paper discusses the problematic influence of technological determinism in popular news media coverage and analysis of the Arab Spring events of 2010-11.

The purpose is to develop insights into how and why elements of a ‘soft’ technological determinism inflect both journalistic practice and news discourse in relation to the Arab Spring. In particular it discusses how the ‘bias of convenience’ and a journalistic obsession with the ‘continuous present’ connect with this determinist inflection to create a potential distortion in the journalists’ ‘first rough draft’ of history in relation to significant and complex events such as social revolution.