Understanding Australia: Notes on the Australian studies vs Australian cultural studies debate

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Media, 'Madness' and Ethical Journalism

This article analyses the way newspapers and journalists sometimes fail to acknowledge and resolve some of the contentious ethical dilemmas associated with reporting news. Its focus is on not exploiting and vilifying the vulnerable, especially people with mental illness, through sensationalism and inaccurate and imprecise use of medical terminology such as "psycho ". "schizo" or "lunatic ". Because ethics is central to our understanding of professionalism, this article uses professions and professionalism as benchmarks aginst which to analyse and critique how journalists and newspapers define and report news.Sometimes journalists fail the test of good ethical practice in terms of negative. outdated and inaccurate expressions they use in the news stories they report. Likewise, regulators of news industry standards appear not to recognize and sanction such reporting. The apparent inability to resolve these ethical dilemmas creates a context conducive to tolerance for, not acceptance of. unethical news reporting.

Genetic and Cultural Transmission of Smoking Initiation: An Extended Twin Kinship Model

Background Considerable evidence from twin and adoption studies indicates that genetic and shared environmental factors play a significant role in the initiation of smoking behavior. Although twin and adoption designs are powerful to detect genetic and environmental influences, they do not provide information on the processes of assortative mating and parent–offspring transmission and their contribution to the variability explained by genetic and/or environmental factors. Methods We examined the role of genetic and environmental factors for smoking initiation using an extended kinship design. This design allows the simultaneous testing of additive and non-additive genetic, shared and individual-specific environmental factors, as well as sex differences in the expression of genes and environment in the presence of assortative mating and combined genetic and cultural transmission. A dichotomous lifetime smoking measure was obtained from twins and relatives in the Virginia 30,000 sample. Results Results demonstrate that both genetic and environmental factors play a significant role in the liability to smoking initiation. Major influences on individual differences appeared to be additive genetic and unique environmental effects, with smaller contributions from assortative mating, shared sibling environment, twin environment, cultural transmission and resulting genotype–environment covariance. The finding of negative cultural transmission without dominance led us to investigate more closely two possible mechanisms for the lower parent–offspring correlations compared to the sibling and DZ twin correlations in subsets of the data: (i) age × gene interaction, and (ii) social homogamy. Neither mechanism provided a significantly better explanation of the data, although age regression was significant. Conclusions This study showed significant heritability, partly due to assortment, and significant effects of primarily non-parental shared environment on smoking initiation.

An examination of the effects of print media exposure and contact on subjective social reality and acculturation attitudes

This study draws upon cultivation theory, acculturation theory, and works on intergroup relations to examine the effects of print media exposure and contact on subjective social reality and acculturation attitudes of Chinese immigrants in Australia. Data was gathered via a survey administered to 265 respondents with Chinese origin. Results indicate that exposure to mainstream newspapers is only positively related to one indicator of subjective reality, namely, outgroup perception whereas exposure to ethnic newspapers was not significantly related to any of the indicators of subjective reality. Acculturation attitudes, on the other hand, are more closely related to group perception and contact but not closely associated with exposure to print media. These findings have again challenged the direct effect assumption of cultivation theory, paved the ground for combining mediated communication variables with interpersonal communication variables in acculturation research and suggested policy implications for interethnic coexistence. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.