The role of Australia's public broadcasters in development and democracy

In this article I investigate the ways in which the ABC and SBS use the internet. I predominantly focus on how the public broadcasters’ promote an informed citizenry though participation online. Such online participation further develops a second vital role of public broadcasting which is to develop a sense of nationhood—through Australian content (which can include information and communication in languages other than English) and which provides for local and international communities in rural and metropolitan areas to engage with each other. In order to understand the capacity for the public broadcasters to enhance online public communication and democratic participation, I firstly examine general internet theory and evaluate how liberating the internet has been for those living in countries where the state and political alliances control traditional broadcast and print media. For this analysis, the key aspects of virtual communication and cyber-democracy are explored as they are relevant to the services the public broadcasters could provide. Furthermore, case examples of current practical work undertaken in these areas are examined. The framework of the ‘virtual agora’ is considered because it represents the ideals of a public sphere in cyberspace where people are currently able to discuss and debate key issues. The theory is then related to activities undertaken through the ‘vortals’ of the ABC and SBS. Finally, the extent of political intervention and commercial influence is evaluated.

What's 'childless' got to do with it?

Childlessness is increasing in Australia and has resulted in an upsurge of media commentary on the lives of childless women, This paper investigates the use of the label 'childless' in the Australian print media by drawing meaning and understanding from these representations within the context of pronatalist ideologies. Our analysis suggests that childless(ness) is used as an irrelevant descriptor and as a discreditable attribute, which fudher serves to perpetuate negative othering stereotypes of childless women. This is particularly exemplified through the representation of Australia's Prime Minister Julia Gillard by the print media. This analysis highlights the continued positioning of women in regards to their reproductive status.

How to keep your mojo rising

Print media, as we know it, is slowly morphing online and transforming tabloids into tablets. Technology is creating new outlets for news and new ways of doing stuff in the newsroom. The result is decreasing revenues, operational shifts, redundancies and newspaper closures. 

Gendered experiences of industry change and the effects of neoliberalism

In a time of dramatic and rapid change in the global media industry and when technological advances and media concentration are shaping the way news is produced and consumed, little research has focused on how the producers of news are affected by such change. This paper explores narratives of confidence and cynicism as told to me by Australian print news media journalists. I am interested in journalists’ memories and experiences of personal change that arise from an intensified workplace and how neoliberal discourses affect newsroom culture. How do the journalists I interview experience and speak of changes in the newsroom? In what ways is being a journalist different now to when they entered the industry? In effect, how have journalists changed as a result of journalism's changes? The interviews with 17 print media journalists contain rich narratives with which to explore how participants remember and make sense of industry changes. This paper finds that the intensification of work practices, ethical constraints and gender bias, underpinned by neoliberalism, have aided in creating a cynicism among many of the journalists interviewed. Nevertheless, the majority of interviewees suggest that a career in journalism has increased their personal and/or professional confidence. There are, however, gendered differences in this experience.

Mediatization and education: a sociological account

This chapter presents an account of the mediatization of education policy through a focus on the development and uptake of the knowledge economy discourse in national education policy and research settings. During the late 20th and early part of the 21st century, Australia, like other nation states around the globe, came to adopt the knowledge economy discourse as a kind of meta-policy that would help connect a variety of statistical indicators and provide direction for a number of policy areas, including education, science, and research funding. In Australia the adoption of a knowledge economy discourse was preceded by coverage from specialized sections of the quality print media, discussed broadly as a debate about the social contract that was afforded to fields charged with developing and producing national capacities for knowledge production. Such a debate mirrored similar claims by Michael Gibbons in the late 1990s, where he argued for a new social contract between science and society. Given the media coverage surrounding the uptake of the knowledge economy discourse and the promotion of the concept by the OECD, this chapter presents an account of the emergence of the knowledge economy discourse through a focus on the mediatization of the concept. The broad argument presented in this account is that what could be called “mediatization effects”, related to the promotion and adoption of policy concepts, are variable, and reach the broader public in inconsistent, time-bound, and sporadic patterns. In order to understand mediatization effects in respect of policy, the paper draws on a broad Bourdieuian informed conceptual framework to understand different kinds of fields, their logics of practice, and importantly here, cross-field effects. Specifically, the focus is on those cross-field effects related to the impact of practices within both national and global fields of journalism on national and global fields of education policy. While the case is an Australian one, the account explores general and more broadly applicable ways to understand links between the globalization and the mediatization of policy.

'Very inflated rhetoric polysyllables and so on': the public intellectual and jargon in the academy

The public intellectual, by their very definition, aims to reach a large sector of the public or publics. This requires proficiency, or at least the capacity to communicate in a variety of forms. As a large proportion of the public, to which the public intellectual appeals, is an online or cyber public, the importance of blogs in a computer-literate public cannot be under-estimated. The immediacy of the blog and the way in which an online presence facilitates immediate communication between the public and the public intellectual through the posting of comments online allow for a broad recognition of the intellectual in the public arena. My arguments will hinge on my interviews with contemporary American public intellectuals (Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Todd Gitlin, Camille Paglia and Stephen Greenblatt) and their views on communication in a society experiencing a decline in the publication of print media.

Obese adults' perceptions of news reporting on obesity: the panopticon and synopticon at work

News reporting, in channels such as broadcast and print media, on obesity as an issue has increased dramatically in the last decade. A qualitative study, in which we used in-depth interviews and thematic analysis, was undertaken to explore 142 obese individuals’ perceptions of, and responses to, news reporting about obesity. Participants believed that news reporting on obesity focused on personal responsibility and blame, and portrayed obese people as “freaks.” They described being portrayed as “enemies” of society who were rarely given a voice or identity in such news coverage unless they were seen to be succeeding at weight loss. They were also critical of the simplistic coverage of obesity, which was in contrast with their personal experiences of obesity as complex and difficult to address. Participants believed that obesity news reporting added to the discrimination they experienced. We consider how this news reporting may act as a form of “synoptical” social control, working in tandem with wider public health panoptical surveillance of obesity.

