Watch This Space: The Future of Australian Journalism

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Watch This Space The future of Australian journalism

Milissa Deitz is a journalist and author and currently lectures in Media at the University of Western Sydney. She has written extensively for magazines and newspapers including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sunday Telegraph and Vogue and co-hosts the TVS book show, Shelf Life.

Other titles in the Australian Encounters series (Series editor: Tony Moore) Tim Soutphommasane Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-building for Australian progressives

Watch This Space The future of Australian journalism Milissa Deitz

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521144285 © Milissa Deitz 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13

978-0-511-78987-8

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-14428-5

Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Reproduction and Communication for educational purposes The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of the pages of this work, whichever is the greater, to be reproduced and/or communicated by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Contents

Acknowledgements

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Encountering Australian journalism

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Preface

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Introduction

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The history of the future of journalism

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Private versus public media

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This is not news

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The media virus

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We’re all journalists now

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Conclusion – unfinished business

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their generous advice and time: Graham Meikle, McKenzie Wark, Lynette Sheridan Burns, David McKnight, Rachel Morley, Linda Drummond, Susan Hanley and Frances Wade. Catharine Lumby has been a mentor and friend to me and I thank her for that. I am very grateful to my most unsympathetic reader, Pip Cummings. My partner, Nick, knows there is little I am able to do without his support and how grateful I am to him. Lastly, I cannot thank Tony Moore, who commissioned this book, quite enough for his support, inspiration, encouragement and shared love of the carnivalesque.

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Encountering Australian journalism Series editor, Tony Moore The Cambridge University Press Australian Encounters series comes at an important time in our national life, when the old orthodoxies of left and right are proving inadequate to understand or remedy the challenges facing Australia. In each volume, readers will encounter new research and thinking by scholars and public intellectuals about an issue or problem confronting Australia that refreshes our public debate and aids civic renewal. One aim is to provide a bridge between academics undertaking innovative research in our universities and readers seeking new ideas beyond the homilies of media pundits and politicians. Journalism is a mode of investigation and analysis that Australians, like other moderns, rely upon to interrogate their society. But lately, journalism itself has become the subject of interrogation. In conferences and speeches, blogs and tweets, the question being asked is: will journalism survive? This is an important question for Australian democracy, and the subject of this volume, Watch This Space. There is no shortage of critics who believe our enthusiasm for sourcing and sharing information over the internet has delivered a death blow to the markets, business models and standards that have long sustained journalism across the traditional media platforms of print, radio and television.1 However, for media scholar Milissa Deitz, these rumours are greatly exaggerated. Indeed she is optimistic that, far from being a gravedigger, the internet is journalism’s saviour. What will perish, however, is the 20th century’s version of journalism. In Australia this orthodoxy, born of the age of press barons, oligopolies, mass markets and paternalist public broadcasting, is changing rapidly in response to new media applications and technologies, convergence of old media forms on single platforms, audience fragmentation into niche interests, consumers’ insistence on participation and the

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emergence of a new suite of cultural entrepreneurs happy to service these demands. Far from ‘dumbing down’ and weakening democracy, these trends are broadening the definition of what constitutes news, and taking political debate beyond the mainstream consensus insisted upon by the powerful and their spinners. There will be journalism, Deitz argues, but not as we’ve known it. Whereas the jeremiahs fixate on a ‘golden age’ that happily coincides with their own career trajectories, this book uses a longer time frame and recognises journalism’s history as a mode of communication that changes through a dynamic interrogation of society.2 For Deitz, new technology is restoring the partisan crusading, plurality of perspectives and engagement with change that made journalism the midwife of modernity in the 18th and 19th centuries. Building on media academic John Hartley’s study of the relationship between newspaper journalism and the popularisation of coffeehouse liberalism and radical thought that helped bring about the American and French revolutions, Deitz finds in our postmodern times a citizen journalism in lock step with a confident cyberspace political activism – spanning the Obama presidential election cam-

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paign, Osama Bin Laden’s viral videos, GetUp’s mobilisation of

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the conscience constituency in Australia’s 2007 federal ballot, anticorporate culture jamming and the rise of the prankster satire – that delivers once-marginal politics to centre stage.3 Indeed, in Australia’s 2007 poll, the Canberra press gallery struggled to keep up with unprecedented citizen intervention via the internet.4 Watch This Space does not deny that 20th-century journalism’s claim to ‘objectivity’ is a casualty of the new citizen journalism. It does argue that objectivity was always a self-serving ideology, observed in the breach, that never accurately described the reality of journalistic practice. There were always more sides to a story than the centrist left–right binary of two-party politics that journalists too often substitute for original research. The failure of Australian newspapers to seriously engage with scientific evidence about climate change, and the treatment of efforts to reduce carbon pollution as a fringe ‘green’ cause until Al Gore and Nick Stern conferred

‘northern hemisphere’ legitimacy, demonstrates just how blinkered the practice of objectivity can be.5 Deitz welcomes the shift from faux balance to more transparent partisanship, and demonstrates why the new journalism – by including far more people, ideas, causes and genres – represents a reinvigoration of the Australian public sphere. Digital media’s breaching of the border between professional journalists and audiences has called into being a new type of amateur commentator, a latter-day revival of the 19th-century ‘man of letters’ or Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’, that is surely a plus for civic life.6 The national conversation proves to be much broader – and much less earnest – than the agenda editors in both the ‘quality’ and ‘tabloid’ newspapers deign to legitimise as news. The established gatekeepers – proprietors, editors and professional journalists – do not always welcome changes that necessarily diminish their power, influence and profits, but the liberal capitalism to which the mainstream media long ago hitched its star thrives on creative destruction.7 Even in a polity like Australia, with its long tradition of cosseting cartels, the older media empires have had little choice but to open their gates to the digital barbarians. To do otherwise would leave the traditional media running been amusing to watch commercial media companies, which have extolled the sovereignty of market forces in other areas of our lives, protest against the preferences of consumers, advertisers and upstart entrepreneurs for the internet and its new aesthetics and politics. of places, the once bureaucratically moribund ABC, which is now busily shedding its Aunty image (a moniker redolent of patronising elitism inherited from the BBC) with a decisive exploitation of

Australian media ecosystem. But while Crikey, The Drum, Q and

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digital capability as it seeks to transform itself from a mass pub-

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Meanwhile, old media regeneration has occurred in that least likely

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the equivalent of an RSL slide night to dwindling audiences. It has

A and hoax-heavy satire like The Chaser and Hungry Beast may

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lic broadcaster into a narrowcasting hub distinguished by a more diverse, participatory and lively conception of the ‘public’.8 Watch This Space finds much to celebrate in the contemporary

have given Australian journalism back its mojo, what of so-called ‘quality’ journalism? Outside the taxpayer-funded ABC, how will media companies pay for long-haul investigative journalism of the sort that makes politicians and business leaders squirm and brings down government?9 While Deitz is sympathetic to this problem she asks an embarrassing question for those who defend the status quo: how often in recent times have the broadsheets, or quality current affairs broadcasters, exposed a great misdeed in the political, economic or social life of Australia? Indeed, she argues that the diseases of PR spin, political management of the news cycle and office-bound reporting crippled ‘quality’ journalism even before the business models began to stumble. Perhaps in-depth investigative journalism will return as an expanded niche specialty of the traditional news companies, which will persuade a significant section of readership to pay for an online subscription? In the meantime, in preference to a ‘fourth estate’ holding powerful institutions to account, senior journalists operate as another institution of power in Australia, and not surprisingly find themselves vulnerable to new media hoaxers and the subject of critique on sites such as Crikey and New Matilda.10

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Australians have been at the forefront of experiments in re-

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imagining journalism, yet these innovations are too often presented as a threat to business models that were always too dependent on state-sanctioned oligopoly. Odd, then, that many left-of-centre commentators join their right-wing sparring partners to lament the passing of a media status quo that has seldom embraced dissident voices. Watch This Space is a timely scholarly intervention in a debate that in this country has been polarised between defenders of a romanticised past and boosters of the latest gadget. Deitz moves beyond nostalgia and technological determinism to question journalism’s own myths and practices, while placing the agency of audiences at the centre of her analysis. This work will be a valuable resource for teachers and students of journalism, media and cultural studies, but it will also be appreciated by journalists who wish to think critically about what they do, and what they might do differently.

Preface

Over the last few years I have attended a number of conferences, held internationally and in various cities around Australia, about the future of journalism.1 In addition to my work as an academic, my experience as a working journalist has been important to the way I frame journalistic culture and my understanding of the limitations faced by those who work in it. While my professional experience enables me to recognise the utility of a model that focuses on conflict at the expense of complexity, I find myself sometimes questioning this journalistic practice, which is at odds with my personal politics. Over the last few years, I have found that it is not only the general public and activists but also mainstream journalists who have begun questioning conventional frameworks for analysing and reporting on politics and culture. A number of those journalists have moved their practice to blogs and other online media vehicles. Until recently I was finding myself frustrated at the limits on what I could glean from the mainstream press or TV about issues and events shaping the world. The Australian society I moved through was not reflected in its mainstream media. Now I have myriad websites, blogs and other platforms through which to access news and current affairs. In 2005, in his report to New York’s Carnegie Corporation, US media consultant Merrill Brown said that through new media, including mobile phones and instant messaging, people are accessing and processing information in ways that challenge the historic function of the news business and raise fundamental questions about the future of the news field . . . new forms of newsgathering and distribution, xi

grassroots or citizen journalism and blogging sites are changing the very nature of who produces news. In April of the same year, in what was arguably a watershed moment, Rupert Murdoch gave a landmark speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Expressing sentiments that seemed not to create much of a stir at all in mainstream media circles, he argued that there was ‘a revolution in the way young people are accessing news’. As part of his speech, Murdoch argued: They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they don’t want news presented as gospel. Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. Of course now we know that, just like St Augustine, Murdoch scurried back to add, ‘but not quite yet, Lord’. Donald McDonald, chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) from 1996 to 2006, argues that alternative media should be seen as more of a challenge than an alternative. When noting how, among the variety of blogs, ‘citizen journalism’ is one branch that has recently monopolised attention in the US due to its contest with mainstream media, he argues that the bridge built by the internet between mainstream and citizen journalism may just see better journalism as its outcome. ‘Citizen journalism will not make institutional journalism redundant or irrelevant . . . It will make traditional journalism stronger, better, more responsive. Sceptics tend to make you lift your game.’2 What I believe to be critical to the future of news, journalism

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and the Australian media is the idea that popular culture is political.

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As far as the future is concerned, the concept of a media ecosystem makes the most sense to me. This would be an ecosystem – a unit of interdependent organisms that share the same habitat – in which journalism is a joint project between journalists and non-journalists,

accidental journalists, celebrities, bloggers and the general public. The evolution of journalism will also depend somewhat on how traditional journalists and media outlets learn to continue to add value to the contemporary media landscape by adapting traditional practices rather than by just adopting new technologies. Milissa Deitz

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I’m sure there was a time when they were saying, ‘You know, only half the people are getting news from town criers that used to.’ Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Introduction

Halfway through 2009 I was talking to some of the first-year communications students I teach at the University of Western Sydney about Balibo, the Robert Connolly film starring Anthony LaPaglia. They wanted to know what it was about, and whether it was a documentary. I told them briefly about the 1975 murder of five Australian journalists by Indonesian soldiers in East Timor and explained that, although the film was closely based on actual events, my understanding was that it was also a drama, a political thriller. Seeing a potential opportunity in an environment of textroverts whose preferred communication method requires keystrokes, I scurried off to the movies. I thought I’d take advantage of the students’ seeming interest in the film to fuel talk about the material practice of journalism, not to mention cultural imperialism and the balance between the historical and the personal. I was also hoping to coax them to draw parallels between Timor and, say, Rwanda or Darfur in the context of mainstream media coverage. Having asked the students to do a little research for themselves, I arrived for the next class with some information about Connolly’s aims. Needless to say, I had underestimated who I was dealing with. I had barely finished delivering my ad-hoc review when one student raised the historical context of the news of the Balibo Five – the end of the Vietnam War and the soon-to-be-dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Another told me the film was based on Jill Joliffe’s book Cover-Up: The Inside Story of the Balibo Five, which argues that the Australian government has always known the exact circumstances surrounding the murder of the journalists. This same student then went on to talk about current issues in Timor and Indonesia.1 1

I was a little surprised. From where were they getting their information? I asked. They looked at me the way the cast of the Muppet Show often used to look at their only human guest star – with a mixture of pity and bemusement. ‘The internet, Miss,’ said one finally. ‘The film’s website has lots of cool links.’ The film’s official website does indeed link to historical background as well as to current information about Timor. The film’s consulting historian, University of New South Wales academic Dr Clinton Fernandes, oversees a ‘sub’ website, which is linked to the film’s official site. It draws on the work of East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, which was established as an independent statutory authority in July 2001 by the UN Transitional Authority in East Timor. In an interview broadcast on Radio National, Connolly mentioned that he was excited by the idea that a website could be used in relation to a film the way footnotes are included in a historical or political textbook.2 Not long after this discussion, the Kyle and Jackie O talkback radio debacle occurred. While much of the fiasco revolved around poor timing and delay, the ensuing debate about media ethics was perfectly timed for my curriculum. In what has now been a muchpublicised incident, the 2DayFM announcers attached a lie detector to a 14-year-old girl and questioned her about her sex life, only to discover she had been raped. Rather than pillorying the radio announcers with barely concealed glee, as did many parts of the media, my students were mostly

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concerned about the personal ethics of the teenager’s mother, who

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had known about the rape and had been in the studio at the time of the incident. They were also more interested, not surprisingly, in the sex lives of teenagers. But not in the way one may assume: what was sobering was the discussion that ensued about sexual assault, or young people being encouraged to have sex against their better judgement. Earlier in the year, talk had turned to the media coverage of the Victorian bushfires. A couple of students mentioned they had

first heard about the fires, or had only understood the extent of the disaster, when information started coming to them via their online social networks. My students were born in the 1990s. Most of them don’t read newspapers, watch television, or listen to the radio much. They may not, arguably, have the general knowledge of older generations but, as journalist Margaret Simons has pointed out on her compelling blog about the state of the Australian media, The Content Makers, if younger generations need information they know how to access it and how to do so quickly. Many take for granted the research skills that journalists once thought of as their professional preserve. Indeed, as a recent hoax hatched by the ABC’s Hungry Beast 3 shows, some professional journalists fail to do the basic online research that is now second nature for many young net natives. As a teenager in the 1980s, I grew up in a household where the Sydney Morning Herald was delivered every morning and Dad arrived home with the Daily Mirror every evening. We would watch Dr Who and the news before dinner. Mike Willesee was a respected newsman and journalist and A Current Affair was not the poor man’s Today Tonight. By the end of that decade I was working at Kerry Packer’s magazine empire ACP as an editorial assistant on Australian Business Magazine.4 People still smoked in the office and I can remember the excitement – admittedly it may only have been my own – when everybody got computers on their desks. These days, as an established journalist, author and media scholar, I rarely buy newspapers and sometimes the online sites of Fairfax, News Ltd and the ABC are the last places I visit when trying to follow up on news. I listen to the car radio daily, but more often than not I am alerted to news via links posted by friends,

a latecomer to Twitter, the platform allowing users to post short

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messages of no more than 140 characters. Yes, it is used for status

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associates and groups on the social networking site Facebook or the micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter. Like many other people, I now use my connections to make my own ‘newspaper’. (As one who professed no interest in ‘what people had for lunch’ I was

updates including the poster’s taste in cuisine, but it is also used for news alerts and, importantly, allows ‘hashtags’ – user-generated coding for searchable online terms – enabling it to be integrated into real-time events. Although I am one of the original Marcel Marceaus of Twitter, I do regard it as an important journalistic resource.) Such a system, whereby large groups of often unrelated people connect, converse and work together in the ether, has been referred to as collective intelligence. The American media scholar Henry Jenkins argues that, along with participatory culture and convergence, collective intelligence is one of three main concepts in which the contemporary mediascape is rooted.5 ‘Participatory culture’ refers to the dissolving distinction between media consumers and producers. For instance, while a mainstream media outlet such as News Ltd obviously has more power than a blogger or a lone teenager hacking iPhone apps,6 the idea is that all media users now participate somehow in media. The term ‘convergence’ is used when referring to the crossing over of media platforms, such as the online component of a print newspaper incorporating a clip from YouTube (the video-sharing website on which anyone with internet access can add and share video clips). The term is also used when large phone and film companies collaborate to increase their profits (for example, Time Warner’s merger with AOL in the United States and Telstra’s proposed takeover of Fairfax in 2004). However, convergence also occurs when people take media into their own hands. What I believe is significant about convergence

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is that it is an ongoing process which, as I said, is why the con-

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cept of a media ecosystem makes the most sense to me when I think about the future of Australian journalism. McKenzie Wark, a media scholar at the New School for Social Research in New York, and I discussed the fact that media as an ecology is a powerful metaphor that, in its application, must also be considered carefully. An ecology is not really a closed and harmonious system, he pointed out, but rather is more usually open and unstable, driven by both internal dynamics and external shocks. Of course

ecologies have within them forms of competition and collaboration, can fluctuate and can sometimes shift states with alarming speed. Wark added: What distinguishes media ecologies from naturally occurring ones is that we can consciously intervene in them. We can have a policy aimed at warding off their worst outcomes, even if we can’t always know all consequences of any media policy. We know enough about ‘when good ecologies go bad’ to think and act consciously to sustain them. Ecologies are not entirely predictable. There are too many factors – economic, political and cultural – as well as technical. What is also significant at the moment, of course, is the power shift. Major media outlets are finding it hard to come to terms with the idea that they are no longer in charge. Traditional practitioners are finding it hard to come to terms with the loss of their exclusive power to define newsworthiness. Sharing their profession with the general public also works against the long-held ideas of journalists as the first draft of history, and against the concept of ‘journalist as hero’.7 While no longer being in charge doesn’t necessarily mean one becomes devoid of influence, many powerful people and privileged institutions are of course losing out financially. This is in many ways a broader aspect of capitalist modernity, which, along with the need for a new business model, will be further explored in chapter 2. In August 2009 I was close to finishing this book when media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced News Corp’s plan to charge for access to online news. He added that he expected other media com-

two months later, McCarthy had this to say in his speech to Fairfax

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Media’s AGM:

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panies to follow with similar plans. It was not long before Fairfax Media’s managing director Brian McCarthy announced that Fairfax was considering charging for online content and that he would be happy to consider talking shop with Murdoch. However, less than

In relation to charging for online content, a great deal has been said and written on this subject over the past six months or so. We are looking closely at this issue and at this stage we have not made a final decision as to what course of action we may take. Shortly after this Mark Scott, the CEO of ‘our ABC’, took a shot at commercial media in general and seemingly Murdoch in particular when he gave a speech at Melbourne University titled ‘The fall of Rome: media after empire’.8 I won’t carry on about Rome not being built in a day or the dangers of fiddling about with the strings of your lyre during a fiery emergency, but I will say this: for many commentators in earlier centuries, the fall of Rome marked the death knell of education, literacy and sophistication. The term ‘the Dark Ages’ was coined because written sources were few and far between. That and the fact that life was hell and people were probably grateful when they inevitably died young. To certain commentators, our contemporary mediascape is akin to a modern Dark Age, one that has lost sight of the core values of journalism. Many highly respected and prominent Australian journalists and commentators, including Eric Beecher, Jana Wendt, David Salter, Robert Manne and Monica Attard, have all made alarmist comments about ‘quality’ journalism being under threat in Australia and the West; citizen journalists having no respect for truth or ethics; and there being less coverage of the things that mat-

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ter, less variety of sources of news, more reliance on government

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spin, and less accountability. Beecher, for example, has opined more than once that relatively few people care about the subjects that matter to ‘serious’ journalists and ‘regard high-end media as increasingly irrelevant to their lives’.9 It is true that, as the distinction between the cultural authority of certain forms of media is eroding, so too are traditional boundaries dissolving between objectivity and subjectivity, journalism and writing, source and audience, and information and entertainment.

So the aforementioned Jeremiahs may be right – we are all headed straight to a virtual hell in simulated handbaskets. Not really. At least, I don’t think so. People of all ages are getting news; it’s just not the news as we think we know it. The contemporary mediascape has been referred to as ‘networked journalism’ – a networked practice of producing, editing, forwarding, sharing and debating – and ‘media work’,10 intermediation,11 mediamorphosis12 and hybridisation.13 The now outmoded concept of ‘Web 2.0’, often simply referred to as social media – MySpace, Facebook and others, and the photosharing site Flickr – showcases possibilities for mass participation and collaborative work. In other words, these media harness and increase collective intelligence as more people use and contribute to, for instance, the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, YouTube, and blog software such as Blogger and Wordpress, which provide templates and help people set up their own blogs. The entities mentioned above, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, are media platforms. They have been, often unwittingly, applying themselves to the traditional structures of newsmaking. They are not replacing journalism or journalists, but through their very existence are questioning the conventions of traditional news and current affairs, including how such conventions may constrain what and who is regarded as newsworthy. For example, one thing so-called ‘new media’ do is redefine how the story is told, as well as link to primary resource documents. In one well-known example, during the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, many people looking online for news were directed to blogs for the latest, and sometimes the only updated, information. The story of the September 2009 dust storms across

Boxing Day tsunami. The eyewitness reporting of ordinary people

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recast the conventions of the mainstream news coverage. When the

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parts of Australia was online for days before the storm reached Sydney – and the mainstream news. The social phenomenon of citizen journalism became recognisably significant in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the London bombings and the

London bombings took place, for example, news agencies around the world relied on citizen witnesses for photos and videos taken mostly on mobile phones. (Building on the experience of coverage of the tsunami, the BBC put together a ‘user-generated-content’ team in place for the UK election of May 2005, which ended up being able to manage the July bombings material from the public.) In his keynote address at the Media 140 conference held in Sydney in late 2009, US media academic and blogger Professor Jay Rosen said that traditional journalists and major news companies should stop expecting ‘open’ platforms like blogging and Twitter to behave like traditional production systems. He told the conference: People who come from ‘closed’ systems see chaos, but they need to see that open systems work differently. If journalists can detach what they do from the medium, from the system [their work] runs on, they can see that having more participants creates a better news system. Traditional media are in decline for a number of reasons, not only because of the advent of the internet. The market has found a way to diversify through new forms of media, challenging the longstanding and traditional oligopoly of Fairfax, Murdoch and Packer in Australia. However, the issues are not only about the business of media; they are also concerned with the ideals of journalism. This book concerns itself in part with interrogating the traditional virtues of the newsroom and the core ideals of jour-

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nalism: objectivity and balance, quality control, ethical consider-

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ations and fact checking. I will argue in upcoming chapters that, far from undermining traditional journalism, the changes to the mediascape are returning journalism to its radical and democratic roots, recreating the feisty, informed public domain extinguished over the 20th century by the concentration of media ownership in Australia. First, the importance of objectivity is probably the core journalistic ideal most often cited by those who believe quality journalism

is dying. Yet one could argue that every decision a journalist makes is subjective; for example who and who not to interview, which questions to ask, which quotes to include, or how much background information to use in a story. The imperatives of daily reporting for mainstream publications – standardised frameworks and patterns, the isolation of facts and events – can be limiting. In previous decades, many journalists who deemed conventional forms and methods of news journalism inadequate for their purposes turned to literary reportage and, in doing so, broke new ground or advanced the practice of journalism in some way. Returning from a trip to China and Japan after World War II, John Hersey wrote an article for the New Yorker that differed from any previous war coverage, telling as it did the story from the victims’ point of view. Not only did Hersey interview victims; he also interviewed the enemy – Hiroshima was later published as a book. The work of George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion, among others, has illustrated how subjectivity can be a route to knowledge and understanding. Secondly, there is the issue of quality control. I am not convinced that ‘quality’ journalism and commercial journalism (also referred to as tabloid journalism) are necessarily mutually exclusive. If we value credibility and analysis, and the Jeremiahs say we should, aren’t we seeing more of these? Thirdly, I don’t see how journalists – a diverse bunch of personalities if ever there was one – can claim to conduct themselves more ethically than their peers or indeed be expected to be more ethical than any other group in society. Naturally journalists should aim for high ethical standards at all times, but this is not the same thing. I also don’t understand why they should expect to have the exclusive power to decide what

processes are now more transparent. With the demand for 24-hour

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news, mistakes do happen: the speed at which news is expected

