Just another Media of the Immediate Future site

This week, I would like to take a look at the use of stereotypes by the broadcast media, and their effect on people’s perceptions of those stereotyped sections of society. All of us have heard many stories about the problems between Australia and India because of supposed racial attacks on Indians in Australia. Everybody found fault with everybody, but I believe that the issue would not have lead to so much confusion if the media had reported it right.

In a 2008 article in the Chicago Defender, Marissa Lee describes studies done by professors at the University of Illinois, which found that Television news often perpetuates racial stereotypes. The study showed that watching African Americans being portrayed as criminals over and over again, made viewers believe that they were poor, intimidating and had low incomes. In another study described in the same article, it was found that in comparison with statistics from the California Department of Justice, African Americans were over represented as criminals on the news.  You can read the article here:

http://www.chicagodefender.com/article-1598-study-television-news-often-perpetuates-racial-stereotypes.html

 In another 2009 article on the Temple Journalism Review, it is noted that the only time that Hispanics and Asians make the news in Philadelphia is when bad things happen. They feel that the news media tends to marginalize them in news coverage and the reasons for this they do not understand, as they are a strong presence in the state. Even the non minorities in the state admit that there is definitely an imbalance in the news when it comes to equal and fair coverage of minorities.  Here’s the article:

http://tujreview.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/minorities-in-the-media-stereotypes-and-negativity/

 In yet another article titled Stereotypes of Minorities in the media, (http://liz-mccormick.suite101.com/stereotypes-of-minorities-in-the-media-a134017 ) the author describes how the people of America are constantly exposed to stories about crime and negative activities, which builds a notion that the cities are not a safe place to live in. These stories are also not balanced in terms of race and demographics. These stereotypes also continue to be exaggerated when it comes to depicting poverty in the media with most stories about poverty being accompanied by photographs and footage of African American neighbourhoods.

With regard to Australia, I am not in a position to comment on news reporting here, as I have only been here a short while. But I did come across this article while doing my research for this post, and I thought it would be interesting. The article talks about the portrayal of Aboriginals in the news, and from what I have seen and heard, there is quite a bit of negative portrayal of Aboriginals and their lives in the media. Here it is:

http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/previous%20series/proceedings/1-27/~/media/publications/proceedings/21/plater.ashx  

As established by a previous week’s discussion, the media plays a huge role in shaping public opinion, and in establishing our views about the various issues in the world. With such an important responsibility on its shoulders, what steps should be taken to ensure fair and accurate reporting of people from different races? 

The article about the Aboriginals and the media talks about an Aboriginal Media Liaison Group formed in western Australia, consisting of journalists and Aboriginals, who conduct campaigns to raise awareness on how to improve reporting (for the media) and how to handle the media (for the Aboriginal people). Steps like these definitely point to a brighter future, but will this be enough? How can journalists ensure that they don’t fall prey to the trap of stereotyping when reporting matters related to minorities?

by Rachael Pictor

Citizen journalism involves members of the public actively participating in reporting, analysing and contributing to news and information. Many examples of citizen journalism include personal blogs, independent news sites, mailings, personal broadcasting and news content captures on mobile devices. This week I would like to look at how new media has enhanced citizen journalism and the implications that come from this.

Journalism faces a number of challenges, as there are shifts away from news sources like newspaper to online content. As new media develops the public has found more and more ways to contribute to and share news stories. This enables many countries where the media on controlled by the state. South Korea, for example, has a flourishing citizen journalist network. “A global study into 60 citizen journalism projects in 33 countries found citizen journalism flourished under governments which could be characterized as “soft authoritarianism” regimes” (The Australian 2009). These guerilla journalists were using blogging sites and twitter to share their messages.

Australia has also used citizen journalism, in 2007 the Australian site YouDecide 2007 began as the first citizen journalism website (http://www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/what_is_the_digital_economy/australias_digital_economy_future_directions/final_report/appendix_case_studies/youdecide2007_an_australian_case_study_in_citizen_journalism).

The site ran during the 2007 federal election from early September to the 23^rd of November. YouDecide 2007 acted as an experiment to demonstrate how social media and public participation can shape political engagement in Australia.  The site worked by hosting user-generated content. Registered users could upload multimedia content and any member of the public could register. The site creators wanted to generate local based content and have a sense on community within the site. The site was entirely promoted through social media and from this the site attracted around 2000 users and approximately 12,000 readers each week.

One story that attracted a lot of attention and otherwise would not have been covered by mainstream media was the ‘crate-gate’ story and exposed Peter Lindsay’s rude comments about young people struggling with their mortgage. Users were able to comment on stories and feedback was encouraged building the strength of the site and built community interaction.