Spectacle and publics: Ava Gardner in Australia 1959

Ava Gardner’s famous line about Melbourne being the right place to film a story about the end of the world was part of the spectacle created by the print media to capitalise on her presence here to film, On the Beach in 1959. Gardner’s refusal to appear in public created different responses from the Australian print media the most interesting of which was Melbourne’s The Truth. With the help of a fledgling paparazzi, Truth used Gardner’s non-appearance to create a fictitious image of her which was mediated to create extremes of public opinion in order to generate sales. This paper examines The Truth ’s response to Gardner in the context of the creation and manipulation of public spectacle.

A mídia impressa sergipana nas eleições para governador em 2006: cobertura do Cinform, correio de Sergipe e jornal da cidade

The elections for governor in 2006 with its victory Marcelo Déda Workers Party (PT), were a landmark in the state of Sergipe, for the first time, called progressive fronts (an alliance of parties formed mostly by origin of the left) broke the hegemony of two political groups, Franco and the Alves, whose direction was in force for over 30 years. This study proceeds on the assumption that the print media has certain standards of conduct in covering the election period. Therefore, this study seeks to quantify, classify and compare data from three newspapers more representative of the State of Sergipe (Cinform, Cidade Journal and Correio de Sergipe) to analyze the behavior of these journals, such as private apparatus of hegemony in election coverage 2006. It also uses the concept of hegemony Gramsci and theories of journalism framing (Entman and Porto) and agenda setting (McCombs and Shaw) to identify these patterns

Inclusão e deficiência: em busca das representações sociais na mídia impressa em Natal/RN

This thesis is the result of an extensive research on print media discourse on the inclusion of disabled people in society. Articles published in the newspapers Diário de Natal/O Poti and Tribuna do Norte from 1992 to 2002 have been analyzed. Beginning with the very same questions that moved Moscovici (1978) in his classic study La Psychalyse son image et son public , according to which the media play a predominant role in the formation and propagation of social representations as well as in the construction of human behaviors, we have chosen this mass media as our investigation field. Understanding the importance of the communication theory, we intend to associate it to the social representation theory, since communication, as an aspiration, relates to the fundamentals of all humanity (WOLTON, 2004, p. 56). Moreover, means of communication represent an important space for symbolic production and representational process, allowing the analysis of the circulating discourses on social inclusion and disability. Based on these questions, we have determined social representations present in print media on the subject to be our study object. This objective was elected due to the fact that the thematic of disability and inclusion is scarcely and sporadically found in journalistic speech. The research questions have been: which is the representation of disabled people s condition in print media? What changes have occurred during the analyzed period and which was the role played by print media in this process? The research corpus was composed of newspaper articles about various aspects concerning disability and of free word association by reporters. We have analysed: 1) graphical language promoted by the picture of the substances propagated in the period from 1992 a 2002; 2) free word association experiments carried out with reporters of both newspapers; and 3) texts published from 1996 to 1997 using the high-tech program ALCESTE (Contextual Lexical Analysis of a Set of Segments of Texts). The results revealed that the print media in Natal/RN refer to the topic in a discontinuous way, and depend on specific events to highlight disabled people s fight for their rights. Social inclusion is still a great challenge for these people in all levels. We believe that this incapacity to overcome all kinds of obstacles is established in a dialectic relation between society and the media: society remains silent (the manifestation of interest for the cause only attracts some people s or groups attention) and the media, which selects which information is to be broadcasted, gives no evidence to the issue. This representation may be noticed in the infrequency in which articles about the subject are published, as well as in the emphasis to sports, a more important issue for the media. An implication of this study is that a new perspective is opened for analysis and reflection: the Paralympics games as both an inclusive and a segregating social phenomenon. It would be beautiful to have all of us together!

Publicidade e moda: um estudo sobre a materialidade da mídia e a produção de sentido na revista ffw>>mag!

The proposal of this research is to analyze the convergence between fashion and communication shown on the materiality of the print media, and how the language from the supporter influences on the production of sense by the target market. Made real in the research corpus comprised of six ffw>>mag! magazines from the year 2011. The applied conceptual mechanism tries to investigate the production of sense from the physical attributes before interpreting the message s content, to do so, the Materiality of Communication is used, which offers an investigative apparatus of the media in its material shape, and those as influences in the communicative acts and processes. Methodologically, we adopt the Peircean Semiotics Theory, for its study focus on the analysis of the possible processes of production of sense. Through Semiotics we achieve the interpretative levels that allow us to clarify the questionings that come from the research s objectives, identifying and tracing the cognitive and intelligibility schemes bound to the media speeches of materiality. The analysis coordinated to the concepts and theories employed in this study point to a confirmation that the materiality of the reviewed media communicates to the readers in the same intensity as its content, provides a preview of the content and notifies the intentions of the publication. In the commercial way, characterizing the target audience it craves, and also in the conceptual way, demonstrating the ideas it wants to communicate. Where the convergence between communication and fashion unfolds as the materiality of the media by the choice of the materials and finishing options, and mainly by the selection and manipulation of technical images and colors from the cycles of fashion

Consumir e descartar: análise da cobertura da Folha de S. Paulo e Jornal da Cidade no caso da proibição da distribuição das sacolas pláticas nos supermercados do Estado de São Paulo.

Pós-graduação em Comunicação - FAAC

Do fato à notícia e ao filme: o assalto ao trem pagador

Pós-graduação em Comunicação - FAAC