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matters. Lastly, we have fact checking. It seems to me that there is a wider variety of sources of news today than there has ever been. As well as having the capacity to link to primary sources, journalistic

and delivered makes this more and more likely. However, there is also more scope for editing and corrections. In addition to the professional journalists, amateur, accidental and citizen journalists provide opportunities via links for readers to source background material and make up their own minds, and to highlight their own errors quickly in order to correct them. So we no longer necessarily have to wait for The Australian or the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, to get their experts to interpret things for us.14 Also, the transitory and inexpensive nature of production means that many so-called content producers don’t see the material they generate as precious but rather as ephemera that will be overlaid within a matter of hours. So who cares if it has spelling mistakes? (Admittedly, I do . . .) To those who say the public is more interested in celebrity than ‘serious news’, surely the rise of the blogosphere and citizen journalism reflects a need for debate and discussion beyond the confines usually imposed by conventional news. American media academic Todd Gitlin describes the routine journalistic approach as ‘cover the event, not the condition; the conflict, not the consensus; the fact that advances the story, not the one that explains it.’15 Traditional news reporting is grounded in an adversarial model, which favours aggressive interviewing techniques and an emphasis on drama. As Australian media studies academic and journalist Catharine Lumby has said when commenting on the traditional adversarial model of news, the privileged topics and sources tend to be the ones that mirror accepted social, political and economic

Such norms arguably impact not only on how stories are told, but on what can be said. Many social, political and cultural issues are not black and white, and mapping them into oppositional terms distorts the positions of various speakers in the debates.16

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hierarchies:

The trouble with this model is that it stopped working for the

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general public, who are treating news and journalism in the same

way as many treat art – they know it when they see it. And when they like what they see and want more, they are going out to get it for themselves. Journalists are no longer gatekeepers or watchdogs. If journalists are lucky – and being one of them I hope they are – they will end up as curators and guide-dogs. There is no reason journalists won’t be lucky. Our digital, satellite and wiki era has opened up many possibilities and there are more to come. However, I do think it will be a matter of traditional practitioners and outlets accepting that they are no longer in a position to tell their audiences what it is they need to know. One way to try to understand the future of journalism is to ask how journalism, news and the media contribute to Australian society. All of us, arguably, now engage with public life in many ways and on different levels. In an era dominated by the domestication and proliferation of new technologies, professional journalists are vital. They are the ones in the position to shine a spotlight on the interaction between people’s everyday experiences and the value of those experiences to the wider society. What I believe to be critical to the future of news, journalism and the Australian media is the idea that popular culture is political – that popular culture is the terrain upon which many political and social battles are now fought.17 To illustrate what I mean, let us consider a few recent ‘stories’: The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election to a second term in June 2009 was widely disputed by the country’s voters. The results were judged to have been a result of massive electoral fraud and the Iranian government soon cracked down on news media, social media and protesting citizens. While it is hard

ment, footage of the protest was posted online hours, sometimes

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minutes, after the events they portrayed. Such images and posts in

11

to judge the veracity of such claims, Iranians’ use of Twitter and the alleged use of the video game World of Warcraft to send coded messages were said to have played roles in getting information out past the censors. Before the crackdown on the media by the govern-

turn affected the way in which people behaved in Tehran. While a sole reliance on these sources could be misleading, it should also be noted that traditional news outlets were taken by surprise; it took them time to understand the significance of events and react accordingly. When they did, professional journalists built on the social media’s aspects of the story, providing a context and a sense of proportion.18 It was the first time a US government agency explicitly acknowledged the potential role of social media platforms in an international event and the consensus among journalists from The New York Times, the Washington Post Businessweek and Time was that Twitter represented a new and influential medium for social movements and international politics.19 Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s 2005 BBC series on the poor nutritional state of British school meals provoked policy responses in the direction of healthier eating for kids. Also in 2005, screening for breast cancer increased by almost a third in women aged between 25 and 44 in the six months following Kylie Minogue’s breast cancer diagnosis. (It should be noted that no more tumours were found as a result; researchers suggested many women were unnecessarily worried.) The second series of Big Brother in the UK was arguably a valuable platform for a public discussion about racism: as race riots exploded on the streets of Britain, issues of multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity were aired nightly on the reality show. Although not nearly on the same scale, in 2004 the fourth incarnation of the Big Brother series in Australia ignited public discussion

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about asylum seekers when evictee Merlin Luck taped ‘Free The

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Refugees’ across his mouth while on stage with host Gretel Killeen. Each evictee traditionally leaves the Big Brother house and is taken straight to talk to the host on stage in front of a large audience. With Luck’s mouth taped and his refusal to speak to her, Killeen was left desperately and at times crankily trying to get him to talk or do something because, after all, she had air-time to fill. Luck later travelled the country speaking on panels with human rights lawyers and politicians. In later media interviews, he attempted to

increase the public’s awareness of Australia’s policy of mandatory detention. I believe the key point about the above-mentioned examples is how they fit into the idea of a media ecosystem. Influenced by a number of scholars, including Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Walter Ong and Gregory Bateson, the idea was popularised when academic Neil Postman20 started a program called Media Ecology at New York University in 1971. Rather than regarding it as a single profession, it may be time to consider journalism as a series of different, overlapping journalisms; that is, a range of journalisms that fulfil different requirements and cater to different audiences, which I think fits neatly into the idea of a media ecosystem. To someone whose background is predominantly in magazines and not newspapers, the idea of ‘many journalisms’ has always made sense, and academia provided me with the means to articulate what was meant by that. In other words, my theoretical arguments derive from my practice as a journalist, media participant and media consumer. In much the same way we need to scrutinise the effects of ‘new’ media on democracy; we need to engage with fourth estate ideals such as objectivity in terms of their potential, rather than treating everything as static. Objectivity can never be truly achieved – which is not an argument for neglecting to aim for it – but such journalistic values need to be continually redefined since parameters such as ‘the media’ and ‘the audience’, to name but two, are always subject to change. Roger East, the Australian freelance journalist working for the Australian Associated Press (AAP), had travelled to Timor to inves-

Cross. East stayed behind with the Timorese, planning to retreat

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further into the country to the mountains and report from there. He

13

tigate the disappearance of, and seek justice for, the Balibo Five (killed by Indonesian soldiers in an incursion in October 1975). That December, when it became clear that a full-scale invasion by Indonesia was imminent, journalists evacuated with the Red

was captured by Indonesian forces and, along with other prisoners, executed by firing squad in Dili. Journalists like Roger East still exist. Of course they do. In many ways there is no-one better equipped to expose corruption, find proof and ask the hard questions than a professional journalist. However, what has changed is that conventional newsroom rhetoric – editorial independence, the concept of objectivity and avoiding bias, balancing the public’s right to know with privacy – needs to be questioned, updated and evolve to fit in with the contemporary media ecosystem. If news and media corporations want

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to stay in the game, they need to learn how to play by other rules.

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Chapter 1

The history of the future of journalism Few Australians have lingered so long at the brink of death. Yet when the end did come it seemed sudden. On the last day, the news crews were alerted and assembled diligently at what would turn out to be the wrong address.1 When it was finally over the accolades duly arrived from the rich, the powerful and the talented. Long at the ready, most obituaries were fitting for such an institution, but the sound bites about the sad day and the end of an era were hurried and hackneyed. In many ways the wake following the announcement of the closure of The Bulletin after 128 years of publishing was somewhat like Gatsby’s funeral: after all, the magazine had long outlived its relevance. In its first 20 years, The Bulletin was an ‘astounding conflagration of cultural and journalistic energy’, its ‘potency and reach into the population at the time was something like that of a major television network.’2 While for much of its life the magazine was racist, chauvinistic, variously anti-Semitic, anti-communist and anti-British, Australian cultural studies scholar Sylvia Lawson argues the need to consider the magazine’s earlier history of misogynist and racist jokes not only in terms of inhumanity but also ‘as

15

elements in a weekly cacophony’. Its play of contradiction around issues of nationality, colony and empire, city and bush, gender and race, she argues, created an environment in which boundaries between high and popular culture were constantly overridden.3 The Bulletin rose out of a revolutionary era in journalism driven by technological change (the telegraph, the telephone, faster press machinery) and against the background of the New Journalism, which transformed newspaper reporting and editorial style throughout America and Britain. While the yellow journalism associated with Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst in the United States stemmed from the penny papers and their propensity for shocking and emotional copy, New Journalism placed more emphasis on the newspaper as crusader. As well as news, The Bulletin mixed old and new styles of journalism by publishing gossip, verse, prose, illustrations and human interest stories and putting emphasis on sport and crime reporting. It analysed the nascent Australian press, challenged officialdom and was critical of the conservatism of papers modelled on The Times of London – the Sydney Morning Herald was only ever referred to as ‘Granny’ within its pages.4 According to US media and journalism scholar Michael Schudson, the period when publications such as The Bulletin emerged was when the idea of the informed citizen was invented, for whom a ‘new’ journalism was needed. In his essay ‘The objectivity norm in American journalism’, Schudson points out that objectivity was not always a norm in American journalism and that ‘It has a history. It has a point of origin.’ The essay also looks at why objectivity as

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a norm emerged first and was more fully realised in the US rather

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than in European journalism.5 Partisanship ran deep in 19th-century journalism: As late as the 1890s, when a standard Republican paper covered a presidential election, it not only deplored and derided Democratic candidates in editorials but just as often neglected to mention them in the news . . . And in the Democratic papers, of course, it was just the reverse.6

Interviewing, widely practised by 1900, was common in America after World War I while it was still rare in Europe. [Interviewing] did not give rise to the objectivity norm but it was one of the growing number of practices that identified journalists as a distinct occupational group with distinct patterns of behaviour.7 Histories of journalism in general point to the necessary factual style of the telegraph and the requirement of value-free reporting for wire services with varied clients but Schudson argues that, in 1900, ‘ideals of journalistic prose were still quite varied’ and ‘The human interest reporting of reporters enchanted with urban life was sentimental. Coverage of politics was often self-consciously sarcastic and humorous. This was not prose stripped bare.’8 Schudson argues in Discovering the News9 that the emergence of serious professional discussion about objectivity only came after World War I when ‘social, organisational and intellectual foundations for institutionalising a set of journalistic practices’ gave objectivity force.10

ethics of professional associations.11 In its heyday, when it was known as the ‘bushman’s bible’, The

Our Readers’ and the cover soon boasted: ‘half Australia writes it, all gossip about Oscar Wilde and the actress Sarah Bernhardt alongside

The turn of the century, along with the death of Queen Victoria

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The interactive nature of The Bulletin enabled its ‘contours to be

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country town anecdotes and stories of fire, flood and cattle prices.12

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Australia reads it’. Next to news of presidents and rebels, there was

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bush part of the world. From the first year, the call went out ‘To

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Bulletin not only brought the world to the bush but also made the

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a ‘moral code’, asserted in journalism textbooks and the codes of

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when objectivity became a ‘fully formed occupational ideal’ and

1

He dates ‘modern analytical and procedural fairness’ to the 1920s

and the federation of colonies in 1901, marked the beginning of the

17

unstable’ and therefore dynamic.13 In the same way, new media forms are having a profound impact on the forms and practices of mainstream journalism by shifting conventional frames and content.

end for the journal. By 1906 its eccentric founder J.F. Archibald had resigned and, while circulation and advertising held up for a number of decades, by mid-century readership had dwindled from a claimed circulation of 100 000 (for a population of three million) at the turn of the century to almost nothing. In 1960 The Bulletin was bought by Frank Packer as part of the stable of ACP magazines. Discounting periods under certain editors, the magazine went on to present a steady offering of conventional material.14 Unfortunately, when it did break stories and provide compelling journalism in its later years, the magazine by then was competing with the news journalism offered by the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Weekend Australian. The Bulletin was not, of course, alone. The 20th century saw the decline of political weeklies worldwide alongside photojournalism weeklies including Life in the US, Picture Post in Britain and Pix in Australia. Many blamed the growth of Saturday broadsheets and Sunday newspapers for the demise of other serious publications: the weekend newspapers were fulfilling the role traditionally filled by such magazines.15 In 2007 Fairfax Newspapers changed its name to Fairfax Media, but it was 2008 that was a significant year for the Australian mediascape. This year saw the closure of The Bulletin and Channel 9’s respected current affairs shows Sunday and Nightline. Such occurrences were seen as consequences of a contemporary mindset that had no interest in current affairs or ‘quality’ journalism. News Corporation Ltd was not forthcoming about exact numbers of redun-

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dancies, then or since. Fairfax reported a loss of $380 million and

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staff reductions by 550 – a third of them reporters. It has been said that this coming decade may see the closure of the Sydney Morning Herald. Modern society will be able to get by without newspapers. I think we can live without journalists too. But I am not saying we can do without journalism. Neither am I saying we can do without people who provide it. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The December 2008 statistics from the Australian Press Council, the Australian Communications and Media Authority and the Pew Research Centre in the US all tell a similar story. The Pew Research Centre reported that the internet had taken over newspapers as the public’s main source of news. The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s annual communications report said that 98 per cent of Australians now use the internet daily or weekly and 72 per cent of internet users go online for news, weather and sports. The general statistics make it plain that traditional media outlets cannot afford to dismiss the role social networking, citizen journalism and blogging are playing in the mediascape. News Limited research by Hitwise shows there are spikes in the number of searches on a given topic when an issue is current. Their figures also show that a significant percentage of traffic to news sites comes from Google searches. Public criticism of the quality of today’s news provided by mainstream journalism is widespread, with many in the industry itself also maligning what they see as the market-driven or bottom-line

Complaints typically target concerns over the decline of investigative journalism and the conventional fourth estate role of the press

leading to political apathy. native media and grassroots political campaigns and their effect

asks what sorts of opportunities new media technologies offer Australians in an age of consumerism, global corporatisation and growing disenchantment with mainstream politics. It considers whether those media professionals and commentators across the political

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mediascape, the public and forms of political engagement. It also

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on mainstream journalism. It maps the relationship between the

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This book looks, in part, at the Australian history of alter-

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nalism. Others argue that media saturation of the cultural space is

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and its replacement by what is often called tabloid or lifestyle jour-

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criticised what they see as the increasing tabloidisation of the media.

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a growing number of journalists, theorists and commentators have

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attitude to news and current affairs. Over the last 20 years or so

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spectrum, pessimistic about journalism in the online age, are lamenting the state of journalism itself or the loss of their own privileged position within journalism. Concerns about reportorial integrity are as old as journalism itself. Lord Northcliffe, who as Alfred Charles William Harmsworth left school to become a journalist, revolutionised magazine and newspaper publishing in Britain in the early years of the 20th century by appealing to the working class and women. Over time, Northcliffe and his brother Harold (later Viscount Rothermere) constructed the world’s largest magazine publishing house, Amalgamated Press, and then branched out into newspapers. Alfred Harmsworth bought several failing titles, such as the London Evening News in 1894, and made them profitable by appealing to popular taste. Prime Minister Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, famously said the Daily Mail was ‘written by office boys for office boys’. Northcliffe’s stable, which eventually included the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, ran things never before seen in daily newspapers – book serialisations, columns for women and gossip. In 1900, books, magazines and newspapers were no longer a luxury but part of everyday Australian life. While the earliest Australian newspapers, the Sydney Gazette (1803–42) and the Hobart Town Gazette (1816–27), were established as vehicles for government notices, government monopoly over print had ceased by the 1820s. As rivals to the Gazette, the Australian (1824–48) and the Sydney Monitor (1826–41) both started in Sydney and often

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carried articles critical of official policies and practices. Similar

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papers started in Hobart around the same time and the establishment of more critical papers gave greater scope for writers. Newspapers and magazines aimed at working-class readers were established in the 1840s, but towards the end of the century such papers took on a more radical tone. Two of the best known, the Boomerang (1887–92) and the Worker (1890–1974), were started in Brisbane.16

Indigenous print media also have a long history in Australia. Publications were often irregular or short-lived, but of course had this in common with many others of the day. Australian scholars Helen Molnar and Michael Meadows note that Indigenous communities’ first regular use of print technology came quickly, considering the nature of European settlement: ‘the earliest identified publication produced by an Aboriginal organisation is The Aboriginal, or Flinders Island Chronicle, first published in 1836, which ran for twelve months.’17 For the Record: 160 Years of Aboriginal Print Journalism18 is a collection of articles by Aboriginal writers on a wide range of topics, edited by former coordinator of journalism studies at the University of Western Sydney, Michael Rose. His sources include the Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle, Land Rights News and Koori Mail. In Australia the mainstream media is often lacking when it comes to reflecting the diverse nature of our population in its coverage of business, politics and class, not to mention other nationalities and identities. So-called serious journalism can often be pompous,

century, as can be seen in Barry Humphries’ revenge on the philistine suburban middle class via Edna Everage and the 1964 birth of

who ran the ALP.20 So it shouldn’t be too surprising that Australia media including the pioneering Webdiary, started by former Sydney

In his landmark study The Press in Australia,21 the grand provocateur of media and communications studies in Australia, Henry Mayer, points out the historical phenomenon of the popular press, drawing on a range of diverse cultural sources. He notes we should

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sites such as Crikey.com and newmatilda.com.

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Morning Herald journalist Margo Kingston, and news and analysis

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has been an outrider of experiments in new online journalism and

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Martin Sharp spoke for anarchic youth rather than for the men

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Oz magazine, whose editors Richard Neville, Richard Walsh and

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alternative media and other vehicles persisted throughout the 20th

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enjoyed a feisty press during the colonial period,19 and a tradition of

1

superficial and too narrowly focused on the centre. Yet Australia

21

not forget the newspapers’ longstanding interest in sex, crime, horror, sport and human interest. Sensationalist popular press in Australia appeared as early as the 1820s and was certainly present by the 1860s. The provincial press that emerged in the 19th century served a high proportion of the population with an estimated one provincial paper for every 4300 country-dwellers Australia-wide. One striking feature was that they were far more openly political than newspapers are today.22 Provincial newspapers were often vehicles for political causes. A.T. Shakespeare, the managing editor of the Canberra Times from 1926 to 1964, has written that the establishment of country newspapers in the 19th century was based ‘as much on differences in editorial policies as on commercial competition’. Editor G.H. Mott wrote in his editorial in the Federal Standard and Border Post in Victoria that the first thing anyone disappointed with election results or the management of the local press did was start a newspaper.23 Between 1870 and 1914 a large number of radical journals came into and went out of existence, including Socialist, Revolt, the Shearers’ Record, the Trade Halls Gazette, The Liberator, Patriot, Co-operator, Transmitter and Dawn. Radical journalism provided a bridge into the commercial press for working-class writers, not to mention a meeting place for prominent writers and artists of the day.24 The labour press was a way of disseminating to a highly literate and relatively affluent working class more detailed information about the activities of the union movement. It also provided the

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means to convey the policies of union leadership to the rank and

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file, which were otherwise dependent on mainstream newspapers.25 In this sense modern criticism of the partisan nature of both professional and ‘non-professional’ journalism is curious: liberal mainstream journalism was once seen as partisan by conservatives because it promoted liberal democracy. In the late 19th century the partisan nature of the labour and radical press was considered valid and so-called objective journalism something which in fact masked a pro-capitalist journalism dependent on advertising.26 It was the

radical, democratising press in the United Kingdom that originally coined the phrase ‘knowledge is power’ as a slogan, one the Poor Man’s Guardian used in the early 1800s to oppose government repression of the ‘pauper press’. While such journalism was not mainstream, it can be seen as a main source of modern democratic journalism and mass readership. In fact, Australian media studies academic John Hartley argues that liberal and democratic politics went hand-in-hand with new liberal and radical newspapers, and that the radical press deserves credit for some of the most important positive developments of modernity. Credit, he argues, is particularly due for its taking popular sovereignty literally and inventing a politicised public of readers.27 Hartley recognises the long-term contribution of both the commercial and the right-wing press and argues that the commercial media was also at the forefront of the industrial, organisational and institutional development of journalism. Commercial media had a major influence on active but disloyal readers and turned them into ‘a reading public who would consume their news as regularly as

more politically partisan than in oligopolistic Australia. The bipartisan consensus towards cajoling favour with media proprietors,

media ecosystem gives opinions beyond a centrist consensus. Vehiso than The Australian or the Sydney Morning Herald.

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up of a generation’s work on the subject, she claims that print-

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The future is now

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cles within it may appear partisan, but in many ways are no more

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Australian politics.29 In giving greater diversity, the contemporary

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specifically the Murdochs and the Packers, has long been a staple of

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cantly more newspapers and media vehicles, certain newspapers are

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In countries such as Britain or the US where there exist signifi-

1

breakfast’.28

ing was ‘the unacknowledged revolution’ whose role as an ‘agent

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In a university course I teach about the theory and practice of media and communications, we look at US historian Elizabeth Eisenstein’s book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.30 In her summing

of change’ had been underestimated in traditional accounts of the scientific revolution. She emphasises two long-term consequences of the invention of printing: first, the preservation and standardisation of knowledge and second, the opportunity it gave people to critique authority. (Incompatible views were more widely available and therefore more easily compared.) My students, who have only ever known a digital age, are encouraged to engage with one of the main focuses of the book, which is: what it might have been like to live in a time when the printing press was invented and old contraptions were breaking faster than the new contraptions could even be conceived of, let alone installed. It must have been confronting, frustrating and, to some, terrifying – rather like now. Vested interests with a monopoly on communication, such as the Church and the monarchy, were especially put out. As the printing press helped break the medieval Church’s hold on the flow of information, so too the rise of the digital age is loosening the grip of corporate-owned mass media. Technological development is rapidly reshaping all forms of communication to a degree indeed comparable to Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of printing from movable type. Consider the following implications of online media: a reduction in cost; the bypassing of information monopoly by offering alternatives to media conglomerates; the facility provided through hyperlinks for readers to be informed of the most recent event as well as be reminded of a movement or group’s overall mission statement and past accom-

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plishments; and the ability of individuals around the world to come

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together and build a sense of community.31

People, politics and the mediascape Before looking more specifically at the current state and future of Australian journalism, I would like to examine the relationship between the current mediascape and the perceived corporateand state-assumed ownership of public space and cultural life. The changing mediascape has been fuelled by broader shifts in

Western cultural and political life, which include the following: a crisis of trust in government, corporate business and the mainstream media; scepticism of PR manipulation by government, business and lobbyists; the reconfiguration of citizens as consumers and the perception, by some, of a growing corporate influence over everyday lives; the growth of an information economy; and the domestication and availability of technologies that have allowed media consumers to become media producers. In 2003 the Middle Australia Project, a study by Australian sociologist Michael Pusey, looked at how the 20-year program of economic reform in Australia (deregulation, privatisation, labour market reform, user pays and tax reform) has redefined the lived experience of families, workplaces and communities. He found that only a minority felt that they and society as a whole have benefited from economic reform and he offers evidence for the claim that many Australians feel disenfranchised by both their political representatives and the private sector. Pusey is one of a growing number of theorists who argue that

ion for too long, creating a narrow and incomplete representation of modern society. However, it may be that this is not as recent a

ine how this crisis of trust is linked to the changing mediascape, politics to smaller parties and alternative and community politics.

the gaps in mainstream reporting. The non-partisan, not-for-profit advocacy organisation GetUp!32 (based on the US model MoveOn and discussed in chapter 4) is a prime example, as it provides opportunities for everyday Australians to hold politicians accountable for their actions.