Citizen journalism is believed to create more accurate, localised news with great exposure. YouDecide 2007 is an example of how new media can harness the voices of citizens and generate discussion. The fact that mainstream media covered stories from the YouDecide 2007 site proves that citizen journalists can have an influence in the media. As many citizen journalists feel there is a certain spin on mainstream news stories, to have a site like YouDecide 2007 which was monitored by journalists, but with content was created by citizen displays how professional journalism can work together with citizen journalism to create more accurate and relative stories.

I think that because new media is so accessible it is easy for fake news stories to be spread more easily, but at the same time it can spread very accurate news in a timely manner. A collaborative effort between profession journalists and citizen journalists using new media sites like twitter and blogs can ensure news stories are factual, informative and also relative to audiences. I believe this is something that should be factored in largely to the future of journalism due to the challenges traditional media faces in the 21^st century.

lead discussion by MillySu

The news content might be more universal and intriguing to the audience in Australia if the ABC cut down the local news to national news. However, the media industry could be suffered from a sequence of effects that happen with the changing policy. According to The Guardian from UK, Plunkett mentioned about the redeployment and the redundancies of employment in the article Global Radio to reduce local news output and outsource travel reports, which explains that the aim of cutting down the local news was to create a significant national news centre providing a more professional news service across the group, whereas some employees could face the end of their future career.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/15/globalradio-commercialradio

Therefore, while the media industry decides to change the contents, people who work in different departments of TV, Radio, and Newspapers could be in the risk. I suggest that the idea of cutting down the local news would depend on the audience needs, the necessities of the country and the reasonable redeployment of the media sphere. For example, I come from Taiwan, where the territory is roughly 220 times smaller than Australia, and the local news normally broadcast with the national news which people can barely notice the differences between, because Taiwan is such a small island. The footages and sound tracks could be sent to Television and Radio stations by the reporters from whole nation with only few hours traveling to the scene; therefore, limited distance is our advantages to broadcast national news. However, for those countries where continents are enormous as Australia or the United States, it is impossible to achieve when the audience are mainly prefer the local news of their states.             

In the investigation from TVB, which is the not-for-profit trade association of America’s commercial broadcast television industry, shows that” Cable News has Personalities but Broadcast News has Ratings,” that is, national news has personalities but local news has its ratings! With the example of President Obama’s speech about the budget debt limit, there are more viewers across the country watched on local broadcast stations over cable news network’s which indicates the audience’s preference of  local news instead of the cable news and national news. It shows that the needs and preferences of audience is one of the crucial elements when choosing the local and national news contents.    

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=zh-TW&sl=en&tl=zh-TW&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tvb.org%2Fmeasurement%2F4748&anno=2

The reasons for shutting down the Art Nation on ABC TV and Artworks on Radio National might be various according to the statements from the news on Crikey, some said it could be the problem with commissioning.

 http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/08/03/outsourcing-the-arts-at-aunty-the-problem-with-commissioning/

From my point of view, I don’t really understand that how important is the arts to Australian as well as how could it actually affect the audience. However, I am sure that it is definitely one of the most important elements when running the programs on TV and Radio in Taiwan, especially for most of the foreigners from all over the world are willing to adapt themselves to this multi-cultural country. They are eager to know more about Taiwanese culture! To be clear, it is said that the best way to get know about a new environment is to intimate with the arts, which represents the culture, customs, living habits and the style of the country. Therefore, while Kim Dalton, head of ABC Television, told The Sydney Morning Herald that one of the reasons for its axing is audiences had fallen by “about 30-odd per cent over the past few years,” it seems like they didn’t pay much attention to what happen to the rating and the regular audience, but decided to remove it without any efforts. Maybe it just as Lyndon Terracini, artistic director of Opera Australia said in the article, “it seems unthinkable the ABC won’t have an arts division [however] there should be a balance between what happens in-house and what happens externally with private producers.”

This week, I would like to look at the role that broadcast journalism plays in shaping public opinion. Television, radio and in recent times, the Internet can be seen as a means of communication by private individuals in a public sphere. It has also become the public’s ‘window to the world’ when we want to be kept up to date with the events taking place nationally and internationally. So there is no doubt that broadcast journalism is a tool that has the ability to capture audience attention and, whether deliberately or not, shape public opinion.

This is supported in a paper written by Bob Hope-Hume which was published on the ACMI site (http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/PUB_RAD_OZ_HUME.html). He talks about there being two parts to this topic. On one hand, broadcast media is a tool that equips the public with the knowledge they need in order to allow them to form their own opinion. One of these instances is when politicians use broadcast media as a tool of communicating their message and gaining public votes. Recently, we were bombarded with information about the controversial refugee deal between Australia and Malaysia and the issue of the Carbon tax. With the information provided, we then form our opinion on whether or not we support the Government’s current initiatives.

