Week 5 Lecture

Week Five's lecture was on ethics in journalism, specifically different ethical frameworks and how they are applied over the broader fields of journalism and communication. We had Dr. John Harrison in as a guest lecturer. Deontological ethics systems are based on rules, principles and duties; compared to consequentialist ethics, which are 'outcome-oriented'.

By discussing the difference between the 'good/bad taste' spectrum and 'right/wrong ethics' spectrum, we were able to arrive at the conclusion that taste and ethics are two related but separate value entities.

Here are a couple of articles that deal with what we covered, both by Jonathon Holmes of MediaWatch fame. I think I have referenced one of them before. Holmes is talking about the possible need (or not) for a deontological code of ethics for the journalism profession (above such codes as do already exist).

Media Usage Assessment

Prepare yourself for a graph barrage:

(Click on image for full size version)

Thus details my daily media usage for the two weeks beginning Friday the 12th of August and finishing Thursday the 25th. My total media consumption time was 2,190 minutes (or thirty-six and a half hours) which makes it close enough to twenty hours a week spent consuming media. This is of course disregarding the media types I did not catalogue for convenience's sake, including billboard advertising, time spent on game networks such as XBOX Live, other visual mediums such as posters and signs, the paper they put on the tray at McDonalds, et. al.. I think this figure speaks for itself: I need to spend more time outside. Assuming my lifestyle is somewhat typical of my demographic, there are a number of interesting observations to be made of the data.

Firstly, the sheer amount of time I spent consuming media surprised me, particularly the time spent on my smartphone: last week I spent almost 10 hours on my phone (not including calls and texting). The phone itself has only been part of my daily consumption habits for about four months; but it has already taken over the large part of time I previously spent on my netbook and PC. The portability is obviously the main factor for this move. I "have a friend" who even checks the headlines on his smartphone when he stops at red lights, not a word of a lie.

Secondly, I was surprised by the amount of radio I listened to. Out of the 'old' media grouping, it was by far the most regularly utilised medium; speaking most likely to it's niche market of 'passive' media. I only listened to the radio in the car and on my phone (I debated for a while whether to include that time in the smartphone category, but kept them separate for interest's sake). And unlike a lot of my contemporaries, I don't regularly download podcasts, therefore my consumption might even be lower than the average. I think this definitely confirms Steve Austin's theory, mentioned in the last audio lecture, that radio - as the oldest electronic medium - is adapting to new communication technologies more quickly than its rivals.

Finally I would not how much my consumption of media varies from day to day. Newspaper reading is delegated to the weekend, magazine consumption is basically the day when my jmag arrives, and I listen to a lot more radio on days I have to commute. This suggests perhaps in the new communication paradigm older technologies may not get replaced, but rather the average consumer will rely on a bevy of mediums with niche functions to deal with the practicalities of the modern life.

Also, I learnt I should not be given too much free time and the ability to make graphs.

Week 4 Lecture

This week's audio lecture contained interviews with Richard Fidler and Steve Austin, both esteemed radio journalists at ABC local radio. Some random but interesting statements I found worthy of note:

"[In radio] the voice comes from inside your head." (Richard Fidler)

"Radio is thriving at the moment... effortlessly blending into new platforms." (Fidler on new technology, social media)

"Don't believe those who say human beings are rational creatures... we are emotional beings." (Steve Austin)

"Up came Dead Poet's Society, and I cried." (Steve Austin on probably the best movie ever)


A big theme of both speakers was the value of the emotional connection that radio achieves.

Week 3 Lecture

This week's lecture was about telling stories with pictures. We saw an award-winning photo by Marissa Calligeros:

And after several hours of research I learned Marissa Calligeros likes Rick Astley and probably doesn't want to go out with me sometime.

Week 2 Lecture

Rod Chester guest-lectured in week two on the subject of 'Telling Factual Stories With Text'. Rod is a feature writer at the Courier-Mail, and has been for some time. He talked to us about writing hard news using the inverted pyramid method (most important information first, least important last). He also talked about his daughter, who he most definitely did not put in a box and post to Melbourne. If you want to hear things literally typed by this superstar, you could follow him around all day.

Week 1 Lecture

The first lecture for JOUR1111 in Semester 2, 2011 was an introduction to the course. The lecture contained a number of interesting quotes, including this one from Auberon Waugh:

"Generally speaking, the best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the shits into law."