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forms of media that appeared and evolved to fill what they saw as

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This shift, I will argue, is linked to the establishment of alternative

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I will look at the significant shift away from mainstream two-party

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such a climate has been growing since the 1960s. In order to exam-

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phenomenon as some suggest. In fact, there is good evidence that

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stream media remained inattentive to the diversity of public opin-

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big business and the mainstream media. He argues that the main-

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we are witnessing a growing public crisis of trust in government,

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From the 1960s on, the world experienced a number of wide social changes including the move from modernity to postmodernity – that is, the social, economic, political and technological developments that have characterised the transition from modern to postmodern ways of life. Due to the emergence and proliferation of new technology and the rise of consumer culture, many critics characterise postmodernity as shallow and fragmentary. Of significance to the arguments throughout this book, however, is the transition from the elitist values of modernity – showcased in high culture – to a postmodern attempt to rethink politics outside conventional left–right, mainstream–marginal oppositions. As politics have changed and major institutions have been sidelined in recent decades, the mainstream media has not kept up. Like the independent media scene of the 1960s, the online environment has begun to give voice to marginalised and newly emerging newsmakers – not seen as legitimate by mainstream media companies, big business or the government. It can be argued that a measure of success is not circulation, but how much of the general public adopt certain ideas by alternative vehicles. Indeed, Canadian journalist and author of No Logo, Naomi Klein,33 suggested that, by enabling activists to bypass traditional media, the internet has revolutionised political engagement. A key point here is the recognition of the audience as diverse rather than as an amorphous mass, and as producers as well as consumers. It has also been widely argued that what is crucial and significant about non-traditional media is that they offer the means for

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democratic communication to people who are normally excluded

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from media production. Consider, for example, the underground publications that often dealt with, among other things, the politics of liberation, direct action and anarchism.34 John Hartley has argued that traditional left-wing ideas about the relations between power, politics and the media do not take into account the fact that the public sphere has now become a mediasphere.35 In his book The Politics of Pictures, Hartley argues that in a modern society our contact with other people is largely

symbolic: that is, we know each other through our media. The media work to generate and sustain that sense of collective identity. They do this by dividing stories that represent people or places or values between being ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’. Those excluded are stereotyped and simplified and different from us. In his books Popular Reality and Uses of Television, Hartley goes on to argue that media consumption is the basis for modern citizenship – we exist in a mediasphere in which all political, cultural and social meaning is now negotiated.36

The domain Drawing on Hartley’s work, I question the fourth estate model of journalism – the media as ‘watchdog’ on the workings of government – because it relies on a traditional notion of the public sphere, otherwise know as the public domain or public opinion. When we look at the public domain in this context I think it is also important to consider how the media saturation of the public domain has impacted on the way public opinion is formed.

to think about in terms of journalism is how workers, radicals and other marginalised groups have formed their own partisan press to

rarely commercially viable when they first appear, their existence The Frankfurt School philosopher Jurgen Habermas famously ¨

new republic of letters. Being mainly made up of elite men, Haber-

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mid-17th century, a public sphere – a space that mediated between

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argued in 1974 that, with the development of capitalism in the

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ensures they are able to participate in the public domain.

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who is included in the public sphere. While new media vehicles are

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keep the liberal press on its toes, thereby expanding the idea of

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labour rights, feminism, environmentalism.37 What is interesting

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movements fuelled by the entry of media into the public sphere –

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Hartley explicitly talks about the rise of new kinds of political

mas’s ‘ideal’ public sphere, of course, excluded many parts of

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society and the state – opened up in Western society: ‘a domain of our social life where such a thing as public opinion can be formed’38 . Journalism played a crucial role in connecting the citizens of this

society.39 Australian media studies academic Alan McKee describes the public sphere as a metaphor for thinking about how people come together to exchange ideas and information. It is no coincidence that arguments about the media and the public sphere, or public domain, often run along the same lines. As McKee notes, ‘academics worry about trivialisation, spectacle and fragmentation of the public sphere’ while commentators say exactly the same things about the media.40 In terms more contemporary than Habermas, US linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, along with social theorists Edward Herman41 and Robert McChesney42 , among others, have been highly critical of what they perceive as the corporatisation of public life. A key concept for these thinkers is hegemony,43 a term which suggests that it is only the powerful or ruling class who are able to create and implement ideas in a given society. Chomsky and Herman argue that there has been a ‘manufacturing of consent’ by elites including the mainstream media, which involves a complex process whereby powerful interests such as large corporations inside democracies create patterns of acceptance in the public mind. Using a theory they call the propaganda model, Chomsky and Herman argue that the major mainstream media outlets are run by corporations and are therefore under the same financial pressures; thus the constraints of running a profit distort the news that is reported due to market selection. They also highlight what they argue is a dependency of mainstream media on government. In order to keep advertising revenue high, much of the media will report news in

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such a way as is most favourable to the government.44 Chomsky

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and Herman’s work has been widely critiqued as simplistic and conspiratorial but it does, in a theoretical sense, mirror many of the concerns that many of the general public have about public life in a mediated and corporatised public sphere. The political and cultural importance of the new social movements (NSMs) of the 1960s, associated with the anti-Vietnam war protests, the women’s movement and civil rights struggles, were debated as people grappled with new conceptions of social change.

Building in the 1970s and 1980s, the NSMs encompassed feminism, gay and lesbian rights, peace movements, environmentalist movements, student and youth movements, and the politics of cultural identity. These movements developed outside the conventional political system of parties and pressure groups. They were separate from traditional class politics of labour movements and they developed new forms of social change, for example consciousnessraising groups among women and self-help groups among gay men.45 There is good reason to be passionate about reinventing news and journalism in the digital age. Through groups like GetUp! and collaborative blogs and via satirical TV shows, there are few people not participating in public debate – although many may not recognise this public conversation for what it is. For one thing, a shift in consumer focus, opinion polls critical of journalists and the fact that traditional codes of ethics have failed to keep some parts of the media in check all seem to indicate that ethics codes need to evolve.46 And let’s not forget that there has never been a golden

since there has been a record of the public sphere. The organisational characteristics of NSMs, as opposed to class

and member participation than with representative democracy, and pressure on citizens to conform to institutions that produce and

fourth estate, has always claimed that it was such a space – a place

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the exclusive focus of power, contemporary conflicts focus more

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circulate information and symbolic codes: as the State is no longer

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conflicts develop in areas of those systems where there is greatest

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political system. NSMs are occupied more with direct democracy

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politics, are not designed to focus on working within the established

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the trivialisation and commercialisation of the public sphere ever

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consistently high quality. Commentators have complained about

1

age when public communication was completely rational and of

where the system of negotiation and representation informs the way

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on questions concerning identity and democracy. Therefore a necessary condition of democracy is public spaces independent of government, the party system and state structures.47 The press, as the

we go about everyday life; one that can be developed independently from formal institutions such as government. Informed comment in the late 1980s spoke about the changes to traditional ideas about labour, production, consumption, politics and identities and the connections between cultural and economic issues (globalisation, niche marketing, consumer lifestyles and new social and political movements). While there is not space to do justice to such issues here, a key argument was that, because economy, culture and politics were no longer linked by class, political allegiances and cultural identities were no longer predictable.48 Yet the mainstream journalists of the press, TV and radio continued and continue to report politics using the old institutional sources and conflicts, and thus miss out on much of the politics going on around town. For this reason, to use one example, US mainstream journalists completely underestimated the power of Obama’s ‘net-roots’ and were certain the Clintons would win. (As part of his campaign Obama’s staff sent millions of emails in 2008, dubbed the year of social networking, creating a new campaign template through the use of community and online tools.) A combination of publicity stunts, street theatre and protest has also been part of the Australian political landscape since the 1960s: and this is crucial to the relationship between mainstream media and public protest action. Australian political studies academic Sean Scalmer talks about politics in which ‘the media’s reporting practices become the object of direct struggle and intervention by protesters’.49 When talking about the s11 ‘anti-globalisation’

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protest in Melbourne in 2000, for instance, which I discuss in

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chapter 4, Scalmer notes that ‘mediatised politics’ – that is, getting messages out using means other than traditional ones – is a possibility in place of ‘mainstream media distortion’ or ‘intimidated political silence’.50 A focus on the political implications of spectacle and image as part of media activism can be traced to a group of artists, writers, students and activists renowned for their part in the uprising in Paris in May 1968: the Situationists, under their self-styled leader Guy Debord.

Like online media today, the new media players of the 1960s reinvigorated the old media players. The protests of the 1960s were punctuated by satire and irony and helped move politics outside the traditional domain by collapsing the distinctions between politics, art, culture and everyday life. It was also a generational struggle. Because their concerns were continually excluded from old media, young people started their own organisations and new media initiatives. The political turmoil over civil rights, the Vietnam War and feminist movements provided fuel for a proliferating alternative media.51 The entire gamut of alternative media in relation to the media and the history of civil rights is larger in Australia than can be adequately summarised here. Suffice to say that, in the midst of the political unrest, many people took the opportunity to start alternative newspapers thanks to advances in technology. Many theorists and writers including Australian Anne Coombs have described how the availability of inexpensive offset printing meant that anyone with glue and a typewriter could make their own media, leapfrog-

In his book Days of Wine and Rage the Australian writer Frank Moorhouse notes that, although he thought the underground news-

magazines edited without censorship, which set new, wider boundabout a hundred little magazines in Australia – twice as many as

and then Thor), the University of New South Wales student paper edited by Wendy Bacon, Val Hodgson and Alan Rees which – over 40-odd issues – would be involved in approximately 40 prosecutions for obscenity and would put Wendy Bacon in jail for a week.52

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and Eyeball. There was also Tharunka (which became Thorunka

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in the 1960s – including High Times, Troll, Super Plague, MeJane

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aries for the commercial press. At the end of the 1970s there were

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nication, once they died away they were replaced by many new

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papers of the time would be a permanent part of media commu-

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(edited by Richard Walsh after Oz).

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duction. There were the larger independents such as Nation Review

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ging around the five or so stages of conventional newspaper pro-

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If we look at a roll-call of many of the counter-cultural, underground writers, publishers and artists from the 1960s and 1970s, the same names are now in the mainstream: Frank Moorhouse, Wendy Bacon, Germaine Greer, publisher Richard Walsh and Richard Neville of Oz fame, to name just a few. It is this reinvigoration of the old by the new that, along with a continued move away from two-party politics in Australia, helped set the stage for the current mediascape and new forms of participation in political life. Historians and sociologists claim that the most fundamental changes in history have occurred since 1975,53 including the scale of technological innovations, globalisation, a decline in national sovereignty related to globalisation and the collapse of the USSR, which ended the (ideological) struggle between communism and capitalism that had been dominant throughout most of the 20th century. Changes also include the pervasive, 24-hour nature of the media (and its even deeper intrusion into the private realms of life). By the time the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, people were already starting to perceive questions of left and right, capitalism and communism, and East and West as more fluid, and less as black-and-white issues. Within the last decade we have seen, mainly in the West, thousands of uninvited citizens and activists being drawn to international conferences about social justice, development and the environment. They have been brought there by a widespread concern about the deteriorating state of the world and the diminishing capacity of bodies such as the UN and the World Bank to maintain a credible appearance of being able to solve urgent problems. S P A C E

again when we start considering the internet (taking into account,

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the concept of alternative media is usually framed around questions

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British media studies academic Graham Meikle notes that, while

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of independence and ownership, these issues are reframed once he adds, that not all countries are able to access the internet easily for a range of reasons). As an alternative mediascape, he argues that the internet ‘teems with dissonant voices which can articulate positions too extreme for mainstream media’. But the important

point, he argues, is that such voices can challenge the mainstream media’s consensus about who and what should have access to the public sphere.54 Publishing online overcomes potential distribution problems and production costs as well as government sedition laws. Historical surveys can relate alternative media to the struggles that we can now look back on as shaping events: individuals and groups participating in these movements do so from a position of non-alignment with political parties and groupings. The major themes of the phenomenon – self-organisation and ‘DIY politics’, rather than traditional political parties and traditional protest groups – are useful starting points for an analysis of contemporary alternative media or even, I suggest, social media.55 Writing more than 60 years ago, Walter Benjamin provided what is still a relevant analysis of the problems of alternative media in capitalist societies. For Benjamin, radical content or ideas have little value in and of themselves. Indeed, market-driven media positively thrive on revolutionary ideas and information, turning such ideas to

is not a revolution so much as part of a long, historical process. the tools we use to access our media. The functions and status of

rather than knee-jerk reaction. Within minutes of the initial prob-

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technologies.57

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old media are shifted, not displaced, by the introduction of new

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And history has shown us that old media don’t die; what dies are

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ent from those used by the traditional media, the new mediascape

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While the tools and principles used by the new media may be differ-

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Process this

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and commodification.56

1

their advantage and becoming stronger through their incorporation

lems near London’s Underground on 7 July 2005, people were

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As the boundaries between local communications and virtual communities are blurred, the implications of this emergent social phenomenon for journalism become deserving of close attention

sending images to the BBC before anyone knew there was a bomb. In the hours to follow, the BBC received approximately 1000 pictures, 20 amateur videos, 4000 text messages and 20 000 emails. Then, minutes after the bomb went off, a few seconds of grainy, shaky footage from the rudimentary video function on a mobile phone gave millions of viewers around the world an insider glimpse of what had just happened. It was the first time amateur images dominated mainstream news. In 2006, when Cyclone Harry hit Far North Queensland, the ABC Brisbane office set up YouReport so the public could upload photos.58 In 2007, when thousands of Burmese activists defied military orders to stop pro-democracy marches in Rangoon, students took photos on their mobile phones and posted them online. As well as statements, photos and video, one thing so-called amateur websites are able to provide well and quickly in the face of disaster are listed names of possible victims, emergency response instructions, safety advice, and links to maps. Of particular value is the articulation of personal experiences, which can often fall outside traditional journalistic boundaries. Moreover, rather than YouTube and citizen journalism killing journalism as we know it, the changing mediascape has been challenging mainstream journalists as well as the public to continue striving for traditional standards of journalism. So today, as we listen to podcasted radio in the car via our iPods or download music from the internet, or catch up on news

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via Twitter or people via Google Maps and Skype, we need to ask:

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what is journalism or a journalist, what is news, what are facts, and what is media? More importantly, we need to ask ourselves why news, current affairs and the media are so important. History shows us that popular, radical and community journalism, or alternative media, are connected to broader social and political currents. Focusing our gaze on their relation to the current public mood helps us focus on how such media engage with

cultural politics for social change along with the public’s longterm priorities. Those controlling the mass media in Australia at the moment still conceive of the market in mass rather than niche terms. Rupert Murdoch is certain people will pay for the news most are now receiving free. That, of course, remains to be seen.

1 T H E H I S T O R Y O F T H E F U T U R E O F J O U R N A L I S M

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Chapter 2

Private versus public media Are you going to pay the public for their contributions and if so, where will that leave journalists, especially freelancers, if you’re getting free or cheap content from the public? Audience member, Media140 conference, Sydney, 5 November 2009 I don’t know, we haven’t worked that out yet. Mark Scott, CEO, Australian Broadcasting Commission The question of who should pay for news was pushed into the spotlight in the second half of 2009 when Rupert Murdoch started spruiking for his business from behind a paywall. He announced that News Corporation was going to start charging for its content; that public broadcasters such as the ABC and the BBC were threatening the future of news and journalism; and that entities such as Google were content kleptomaniacs. He threatened to remove News Corp content from Google altogether. Google, which receives millions of hits daily on its news site, 36

which compiles articles from around the world, has said in the past

that any content owners who don’t like it should feel free to take their content off the Google search engine. If Murdoch makes good his threat, News Corp will of course miss out on millions of hits. In an interview with Sky News, Murdoch countered by saying he was content with a smaller audience so long as they all paid to read News Corp’s online content. He noted that there was not enough advertising revenue in the world to make all online sites profitable, and certainly not enough to support newsgathering. Few were surprised when Murdoch also announced that News Corp was holding talks with other newspaper publishers about forming a consortium that would charge for news online and on portable devices. Indeed, the portable devices people choose may turn out to be more significant than any arguments between media moguls and managers of public broadcasters. That is, the line in the marketplace may just be drawn by loyalty to certain devices. Remember Beta versus VHS? In other words, choices are likely to be made due to the hardware someone has or what terms are dictated by their phone carrier – for instance the news providers licensed to Kindle e-books or material licensed to iPads – rather than preferred news sources. But this is of course guesswork; the international experimental phase we are living through is likely to last for some years yet. And to people who continue demanding to know what will replace the old, broken newspaper model, Clay Shirkey says: 2

papers to replace the one the internet just broke.’ Professor Jay Rosen of NYU is to the point when it comes to

I have no fucking clue what the next business model for on my Twitter profile. 6:28 a.m., 23 August 20091 Academics aren’t generally known for their sense of humour. It

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news is. Never said I did. Were there room I would put that

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business models and news journalism:

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‘Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for news-

post from Rosen did just that. Along with Shirkey, another of my

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newly favourite media academics, Rosen is not afraid to clearly state

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is certainly rare for one to make me laugh, but this cranky blog

that no-one knows what the mediascape is going to look like in 12 months, let alone a decade. Still, if we care about an informed public domain, we need ‘professional’ journalists in one form or another, but who is going to pay them? While no business model is certain, how to support professional expertise remains an issue. The answer to the battle between free, crowd-sourced expertise and skilled professional journalists should not be concentrated so much on which side will triumph, but rather on how they can both continue. New institutional forms have emerged to coordinate and monetise the potential of DIY media (Facebook and YouTube, for example). Rupert Murdoch has invested billions in various online experiments (including MySpace, Hulu.com, AskMen.com, GameSpy, DrownedinSound.com, Photobucket.com and more). He is clearly thinking about how a participatory media ecosystem can be developed into an orderly market, as Apple did with iTunes. As the US media scholar Neil Postman reminds us: ‘. . . our most important radicals have been capitalists, especially capitalists who have exploited the possibilities of new technologies’. He goes on to mention Samuel Morse, Alexander Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Samuel Goldwyn, Henry Luce and Walt Disney. Postman notes that these radical capitalists were fascinated by new technology and were in part responsible for the achievements of the 20th century, but also points out that ‘a culture which exalts the new for its own sake’ and is indifferent to the destruction of the old ‘runs the risk of becoming trivial’.2 I take this

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to be one more argument for moving beyond crude dichotomies

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(such as professional versus amateur and journalist versus blogger) when it comes to the state of the contemporary mediascape. Consider what could be described as the first business model for news: the employment by merchants and traders in early modern Europe of letter writers in cities other than their own to pass on information, including conditions for trade and transport, and the availability and price of various goods. Political information would

also be relayed: what the local authorities were up to, rumours of war, court gossip and natural disasters. The newsletter had been accepted as a conventional form of correspondence between officials or friends in Roman times, and in the late Middle Ages newsletters began to be exchanged between important trading families. The most famous example is the Fugger Letters from the 16th century, a private system of newsgathering coordinated by the Fugger family, who owned a financial house in Augsburg, Germany. The letters were not intended for public distribution. They were certainly not for the eyes of competitors: the news such letters conveyed was extremely valuable because it was relevant to decision-making. Accuracy, currency and reliability were of utmost importance. With attempts at regular publication and concern with topical events, the commercial newsletter became the first vehicle for serious news. The rise of blogging has often been compared to the growth of pamphleteering in the late 17th and 18th centuries – cheap and easily accessible, and able to make news and opinion public quickly. Jumping forward to 1994, we have Daniel Hallin speaking of a potential crisis in journalism – that of the breakdown of the myth of ‘journalist as hero’ and the fact that, simply put, journalists were often ‘too close to the powerful institutions whose actions need to be discussed’.3 He went on to argue the need for forms of journalism 2

between political institutions and the mass public’.4 Journalists are often criticised for having one-sided views or not number of subeditors may work on a piece before the public gets to see it and the original journalist may well find the point or angle seasoned journalist in Australia who hasn’t experienced this. Significantly, due to the size of our population, Australia has

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of their story unrecognisable once it’s in print. There is surely not a

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understanding the background to a story. However, editors and a

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that were able to converse with the public rather than ‘mediating

news force of a BBC or a CNN – yet Australians get cranky when

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news is too often filtered through BBC or CNN. Media producers

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trouble generating the advertising revenues necessary to support a

are torn between conflicting forces every single day – and this should not be news.5 In early 2009, the Pew Research Center’s New Media Index published some interesting data on the differences between social media, including blogs, and mainstream media outlets in the USA. The New Media Index monitors and analyses the content on more than 100 million blogs and other social media web pages concerned with national news and public affairs, then compares the results to the stories in mainstream media. The results suggest that social media covers a wider range of topics and focuses less on ‘winner– loser’ coverage. The hottest topic at the time was how Obama was faring in his first month in office. The subject made up 16 per cent of the links found (in the New Media Index of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism for the week of February 16–20). The second largest story, comprising 10 per cent of the links, was the ongoing financial crisis. What was interesting was the other story with 10 per cent of the links – to articles about a controversy embroiling Facebook, which changed, and then changed back, its terms of service language. Days after the story appeared online it made it into the mainstream press. Paul Colgan, managing editor at News Limited’s online venture The Punch, says journalists are finding that distributing links to news stories across the web is an easy and effective way of reaching more people: Huge networks like Facebook and Twitter, and sharing sites like dig and mixx are just the beginning. Once people find

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links they like on there, they might share them on other

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networks or post them on their blogs. That piece of content can then go viral, leading to millions of visits. ‘I’ve seen it happen on content I’ve worked on, and it’s breathtaking,’ he added, referring to the fact that journalists in these instances also have the lure of bigger, international audiences. Citing US journalism professor Jeff Jarvis regarding the ‘link economy’, Colgan spoke about the value of links from other sites.

Then it’s up to you to make money out of that audience. It’s this last part of the equation – how to make serious money from having a big audience – that remains unsolved . . . in the meantime, news organisations have got bills to pay. Colgan recalls a meeting during which he received two text messages and four emails, all saying the same thing: that Ted Kennedy was dead. I told the people in the room and thumbed in a tweet. The six messages had all come from multi-million-dollar news operations which pay people – at considerable cost – to report, check, and publish this kind of information every minute of every day. The emails were free, but the two text messages were from paid subscription services. Maybe those two got back a few cents for their efforts in distributing the news. But the companies sending emails were giving it away – in fact, it was costing them to do so. And weren’t they performing one of the fundamental duties of news organisations? Conceding that the Kennedy death is an extreme example – the kind of story that zips around the world in seconds – Colgan argues that, while a citizen reporter could have broken this story: 2

all the time, is to have an organised group of people make it

The mullet strategy either so badly written as to be nonsensical or so vitriolic it is hard to take seriously. (Think of the comments following news The Huffington Post’s Jonah Peretti advocates the ‘mullet strategy’, which invites users

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stories on the online sites of mainstream newspapers, for instance.)