But there is no doubt that it is a tool that can become misused because only a select group of people are allowed to broadcast their opinions. These groups then have full control the kind of information that we receive. Bob Hope-Hume uses the term “monopolies of knowledge” which was derived by Harrold Innis in 1972. Recently we watched as rioters took to the streets of London over the death of Mark Duggan. Initially we had heard that the police had shot him because he had first shot at the police. Later it emerged that in fact, the police had given misleading information about the facts of the case to the family and then told a different story to the media. This case was a classic example of a party misusing broadcast media as a tool for shaping public opinion.Broadcast journalism is clearly a very powerful means of getting a message across. Community based broadcast media has allowed for a less hierarchical media monopoly because it has provided a gateway for the usually more marginalized groups to have their voices heard. But there is still a long way to go. What steps should we take in order to make broadcast media, as Bob Hope-Hume says, “a more democratic medium”?

This week  would like to talk about news content in Australia.

This week, The Australian newspaper reported that Channel Ten had announced that they would be cutting their local news weekend  programming and switching from a 60 minute to a 90 minute national news program on the weekend.

You can see the story here:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/ten-drops-local-weekend-news-to-go-national/story-e6frg996-1226129293214

The Australian also reported that the ABC had announced that they woudl be cutting their Arts-based radio programs as of next year. This follows the axing of two Arts programs on ABC television. 

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/latest-casualty-kicks-the-arts-off-our-abc/story-e6frg996-1226129297569

I would like you to discuss both the positive and negative ramifications of these decisions, thinking about news content, employment, and the needs of the audience.

Not such a long time ago, television and radio were the only way to get news and information about and from the rest of the world. The sharing of content was fluctuating just in one way, from the professionals’ side to the audience. The problem was that the audience had their own words to say, and to share.

When social media emerged few years ago, it’s been like a big bang in the new technologies. Many facets of the communication changed. All these new websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and so on, are well known from the audience.

Nowadays, technologists, media industrialists talk about the concept of “The Three Screens”. It includes computers, mobiles and televisions. They are our windows to our own world that we create. We model, choose, transfer information.

The impact of the social on the broadcast is really important. Today, professionals really care about our point of view. They are still giving us the news, with one exception, they added our reflections in their communication strategy. We want to be a part of the experience, and sometimes we might hold THE great news. They literally need us. Whoever did not understand that, is losing its audience.

“Media has become a mass of conversations, based on two-way communication, not on traditional one-way information push models”, says Rob Van Den Dam in his article “How social media is redefining broadcasting”. Internet is the place where major changes happened. This is where social media mainly transformed our methods of communication. Million of Facebook and Twitter users relay information or just make information public. Moreover, with the idea of “The Three Screens”, the news flow is faster, especially with the uses of mobile devices. People carry their mobile phones everywhere, constantly connected to Internet. They use social apps or they are directly connected to Internet. And in less than a second, they broadcast their own information. Wherever they are, whenever it is, that is the beauty of the social media.

For example, the 51^st Grammy Awards created a partnership with Ustream, the leader of live online video. In that case, with Twitter, it permitted to Internet users to comment the show in live. For this social web event, according to the article “The Future Of The Broadcast Is Social”, it attracted 200,000 online viewers. This example shows perfectly the alliance between social media and broadcasting.

All these changes seem to be well accepted. But, if we refer to the article “Twitter Revolution: Social Media as Broadcast Media”, it mentioned that the function of Facebook, or Twitter, as a broadcast media is not appreciated as it should be. This is something that I could understand. Social media created a conflict between the traditional and the new trend of broadcasting. As I said, before it was only professionals who were writing, publishing, creating the news. Now, with the social media, everyone has access to new low cost tools to broadcast their own news.

The conflict, that I just mentioned, is not the only explanation. They are also the cultural, political, and historical aspects. Also let’s not forget, that news broadcasting is quiet bonded with politic. So, if the impact of social media on broadcasting is important, it means that it has also an impact on politic.