This Post is Illegal

Go on, let's have a riot. I'll be at Queen Street Mall tomorrow with a piece of 2x4 and some nihilistic rage; I'd like you to join me in establishing a new world order.

So probably I'm not much of a demagogue, but you get the idea. I could - technically - go to jail for writing this post. And obviously I will not. What's the difference between me and these louts?

As Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill puts it, "...it is highly questionable whether [convicted inciters] Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan could be held morally responsible for their behaviour." O'Neill argues that in the UK the previous common-law iterations of incitement laws (now enshrined in the Serious Crimes Act 2007 Section 44) made a distinction between views 'circulated in the press' and encouragement uttered in the 'heat of the moment' to an audience teetering on the edge of a frenzy of violence.
Similarly, the Australian Criminal Code Act 1995 Section 2.4 Div 11 makes incitement an offence, going so far as to make incitement prosecutable "...even if committing the offence incited is impossible."

These laws are not legislative backwaters, with most the amendments made in the post-9/11 era. And in the UK at least, the public prosecutor and courts are apparently quite okay with sentencing two youths to four years in actual shiv-in-your-kidneys, ruled-by-gangs-and-rapists jail. For making a Facebook page about a riot. That nobody went to.

Whether or not we have at the moment the political will to get away with such a daring feat of inalienable-rights abusing, the fact is that we have the same laws in this country. And a few more that may worry you, if you get all antsy about your human rights. Is this sane? I could quite legally go to jail for inciting nobody to go steal something that does not exist.

What is missing from this equation is an understanding of individual culpability. If I post signs around Brisbane asking like-minded citizens to murder David Cameron with sharpened sticks, that is technically incitement. But it should not be the offence incitement. There should be an expectation that incitement is only a crime if the offender is capable of swaying a number of people in the heat of the moment to actually commit am offence. O'Neill's conclusion is quite apt:

"Both the powers-that-be and many in the radical intelligentsia see "the little people" as totally different to themselves - as incapable of processing ideas in a reasonable fashion and thus given to outbursts of newspaper-inspired hysteria. Effectively, they see everyday folk as the moral equivalent of attack dogs, who hear an order and act on it. Where we, the decent, educated people, have free will and the ability to make moral choices about how to behave, they, the ignorant horde, apparently do not."
My condolences to the Facebook warriors. You might be berks, but you certainly do not deserve what you got.

Obama's Missing Narrative

Drew Westen at the New York Times has a lot to say on the subject of Barack Hussein (link courtesy of the indefatigable @Proudreader).  It is good to see an opinion piece like this in mainstream journalism; though the NYT is hardly a tabloid.

Westen maintains one of Obama's greatest failings as a President is failing to present a simple narrative to the voters and acting upon it. After the GFC,

"...Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety."

Westen blames Obama's failure to establish a dialogue with the American people (and therefore his broader failure to re-stabilise the American economy) on a raft of possible reasons. A misinterpretation of the lofty principle of bipartisanship is one. 

Bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake is utterly ridiculous; a compromise between two groups of morons is likely to be, well, moronic. The reason our adversarial political system values bipartisanship so highly is not because we give a shit whether or politicians get along. It's because generally when the cycle of proposition and disposition is interrupted (something you certainly don't see from either the Republicans or the LNP much nowadays) it is because the issue at hand is so important not even their desperate instinct for nay-saying can override it. The beauty of being (a least somewhat) a successful bipartisan leader is not your ability to compromise. It's the fact that they must be doing the right thing a lot - why else is everyone agreeing with them?

Of course the last paragraph is there for purely academic purposes. Who wants the respect of the current Senate? As Westen succinctly puts:

"...400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans... the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically... only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation... as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate."

I've only scratched the surface of the article, it really is quite compelling. Linking it again for emphasis.

Reverend Nile Invokes Godwin's Law

NSW Christian Democrat MP the Rev. Fred Nile has once again invoked Godwin's Law in the esteemed chamber today. This latest tirade of gratuitous (and rather confused) name-calling revolves around a piece of Government legislation that allows public schools to offer ethics classes as an alternative to scripture. Quoted in the ABC News article:

"[The current proposed ethics course] is a course which I believe does not teach children right from wrong but promotes the secular, humanist relativist philosophy."

Which obviously leads him straight to the conclusion that:

"I believe this is the philosophy that we saw during World War Two with the Nazis and the communists."