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One rather obvious issue is that much user-generated content is

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their life’s work to bring the news to people. Journalists.6

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the only way the world has found yet to cover all the stories,

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[to] argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp . . . the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.7 A traditional journalist turned blogger, Mark Potts at the Recovering Journalist blog is behind the Voice of America (VOA) blog. VOA has a legal charter obliging it to present accurate, objective and comprehensive news. They claim they are one of the few remaining practitioners of what one might call ‘pure journalists’ in a media world that is increasingly characterised by commentary, attitude, argument, gossip and celebrity.8

Stakeholders When Rupert Murdoch’s second son James, who heads News Corp’s Europe and Asia arms, delivered the MacTaggart lecture to the Edinburgh International Television Festival,9 he claimed the BBC’s broadcast and online news services were ‘throttling’ the market. He argued that the BBC’s dominant position as a news provider in Britain was a huge obstacle to the survival of its commercial rivals: Dumping free state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet . . . If we are to have that state sponsorship at all,

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then it is fundamental to the health of the creative

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industries, independent production, and professional journalism that it exists on a far, far smaller scale . . . We seem to have decided as a society to let independence and plurality wither. A fortnight later, the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott made it clear at the A.N. Smith Memorial Lecture in Journalism that he was sceptical about Murdoch’s expressed desire to limit the BBC at

the same time as his company wanted to start charging people for online news. Margaret Simons, a Melbourne-based journalist and lecturer at Swinburne University, has become a spokesperson for the future of journalism since starting her blog The Content Makers in 2007. As Simons has pointed out on her blog, only public broadcasters can embrace audience fragmentation and remain unfazed by the collapsing business models. It is harder for a media company focused on quarterly economic results to innovate and experiment quickly – at least not with the depth and speed necessary for a professional news provider. It is no accident, she continues, that the public broadcaster takes the debate forward. That is why the ABC is more important now than since its creation. Its new justification for existence includes innovation and experimentation at a time of collapsing business models and paradigm change in media. And that is why we can expect it to come under increasingly fierce attack from all of those who want to make audiences pay for content. She adds that one of the big battles of the early part of this century will be between those who try to make people pay for content, including pay television, and public broadcasting; something that 2

the US. Subscription television, especially news stations such as the nalism. At the World Media Summit in Beijing in October 2009, Murdoch and other delegates – the CEOs of Turner/Time Warner, the problems of paywalls and copyright. The Australian columnist Mark Day wrote about Murdoch’s upcoming plans, explaining that

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AP and Reuters, for example – began to find their way through

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BBC, CNN, Fox and Sky have found an economic model for jour-

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will differentiate between the future of media in Australia and

ing comments. This was supported somewhat by Rupert Murdoch

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when he explained to David Speers on Sky News that the walls

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it would not be a simple case of erecting a paywall around exist-

‘would not go all the way to the ceiling’. According to Day, News Corp products would be redeveloped into niche products, which would incorporate social networks.10 Some will be aimed at youth markets, others at the so-called working families, others at upmarket, culturally influenced, older audiences. Some will be defined by geography (that is, city or regionally oriented); others by specific interests. They will be hybrid sites with open-access for all the breaking news that is currently provided free today. It won’t cost you to learn of a plane crash, a government initiative, or a sporting result. Beyond the open pages will be a raft of services and specialised information. A clue may be taken from the launch last week of Times Plus in Britain – a site majoring in culture and travel initiatives, where subscribers to the Times and Sunday Times will have automatic access, and non-subscribers will be asked to pay fifty pounds a year to join the club. On offer are travel deals, tickets to film and theatre previews, discount book offers, cross-promotional offers for pay-TV services, upgrades on airlines, and so on.11 The American media scholar and blogger Clay Shirkey has said the internet makes all commercial models of journalism harder to sustain – but not impossible. He believes we are seeing a rebalancing of the landscape in terms of the logic of the creation of public goods, away from a market dominated by commercial interests into a market where all three of these modes of production are going to

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be operating side by side in different ways.12 In other words, like

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an ecosystem.

Public broadcast threat to commercial media? Former Australian Labor opposition leader Mark Latham came out with strong opinions about the ABC, and not on the public broadcaster’s side. In his usual bombastic style Latham said it was time to

sell the ABC. He made salient points, including that the sale would raise billions of dollars and save $950 million in annual recurrent spending; that the proliferation of affordable entertainment and information services meant that the public sector no longer would need to dedicate resources to broadcasting; and that privatisation would take the politics out of the ABC.13 However, he also made comments that made him sound a little out of touch. He described the internet as ‘a forum for extemporaneous browsing and celebrity gossip – the antithesis of content quality’. However, it was in criticising Mark Scott for the plan ‘to make the Internet the primary platform for the delivery of ABC content’ that Latham made his biggest mistake. He described Scott as someone ‘who has been on the edge of party politics but never made it into parliament’ and went on to criticise the sort of people he called responsible for the way ‘serious news and public affairs reporting has been downgraded’ and turned into ‘hybrid journalism’. He named and shamed the late Australian newspaper journalist Matt Price, former political sketch writer for the Sydney Morning Herald Annabel Crabb (recruited in 2009 to lead the ABC’s push into digital journalism) and of course The Chaser. But what these people do is make politics not only palatable but also understandable for the average person who has never made it to parliament, let alone near the edge of party politics. I think that makes them vital rather 2

When he spoke at the Media140 conference in Sydney in early November 2009 about the ABC’s plans to transform itself into a soon open at least 50 new positions for digital media trainers across the country. The ABC Open Project, to be launched in 2010, would around Australia, teaching the public how to upload their own content to the ABC’s website.

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see these new digital media producers, stationed in ABC centres

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hub for user-generated content, Scott announced that he would

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than ‘infantile’.

align himself with the cutting edge of digital technology, the editor

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of newmatilda.com Marni Cordell wrote a provocative piece asking

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While acknowledging her commendation of Scott’s efforts to

how such endeavours were going to contribute to the production of ‘quality journalism’ that so many people seemed worried about. She argued: Missing from this debate – and from the uncritical applauding of Scott’s foray into community-driven content – seems to be a collective recognition that Scott oversees a very large part of a dwindling resource: that is, money to be spent on good, original journalism.14 When I spoke to her, Cordell said she was surprised by how little scrutiny there was, by commentators, of journalism that taxpayers already fund. ‘My problem is not that the ABC is putting money into digital trainers,’ she told me, but that when [Scott] is asked to talk about business models and the future of journalism, he talks about user-generated content – it’s not the forum for it. The lack of funding for journalism isn’t being addressed. She added that there was also a pool of untapped talent already out there in the traditional journalism community. Cordell did not see the question of remuneration as relevant in the case of the ABC and user-generated content, arguing that the role of the public at the ABC was not to generate stories directly but to add comment and debate, to ask questions that might not have been asked, and to point out errors or omissions. ‘I don’t know if the ABC is necessarily the place that should be paying freelancers

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anyway; it should be hiring journalists.’

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While it was something she aspired to, Cordell said she could not see a time when newmatilda.com would be able to pay award rates to everyone who wrote for them. When they were setting up ABC Unleashed they contacted me to ask a few questions and asked how much we paid. I think they may have been sounding out what they could get away with. I regret telling them because they now pay

that rate and that might be my fault. I feel terrible that New Matilda can only pay most freelancers and contributors small fees but we’re not the ABC, and we shouldn’t set the bar.15 News Limited’s Punch and Fairfax’s National Times do not pay at all for contributions. When I asked whether he thought the online environment’s tendency to use unpaid labour could possibly undermine journalists’ work, the editor of Crikey.com, Eric Beecher, told me he didn’t understand what I meant by journalists not being paid. The websites I’m involved with are commercial so we derive revenue from subscriptions and advertising and sometimes from both; it’s a commercial operation just like any other media. I don’t understand what you mean by journalists working for free – if a journalist writes a blog and doesn’t get paid for it, that’s their choice. We pay all our journalists and we pay them market rates. People who don’t get market rates or who are not paid in my experience are the nonjournalists – the academics. There are people who work with two currencies – money and exposure of themselves. They put value on that and have to decide what it’s worth.

produce Eureka Report, a private subscription service aimed at and provides business news and commentary by financial journalists. Beecher pointed out that there are business models, including

but I don’t know of any that can fund tens of millions. Sites don’t have a sustainable business model and no-one pretends they’re commercial.

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like Polico and the Huffington Post are doing well, but they

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Crikey.com’s, that can fund millions of dollars a year:

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small investors, and Business Spectator, which is free of charge

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As well as Crikey.com, the offices of Text Publishing in Melbourne

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It’s absolutely a two-way and fair exchange.16

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I spoke to the editor of ABC.net.au, Bruce Belsham, about the online opinion pages Unleashed. He told me: Unleashed is a discussion and opinion area, a talking shop. The intent and the editorial policies are quite different. It should not be confused with news journalism or even citizen journalism – the generation of primary news content and information. The concept of journalistic rate cards is a separate discussion that might apply to freelancers or users if we looked at those people filling news functions. But we don’t do that at the moment. Unleashed is an addition to what the ABC traditionally does – not a substitution – so it doesn’t represent a transfer from a paid to an unpaid sector. But because we maintain a professional news gathering capacity, there aren’t a lot of spare funds to channel into these newer ventures. He went on to advise me to look at the contributors’ page of Unleashed. I didn’t need to, because I knew it boasted a long list of contributors: from the powerful and influential, to well known scribes, relative unknowns, lobbyists, specialists, academics, enthusiasts. We’ve also had around a quarter of a million user comments posted. This reflects the deliberate eclecticism of the site and a much broader range than

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newspaper op-ed pages over a comparable period,

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he continued. I agree that prospects for the freelancer who seeks to make a living out of journalism are not rosy. While the commercial sector struggles with revenue models, cash costs like contract labour get squeezed first. But I don’t think it’s a sustainable argument to suggest that online media sites like Unleashed are not broadening the range of voices heard.

That last comment was in response to my query whether he thought a trend for unpaid labour could encourage a tendency to use only voices of those who could afford to go unpaid, such as retirees or academics with full-time jobs; or students and freelancers desperate to acquire bylines in order to generate paid work. Is it not well and truly time to let go of the binary codes of amateur and professional, new media and old media? Such polarisations are no longer meaningful, let alone constructive. The above comments highlight a need to interrogate and constantly scrutinise what we mean by journalism and journalists as well as balance, bias, quality and independence. I would argue that all media practices and platforms pose concerns about the nature of citizenship, pluralism and how institutions work and interact. Media arguments, as Henry Mayer frequently noted, often turn into morality plays – which surely is another reason to fight blind loyalty to groups (reporter or blogger?) or political lines (left or right?). Such an attitude discourages a questioning environment.

Test sites A new Australian venture that looks promising is the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism – a not-for-profit group set up as part of the Swinburne Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne, which will explore new business models 2

publishers, journalism academics, community advocates and online media innovators.17 Spot.Us blueprint. Spot.Us was created by US journalist David Cohn, a former technical and science reporter for Wired magazine, sustaining local investigative journalism.18 The basic idea is this: a freelance reporter will pitch an issue she or he wants to follow

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with the intention of creating a new business model capable of

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The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism is based on the

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for journalism. The board includes leading Australian journalists,

then talked over within Spot.Us, where donations from the public

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can be pledged and processed. Once the goal is met, the story gets

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and propose a budget for what it will cost to develop. The idea is

launched. ‘This is a way for the community to come together to help fund investigative journalism through small donations,’ says Cohn. ‘If you get 100 people to give just $15, that’s enough to pay a journalist to do a story on something that will benefit the community.’ Once the project is finished, it will then be given away to news organisations that can run it at no cost both in print and online. If a news outlet wants exclusive access to the material, it then pays back the original donors, who can then donate to another proposed story. Cohn built Spot.Us with the help of a grant from the Knight Ridder Foundation, a remnant of the media conglomerate that is dedicated to promoting journalism and supporting the 26 communities where the company formerly operated. Cohn says Spot.us ‘is not a news organisation’: [it’s] a marketplace, a platform that independent journalists can use to crowd-fund for themselves. It’s for freelance journalists, and it works on a pitch by pitch basis. A newspaper is a packaged product that is delivered to your door. What journalism does is to inform people, and I think people will always want information, especially about their local community. I would argue that it is not individual reporters and journalists holding journalism back but rather the institutions of which they are part. Structured in a top-down fashion, as news organisations are, makes it hard for individuals to make decisions on the fly, which can cause

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them to be somewhat narrow, or unable to work rapidly in

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response to the community. Of course the community now has a voice thanks to the internet. Along with medical journalist Melissa Sweet, board member Margaret Simons initiated the idea for the Australian Foundation for Public Interest Journalism. She told me that one of the main aims of the foundation is to involve the wider journalistic community. The foundation will fund ‘worthy’ journalism projects initiated by either

members of the public or practising journalists. Its first project will be to establish a website through which members of the public and journalists can come together to organise journalistic projects. The US has a far greater tradition of risk-taking investors and philanthropists, not to mention a vastly larger population, so how the foundation will fare remains to be seen. According to Simons, one of the foundation’s initiatives is enabling the public to nominate the type of journalism it wants to see. That may be something very local which is simply not commercial for a larger organisation or may be a larger issue, national or international. Melissa is concerned about issues of public health which can be to do with mundane matters such as the ability to access fresh produce, issues that don’t get anything like the exposure that a cancer scare does. The idea is that it is not for us to sit in judgement and decided what people should have. Another vehicle being set up by the foundation is the Investigative Journalism Resource Centre [which] is really an enabling thing for journalists. It’s very

access materials on the public record. So the resource centre will be a one-stop-shop for resources and training.

teaching program. There are journalists on the board and the foun-

As far as funding to date, the university has provided funding for the actual journalism will come from the public. If it doesn’t, we’ll know it hasn’t worked!

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everything, and we’re now seeking seed funding. The

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dation will also be commissioning freelance journalism.

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Some journalists are already on staff at Swinburne as part of the

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do a company search. Or a title search, or to know how to

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hard these days, for example, for a journalist to learn how to

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The Spot.Us model the foundation is drawing ideas from is trying to pioneer ‘community-funded reporting’; the act of distributing the cost of hiring a reporter across many different people. Writing about Spot.Us for Crikey.com late in 2009, founder Dave Cohn said, ‘for example, if 17 people donate $20 each, we can fund an investigation into what chemicals end up in our foods.’ He believes the reason the site has merited attention is because: it brings a new level of transparency to journalism. The entire process of a story, from start to finish, is public through Spot.Us. That is radically different to how journalism is traditionally done, with an emphasis on ‘the scoop’ and hording information until the last minute. We believe scoops have the half-life of a link. We believe transparency is the new objectivity. By doing our work in public, that is the standard to which we are held. He states clearly that, although they are not claiming to have found the answer to solve journalism’s problems, ventures like Spot.Us will be part of the solution. ‘Journalism needs 1000 start-ups,’ he added. ‘Of those, 800 will fail. Another 150 or so will teeter for a few years and 50 will emerge as the digital equivalent of the New York Times.’ The importance of continuing the search for new alternatives is vital, via for-profit and non-profit; amateur; professional; professional-amateur; market-driven and subsidised sources. One of the positive objectives of initiatives and models such as the

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Australian Foundation for Public Interest Journalism is that it will

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increase the number of people who understand that serious reporting is a public good in addition to being a marketplace, and who understand more about the economics – that journalism costs a lot of money. Many journalists I know have embraced the changing mediascape, involving themselves in new opportunities wherever possible. But just as many I know or have met at recent media-related conferences are feeling increasingly defeated or else outright hostile.

When ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’ converge at such conferences, the hostility is even keener and comes from both sides. Traditional practitioners, citizen/amateur journalists and bloggers all believe they are using their powers for the ultimate forces of good. The apocalyptic, end-of-days language is rife – and increasingly dull. There are plenty of groups emerging that realise they may as well experiment while they wait. In the US in April 2009 a company called Journalism Online was launched, with the purpose of helping news organisations make money online. It announced that more than 500 newspapers and magazines had agreed to join the venture as affiliates. At the time of writing the plan was that a payment platform would go online which would allow subscribers to access paid content at the sites of the affiliates using a universal Journalism Online account. During a massive recession in the US there was an injection of $300 million into new media sites, and companies such as AOL and TPM are hiring ex-journalists. Then there are other members of the public experimenting on their own. A multimedia digital reporting cooperative that merges traditional media with online social media tools, Not on the Wires, was formed by a group of young people who aim to ‘shoot, edit, design, present code and aggregate’ for other organisations including charities and non-profit organisations. The group came to attention with their innovative coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2

hits, it reflected a demand for the aggregation of so-called old and new media and is now backed by Reuters, who are calling it a number of traditional journalists have responded to the changing priorities of their own industry.

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‘mobile reporting experiment’. In chapter 5 I will look at how a

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G20 summit. When their site covering the G20 received 80 000

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Chapter 3

This is not news On Thursday 6 September 2007, what appeared to be a motorcade carrying an official dignitary was waved though a police security checkpoint in Sydney’s central business district. The checkpoint was to safeguard delegates attending the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group (APEC). The New South Wales police in charge, perhaps bedazzled by the hired car and suits, simply waved the car through with the words ‘The road is yours.’ The convoy found itself metres away from the InterContinental Hotel, which among other guests was hosting US President George W. Bush. Despite the state and federal governments’ rhetoric about their lock-down of Sydney, it is probably safe to say that, when the world’s most wanted man Osama Bin Laden popped out of said car, it was probably the biggest breach in the President’s security to date. The Chaser is just one of a series of new, emergent forms of journalism that have arisen over the past decade; it is an example of a contemporary, political communication practice that doesn’t fit into traditional journalistic models. ‘Because understand54

ing of an issue comes from a range of different sources, these

different perspectives can be combined together to give audiences a more well-rounded understanding’ of what is happening in public life.1 In doing so, such emerging forms are reshaping democratic debate and civic engagement. There is also more to the contemporary media ecosphere than online material. The convergence of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media is enabling new genres to evolve. The Chaser team, to use one example, started in print, have been online and on radio, and have also excelled themselves on television and on stage. They combine the aesthetics of student pranks and revues from the 1950s and ’60s with those of the underground press, and satire of the 1960s and ’70s with punk anarchism, and harness the spirit of the ‘carnivalesque’.2 Arguing into the red, mottled, angry faces of those who believe quantity and ‘trash’ have won out over ‘quality’ journalism, I would suggest that the breaking up of journalism into a series of overlapping and complementary parts is making a valuable contribution to public knowledge. The Chaser’s War on Everything was a night-time comedy and satire program that screened on the ABC in 2006, 2007 and 2009. It generated quite a bit of controversy in its short lifespan3 but also drew praise for its unorthodox commentary on Australian politics. In causing controversy, it highlighted the managerial stance of so much of politics: ‘scripted staged appearances, focus groups and gaffe spotting . . . in the place of wit, passion and ideas’.4 The show was also extremely popular. On 12 September 2007 – the episode that showed the footage from the APEC stunt – ratings records were smashed when 2.3 million people tuned in. On the

normative practices. While surely it is now almost impossible to

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nalists are irrelevant, but rather that they need to adjust their

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I don’t mean to suggest that political commentators and jour-

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by Kerry O’Brien, attracted only 800 000 viewers.

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same night The 7.30 Report, featuring an interview of John Howard

school debate style of a Kerry O’Brien, one that seeks ‘objectivity’,

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is no longer satisfying. A show like The 7.30 Report is aesthetically

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uncritically align yourself with the left or the right, the tedious high

and intellectually out of its time and therefore unable to comment on contemporary life because its agenda is so narrow. Such a show doesn’t hold the media itself in its frame, unlike The Chaser. A seasoned reporter, Kerry O’Brien is intelligent and highly knowledgeable but became extremely cranky about the Chaser team being allowed on the tally room floor during the 2007 election night coverage. He didn’t understand the point of them – which is ironic, given the dominant position satire has held in political coverage during recent elections, both here and in the US. When Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, took the opportunity during his 2006 speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner to satirically attack President George W. Bush, millions downloaded the scene from YouTube. So many, in fact, that the mainstream media was forced to give space to the incident. Comedian Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, caused similar controversy when he appeared on CNN’s news show Crossfire in 2005 and accused the hosts of ‘hurting’ the state of American politics with their ‘dog and pony show’.5 The speed with which both incidents circulated online speaks not only to the personal popularity of the hosts of these ‘fake news’ shows. US scholars Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson credit the rise of Stewart and Colbert with transforming the mediation of US politics, especially in the 2008 US election. In Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, they note how growing audiences have realised that ‘keeping up with the news is more necessary than ever . . . there’s simply no other way to follow a monologue by Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.’ S P A C E

Kevin Rudd in a mock documentary using material produced by

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about Australian and US politics and uploading them to YouTube.

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In 2007, Australian lawyer Hugh Atkin started creating videos

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One posted during the 2007 Australian federal election depicted the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong proved popular with Australians. Atkin also created several videos relating to the 2008 US presidential election, one of which, Barack Roll, has been watched over five million times.

By working to blend the lines between news and entertainment, fake news, satirical material and pranks approach social and political issues from a distance, enabling reflection and analysis. Such vehicles are a means of critique and challenge the traditional norms of news and journalism. If pranks and satire focusing on the media have one thing in common, it is their ability to coopt ‘tabloid’ tools – doorstopping, face-to-face confrontations, feigned outrage, hidden cameras and so on – that are often used in an attempt to make ‘victims’ look awkward or outraged. The comical nature of pranks and satire allows those responsible to be quite direct in their political criticism. This approach catches its powerful targets off guard, and does so in a manner that is humorous and therefore arguably more powerful in terms of public engagement and knowledge. Despite the critical attitude repeatedly shown in public opinion polls towards journalists and the media,6 public concern and ensuing debates seem to have little material effect on media practice. And while it may seem easy to lay the blame for any ethical dilemmas at the feet of the tabloids, ethical problems of course run across the spectrum of media. Driven by technological advances and the globalisation of information flows, the variety of media formats today is unprecedented, presenting producers and consumers with a plethora of ethical challenges. Added to this is the fact that, when it comes to critical ideas, media practitioners and consumers are often coming at ethical problems from completely different angles. Suggested controls such as the tightening of the code of ethics are not taking into account two issues: first, that journalists and consumers may have different ideas about how the traditional practices need

sumers on the other often prioritise conflicts of interest quite

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For example, media practitioners on the one hand and con-

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the media.8

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ability of consumers to redress the balance by coopting the tools of

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regulating;7 and second, that suggested controls often disregard the

power – acting as watchdogs in the public sphere and challenging

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institutional authority on behalf of the public. What this

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differently. Many journalists see themselves as outsiders to

framework for understanding the production of media texts ignores is the way the traditional norms of journalism constrain public debate. It is not just the content of what or who is written about in the media; it is the way journalistic norms shape ideas about what is and isn’t news, what is and isn’t political, what kind of knowledge counts as expert, and how people should relate to news or should use it.

Locating the prank The best-known Australian prank was the Ern Malley hoax, perpetrated in 1944 by Australian poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart with the aim of disparaging the style of contemporary poetry that was receiving critical praise at the time. They concocted poetry in the same modernist style under the fictitious name of Ern Malley and sent it to the literary magazine Angry Penguins, where it was treated as genuine and published. As Australian art critic Robert Hughes notes in the introduction to Heywood’s The Ern Malley Affair, the hoax marked the first time in Australian history that poetry became front-page news. Hughes goes on to say that McAuley and Stewart created an icon of literary value, and that ‘Ern Malley is the only truly avant-garde writer in a country which has never sponsored a literary revolution.’9 The prank has a long history in Australian popular culture, as evidenced in the recent books Hoax Nation and How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti and Political Mischief Making from Across Australia.10 While there is not space to do all

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the perpetrators the justice I believe they deserve here, I would like

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to consider the resurgence of pranksterism in the late 1990s as typified by John Safran, Pauline Pantsdown, the Dole Army, Young People Against Heavy Metal T-Shirts and Young People Against Poetry,11 who targeted not obscure literary journals but the most commercial of media. This is a trend that has been ignored in most recent debates about media ethics, and yet it is one with real significance for the

way we understand the relationship between media practitioners and their audiences. Media savvy is one of the hallmarks of the postmodern media prankster. Generations X and Y (and now their younger counterparts) are familiar with the vocabulary, technology and formulas of the media and are using their knowledge to develop and deploy an auto-critique of the industry. Pranks and social commentaries aimed at mainstream media not only challenge assumptions about the passivity and gullibility of audiences (especially youth) but also, more importantly, suggest that any discussion of journalistic practices needs to be interactive. Journalists can no longer proceed on the assumption that the masses are ignorant of the techniques and tropes of the mainstream media. Clare ‘chk chk boom!’ Werbeloff became an internet sensation in May 2009 after her bogus account of a shooting in Kings Cross, Sydney. Her notorious description of the ‘fat wog’ shooting the ‘skinny wog’ to the Channel 9 news camera crew was viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube and led to job offers and interview requests from around the world. As mentioned above, the notion of tightening controls such as the code of ethics disregards the ability of consumers to redress the balance by coopting the tools of the media. By exploiting the weakness of the mainstream media for polemic and novelty, prank protest and satire can achieve something that reasoned, straightforward criticism is not always in a position to do – give the views of an unknown or otherwise voiceless group publicity. This chapter will look at how pranks perpetrated on the media illustrate a shift between producers and consumers and challenge assumptions

ethics needs to be understood as dynamic, not fixed, and the relainteractive:

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tionship between audiences, media products and technologies as

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gest in their introduction, the relationship between media and

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Lumby and Australian gender studies scholar Elspeth Probyn sug-

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As the editors of Remote Control: New Media, New Ethics,

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about passive audiences.