Free media is an ingrained value in Australian society. The media is free from governmental influence, to report informatively and accurately, on newsworthy matters The Australian Communication and Media Authority, ACMA, administers 26 acts passed by parliament in the past 50 years, which includes 523 pieces of regulation, yet the majority of this legislation was made before the internet was in use in Australia. The rapid development of technology has rendered gaps in regulation, which have been filled by ‘bandaid solutions’. If new regulation is not formulated and implemented, then the media will have the opportunity to, for example, exploit the way the content is delivered. The ACMA media release states that ‘of the 55 legislative concepts analysed in the paper, the majority are either ‘broken’ or under significant pressure from the effects of convergence’. ACMA is the government body responsible for the regulation of broadcasting, the internet, radio-communications and telecommunications. It is also responsible for regulating online content, including mobile phone content and enforcing Australia’s anti-spam law. It aims to promote self-regulation and competition in the communications industry, while protecting consumers and other users. ACMA issues and renews broadcasting licences, regulates the content of radio and television services and administers the ownership and control rules for broadcasting services. It is quite obvious that ACMA has regulation responsibilities over broad range of mediums, and this will only expand as the media digitalises. Areas that, I believe, will need to be monitored and regulated include; diversity and the monopolization of media outlets by commercial organisations; the development of mobile phone technology – and the blurring of the lines between financial and communications regulations when using a mobile phone as an alternative to cash or credit cards. The University of New South Wales’ Catharine Lumby and Kate Crawford, senior academics at the Journalism and Media Research Centre there released a research paper on convergence entitled The Adaptive Moment: A Fresh Approach to Convergent Media in Australia, the paper suggested that Australia create a new “one stop shop” regulator that they call a “Convergent Media Board”, which they think should “act as Australia’s centralised point of contact with international for addressing media content governance”. Such a board would not replace ACMA or the other regulatory agencies, however, but rather work alongside them. Lumby and Crawford do not explain in too much detail about how the board would work, or who would run it, such is how complex the issue is. This new authority is an idea that is worth discovering. Convergent and digitialised media is growing at such a rapid rate that the creation of a new board is the logical next step. I believe that the best form of regulation is self-regulation, as an industry, the media should be able to establish what conduct is acceptable. However, there are always going to be instances whereby the media oversteps the mark. This is where ACMA, or another convergent-media specific body, has the ability to step in to adjudicate, and punish if necessary.

This week David will lead the discussion–he has asked me to post the discussion theme.

This week, the Australian Communication and Media Authority released a report saying that most of their media regulation has been ‘broken’ by the convergence of media platforms.

Here is the press release and a link to the report: http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_410128

Here is some news coverage of the report in The Australian newspaper (online): http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/regulation-broken-by-convergence/story-e6frg996-1226124027060

I would like you all to respond tot he findings in the report, thinking about whether ACMA can actually be a sufficient regulator in a digital age and what makes ‘good’ regulation–how much do we need, if any, and regulation over what?

By Long, Ha Nam

The development of technology has obviously changed the face of the whole world. Every industry, every segment receives enormous benefit from the advanced technology, and media is not an exception. Indeed, with supports from hi-tech devices, it has never been such easy for journalists to discover what they want. However, everything has two sides, even the help from hi-tech also causes problems to media, especially when it is involved with ethics. The fact is that some journalists overuse their tools during their business, which usually leads to invasion of privacy. The question has emerged: is media regulation ‘tight’ enough to protect people from unethical behaviors of journalists.

The need for tightening regulation has been brought into debate.

John Hartigan – the leading voice for Australia’s Right to Know – opposed the legislated right to privacy by stating that: ‘If a statutory right of privacy were allowed, without a corresponding consideration of the public interest… it would mainly benefit only those public figures who are rich enough to cry ‘privacy’ when the media threatens to expose their hypocrisy or corruption.’

Another case is Channel 7 and New South Wales Minister for Transport, David Campell. Briefly, the case was about Channel 7 had discovered the minister using his ministerial car to visit a gay men’s club, which later led to Campell’s resignation. This case brought Seven, and later the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) into trouble. First of all, ACMA decided that there was a breach of Commercial Television Code of Practice in the case. And the next thing which matters is to decide whether the public interest was taken into account, in this case, it was. In an explanation for the resignation, Chris Chapman, ACMA Chairman stated that ‘the resignation of the Minister meant that the broadcast, which would otherwise have been an invasion of privacy, was justified, but solely because it provided a deeper explanation of the circumstances behind the registration…’ In brief, Seven was not guilty in exposing Campell’s life. However, the case followed with 57% of people believed a politician’s private life should not be made public. Additionally, in a letter to Federal Minister of Communications, former interim CEO of Advertising Standards Bureau, Mark Jeanes, described ACMA as ‘a shadow, narrow-minded, unprincipled and disgraceful decision.’

I am not Australian, so things are not very familiar to me. What I think, personally, it is good to let people know what happening around them, but it is a big problem to let them know everything. The truth is that people need to know, so that they can totally trust their government. But of course there is something must be kept in secret, otherwise it will cause panic in community. For instance, the Tian An Men Square event in 1989 was never allowed to mention in China. I live in Vietnam, where government controls media. Anything which is believed causing unrest amongst people will be strictly forbidden (sovereignty, politics, military). However, the media rule allows journalists to discovery corruptions, bribe and bring them to the light. I mean, the difference between ‘allowed’ and ‘not allowed’ comes from the scale of influences. The bigger the scale is, the more likely it should not be exposed to public.