Is it the job of the tax-payers to pay for whichever cult wants their kids brainwashed at school (presumably because they can't be bothered to do it at home)? Should religious 'education' even be part of a rational and empirical education system? Is allowing an ethics course, which teaches kids instead to rely on their own values system instead of others', a meaningful alternative? These questions and more, Nile couldn't care less about.

It's a lot safer to hold your hands over your ears and scream naughty words, Rev. Nile. Otherwise you might have a generation of Australians with their eyes open to universal ethics systems. And you'd probably lose whatever votes you are clinging to.

 

 

Australian Literary Review: Probably Not Sexy Enough

The Group of Eight Universities is one of those honour society scams. You know, they create a group whose only function is to be prestigious, and whose prestige somehow rubs off you when you join. But you only get to join if you are prestigious in the first place, so one wonders... Well, it's a nice little scam they've got going if you ask me; if you didn't know already, UQ is one of, if not the, most prestigious universities in the prestigious university group.

The G8 (I don't know if it was the group itself that disseminated that little acronym, but considering its resemblance to the other G8 I'm going to guess yes) has cut funding for the Australian Literary Review, which it was apparently funding to the tune of about $336,000. You might be saying "How does this affect me, Leo? I am not a massive nerd." Well, it likely doesn't affect you that much, except as a symptom of the general decline of academia in the news media.

When all the words in the paper get replaced by alternating pictures of breasts and tragic victims of crime, you'll miss the Australian Literary Review and its inaccessible rhetoric. Probably.

ABC: Australia's Most Trusted News Source

This article by Jonathan Holmes (of Media Watch fame) has some interesting figures in relation to media outlet trust. The ABC is a clear winner:

"It [this report on public trust of media outlets] showed that trust in the news and opinions to be found in Australian newspapers has taken quite a dive in the past year. In March 2010, 62 per cent of the sample had some or a lot of trust. In July this year that figure had slumped to 53 per cent.  (The Daily Telegraph, with only 45 per cent expressing any trust, did notably worse than The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald).A similar decline was evident for commercial TV news and current affairs.  There was even less trust in commercial radio news, and less still for talkback radio, news websites and internet blogs.During the same period, trust in the news and opinions of one news outlet increased: the ABC's. Seventy-one per cent of the sample said they had some or a lot of trust in ABC Television news and current affairs, up from 70 per cent the year before."

Holmes goes on to argue that the lack of respect and enforcement for industry codes of conduct in commercial journalism are the main driving force behind the decline of integrity (or the public perception of integrity, anyway). If you like your Jonathan Holmes - which I assume you do, since you are at least smart enough to read - you will recognise this line of argument. 

If I were to play the devil's advocate I might posit that having two tiers of journalism, public and commercial, each with its own particular way of seeking and reporting news ensures that one covers for the shortcomings of the other. The corollary of this lofty notion, however, is that I don't see many negative consequences arising from the ABC's moral frameworks (if perhaps in the way they are interpreted). 

Industry standards though? Well, I guess New of the World has proven that playing fast and loose with journalistic ethics sometimes makes the reporters antagonists in themselves; something the industry has to really avoid if they don't all want to be replaced by bloggers one day.

A frightening prospect, really. I can just say whatever I want and I don't ever get in trouble from my editor. My editor is openoffice.org and it is a pretty cruisy boss. Look: John Howard once strangled a puppy. 83% of Coalition voters are incontinent. See? I thought I was getting in trouble for that last one, but it turns out that red squiggly line just meant I had spelt 'incontinent' wrong. 

I think you get the point.

Gittins on Net Value

Ross Gittins is my favourite economist (well, to be honest, the list of economists I know by name isn't exactly a novel). In this article he arbitrarily assigns value to the many hard-to-quantify benefits of the internet as a technology.


http://www.rossgittins.com/2011/08/net-benefits-at-50-billion-and-climbing.html

You may argue figures with him (if you are a more confident mathematician than I) but it definitely brings the Net into the arena of a major industry. Hard to believe of an entity that is still 90% grammatically incorrect cats.

Leo Campbell: Conqueror. Academic. Lover.

Facts about Leo: from Brisbane, likes live music, once ate a battery.

(Picture related; batteries make you a little crazy)

This is my blog for a journalism course at the University of QLD, JOUR1111 with the brilliant Dr. Bruce Redman (who is quite a swarthy gentleman, if I may say so!). In the interests of fair and balanced journalism, I will note here that Dr. Redman will be marking the blog at the end of this semester.