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. . . inquiries into ethics of contemporary popular media need to begin by considering how emerging genres and technologies are re-shaping our public sphere, and how this might cause us to rethink the assumptions grounding our ethical norms. Their broader point is that scholarly and professional debates about media ethics remain dominated by a belief in abstract codes that define ethical behaviour in a way that assumes media producers will adopt a paternalistic and protective role towards media consumers. In practice, however, consumers may have very different ethical priorities and concerns.12 A prank connotes a light-hearted activity and therefore, upon first glance, camouflages any challenges to verbal and behavioural routines, or the undermining of language, image and social convention in general. Pranks question reality by urging audiences to question what they see. Central to such modern-day media pranks is the use of mainstream media techniques and formats – footin-the-door journalism, an emphasis on the intersection between public and private spheres, the use of sensational and moralistic tones, invasion of privacy and stereotyping – to expose hypocrisy and as such broadly challenge cultural and political hierarchies. If Frontline is the elder statesman of satire (in New South Wales it has been required viewing for the HSC syllabus for a number of years), then John Safran is the eldest son of its bastard progeny. These days, Safran is a reasonably well-known media personality

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in Australia. However, back in 1997 the former advertising copy-

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writer was a contestant on the ABC’s program Race Around the World, a program in which young contestants made short videos. Safran’s work was instantly notable for the way he played with both genre and audience expectation. Satire is his lingua franca. For Race Around the World Safran stripped in Jerusalem, insulted Walt’s reputation at Disneyland and cast a voodoo curse on an ex-girlfriend. However, it is for a pilot made for the ABC in 1998, work that never made it to air, that Safran is perhaps best known. In

one segment of the pilot, Safran waylays a bemused executive on his way to work at the Phillip Morris conglomerate. He presents a marketing idea – a lone cigarette included in a ‘Cheesesticks’ packet. This way, Safran explains, when the six-to-twelve-years market for the cheesesticks are ready to move on, their first cigarette is there for them. (Phillip Morris markets cigarettes as well as cheese.) In another segment, Safran targets working bludgers rather than dole bludgers. Using the hidden camera technique employed by tabloid current affairs shows, Safran follows staff from A Current Affair to the company canteen. He then films the workers, as he says, ‘doing bugger all’. The most infamous segment, however, is the one in which Safran targets Ray Martin, a host of A Current Affair for many years and an Australian television icon. Martin was the host of A Current Affair when the show ran a story about the Paxton family – a mother and her three teenaged children – who were portrayed as a family of dole bludgers. The family was slammed by politicians and media commentators on a national scale; they were held up as figures of ridicule. (At the time, Martin and A Current Affair had been targeting unemployed youth during a time of prolonged economic recession.) When he set up camp outside Ray Martin’s house to see what time Martin left home for work, Safran took Shane Paxton along as his timekeeper. Safran used the 60 Minutes style tactics that had made reporters like Martin famous – ‘doorstopping’ (waiting on his doorstep), speaking directly to the camera and feigning outrage at Martin’s stance. Safran ended up in a scuffle with Martin and

television.

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universities, to date the pilot has not been seen in its entirety on

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it can be viewed on various internet sites and has been screened at

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Martin’s face to reveal his arrogant sense of entitlement. Although

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his wife and the Mr Nice Guy mask slipped momentarily from

when the Ray Martin segment was shown on the ABC’s Media

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Watch in March 1999. A week after screening the tape, Media

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The pilot’s place in Australian prankster history was assured

Watch made an on-air apology for airing the controversial segment. At the time, Media Watch host Richard Ackland said the material was aired to demonstrate a point about thin-skinned journalists. Roger Grant, then head of ABC Corporate Affairs, protested to the Independent Complaints Review Panel that the program was unfair and biased against Martin and failed to show the extent of intrusion into his privacy. The panel rejected that complaint but upheld Grant’s other complaint that Martin had been unfairly portrayed by Media Watch. One of the most interesting aspects of the stunt, regardless of where you stand on Safran’s intrusion into Martin’s privacy, is the way it shows the power wielded by one individual armed with a Handycam and a sense of humour. Ray Martin’s standing in the industry undoubtedly contributed to the quick and public apology issued by Media Watch. But clearly, anyone who has acted as the high-profile host of a current affairs program, known for using hidden camera techniques and walk-ups (whereby a journalist confronts the subject without prior warning) is open to being accused of hypocrisy if they complain about an invasion of their own privacy. In the first few years of this century there were a number of small groups of ordinary people who, frustrated by what they saw as political, social and cultural hypocrisy, were motivated to create new forms of expression. Taking advantage of their own media and cultural literacy, these citizens channelled their skills into personal media vehicles in order to challenge the traditional public sphere

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and the mainstream media. In doing so they attacked what they

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saw as a lack of diversity in public discourse.

The producers I interviewed Russ Weakley, who along with Peter Firminger designed some online satirical games that garnered international press attention. Initially, Weakley told me, they came up with the games – available at the time through a site they called Webwank – to amuse friends and teach themselves the computer program

Macromedia Flash. In the Crucifixion Game, players gained points for correctly nailing Jesus to the cross. In the John Howard Shooting Gallery, players slugged the Australian Prime Minister with used tampons, an especially popular pastime among net-savvy Australians after the Liberal Party announced that the controversial GST would be imposed on feminine hygiene products. When John Herron, the then Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, refused to admit that there was an Indigenous Australian ‘stolen generation’, Weakley created a satirical game based on the Howard government’s policy towards the Stolen Generations. The idea of the game was to steal Herron’s 10 children one by one and give them to Aboriginal families. (The Howard government had been accused of abandoning reconciliation by denying the existence of the Stolen Generation in a leaked submission to a Senate inquiry. Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron’s report argued that no more than 10 per cent of Aboriginal children were taken from their families and therefore there was never a generation of stolen children, ruling out the need for compensation.)13 Russ Weakley told me: [The games] were simply personal reactions to political situations at the time. I was particularly angry with the government for the way they were treating indigenous peoples and their issues at the time . . . At the time of the interview Weakley was running a web design business called Max Design and Firminger was running a web development business called Webboy. He says he never believed that the

know the game was online and to see if he wanted to make a comCourt of Queensland and the ‘tracking down’ by the federal police:

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ment. John Herron replied with a threat involving the Supreme

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Weakley and Firminger emailed Senator John Herron to let him

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even as each game was created.’14

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coverage. ‘We had no real aim when starting the Webwank site, or

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Herron Game would achieve national, let alone international, press

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This is to formally let you know that I am instituting proceedings against you for defamation in the Supreme Court of Queensland. The Federal Police will be involved to track this website if I do not receive a response within 24 hours. John Herron Minister for A.T.S.I. Affairs. In response, Weakley and Firminger posted a statement on Webwank: This game is political satire. It was intended to be a comic depiction of the Howard Government’s policy and John Herron’s stance towards the Stolen Generations. We were very surprised by his threatening response to what can only be described as an online political cartoon. We do not in any way intend to offend or threaten John Herron’s real children.15 Weakley and Firminger initially reacted ‘with complete panic’, Weakley told me plainly. We didn’t think we would get such a heavy handed reaction – in fact we didn’t expect any reaction at all. Secondly, we didn’t expect any media attention. We were caught completely off guard. It was only when we had a day to calm down that we realised we were not breaking any law, and that the threat was not only empty, but also wrong on many levels. Peter and I became angry then for different concerned about a game than he seemed to be about the indigenous issues that the game addressed. Peter was angry because he believed it infringed on his freedom of speech. He believed that it could affect any cartoonist, if we were actually successfully sued.

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reasons. I was very pissed off that Herron was more

The front page of the website turned into a political debate about

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the freedom of speech.

I recently did a search for my name in Google and came up with many news articles across the world that talked about the game. So, my perception of what we were doing is radically different now to what it was when we made the game. As I said, we’d made the games for a laugh, but the best part was that in order to understand the controversy, people all had to go into a bit of background about what the game meant – as international audiences did not know the full story. This meant that a lot of people were made aware of the problem and the situation for indigenous peoples in Australia. We could never have achieved this if we had not been threatened with legal action. The policies of the Howard government also affected a lone culture jammer who calls himself Mickie Quick. He told me he was so incensed by John Howard’s treatment of asylum seekers in the leadup to the 2001 federal election that he immediately began to think of what to do. One action he took involved the street signs on builtup concrete islands for pedestrians. The signs were a diamond shape with a simple graphic of people crossing, a tall one leading a smaller one by the arm, with a rectangular sign just underneath the figures which read: REFUGE ISLAND. Quick made up some photocopy cut-outs, so that an M-16 machine gun appeared in the free hand of the tall person, with the gun pointing towards the head of the smaller person. In light of this, the sign became a representation of one person grabbing another person by the arm and forcibly leading them somewhere at gunpoint. Underneath, the slightly altered text

who curated Borderpanic, an exhibition and symposium for the

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Deborah Kelly is an artist and media activist living in Sydney

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years.16

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of the altered signs stayed in Sydney for many weeks and some for

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read: REFUGEE ISLAND. Quick’s work was such that a number

a group who conducted a number of displays around Sydney in

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reaction to the plight of asylum seekers in Australia. In Woomera,

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Performance Space in Sydney. She is a member of Boatpeople.org,

300 miles north of the nearest city, Adelaide in South Australia, hundreds of asylum seekers resided in an Immigration Detention Centre between 1999 and 2003. Young asylum seekers sewed their lips together in protest while others went on hunger strikes. Over the 2002 Easter weekend, about a thousand protesters made camp in front of the Woomera Detention Centre, tearing down fences and freeing some detainees. Online and off, groups including artists and activists from the Netherlands, Germany, Australia and Britain including No One Is Illegal, Boat-People.org, No Border.org, The Virtual People Smuggler and the Refugee Action Collective had called for action to bring to an end the human rights offences committed against asylum seekers. Boat-People.org uses tactical media, from networking to fax campaigns, street demonstrations and email-based poster distribution and guerilla projections in Sydney Harbour.17 Boat-People.org were responsible for dressing statues around Sydney in barbed wire, Tampa sashes and black armbands while in other cities around Australia collaborators produced guerilla projection art events. Some of the group projected an image of an 18th-century tall ship onto the Sydney Opera House. The group arrived at the Opera House at 9 p.m. with a portable generator and a domestic slide projector. When the projector was switched on, a 15-metre-high image of a tall ship hit the sails of the Opera House. The group took photos for 20 minutes before security guards arrived and threatened to call the police. Boat-People.org volunteers began sending out images and press releases.

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While the mainstream media in Australia largely ignored the

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event, the image travelled around the world via the internet. Within 48 hours, the group were receiving congratulatory emails from activists all over the world. ‘Boat-People aim to send a message of compassion. Not all Australians agree with the government’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers,’ says Dave Gravina, one of the founders of the media activist group. ‘We’re levering open space for powerful, hopeful new ideas to counter government promotion of fear and racism,’ adds Kelly.

The simple truth is that if you’re not indigenous, you’re a boat-person. We have been encouraged to forget what we have in common with people seeking sanctuary here. Boat-People is an antidote to amnesia.18 The impending war in Iraq also spurred protesters to action. By the time David Burgess, a 34-year-old environmental activist, and Will Saunders, 43, a cosmologist, were being arrested in March 2003 for painting ‘No War’ on the Sydney Opera House, the image of the 25metre-high graffiti was being sent around the world. While Burgess and Saunders were with police, Prime Minister John Howard was publicly committing the nation to military conflict. The newspapers the next day were full of war, but the graffiti did not go unnoticed. Then NSW Premier Bob Carr said the act was dishonourable and he thought the Opera House was above politics. Andrew Wilkie, who had quit his job with the Office of National Assessments the week before in protest over the government’s pro-war stance, said: Let’s keep this in perspective; David Burgess and Will Saunders painted some words on the side of a building which were then cleaned off. Any wrong in their actions was inconsequential when compared with the terrible events they were trying desperately to prevent. The graffiti has now been seen the world over, earning its creators the sort of profile that can take years to gain. As Burgess said: To achieve change on other issues, I’ve put in lots of hard

One notable prank that took place around this time is an example

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Man bites media

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write five letters and you’re known for that.

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hundreds of thousands of words to achieve change, you

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been much recognition. And then suddenly, after writing

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yards and lots of bureaucratic work . . . and there hasn’t

of a far more deliberate, self-conscious targeting of what the group

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who called themselves the Dole Army, and who managed to lure mainstream current affairs shows into their lair, perceived to be an ideological bias in the mainstream media’s attitude to reporting youth unemployment. The opening page of the Dole Army’s website carried the following disclaimer: The information and content of this website has been supplied to dolearmy.org from various individuals and sources. The information is reproduced for informational, research and educational purposes only. Dolearmy.org does not in any way promote or condone any action or conduct contained in this website. (heaven forbid.)19 Much of the content of the Dole Army’s website covers information about what to do and who to contact if you have trouble receiving unemployment benefits from Centrelink, the Australian government agency that delivers a range of Commonwealth services to the Australian community. There is information about when it is appropriate to appeal against a Centrelink decision, how to appeal and the appeals process, as well as information about Freedom of Information. On 23 January 2002, the Dole Army contacted Channel 9’s A Current Affair and Channel 7’s Today Tonight via email, claiming the Army was made up of people living in tunnels below Melbourne who only came out at night to forage for food in dumpsters. They said they ran a website that detailed how to stay on the dole, avoid the Work for the Dole program and generally beat the Centrelink

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system.

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‘It’s one of the country’s best-kept secrets,’ says reporter Norm Beaman to camera at the beginning of Today Tonight on the evening of 4 February: A rebel army working deep beneath the city. They live in drainage tunnels under Melbourne and their goal is to teach people how to rip off the welfare system. Using a website for communication with the outside world, the Dole Army

details everything from defrauding the Work for the Dole scheme to tips on lying to Centrelink officers. With masks covering their faces, members of the Dole Army were then interviewed and explained that they were a group of people who met to ‘discuss things, we talk about what’s going on up there, we exchange food and ideas . . . some nights we sleep down here.’ The reporter then explained to the audience that the majority of the people in this group don’t work – ‘they could, but they simply do not want to.’ Not surprisingly, neither TV show made any mention of the site’s structural analysis of Australia’s welfare system or how it could be changed. The next day, the group calling themselves the Dole Army owned up to the hoax, saying that the stunt was perpetrated as a form of revenge on the news media for their prejudiced portrayal of the jobless and other disadvantaged groups in society. The Australian and the Daily Telegraph ran stories about the hoax. In a piece on the ABC’s Lateline on 5 February, journalist Mark Tamhane reported that, as well as having fun fooling the two TV programs, the group had said there was a serious point behind their media prank. A member calling himself Wombat said: Those tabloid news programs basically will show anything that fits their point of view and we fitted their point of view because, for them, we were a bunch of dole bludgers living in a drain and that’s their interpretation of what 3

Affair went to air, the Army was contacted by Today Tonight, which

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Keith said that, as soon as promotional advertisements for A Current

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Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, the group’s General Kool

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unemployed people are.

group took Today Tonight to a deserted brick factory to shoot the

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segment. There was no tour of the Army’s headquarters, as was

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he alleged offered the group $1000 for a spoiler story. He said his

reported. A Current Affair claims that it did not pay any of the members of the Dole Army. The group, however, claims A Current Affair offered it $2000 not to talk to Today Tonight and handed over $360 worth of digital videotape. After admitting the hoax, a Dole Army spokesman calling himself General Kangaroo said they did not live in drains and that most members had jobs. In interviews with the Australian and the Daily Telegraph the group said: ‘[The] big guns of tabloid TV fell victim to their own sleazy set-up tactics’, and that ‘We’ve proved that there are a lot of people that get paid a lot of money to make really bad media with very little integrity.’ The group also said that the con had publicised their website, aimed at advising the jobless on the ‘inhuman Centrelink bureaucracy’. The Dole Army spokesperson General Kool Keith said: We set out to expose the lazy, sensational standards of tabloid TV and to promote our website. We achieved both goals. We had over 6000 hits over the weekend and the two programs have been held to accountability. Kool Keith says their initial claims went unchallenged by either TV show, while A Current Affair’s David Hurley says the existence of the website – and the fact that the office of the Employment Minister of the time, Tony Abbott, was aware of it – was reason enough to go ahead with a story. While the publicity drew attention to sloppy and polemic practices that characterise some current affairs journalism, it didn’t

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necessarily serve to highlight the political issues the Dole Army

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sought to raise. Details in the media release the Dole Army sent out after the hoax was exposed were largely ignored by the mainstream media. The release included details about current unemployment figures, the fact that student benefits were up to 33 per cent below the poverty line, and that nearly 350 000 welfare recipients were punished with ‘financially crippling breaches’ for reasons such as arriving late to a Centrelink interview; or not receiving Centrelink mail due to being homeless; or Centrelink’s own mistakes.20

Invitation only In critiques by scholars such as Julianne Schultz21 (1998) and John Langer22 (1988), the public are assumed to be unable to read the media without help from media studies scholars. Today, of course, shows like The Simpsons have well and truly put paid to that; and the generations who invented the 1970s current affairs style shows do not generally appreciate the media literacy of younger generations. If Schultz and Langer assumed the way people read the media was a given, Ien Ang and Virginia Nightingale are two pioneering and prominent scholars whose work suggests the public can be active readers. In Desperately Seeking the Audience and Living Room Wars,23 Ang’s theoretical and analytical engagements with audiences seek to show how the audience is a discursive, digressive conceit, signifying the shifting ways in which people construct and contest meaning when consuming media in an everyday context. Virginia Nightingale argues in Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real24 that audience research is a multi-faceted activity. She goes on to show that what audiences do with television and how they engage with it is more important than what they watch. She argues that consumers don’t necessarily accept everything that is presented to them as truth and are able to resist and be critical. And when it comes to media ethics, the debates about codes failing to take account of the realities and complexities of actual media practice are not new. The NSW Country Press Association published Australia’s first media ethics code in 1927, not far behind the trend in the US. However, early statements of principle tended to be couched in general terms. The general nature of journalistic

case, the public’s right to know outweighs any concern.25

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someone’s privacy may indeed be intruded upon in a particular

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as unethical practice. Yet journalists may often decide that, while

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public. Intrusion into privacy is one issue the public often sees

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ethics often causes conflict between media professionals and the

the conception of the news media as having two functions. Media

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companies are businesses run for profit, but they also have a social

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The debate about media ethics is made more complicated by

function to inform the public. In Australia, even the ostensibly non-profit sectors, the government-funded ABC and SBS, need audiences to survive and are under increasing pressure to become at least partly self-funding. The two imperatives of a media company – to succeed as a business and to inform the public – do sometimes conflict. In addition, there are sometimes divisions within the news industry itself about what constitutes quality. Jana Wendt caused some controversy in 1997 when she became involved in a court battle with Channel 7 because she believed the current affairs program she had been hired to host, Witness, failed to meet the journalistic standards she had been led to expect. Those responsible for shows like The Chaser and Hungry Beast understand such a conceit and indeed conceptualise it. Hungry Beast series producer Andy Nehl says that you cannot put a label on the show and call it current affairs; parts of it are entertainment, there are serious stories and there is performance: ‘We deliberately started this show with no format and have been evolving the format with the team because we wanted to involve them in the development.’ He points out that a decade ago Race Around the World found many talented young people out of a similar nationwide recruitment process. The show aims to feature stories that are not part of the regular news cycle, or to cover stories that are from a fresh angle. He says the producers are not concerned that most of the 19 presenterreporters have little or no journalism experience, stating again that it is not strictly a current affairs show.26 When I asked him about The Chaser’s initial modus operandi,

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Julian Morrow told me that when they started the paper, long

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before the online version or any inkling they would be offered a television show, fun was the main thing. But there was also a sense that there was a lack of that sort of product. [The newspaper was] a liberating way to write about politics because you didn’t have to be as carefully argued, but you also didn’t have to be as cautious of the political ramifications. The majority of us have always been

interested in political satire. Not necessarily because we think it’s constructive or that it helps create massive social change, but it’s a way of expressing certain views. In fact, a lot of the time you can be more open and honest when you’re writing comedy, compared to what you can get away with in the mainstream press, for instance. Morrow said that, broadly speaking, the members of The Chaser were all ‘left of centre’ but their agenda was not to have an agenda. We’re the ones with our reputations, assets and balls on the line so yes, we pick and choose our targets. Generally the brief is to focus on those in power. We make a point of trying not to be politically partisan so even though we’re more generally sympathetic to the Labor party, we’ll kick the shit out of them if we think there’s a good angle. It’s not our job to be partisan, it’s our job to be satirical.27 As Tony Moore argued in his paper ‘Does the Left need a sense of humour?’, The Chaser channelled the subversive elements of what he called the ‘larrikin carnivalesque’: anarchic antiauthoritarianism, dada-esque stunts, the parody of other media and flirtation with obscenity and offences against good taste.28 The Dole Army may have been a little ahead of its time; at the end of the same decade the power of the public to understand and recognise manipulation of the mainstream media is not much of a surprise at all. In his book Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace, New York-based Australian media studies scholar McKenzie Wark

what can be done within the actual media’ are less common.29

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what’s wrong with it abound, intellectuals who can ‘conceptualise

3

points out that, while intellectuals who criticise the media and

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journalism either in the name of its stated ideals of alternative. By the 90s, criticism still attacked the legitimacy of journalism, but mostly this served to legitimise the

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objectivity and independence, or in the name of a radical

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In the 60s, critical media studies attacked the legitimacy of

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authority of the academic critic rather than advance a reforming or radical agenda.30 Like Dick Hebdige’s seminal work Subcultures: The Meaning of Style,31 the best theory describes reality and feeds back into it. Wark, for example, notes that it is unlikely that shows such as the Australian Frontline and the English Drop the Dead Donkey (both about newsrooms) would have been as popular if ‘the critical ideas of media studies had not themselves become a part of everyday culture. Frontline poked fun at what everybody already knows is wrong with current affairs journalism.’32 A decade after he made them, Wark’s arguments above are now themselves taken for granted as part of an assumed knowledge. One could argue that the Chaser team weren’t being particularly original when they disguised themselves as the Canadian delegate convoy and passed through security at APEC. In his editor’s letter for a volume of the Institute of Public Affairs, Chris Berg writes: Cynicism about the type of people who choose to go into politics and the capabilities of government action does clash with the ongoing hunt in the left for the political saviour. For this reason, The Chaser’s jokes may seem fairly left-wing, but by undermining the sacred authority of the political class, satirical news tends to be more libertarian than socialist. A generation raised on cynicism and sarcasm are far less likely to jump on the bandwagon of a charismatic

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leader-type.33

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But back to the APEC stunt. When the motorcade that appeared to be carrying Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to a stop and the leader of the terrorist network Al Qaeda popped out to ask why he had not been invited to the APEC conference, the stunt called into question the multi-millions of dollars that had been spent to make sure nobody entered the APEC meeting’s ‘red zone’ without security clearance. APEC organisers were forced to explain how a team of comedians had slipped past what had been

touted as Australia’s largest-ever security operation, not to mention how they had missed someone dressed as the man said to be behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iran and the elusive weapons of mass destruction. Eleven members of the Chaser production team were arrested and charged over the incident. These charges were dropped in April 2008.34 As it turned out, the Australian public viewed this event quite differently from the authorities. Almost 90 per cent of respondents to an online poll conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald found the incident humorous, not irresponsible and it was not until after the stunt that journalists covering the APEC summit began vigorously questioning the real value of the taxpayer-funded operation. According to Craig Reucassel, the intention of The Chaser’s political satire is to work in opposition (or indeed, bring ‘chaos’) to the highly formulaic, structured world of contemporary politics where ‘control’ is the ultimate aim: I mean, one of the things that I think we found fascinating and annoying and certainly try to subvert was the very stagemanaged nature of political campaigns nowadays: the way in which it’s very media managed, very much [that] all the journalists get on the bus provided by the party and go to the next event, and that sort of thing. In stark contrast to many naysayers, it has been argued that ‘chaos’ as a phenomenon is not destructive but actually beneficial for democracy.35 A far more serious example can be found in the execution of Saddam Hussein in December 2006. 3

video-equipped mobile phone presented a very different, speed with which that video was able to spread – via the free video-sharing website YouTube – meant that millions

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although far more accurate, version of events. The ease and

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great dignity, the presence of someone at the event with a

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suggest the former dictator’s life was extinguished with

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Although US and Iraqi political leaders were at pains to

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of people around the globe knew that the former dictator was in fact verbally abused by onlookers until the moment of his death. BBC reporter Nik Gowing even used the incident to highlight what he calls a ‘new transparency’ that has been forced by the ubiquity of digital communication technologies.36 All of this, then, suggests that there have been, and will continue to be, significant structural changes to the way information moves through our culture, which is becoming more democratised, more vernacular and less hierarchical – trends that can, of course, also be applied to so-called citizen journalism. This idea harks back to an earlier form of 19th-century journalism discussed in chapter 1, in which the reporter acted as more of a hero or crusader working hard in the pursuit of truth. What the mainstream media and indeed parts of the ‘new media’ sphere (at the time of writing I am thinking in particular of the more-than-sometimes superior overtones of the current Crikey.com) think is problematic is not necessarily so for the general public. The example of the way my students reacted to the Kyle and Jacqui O stunt-gone-wrong, as described in the introduction, is another example. Late in 2009, The Chaser was suspended by the ABC for two weeks after an outcry over a sketch that joked about the Make a Wish Foundation charity for sick children. The sketch presented an alternative – the Make a Realistic Wish Foundation – in which charity workers denied dying kids their fantasies. One girl who wanted to meet teen idol Zac Efron was given a stick instead. S P A C E

was also tall poppy cutting time. The ABC responded by suspend-

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Telegraph dedicated an entire section of its paper to attacking The

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The response was outrage, arguably led by the media – the Daily

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Chaser. As The Chaser had always attacked the rest of the media, it ing the program and announcing a review of its editorial approval process; The Chaser issued a statement apologising for the sketch. Let us stop for a second. How does one objectionable sketch justify the suspension of an entire show? In the 1960s the

editors of Oz went to court and jail twice for obscenity. New South Wales police twice charged Oz’s editors for publishing obscenity. The 1965 court finding that Oz had literary merit was a significant victory, encouraging others working in journalism and the arts to eschew customary self-censorship. Oz continued in Australia under Richard Walsh until 1969 when he turned it into a new project, Nation Review, while Neville and Sharp took Oz to London where it provoked another obscenity trial.37 In 1971 Wendy Bacon was the first Australian citizen since 1948 to spend time in prison on a censorship charge relating to material published in Tharunka.38 The Oz editorial team and Bacon both used their trials to argue for their work as art. Neither ever apologised. Surely The Chaser’s success was tied to their willingness to challenge the status quo? Leaving aside much of the knee-jerk reaction, the most interesting response to the Make a Wish skit was a sober letter to the editor published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 5 June 2009. The letter-writer, Dr Suresh Viswanathan from the John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, NSW, said the skit achieved what it set out to do. ‘That was to start debate about issues that are seen as taboo. Let us debate the role of charities such as the Make-a-Wish Foundation,’ he said. As a doctor, I can tell you sick children want two things: to get better and to go home. If you are concerned about sick children, donate to medical research or make it an election priority. Research works, and that is why children now survive diseases that were once terminal, such as leukaemia.

day subjects which are usually shaded by the conventions of polite society. . . .

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In making fun of the unfunny it can bring into the light of

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well, argues that black comedy is risky – that’s the point.

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The president of Friends of the ABC (ACT and Region), Jill Green-

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self-serving.

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Such charities pander to parent guilt and have become

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Who would dare to criticise the playing on our emotions or the exploitation of our guilt by an organisation which brings a little happiness to the life of a terminally ill child? . . . Why not do what the ABC did in a situation at least as controversial as Summer Heights High in 2007? . . . three weeks into the popular 2007 series, the ABC realised the ‘extremely unfortunate co-incidence’: that one of its characters had the same name, and some similar qualities, as a young woman, Annabel Catt, who had died of a drug overdose in February of that year. The ABC admitted that it became aware of the horrible co-incidence 11 days after completion of the production, but that had been two years in the making and could not be changed. . . . In its apology, the ABC acknowledged that ‘in hindsight, we feel that we should have alerted the Catt family to the situation in advance of the broadcast.’39 Journalists often write for each other in a game of one-upmanship.40 The Daily Show host Jon Stewart uses a sporting analogy to describe the relationship, but argues that the offence is beating the defence: I think the problem with the media is they’ve forgotten their role. Politicians and corporations have figured out the system . . . they all know how it works. And they’ve figured out how to get around it. So now the offence has gotten better than the defence. The defence [need to] get together

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and figure out how to become more effective. And to me,

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that will engage people as a matter of course.41 One of The Daily Show’s main aims is to expose the lack of substance behind so much political output – the public relations spin tactics. Unlike many traditional news reporters, the ability of the cast of The Daily Show to compare and contrast and mock can often lead to a deeper analysis of the issue at hand. Audiences are better equipped to make up their own minds rather than take the news

as black and white.42 These days Stewart is seen as a serious media commentator and the cast of his show often secure media passes to official events.43 In The Colbert Report, a spin-off from The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert ‘plays the role of a right-wing pundit’. In early promotional advertisements for the show he stated, ‘Right or wrong, you’re wrong.’44 Like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report can be seen as social criticism; both shows create a forum in which guests can go beyond the dichotomy of left and right and stray outside an adversarial news framework. Stephen Colbert always plays the ‘foil’. In one show he tells Georgia Republican Phil Gringey it’s nice to be talking to someone who agrees with him (Gringey has been sharing his opposition to gay marriage). Colbert then asks him ‘where he comes down on gays having driving licences?’ and argues when Gringey says gay people have every right to have a driver’s licence. Colbert ‘creates a setting in which guests are forced to articulate and defend their ideas.’45 When interviewing Dr Michael Oppenheimer, expert on global warming and lead author of Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, Colbert asks, ‘Why are your scientists better than my scientists?’ In doing so, he gives Oppenheimer a platform and the opportunity to spell out his research findings as well as offering ‘a critique of the simultaneous suspicion toward and politicisation of science [that was] common in the Bush era’.46 Faced with unconventional frames for political expression and social critique, audiences are forced to use more of their own judgement and analysis. Are news and journalism in crisis? If we define

public, the everyday world we live in and the larger world, then

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there may be much more room for optimism.47

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tem, ‘a form of cultural discourse’ that acts as a link between the

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material from across a spectrum of genres and define it as an ecosys-

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inclusive definition of news and journalism as that which includes

3

them in a traditional sense then yes, they are. But if we use a more

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Chapter 4

The media virus People had travelled to Copenhagen from all over the world to protest the 192-nation climate conference. Quickly scanning mainstream new sites on the first day of the conference I noticed images of a young man with an impressive mohawk. As it is standard mainstream journalistic practice to feature people who can be classed as ‘alternative’ at any protext action, I don’t know why I was surprised to see him in photographs – it seems some things may never change. A day or so later, there was another all-too-familiar scene as Danish police were accused of over-reacting to alleged sporadic street violence in Copenhagen by arresting anyone they could see, not stopping to ask people whether or not they were part of the protest. The day after the mass arrests, only 13 of the 968 people detained during the mass rally remained in custody.1 A reporter on the Australian online news site Crikey.com said they witnessed an entire 230-strong group placed under arrest at one point, despite no sign of violence. The Australian non-partisan group GetUp! filmed and reported on the entire rally. Social networking and the alternative viewpoints of citizen 80

journalists and bloggers are continuing to disrupt and challenge

standard modes of reporting and the interpretation of events. Mark Deuze2 has spoken of ‘networked journalism’, which is a concept of journalism as a networked practice of producing, editing, forwarding, sharing and debating public education. In this chapter I trace the development of journalistic styles beyond conflict-based, self-contained stories through a number of significant events that have occurred on the Australian media ecoscape since 2001. Along with other media scholars, Axel Bruns notes that the growing disenchantment with news reporting in the mainstream media has much more to do with the ‘popular realisation of the shortcomings of professional journalism’ than any ‘diminishing interest in news’. This is especially apparent in an increasingly agglomerated commercial environment, he argues. He goes on to cite as evidence news sites such as Wikinews, Slashdot and Indymedia – which is also referred to as an Independent Media Centre3 – all of which are internet-based vehicles open to the public to contribute stories and discuss ideas.4 Elsewhere, Bruns has called these types of participants ‘produsers’; that is, audience members who are simultaneously information gatherers, reporters and evaluators.5 As I will argue throughout this chapter, the net’s erosion of the influence of concentrated media ownership in Australia has influenced both mainstream media and mainstream politics, making so-called alternative, citizen and accidental journalism a force with which to contend. I will look at three main instances of what I would call the new media ecosystem in action – the three-day protest in Melbourne in 2000 that came to be known as s11 and its alternative news site; the non-partisan group GetUp! launched in 2005; and the

life experience of ordinary people, changing the way community and power have been traditionally understood and thereby enabling

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world of traditional politics being brought closer to the everyday

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in the introduction, what is significant about such vehicles is the

4

citizen journalist initiative known as YouDecide2007. As discussed

The media ecosystem helps create informed citizens: forums

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that enable participatory citizenship through media participation

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people to use ‘collective intelligence’ to transform governance.6

connect people to issues. Before we consider any examples, it is worth remembering that before the term ‘citizen journalist’ was coined there were, of course, plenty of people contributing to or making their own news, albeit without the added bonus of the online world to help them get their message out. In The SBS Story: The Challenges of Cultural Diversity, their incisive account of the development of SBS, Australian scholars Ien Ang, Gay Hawkins and Lamia Dabboussy detail how SBS used migrant communities as a resource to create multicultural media. One of their main claims is that, rather than being a history, the book provides a previously unfulfilled need for a ‘comprehensive account of its development and significance as the world’s first multicultural public service broadcaster’. The book focuses on the challenges the organisation faced in making media multicultural, and the importance of the broadcaster in ‘expanding Australia’s understanding of itself and its relationship to the rest of the world’.7 One of the challenges the broadcaster faced was overcoming the misconception that it was an ethnic broadcaster serving mainly an ethnic audience rather than the entire Australian community. In contrast to the ABC, part of the SBS philosophy was and is to conceive of the public as plural rather than to ‘be driven by the idea of a singular Australian identity’ and ‘to broadcast the plurality of histories perspectives, not to sweep them into some singular common denominator’.8 Just like the online environment now, multicultural broadcasting provided a chance to reinvent the way television and radio

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were conceived and presented. SBS experimented with program-

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ming sources, schedules and styles, and their relationship to their audience.9 SBS’s commitment to world news was groundbreaking when it began, point out Ang, Hawkins and Dabboussy, who describe the instigation of the SBS news service as ‘the moment when Australian television discovered foreignness’ and, significantly, at least in relation to the arguments within this book, modernised news in terms of positioning it so it could ‘be framed by looking outwards instead of inwards’.10 SBS sourced stories from

an extensive array of international media to build its TV news service and the authors point out that in the 1980s, while the ABC developed its overseas bureaus to expand its international stories, SBS used foreign news feeds to develop a different perspective on cultural difference. SBS provided ‘an “open to the world” point of view that wasn’t necessarily grounded in the national’ rather than an Australian national point of view of world events.11 Indigenous Australians have often created their own media in response to negative portrayals of Aboriginal people in the mainstream media. Aside from a resurgence in Aboriginal newspapers in the late 1990s,12 community radio has proved to be most advantageous and accessible for Aboriginal people since it began in 1974. By end of 1990s, there were 95 licensed Indigenous stations in Australia, 80 of them in remote areas.13 Australian scholars Helen Molnar and Michael Meadows argue that the growth of Aboriginal community radio has been important because ‘access to non indigenous community radio stations is always conditional . . . Indigenous people argue media control is essential if they are to have freedom to set their own communications agendas.’14 Jim Remedio, former chair of the National Indigenous Media Association and at the time of writing the chair of the Aboriginal and Islander Communication Association, has noted that Radio Redfern initially started with a 15-minute allocation for their broadcast. ‘The Community Broadcasting people just didn’t see the need for Aboriginal broadcasters. They put us in the same category as multicultural people, making us ethnics in our own land.’ Talking about the National Indigenous Radio Service, which allows remote

che and thinking of mainstream Australia’.15 When it comes to becoming an informed citizen, an ability

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has on the broader community as well as ‘a large impact on the psy-

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service NIRS provides’, Remedio emphasises the positive effect this

4

areas to directly transmit to the satellite ‘or through the up-linking

more essential than deciding whether you are for or against some-

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thing. A media ecosystem, of which community media and citizen

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to grasp all the contradictions inherent within any issue is far

journalism are a part along with mainstream media, helps people understand differences without losing a grasp on their own judgement – something the summary judgement of traditional adversarial news cannot do. There have always been alternatives to the mainstream, but now they are online where individual diversity cannot be ignored: and they are beyond the complete control of self-appointed social arbitrators, who don’t like this one bit. Community media and/or citizen journalism both attempt to find space for public conversation and a diversification of public opinion. Such vehicles often operate in the cracks between the blogosphere and the agendas of mainstream media. For example GetUp!, launched in 2005, has transformed the way many individuals interact with the issues of the day. Its founders, David Madden and Jeremy Heimans, imported the idea to Australia after seeing how the group MoveOn operated in America.16 In her 2008 paper ‘How cyberactivism changed the World’, Anne Coombs details GetUp!’s influence, citing in one example how female MPs from all parties, facilitated and publicised by GetUp! and backed up by thousands of emails from the public, stopped the legislation concerning the abortion drug RU486. When Howard attempted to have all asylum seekers processed offshore, GetUp! pointed out that doing so would put children back in detention. One hundred thousand people signed an online petition and Howard withdrew legislation when it became clear that some Coalition MPs were prepared to cross the floor. Petitions, of course, are an old 18th- and 19th-century radical and liberal tool, used in the abolition of slav-

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ery and political prisoners. It seems it has fallen to ‘new’ media to

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revitalise this classic Enlightenment democratic device. As I have argued previously, in this way the contemporary media ecosystem is shaping up to return journalism to its radical and democratic roots. A third example that showed the ability of GetUp! to build campaigns across political parties was aimed at increasing the funding of the ABC. In May 2006 it collected over 40 000 signatures in four days and the ABC received the best funding it had had for 20 years.17 As has been already stated, where media, politics,

culture and activism collide, the lines between professional and amateur, audience and source, journalists and non-journalists, all blur. There is little doubt that the Australian public is interested in news and current affairs, but they want their information in context: what is surprising is that traditional news providers who document change in the world can be so oblivious of the change in their own craft and fail to adapt quickly enough. The 2007 Australian federal election saw new levels of political engagement through the internet, including the rise of citizen journalism as an alternative outlet and mode of reporting on the election. The YouDecide2007 project was undertaken by a Queensland University of Technology-based research team who evaluated the project by looking at the establishment of new links between mainstream media and independent online media. The project fits neatly into the historical cross-fertilisation of radical and alternative media in the past and the online media of today that has informed my own research. In what was to become one of the first examples of the media ecosystem in full flight, on 11 September 2000, a protest now widely known as s11 began in Melbourne against corporate-led globalisation. The website set up for the protest exemplifies how disparate groups of the Australian public can band together in a display of social and political solidarity. The protest was to last three days – the length of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Asia Pacific Summit, an invitation-only gathering of global corporations, business leaders, government officials, scientists and the mainstream media. As well as individual protesters, Zapatistas,

Clause, the Democratic Socialist Party, Queers United to Eradicate Economic Rationalism, Unite (Lesbian, Gay, B+i and Transgender

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Earthworker, Food Not Bombs, Friends of the Earth, MonSanta

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lic First, the Australian Greens, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship,

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Reclaim the Streets, People’s Global Action, Jubilee 2000, Pub-

tingents from regional Victoria, Sydney, Brisbane, Byron Bay, New-

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castle, Canberra, Hobart, Adelaide, Perth, Lismore, Townsville and

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Workers), Jabiluka Ploughshares and Peacebus, as well as s11 con-

New Zealand. They were joined by the more traditional Trades Hall Council, the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union and the Construction, Mining, Energy and Forestry Union. Representatives from different protest groups formed a body that would become known as the s11 Alliance.18 As noted in chapter 1, a move from mainstream politics began in the 1960s when an eruption of political groups outside the recognised and official political public sphere occurred. The Vietnam War marked a watershed in Australian political culture. While voices for all radical movements may not have originated in the anti-war movement, they found empowerment in the methods of civic dissent practised throughout the war and the use of media spectacle and the carnivalesque as campaign tools. By the 1990s, voters were beginning to vent their frustrations with conventional two-party politics across the Western world. Voters in Australia expressed strong interest in independent candidates such as Pauline Hanson, and interest in the Australian Democrats and the Greens began to grow.19 The frustration was not limited to politics. In A Question of Trust, British philosopher Onora O’Neill (2002) detailed the many ways in which Western societies are undergoing a crisis of trust not only in government and business but in mainstream media as well. Indeed, O’Neill singled out the mainstream media in her analysis of growing social distrust. She said the public had reason to worry about the trustworthiness of mainstream newspapers, television and radio because these forms of information usually flow one way –

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from corporation to consumer – and offer few possibilities for chal-

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lenge or interaction. Australian sociologist Pusey’s findings on the attitudes of Australians to the media concur with O’Neill’s: My study shows that people blame big business, politicians and the media . . . for what they see as the unhappiness of middle Australia. The talkback end of the media hides the complicity of the media barons with politicians. This power relationship is

protected from view. The powerlessness and frustration people feel is turned into vengeful outrage towards others who are seen to be undeserving – boat people, protesters in dreadlocks, the Greens and policy silvertails.20 As has been discussed in chapter 3, many journalists are successful people who can often identify with the powerful and centrist ideas and reject the marginalised, even though history shows again and again that marginalised rebels, such as Mandela or Lenin, eventually become mainstream players, just as independent journalists working in alternative media often end up in the mainstream. Hanson’s One Nation party made a point of exploiting this widespread distrust of the media in their 1998 campaign. One Nation also made a point of noting to the public the increasing number of politicians who come from the professions, have little in common with other demographics, and rely on a proliferation of spin-doctored campaigns.21 Despite such claims, however, the strong interest in political parties other than the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal party, and the rise of personal zines, blogs and small company websites, suggest that the Australian public cannot be accused of being simplistically anti-political or anti-media.22 By the time the World Economic Forum was due to take place in Melbourne in 2000, many Australians were well versed in the inequities grounding the global economy, as detailed in Naomi Klein’s book No Logo and evidenced by well-known worldwide boycotts and protests such as those against Shell Oil, Nike, Nestle´ and McDonald’s and by groups

ious political and issue-based groups as representing two things:

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When considering s11, I see the gathering of individuals and var-

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Nobody panic

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such as Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass.23

ondly, the ability of consumers to bypass traditional media. The

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groups that made up the three-day protest were not aligned to

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first, a shift away from mainstream two-party politics and sec-

any one political party, yet banded together in social and political solidarity for three days before disbanding once the protest was over. As part of the protest, a highly coordinated website was set up through Indymedia, which enabled anyone interested to discuss ideas and contribute articles, first-person accounts, images and videos. One of the questions most frequently asked of Indymedia is how they are associated with the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement.24 While accepting global connectivity and movement, they wish to debate the terms of the deal, much in the same way that the labour movement disputed the terms of 19th- and 20th-century industrialisation and national capitalism. While it has since been argued that, after its initial effect, Indymedia struggled to move outside or beyond its initial alternative standing and is now simply an archive that preaches to the converted, Chris Atton has argued extensively that the rise of Indymedia was a key moment in an emerging global awareness of the new possibilities of journalism, establishing a bridge between the long traditions of alternative media and the new possibilities for collective and non-hierarchical journalism to be accessed from multiple sources and distributed globally.25 Aside from the technological importance of open software and open publishing, it is important to consider the roots of Independent Media Centres in the socialist anarchist tradition. What gives the IMC story significance is the awareness by those involved of the importance and potential of developing globally based resistance outside the mainstream. The result is a vision of media activism that is strategic as well as politically effective.26 S P A C E

(initially) denied them; disseminate information about the protests

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all-encompassing report about the protest. Those behind the s11

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The website set up for the s11 protest claimed to provide an

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website argued that they were trying to: provide facts to a public such as a map of the area; provide updates during the protest; and, through the larger Indymedia site, continue to provide links to other anti-corporate organisations as well as articles about corporate globalisation in general once protests were over. In late June, two or

so months before the WEF Summit was due to begin, an unknown group hacked into the official Nike website, transferring visitors automatically to the s11 site. Over the next two days, the s11 site received approximately 900 000 hits. It presented news, analysis and opinions provided by amateur commentators, material that the people involved in s11 argued was not being made available via the mainstream media. According to a collective statement on <www.melbourne. Indymedia.org> several hundred people at s11 had been there with media-making equipment, and that many of these were not part of the organised Indymedia grouping but were simply documenting the event for themselves and their friends. Well over 1000 hours of digital video footage was shot and archived (with several hundred hours already provided to the legal observers’ team to contribute to the prosecution of those police who were violent towards protesters). There were also approximately 50 audio recorders, 50 digital still photographers, over 200 film-camera people and over 150 online contributors posting news on the s11 sites. As will be seen, the mainstream media were slow to catch on to any story that fell outside the conventions of news framing. By the end of the s11 blockade the Indymedia Melbourne website had logged more than 700 000 hits. There were over 700 stories posted on the site. The site also published over 200 images, approximately 15 videos and 35 audio stories. In addition, a fourpage IndyBulletin was published for the protest. Three bulletins came out prior to s11 and another one was published for each day of the three-day protest to provide an overall snapshot of what was

One of the main reasons protesters were able to keep in contact was the existence of (i)Xpress, a free bicycle courier service estab-

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the bulletin.

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and trams in Melbourne, and visitors to the site could also download

4

occurring each day. Hundreds of copies were distributed on trains

Union (CFMEU) provided the infrastructure for the first aid vol-

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untary service. A roster of over 50 doctors, nurses and trained first

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lished for s11.27 The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy

aiders worked in shifts to provide 24-hour-a-day care. The CFMEU provided a large tent and $4000 in medical supplies, supplemented by over $2000 in donations over the three days. Eyewitnesses contributed their accounts to the s11 site daily, and those behind the s11 website argued that such accounts, as well as giving background information about the anti-corporate movement and practical information such as where to go for first aid, provided facts to a public denied them by mainstream media as well as a coordination base for those involved in the protest. In more and more instances in the early part of this decade, socalled citizen journalists were in the perfect position to report on events because they were there. The increasing tendency of mainstream journalists to stay in their offices or only do the most basic of research was often due to a contraction of journalist numbers and a crunch for news space in mainstream papers. However, more and more traditional journalism was also becoming at best the old two-way debate between two very similar centrists or at worst a parroting of press releases. Herman and Chomsky’s argument that the media establishes and defends the agenda of the dominant groups in society has been criticised as a gross oversimplification of the way media discourse operates and tends to homogenise media commentary.28 However, it is a useful model to bear in mind when considering the contrast between the mainstream media’s coverage of the s11 protest and the role played by the alternative s11 website.29 At first, much of the commentary from mainstream newspapers

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and news and current affairs media was overwhelmingly negative;

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many opinion writers seemed content to denigrate what they saw as a bunch of global village idiots with seemingly too many causes wanting to protest for the sake of protest.30 Some in the mainstream media thought the event was organised, as a journalist from the magazine that has since closed, The Bulletin, put it, to protest ‘against everything and anything bad in the world’.31 On 27 August 2000, more than a fortnight before the protest was due to begin, John Elder from The Age noted:

For weeks now, during any news item related to the planned protest . . . we’ve seen pieces of what happened in Seattle: chaos under clouds of tear gas, heads held down by booted feet, batons and rifles butting people to the ground, and some idiots breaking windows. Those journalists who focused on the possibility of protester violence at the upcoming WEF summit frequently failed to engage with the issues many protesters were trying to draw attention to – the power of multinational corporations; the need to regulate international capital flows; the rights of workers in the third world; and so on.32 Yet the seemingly anarchic nature of the protest was belied by the highly coordinated use of subversive media. Despite the absence of celebrities or officials ready with sound bites, the s11 site was the 400th most popular website in the world in the first two weeks of September.33 While many in the mainstream media claimed the s11 protesters were all style and no substance, it might be argued that it was those mainstream media-based critics of s11 who spent more time focused on the spectacle, ensuring that any potential discussion of issues was replaced by a depiction of conflict. As Graham Meikle notes, on the rare occasion the mainstream media covers the actions of fringe groups, the coverage is framed along predictable lines: Actions and events will be shaped to fit the familiar protest genre. Conflicts and oppositions will be highlighted or manufactured, and discussion of issues will be replaced by a

with police’.34

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marginalised to fit the narrative pattern of ‘protesters clash

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causes that generate any political action are inevitably

4

depiction of disruption to the status quo. The issues and

lighted events rather than processes, effects rather than causes.35

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It could be argued that the reaction to the s11 protests is a classic

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On the whole, much mainstream coverage of the s11 protests high-

example of Stanley Cohen’s definition of moral panic, first articulated in 1972, whereby a group is first defined as a threat to society; the media presents this threat in a stereotypical or recognised form; and there is a response from the authorities.36 Cohen argues that the media creates social problems by playing on the normal concerns of the public and by thrusting certain moral directives into the public arena. According to Cohen, this was achieved by the use of exaggeration and symbolisation (protesters are a certain ‘type’ who act in a certain way). In the case of s11, the exaggeration was not in the number involved in the protests but in the number of protesters who were violent, and the ‘symbolisation’ was evident in the nature of sensational newspaper headlines and the emotive language that followed.37

The bottom line Before the explosion of digitally powered life forms, moral panics sold papers and earned ratings that led to larger audiences and more advertising. This is no longer the way of the world. By continuing to succumb to moral panics – focusing on potential violence and concentrating on conflict rather than discussing ideas on alternative agendas – the mainstream media are not only debasing journalism; they are also often missing the real stories. Stories that other people are now telling. Many weeks before the three-day protest began, those in the mainstream media critical of the protest offered the Australian public stereotypical accounts of the sort of people who would turn up to protest and how much trouble they would cause.

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By the second day of the protests, demonstrators were more than

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‘folk devils’;38 according to New South Wales Labor Premier Bob Carr and Victorian Labor Premier Steve Bracks, they were ‘bullyboy fascists’ and – that old chestnut – ‘unAustralian’.39 In the lead-up to September 11, demonstrators were spoken of in the mainstream media as ‘offensive and hypocritical’ (Paul Kelly, The Australian); ‘addle-brained’ (Greg Sheridan, The Australian); ‘stupid’ and ‘idiots’ (Imre Salusinszky, The Age); and their arguments were described as ‘totalitarian’ (Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun);

‘mindless rhetoric’ (Kelly, The Australian) and ‘paranoid drivel’ (Salusinszky, The Age). Added Alan Wood at The Australian, ‘The poor have never had it so good.’40 In a piece for The Bulletin, Patrick Carylon opined in what would be a continuation of much of the mainstream media’s line about there seeming to be no one cause.41 On 12 September, the second day of the protests, the politicians stepped in. Bob Carr labelled protesters ‘bully-boy fascists’ in an interview with radio 2UE. Carr believed that blocking access to the venue made protesters unAustralian, and said attempts to stop people expressing their opinions or to close down the meeting were ‘anti-democratic, indeed fascistic behaviour’. Describing protesters as ‘extreme left-wing groups’, Carr said their behaviour was analogous to ‘One Nation thugs saying we don’t like an Aboriginal congress or a meeting of migrants taking place and we’re going to blockade them’. The terms ‘unAustralian’ and ‘fascists’ were later taken up by Steve Bracks, who backed the alleged police violence with the comment that demonstrators ‘deserved everything they got’. Oddly, no-one on the staff of the Herald Sun seemed to notice or care when photos did not back up the articles. When it was becoming apparent that many protesters were being seriously injured during the demonstrations, those in the mainstream press who had been opposed to the protest were slow to pick up on an alternative story. On 14 September, the Age’s Geoff Strong opined: ‘Sure there have been broken teeth, bleeding heads and kicked genitals after police baton and cavalry charges. But these injuries have only helped draw public attention to the protesters’

descriptions of the protest in Seattle).43 The day Steve Bracks declared to radio station 3AW that the

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protest peppered by short bursts of conflict (closely reminiscent of

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on the s11 site spoke of boredom – long periods of uneventful

4

issues.’42 In stark contrast, the reports of hundreds of eyewitnesses

announced he would investigate 200 complaints of alleged exces-

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sive force by police. A week or so after the demonstrations, sections

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demonstrators ‘deserved everything they got’, the Ombudsman

of Bracks’ own party had sided with churches in condemning the actions of the police.44 On the internet, the gate-keeping function that mainstream news producers serve had been bypassed; cheap digital recording equipment transformed hundreds of witnesses into reporters. Hundreds more posted personal narratives on to the s11 site, which contradicted the mainstream media’s initial reporting and much of the subsequent reporting. By the third day of the protest, some mainstream journalists had logged on to independent sites, as evidenced by pieces that began to appear in The Age.45 When the WEF summit and the protests ended, the issues put forward by demonstrators and the wider implications of those began to be given more space in the mainstream press. The Australian’s Paul Kelly, whose articles before the protest had denounced demonstrators’ opinions, echoed such sentiments: For Labor there are three ominous messages: that a new left coalition with potential mass appeal is mobilising on an anti-globalisation rhetoric; that the trade union movement is increasingly ideologically divided from the ALP; and that a Beazley government would face a deep philosophical rift among its institutional supporters.’46

Collaborative spaces While groups like Indymedia arguably have no interest in align-

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ing themselves with mainstream media, online activist sites such

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as GetUp! and YouDecide2007 enable the agendas of commercial media and the blogosphere/citizen journalism to mesh. Such groups were set up precisely to influence mainstream political parties and media – partly as a response to major political parties no longer having access to a larger, active membership of young people, and partly to attack the media oligopoly of Australia. Of GetUp!’s success since 2005, former executive director Brett Solomon cites the David Hicks case as an example:

There was the rusted-on left, the predictable left, the radical fringe. But there were also Hanson voters, pissed off because here was another example of an Aussie bloke being abandoned by the government. Then there was the legal fraternity, plus the Major Mori fans. David and Terry [Hicks] were Adelaide people, and they gathered support from South Australians in [Minister Alexander] Downer’s own corner of the country. Solomon believes individuals wanted to see that their voice, and their vote, amounted to something more ‘than a conceptual, democratic ideal’; that something ‘could be shifted significantly’ for the online group to grow. The 2007 federal election, according to Solomon, demonstrated how such identification formed around a few key issues for GetUp! subscribers: issues that resonated strongly, such as the war in Iraq, climate change and education.47 The potential to mobilise those not traditionally known to be interested in politics was further demonstrated in 2008 when GetUp! ran a campaign against internet censorship that also attracted tens of thousands of new members.48 ‘New media has changed the way that people activate,’ says Solomon. Technology has changed the way we do everything from shop, to communication. Now it is transforming the way we do politics. Online you can mobilise, inform, channel and influence. Most importantly, new technology allows us to unite on issues that are important to us.49 4

opportunities to get involved and hold politicians accountable on important issues’. It works mainly through email campaigns.

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roots community advocacy organisation giving everyday Australians

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GetUp! () is ‘an independent, grass-

is ‘issues-based’, rather than dependent on membership of, and

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loyalty to, traditional political parties.50 For busy people juggling

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GetUp! can be seen as a driver of a new form of democracy that

jobs, study, family duties and leisure, such an organisation does not demand the attention of traditional meetings and is therefore convenient. Its modus operandi connects it to the tradition of partisan journalism in the 19th century and various left-of-centre periodicals in the underground press since. GetUp! uses many forms of media to mobilise public opinion on key social issues: subscriber lists, emails, public Q and A events with politicians, street pamphlet distributions and ‘get-togethers’ are all practical instances of new media utilised to encourage actual engagement. According to the Frequently Asked Questions on its website, GetUp! has a clearly defined focus on issues. Members can receive email updates about new campaigns, send emails or contact a member of parliament, sign petitions, attend an event, assist with production of a television ad and provide financial support. Registered members of Getup! had reached 230 000 and its donated campaign funds of about half a million dollars by the time of the Australian federal election on 24 November 2007. Resources enabled the dissemination of information on issues such as climate change, industrial relations laws, Indigenous affairs, the Iraq war, and voter enrolment to a broader audience. GetUp! members lobbied on causes such as: the Know Where I Stand Anti-Work Choices campaign, where members stuck Post-It notes over former Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey’s office; a global ‘pictition’ to APEC leaders during the September 2007 meeting in Sydney, with ‘live’ demonstrations across the country in support of calls for binding targets to stop climate change; an online petition containing 96 000 signatures was given to Federal Climate Minister Penny S P A C E

GetUp! members got together in hundreds of local meetings to dis-

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official site also details the campaigns which the group consider have

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Wong to take to the December UN climate meeting in Bali.51 The

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had an effect on governance. For example, after the 2007 election, cuss priorities for a People’s Agenda, much of which found its way into the maiden speeches of several parliament members. The Climate Clever-er television commercial, which showed a family in floaties facing rising sea levels, aired on prime time

television. The alternative campaign, although poking fun at the former federal government’s lack of action on climate change, did not push a party line. GetUp! ‘parodied something a growing sector of the Australian public was tolerating less and less: the scripting of the Howard Government’s official talk on everything from trees to terrorism’. Campaigns in 2010 focus on holding the Rudd Government to its election promises, including cutting the taxpayerfunded government advertising bill and withdrawing troops from Iraq.52 Organisations such as GetUp! can encourage people to take part in or otherwise support particular campaigns – in one example, the online petition to Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy to save the net. Email alert members signed the petition by typing their email address into a box. An easy-to-print fact sheet on internet censorship was provided. It took five minutes to participate and so was easy for people to be involved, however minimally, and, perhaps more importantly, to be informed.53 Activities and practices that could be described as examples of media activism are more likely to be characterised by affiliation than by sharing of common traits. Media activism constitutes sets of features that intersect and overlap within the context of media use and production. In May 2009, for example, GetUp! emailed across Australia to invite people to participate in the government’s national Human Rights Consultations. They asked members to register, outlined what was expected, how long it would take, and where they needed to go. Official communication from GetUp! emphasised that no special knowledge was

experience.55

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ities that don’t necessarily cohere, reflect the contemporary social

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social movements of the past, media activists, using a set of activ-

4

needed to participate.54 While they may share some associations of

The project YouDecide2007.org was the first phase of a research

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project into participatory journalism in partnership with SBS, the

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Make up your own mind

National Forum, Cisco Systems and the Brisbane Institute, which provided contributors with the tools to cover their local electoral races for a wider audience. YouDecide2007 contributors were encouraged to interview their local candidates (including, but not limited to, those of the major parties), conduct vox-pops with local voters, and report on the issues central to their own electorate; these reports were then posted on the site.56 Based on his direct involvement with YouDecide2007, Australian media studies academic Jason Wilson sees ‘one possible future for journalists which lies in creating, coordinating and nurturing participatory online communities for amateur content-makers’. The project, he argues, hoped to allow experimentation with new forms of news coverage. The group were interested in providing a ‘bottom up’ counterpoint to the election narratives of the mainstream media. They also hoped to discover what kinds of relationships exist, or are possible, between independent, online news media and mainstream media news services. Most importantly, argues Wilson, the action research was premised on the thought that running a citizen journalism site offered a road to understanding precisely what the work of facilitating citizen journalism is. Wilson suggests there will be a significant role for professionally trained journalists in the digital era.57 YouDecide was launched in early September 2007 and operated for three months during the election campaign up to and shortly after the election date, 23 November 2007. It was developed as a news and information site that aimed to be complementary to

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mainstream media in terms of the content that it generated, yet

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distinctive in terms of how this content was accessed. The site aimed to generate content that would be picked up in the mainstream media.58 A vital aspect of the project, say the project leaders, was the revealed need for information on how citizen journalism initiatives operate, their achievements, problems and lessons for the future of journalism. To date, most discussions about such initiatives have been dominated by

. . . polemics that either herald citizen journalism as being the advance guard of a networking media utopia (such as Quiggan and Hunter 2008) or conflate citizen journalism with blogging and argue such practices operate as an amoral fact distorting and ethics-free zone (eg Knight 2008).59 YouDecide2007 co-member Axel Bruns argues that the 2007 Australian federal election campaign should be remembered for reasons additional to being only the second time a sitting prime minister lost his seat. It must also be seen as marking a transformation of the Australian mediasphere towards a substantially greater role for online and citizen media forms – a trend also observed in the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, but here, with its own, uniquely Australian inflection.60 Bruns argues that, over time, forms of citizen journalism have proven to be successful both in generating quality news coverage and in attracting sizeable communities of users and have established themselves as key news sources in their own right. He cites the examples of South Korean news site OhmyNews, which has become the central news source on the progressive side of Korean politics, and argues: ‘such developments provide hope for national mediaspheres – like Australia’s – where current journalistic standards leave room for improvement.’ Additional material was also prepared by YouDecide staffers.61 YouDecide attracted citizen journalists in roughly half of all

from mainstream coverage. One of the main advantages of such

by relying on a broader community of citizen journalists, it can uncover a wider range of stories than is accessible to

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an initiative is that:

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the initiative to cover stories and feature candidates excluded

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overlooked by election coverage in the national press. This enabled

4

Australian electorates, including many which had been largely

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what is an increasingly limited workforce within the traditional media outlets.62 As previously argued, with an increasing array of media channels and media vehicles in the West there has never been more public discussion or more opportunities for people to express themselves. What is curious is the recurring theme from certain commentators about a perceived lack of political engagement, and how central the role of the mass media is to many such arguments in this perceived erosion of democracy. In Copenhagen, the large crowds seemed to belie this perceived apathy. I did read a story with a new angle on the mass rally, though: how a sad by-product of the thousands of environmentally conscious individuals attending and demonstrating outside the COP15 Conference was the startling amount of paper, wood and other debris that ended up polluting the beautiful

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European town . . .

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Chapter 5

We’re all journalists now YouTube understands the concept of a media ecosystem. One might say it embodies it. When the video-sharing entity announced a new and free tool1 – one that allows news organisations to highlight newsworthy viwdeo footage from ‘citizen journalists’ on their websites – online news sites the Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post were among the first US outlets to sign on. ‘YouTube Direct’ allows any media organisation to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users. The head of news and politics at YouTube, Steve Grove, said on a post that the tool was not only aimed at connecting citizen journalists with traditional news outlets but could also be used, for example, by businesses wishing to highlight promotional videos. The potential for amateurs to influence public discourse and mainstream media coverage of events may date back to Matt Drudge’s intervention in the Clinton regime,2 but it is only recently that the phenomenon has taken a quantum leap with the proliferation of blogs in the 21st century. While the Bill and Monica story would no doubt have surfaced anyway, the scoop became

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a point of definition in American journalism, says UK journalist and media studies academic Ian Hargreaves, when it ‘precipitated a scramble for angles on the same story by established newspaper and TV reporters, in which corners were cut, mistakes made, and rumour was paraded as fact.’3 When the official investigation into the Lewinsky affair was published, it was the first such official report to be made instantly available on the internet, causing news sites around the world to freeze under the burden of traffic. According to polls at the time, the behaviour of the news media inflamed public opinion not against the President, but against the news media. President Clinton survived impeachment. Blogs can report on in-depth issues just as conventional media can, but that interactivity redefines how the story is told. While mainstream journalists give readers or viewers stories as a fait accompli, blogs can be linked to primary resource documents. Often the idea is to read a number of different blogs and use them to form your own opinion. Due to decreasing numbers of staff journalists and the chase for ‘scoops’ to beat television and radio news, newspapers are no longer papers of record. Yet the need for a forum that enables comprehensive, value-added coverage of stories still exists. Trevor Cook, PR consultant and well-known blogger, has argued that the media has a 24-hour cycle, after which it wants fresh news. Bloggers, he argues, can decide to stay with an issue and keep searching for or providing information. The real power of blogs I think is in that sort of extending the agenda, being able to emphasise things that we want to

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talk about rather than just what the media editors might

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want to talk about.4 And let’s not forget there are now millions of online pages dedicated to lifestyle – fashion, food, parenting, gardening, health, sport – and entertainment and celebrity news and celebrity gossip all written and compiled by ‘amateurs’. Some of these so-called amateurs have parlayed their hobbies into full-time jobs. When it comes to celebrity, gossip columnist Perez Hilton is now seen as one of the

most powerful online commentators. Such sites can rarely be called news, but as far as journalistic discourse is concerned they have their place; whether we like it or not, the burgeoning presence of such material cannot be ignored. As Michael Massing wrote in the New York Review of Books: ‘The practice of journalism, far from being leached by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news.’ Massing cited ProPublica, an online investigative unit backed by generous philanthropic grants, which ‘has produced exposes ´ on everything from the involvement of doctors in torture to the contamination of drinking water by gas drilling.’ He also discussed Informed Comment, a blog by Juan Cole, scholar of the Middle East at the University of Michigan, which ‘has over the years offered a more acute analysis of developments inside Iraq – and now Iran – than most of the reporters stationed in those countries.’5 When it comes to the management of natural disasters, blogs have not only made a significant impact when it comes to accurate information; they have also made an impact on coordinating relief volunteers and charitable funds. Blogger Paola di Maio survived the tsunami’s impact on the beach in Phuket, Thailand, and with available internet connectivity on the island communicated to Peter Griffin, a communications consultant in Mumbai, India, that the

blog, tsunamihelp.blogspot.com. The idea spread across the wired Numerous blogs are still directing viewers to Wikipedia’s Tsunami Ocean earthquake’, a stellar example of a collaborative record of the event. In the early 2000s, a number of Australian mainstream journalopportunities afforded by the changing media landscape. I want to

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ists, including Tim Blair and Margo Kingston, began to embrace new

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entry. There is also a comprehensive entry titled ‘2004 Indian

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world and is now sustained by an army of volunteer contributors.

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up the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami (or SEA-EAT)

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most pressing need was for accurate information. They quickly set

point to some of the pioneering work they did, because I believe

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it serves to contextualise the current media ecosystem – Kingston’s work on Webdiary in particular. Kingston has a longstanding reputation as an investigative journalist and political commentator and was until a few years ago employed full-time by Fairfax at the Sydney Morning Herald. (In August 2005 Kingston severed all ties with Fairfax and set up an independent Webdiary, before leaving it to others to facilitate in order to pursue other work. She has since officially retired from journalism.) Until the magazine closed down, Blair was a news editor at The Bulletin and is a longstanding news journalist. Each has a reputation as a larrikin – or even a ‘ratbag’ in the case of Kingston – but both are considered by their peers to be hard-working and professional. Both made independent decisions to start blogging. Kingston began Webdiary (<www.webdiary.com>) in 2000 but initially it was better known as the Sydney Morning Herald’s version of a group political blog, whereas Blair’s was autonomous. Personal opinionated content may seem a strange fit for journalists with ties to the country’s most prestigious titles, since conventional journalism is based on concepts of impartiality and objectivity, but Blair and Kingston believe this concept of journalism is changing. A few years ago the site Tim Blair (<www.timblair.net>) was described as one of Australia’s most prominent and most visited blogs. He told me: My blog began around November in 2001. If it does have a

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particular focus, it would be highlighting stupid politics –

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although all manner of things and people are mentioned. I wasn’t hoping to achieve anything. I just wanted some place of my own to write. I’ve worked a lot for magazines and newspapers, where you’ll always be edited or cut or changed. Here at the site it’s only me, and the readers are partners. If you check the number of comments at my site, you’ll find that the readers actually contribute vastly more words than I do. Often better and funnier words, too.6

Blair now blogs for News Ltd’s Daily Telegraph, among other projects. This partnership with readers was one of the highlights for Kingston, too. She explains that, when she started in journalism in the mid- to late 1980s: . . . the journalists were the gatekeepers for the information. We went to the press conferences, we read the speeches, we decided what to run and what not to run. What the net has meant is that the speeches and the press conferences can now be accessed by the general public. There is so much information online that we’ve completely left behind the relationship of journalist as giver of information, reader as passive recipient, so that in many cases the reader is much more informed than the journalist, and can keep the journalist honest.7 From the first day of Webdiary, in July, 2000, I wrote in the first person and asked all reader contributors to write in the first person too. I wanted Webdiary to be a space for conversation among Australians from all different walks of life and from all different political points of view, I wanted that space to be safe, and I felt I could guarantee safety by being very open about what my beliefs are, and publishing genuine criticisms of my beliefs and my opinions and my 5

journalist who’s pretending to be objective. And that proved to be the case. After the 2004 election, Webdiary was

Australians participated, and they felt safe to participate. And they felt that their voices were being fairly expressed. Kingston argues that blogging is a form of liberation from the state form of citizen journalism, which she has labelled participatory journalism:

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of mainstream newspaper journalism. She goes on to explain her

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much more balanced site, many, many more right-wing

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transformed from a basically leftish, small-l liberal site to a

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facts. I think the reader in the end trusts that more than a

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Fair dinkum participatory journalism on Webdiary started in 2003. During the ‘Honest Politics Trust’ scandal I tried without success to get answers from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) on their inaction over the trust and their failure to order disclosure of donations to it. She published transcripts of her 83 interviews and readers began to demand answers. Kingston published their emails and the AEC’s answers. She claims this helped force a rethink by the AEC of its secrecy policy, the intervention of the AEC chairman, and a reexamination of the trust files. ‘Properly resourced, I believe the sky is the limit for this type of journalism.’8 Blair not only achieved a new relationship with his readers; one of the blogosphere’s first scoops recounted the following instance of biased reporting. Blair told me: The Chicago Tribune had a man based in Australia called Uli Schmetzer. He was a veteran in his sixties covering the case of T.J. Hickey, an Aboriginal boy killed in Redfern after being chased by police. Police had been accused of pursuing the 17-year-old recklessly, causing him to crash his bicycle into a fence where he was impaled. His death sparked street rioting in the area during which 40 police were injured.9 Schmetzer wrote that Australians have a very biased and hateful view towards Aborigines, generally. And he included a quote from someone he identified as an Australian psychiatrist, Graham Thorn. And it just didn’t ring true to

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me. It was every kind of despicable and loathsome thing

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that you could imagine white Australians saying about Aborigines, all neatly condensed into the one quote. And it just didn’t sound like the sort of thing an Australian psychiatrist would say.10 Blair put it up on his website and said that he didn’t buy it. He promptly received an email from someone in Chicago saying, ‘Well here’s an email address for the paper. They’ve got what they call

a public editor, an ombudsman.’ Blair sent the information to the ombudsman. who checked it and discovered it had been fabricated by Schmetzer. ‘He’d either made up the quote or Graham Thorn. Either way, they booted him, very quickly. Fired.’11 In its first incarnation Webdiary had, at times, an influence on more than mainstream media and news. I think I did a one woman challenge to the gallery during President Bush’s Australian visit, specifically when Bush was in Canberra [23–24 October 2003]. I was very critical of the gallery both verbally and in Webdiary, Kingston told me. I felt that Australian journalists were being locked out of proceedings. Matt Price [journalist from News Ltd’s Australian, now deceased] and I were arguing all the way through the first day. I said the whole thing was a censorship conspiracy, and he said it was a fuck up. Then the next day I showed him an article about the way our Parliament had greeted Bush, a day in the life of our faltering democracy, and said, ‘Look at this piece, Matt, and tell me it’s not a conspiracy.’ He decided to investigate.12 Kingston said the significance of the piece was that it then became

Because Kingston had been away from the press gallery for three

It seemed other journalists hadn’t thought to question what was going on. Once you’ve been there for a while you tend to accept the rules; they’d lost a sense of what they’re there article] was a cause of enormous comment, and put enormous pressure on the speaker, who then started to

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for, what their meaning is, in a democratic sense. [Price’s

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explained to me:

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years she immediately saw the enormity of the close-down. She

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was going on, and a lot of the journalists hadn’t understood, either.

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obvious that many politicians in the building hadn’t known what

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negotiate with the gallery. [The fallout] convinced people in the gallery that the censorship wasn’t an internal problem, it was a closing down of the public’s right to know – it was actually a news story . . . Without an enforceable or generalised ethical code, how do bloggers inspire the trust that the mainstream media seems to be rapidly losing? Blair believes it is due to the speed with which readers can hold writers accountable, and the fact that they are prepared to do so, and that this information will run alongside the writer’s comments. If it doesn’t, the blog loses credibility and then readers and contributors. You know the length of time the blogger has been blogging and you can follow whether this person is accurate over time, whether they correct errors, whether they acknowledge sources, you know that if people begin passing off information from others as their own, they’ll be found out. You apply the same rules you apply to basic journalism, but it’s essentially a different delivery system. It’s live comments and live opinion pieces.13 When Webdiary started, Kingston decided that most readers might well be inclined to her ‘worldview’, so in order to encourage people with different viewpoints she made sure not to ‘ridicule or deride contributions, and published most emails critical of me, my style, and my substance.’ Kingston said that when people of one view begin to dominate, invariably other readers balance them. She cites

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examples of both the Tampa issue14 and the war on Iraq, where

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opposing views were finally presented in balance. However, she admitted this did not stop some readers complaining that Webdiary lacked balance. When it comes to ethical issues, Blair says his blog faces the same issues as faced by any journalist, although any ethical issues are more immediate because it’s a one-person site here, and not a collective like a newspaper

or magazine. All decisions – what to publish, what to omit, what to say – come down solely to me. It’s made me a better journalist because I’m exposed to more information, from wider sources, than I would be exposed to via traditional journalism, where people tend to rely on the same sources they’ve always used. It’s very easy to locate an expert in even the most obscure field simply by posting a request. The expertise comes to you. Kingston believes the readers and contributors to Webdiary trust her because she has never had a problem admitting when she is wrong. She says the average number of emails on Webdiary (or number of hits per week) is meaningless: The first real challenge to my sanity in Webdiary was late August 2001 with the Tampa crisis. I had hundreds of emails a day and they were of a particular type – short and emotional. Almost desperate to be on the public record. I worked about 18 hours a day to pump all these emails out. It didn’t reach that level again until February 2003 when the Iraq war was getting close. Hundreds again, but they were longer emails, more argumentative, trying to make points about what the war was really about. They were more 5

of emotion. So, at times I may publish 90 per cent, others five per cent.

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academic, too, whereas the Tampa ones were outpourings

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personal slurs under a nom de plume. I strongly disagree with the modus operandi of [the original] <www.crikey.com.au> in this regard, and believe that a site that complies with the code of ethics.15 [Under Eric Beecher, Crikey.com.au no longer operates this way.]

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whatever its considerable merits, it cannot lay claim to being

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Kingston doesn’t believe in noms de plume – she refused to publish

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The man who started Crikey.com, Australian journalist and corporate shareholder activist Stephen Mayne, has been referred to as the Australian version of Matt Drudge. Like Drudge, Mayne ran a news site full of political and media gossip. Unlike Drudge, he was respected as a news journalist before he went out on his own. In February 2005, Mayne sold Crikey.com to Australian publishers Eric Beecher and Di Gribble’s Private Media Partners for one million dollars; the value was seen as being in the subscriber list and contacts Mayne had set up. For the first time in Australia, an internet-based news service exchanged hands for real money: a significant event. Before he sold it, however, Mayne was a one-man force against traditional media. Like Kingston, Mayne has a solid reputation as a ratbag larrikin who is also a tireless worker. He says: In terms of being a media critic, I’m probably the only journalist that has worked for the two main newspaper groups – Murdoch and John Fairfax – in both Sydney and Melbourne. And having sat in major metro news conferences as a business editor, chief of staff or columnist for five years also gives me a good head start for being a media insider.16 Noting Private Eye in the UK as his bible in terms of incisive satire, Mayne told me he believes Australia lacks equivalent publications, and acknowledges that Crikey.com’s lifeblood is the daily subscription mail-out (not the website). Crikey.com, like The Bulletin of the late 1800s, always understood that the mediascape was part of the story, part of politics. After working at the Daily Telegraph,

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Mayne worked as a columnist at the Australian Financial Review,

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but after three months decided to stand against Jeff Kennett in the 1999 Victorian election. He was ruled ineligible to stand in the election because he was not registered in the right electorate, and with the assistance of a friend (Con Christov) launched Jeffed.com, an opponent of Kennett’s own site, Jeff.com. Says Mayne: The only way to bring attention to the full panoply of scandals was to stand against him in the election and publish

Jeffed.com . . . This site had 115 000 page views in two weeks and helped change the government. And with every bridge back to the mainstream media burnt, I had to stay online. According to Mayne, newspapers didn’t want his critical pieces on Kennett, so in February 2000 Mayne launched Crikey.com, aiming to critically examine the relationship between politics, big business and big media interests.17 As a radical Liberal rather than a leftinclined Labor party man, Mayne made the links that mainstream media would not do because it would upset advertisers and risk defamation. Mayne was sued a number of times. Initially with Jeffed.com it was purely public spirited and a single purpose anti-Kennett vehicle. Then it broadened into media and business, changed from a web vehicle to a primarily email vehicle and became a business turning over 350k a year, paying five people and hopefully providing for my family [in 2004]. The power is so concentrated in Australia, be it in business, politics or the media, that you don’t get many independent voices tackling the power bases, because people can’t afford to burn those bridges. Unfortunately, the power structures in our society mean that there’s not enough scrutiny. 5

circulating among politicians, investors, journalists and business comment, analysis and speculation. The most frequent criticism of didn’t have time for fact checking. However, in spite of the haphazard nature of the site, the readership was strong and regular; hundreds of subscribers were key business and political figures. In a editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and head of Private Media Partners, claimed:

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statement sent out upon buying Crikey.com, Eric Beecher, a former

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Crikey.com was that it published gossip – Mayne maintained he

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leaders – a must-read. It provided insiders’ gossip, breaking news,

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Crikey.com had real influence on public life for the first five years,

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There is nothing quite like Crikey anywhere in the world . . . It is our intention to retain Crikey’s essential ingredients: disclosure, ferreting out important information that people don’t want you to know, being an active and lively part of the Fourth Estate that acts as one of the crucial checks and balances in the Australian democracy. We hope to enhance it and take Crikey to its next state of development as a distinctive and valuable part of the media landscape in a country that desperately needs more media players.18

The frontline Some years on, all the main mastheads of the Australian press have online editors. Chris Manly became online editor of Western Australia’s thewest.com.au after 25 years as a newspaperman. He says that once you start working online you start to think about the news differently: What I quickly found out about the website is that it’s insatiable. What I like about it is the immediacy. Newspapers are certainly very busy and quite immediate, but online gives you almost instant gratification. I found I had to change completely the way I was thinking about the news. I was looking, I suppose, to see how quickly we could get the stories up, but also looking at the broader aspect of the range of things people are interested in. With the newspaper, we were responsible for 19 forward news pages, but the breadth of online means we can cover such a wide The most important thing is that we are relevant to our readers, and authoritative. So when people read an article at thewest.com.au, I want them to be sure that what they are reading is credible, that they are getting the news from senior, respected, experienced reporters.19

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variety of news coming from such a wide variety of sources.

The Punch’s Paul Colgan spoke at the Social Media Summit gath-

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ering just days after News Corp announced its plan to charge for

news. He was speaking about strategies around social media, including Twitter. The announcement that News planned to charge for access to its websites was the hottest topic of conversation in the wings and with the exception of one or two people, the view among the delegates was that it wasn’t going to work. With most of them being accustomed to the news delivery powers of social networks, this is a natural response. Why the hell would you want to pay for news when you get it all for free from your friends? But the trouble, he added, is that when someone like Ted Kennedy dies, the first people to know and tell other people are journalists working in newsrooms that cost millions of dollars to run. As Twitter has repeatedly demonstrated by being at its best in the heat of a big story, social networks are powerful news platforms. But this is just a technologically turbo-charged reality. Newspapers and, more recently, radio and television have always produced information that people have gone on to talk about.20 Australian blogger Tim Burrowes from the marketing blog Mumbrella notes that the social media debate tends to put marketing

Twitter ‘doesn’t get it’, and those who think that most of

from one end of the debate polemics about dinosaurs, and from the other the question, ‘Why would I be interested in what someone had for lunch?’21

scholars, including Julie Posetti from the University of Canberra,

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A number of commentators have called Twitter a fad, but media

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groups of people can be pretty unedifying. You tend to hear

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the digerati are unbearable wankers. At the extremes, both

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. . . the devotees who think that anybody who isn’t on

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people into two camps:

argue that, even if it turns out to have a shorter shelf life than

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expected, it is likely to be that, if you’re not familiar with Twitter, getting up to speed with whatever comes next will be harder. The managing editor of Fairfax Online, Mike van Niekerk, says that while Fairfax was once defined by its two main newspapers, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, it is now much more. Not only because of its new assets, but also philosophically. If you look at the introduction of the telegraph in the 1800s, it also changed the format of journalism, the way people wrote stories, the speed and accessibility of information, and its distribution methods. I think digital journalism is based on the same skills, which are still useful and important to the way we work on the Internet: it’s about telling stories and tracking down the people to tell those stories. Old school journalists who are learning to work for the Internet are delighted to learn that they are extending skills they already have. He is not so optimistic about investigative journalism, noting that the economics of new media make it very difficult to fund investigative journalism in the same way it once was. If you’re talking about the kind of journalism that keeps governments and corporations at check, I am concerned about its sustainability in the future.22 As has been argued throughout this book, there’s a misapprehen-

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sion that ‘quality’ journalism is rigidly restricted to sober, sensi-

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ble, mildly tedious coverage in a broadsheet newspaper. But surely quality journalism can come to us via any medium. Michael OwenBrown, deputy editor of Adelaidenow, told me how the fact that Australian news websites are currently caught between two imperatives which are frequently in competition [makes it hard] to be all things to all people. One imperative is to chase as many hits as possible to generate revenue – the

other is to cover the most significant news of the day in a way that engages readers and takes full advantage of the latest online technologies. The fact is that quirky stories tend to generate more traffic than ‘worthy stories’. Our experience shows that while celebrity gossip is frequently the target of reader comment berating us for publishing such trivial, frivolous stories, they tend to be clicked on at a much higher rate than a story about the latest GDP forecasts, or a destructive earthquake in Indonesia. Adelaidenow, like most mainstream Australian news websites, tries to find a balance between the quirky and the worthy, between what people need to know and what they will be talking about to their friends at work. We also have a strong focus on local South Australian news, as this is our key area of differentiation from competing sites.23 While he believes there is no doubt that reader input has added an extremely valuable new aspect to journalism – for one thing, ‘it enables news organisations to quickly establish what issues are important to their readers and which way the public mood is trending’ – he also firmly believes that only professionally trained journalists (and a small minority of media-savvy bloggers) are equipped to present stories quickly, clearly, accurately and concisely, while

He says the biggest lesson he has learned since moving from the fact that few readers are content to be passive consumers of

they demand involvement. This can only benefit media organisations, particularly on major breaking news stories. The Advertiser has had about six page one photos in the past

But he also points out the downside of reader interaction:

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year that were sent in to adelaidenow by readers.

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journalism:

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print to online news is the importance of reader involvement and

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journalism.

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negotiating the numerous legal and ethical pitfalls of online

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Anyone with experience of the general calibre of reader comment on news websites (and I’m talking in particular here of the 40 per cent or so of racist, sexist, homophobic or barely literate rubbish that is rejected as unsuitable for publication) is aware of the glaring flaw in [the argument that journalism will be saved by user-generated content] . . . Many readers frequently leap to erroneous conclusions, make assumptions, are motivated by political or social bias, and in some cases post comments that are so mindnumbingly moronic they make you want to bang your head on the desk. While journalists are frequently lambasted for their perceived biases, at least good journalists (well, those who aren’t opinion writers) try to keep things balanced, fair and accurate. As did many journalists I have spoken to, Owen-Brown notes that the need to get stories online as quickly as possible means stories are posted without the rigorous subediting that goes, or at least used to go, into the print product. He also explains that, as most Australian news websites contain areas that are syndicated, in our case from , in Fairfax’s case from <smh.com.au>, there are areas in which site editors are forced to surrender creative control and rely on people interstate to do their jobs properly. A very short time ago getting your news and analysis online was still something of a novelty for most Australians. These days, things

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are changing monthly in the online environment, and the growth

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of social media has fast-tracked that. However, arguably the biggest thing that has happened to the Australian media in the past few years is a crisis of confidence, often referred to as ‘the death of quality journalism’. Yet not everyone involved in the media received that particular tweet.

Chapter 6

Conclusion – unfinished business The citizens of Facebook, the self-described sixth largest country in the world, threatened to leave en masse when the social networking site tried to change its terms of use in 2009, suggesting ownership of all members’ information. The backlash led to an interesting experiment for such a forum – the creation of a bill of rights and a promise to members that they could vote on policy changes. Tourism Australia saw Baz Luhrmann’s epic, the historical romance Australia, as a handy marketing opportunity: interestingly, a subsequent poll by the company revealed that many Australians did not know that Japan attacked Darwin during World War II. The demands of business as usual saw the potential of the Rudd government’s 2020 Summit for an engaged citizenry come up against policy hierarchies and budgetary constraints: but in terms of transparency and encouraging public participation, it was a start. We are living in a media ecosystem defined by blurred boundaries. In an era when mainstream media and political communication often degenerate into sound bites, infotainment and spin doctoring, a willingness to blend once-distinct genres and vehicles

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into previously unimagined combinations is surely cause for optimism. The future of journalism in Australia depends somewhat on the rejection of the assumption that there are only two sides to any story. While journalism does need to take into account issues of balance, lack of bias and the translation of abstract ideas and specialist terms, conventions of news should not inevitably lead to oppositional propositions. Yet the mainstream media most often direct public debates onto left-and-right or black-and-white ideological battlegrounds. Issues of public concern will not be considered in any depth while an adversarial, conflict-driven news agenda is seen as the only legitimate agenda. Access to the media is a vital component in the democratic process – and what is interesting is that learning to become an active citizen is coming more and more from outside formal media and news outlets. The concepts of openness, participation and collaboration are all producing profound culture change: information that was once protected by insiders and vested interests is now potentially available to all.1 We may be a virtual mob, but we are storming the castle, not with pointy farming implements and flaming torches but with mobile phones and YouTube. In a nation with the Western world’s highest level of media concentration, shows such as Four Corners and Foreign Correspondent and other credible sources of general news should of course continue to be viewed as essential. However, humour, satire and other channels that explore popular culture are all just as vital to the health of the Australian identity as Australian documentaries and current affairs. While some

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argue that it needs to be more diverse, the ABC’s current affairs

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still offer a far greater range of viewpoints than any other Australian mainstream media outlet.2 The ABC is facing the challenge of transforming itself from a paternalistic broadcaster with a passive audience into a multi-channel narrowcaster, engaging diverse audiences who expect to at least be consulted.3 The contemporary media ecosystem is concerned with diverse and niche audiences: illustrative of this is the decline in use of free-to-air TV by younger audiences.

Australian academic and former ABC employee Tony Moore has pointed out that, in the past, the ABC has suffered from a view of Australian culture that is too homogeneous, imposed via management structures that have centralised control of television content in the hands of a few senior executives.4 In order to deliver the multichannel and digital nirvana touted by CEO Mark Scott, the ABC must deal with the internal structural and cultural problems inimical to diversity that have intensified over the last decade, argues Moore. Under the prime ministership of John Howard, the sense of national vision and ambition at the ABC shrank significantly, as exemplified in the decline of flagship national documentaries and drama series. Former content commissioner for the ABC Courtney Gibson has criticised the ABC for being ‘too white, too straight, too middle class . . . if you don’t have diversity in the production offices, you’re never going to get it on screen’. Moore advocates genuine democratic talent scouting: a twenty-first century version of J.F. Archibald’s The Bulletin of the 1890s that scoured the bush and back lanes and discovered the likes of Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson and Norman Lindsay.5 Allowing commissioners in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and regional areas would enable diversity by establishing relationships with local creative communities and reversing the trend from centralisation in Sydney, he argues: the BBC’s decentralisation has allowed it to embrace the talents of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales in its drama and current affairs. The changes under way in the ABC’s online environment alone are laying the foundation for further cultural democracy, with viewers and listeners contributing 6

ity journalism as that which ‘involves experienced reporters going

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ideas through ABC forums and blogs like Unleashed.6

places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources,

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Addressing readers online in 2009, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller complained about the ‘diminishing supply of quality journalism’ at a time of ‘growing demand’. He described qual-

checking and double-checking, backed by editors who try to enforce high standards’.7 He went on to attack aggregators – those who gather news without sourcing the point of origin – calling them parasites responsible for killing the host. Such laments do not take into account, among other things, that the internet has opened up entire subjects once off limits to the press, such as the domestic policies of countries in the West towards the Middle East. The polemical excesses for which the blogosphere is known remain real, as blogs often link to other blogs of a similar political persuasion. But isn’t this similar to only ever reading The Australian or only ever reading the Sydney Morning Herald, as so many people do? Another issue in the blogosphere is that sites which don’t identify officially or otherwise as being news media often reject out of hand any attempt at, say, balance. While this makes for a dynamic environment, it also points to the need for skilled aggregators able to sift the wheat from the chaff and the factual from the phantasmagorical, and thus help guide readers. Ideally, the people with such skills will be part of a news outlet that envisages news as a searchlight, providing resources and accountability, rather than the blinding theatrical floodlight that we can so easily end up with. News, politics and entertainment have been remoulded into previously unimaginable combinations; the metaphorical walls between public and private, public affairs and popular culture are no more. Shows such as Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and The Colbert Report blend insightful coverage of news with entertainment within a talk-show format. Online coverage of politics, for

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example, potentially allows for more and varied sources – which

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is significant, because mainstream political journalists – those who are used to talking to reporters – often use the same professional sources. The volume of resources now available and the decreasing role traditional news sources play in filtering news means that a steady diet of pre-scripted information is far less likely. With the public and private domains so intertwined, every corner of power is

illuminated. It also means that routine matters, from birth and death to ethnic customs, are less taken for granted. The downside to this, in Australian politics at least, is that politicians are rarely rewarded for thinking critically, or even for thinking out loud. When attempting to discuss complex issues such as the need to juggle work with family and rebuild a local sense of community at various times, both the former Australian Labor opposition leader Mark Latham and former Liberal opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull have been derided as ‘soft’. The reason Mark Latham was most criticised for The Latham Diaries (written initially as a diary and not for publication; the subsequent book is annotated to assist readers with any shorthand or background information needed) was that he exposed the private lives of journalists, including in one case an alleged sexual indiscretion. He shot back at the criticism, calling journalists fair game because of their constant intrusion into the lives of others. His book threw this former political leader into the same territory as John Safran and The Chaser by appearing where journalists feared to tread and, to add insult to injury, using their own tricks on them. In this fly-on-the-wall record of his 11 years in the Australian Parliament, including 14 months as leader of the Australian Labor Party, Latham writes: Diaries are rare in Australian politics, too rare. In understanding political events, the Australian public depends heavily on journalists, people who can never go behind the scenes and provide a first-hand account of the political process. By its nature, their work is derivative, relying on other sources of information and second- and

happens behind headlines, political spin and the manipulation of the daily news cycle.8 Journalists are often dependent on PR and politicians; social media is one forum that has opened this up.

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He adds that the electorate has had little exposure beyond what

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third-hand interpretations . . .

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Journalism – defined as more than simply news reporting – has never been so closely scrutinised nor so committed to the core values of accuracy, truth and scrutiny of power. While it may well be supplanted not long after this book is out, Twitter at the end of 2009 was the fastest growing platform with an estimated 25 million users: British comedian Stephen Fry asks if Twitter is the new Fifth Estate. It is a research tool, a giant and virtual public notepad, contact book and search engine. But it is still only a tool. The 2009 Iranian conflict was the first occasion when information was published in the mainstream without being checked, relying as it did initially on Twitter, but this form of crowd-sourcing was ultimately a part of the news. It was not a replacement, and should be seen within the context of the overall coverage. Traditional journalism played a part by checking for credible sources as the protest coverage continued. Interestingly, individual journalists seem to be negotiating better than their companies, participating in the community via platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and thus becoming members of a new emerging public. Journalists need to be where the information is being exchanged and ideas traded; the ‘pro-am’ (professional/amateur) model widely touted as the business model that will ultimately win out will always require journalistic skills. Annabel Crabb, former political sketch writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and now ABC Online’s chief political writer, has said that, as part of political reporting, Twitter is self-selecting.

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That is, people identify as her audience by following her tweets –

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observations on question time, what she has called a form of public note-taking. She believes, as Margo Kingston argued before her, that the Australian press gallery is out of touch and elitist and that Twitter has opened it up. She acknowledges the constraints – participation, for example – as everyone relevant to a debate needs to be present to take part. Proof of authenticity is also a constraint: she noted that sometimes the fake politicians are more convincing than the real ones. (Remarks made by someone posing

on Twitter as Liberal Party MP Sophie Mirabella were endorsed by her party.)9 As John Hartley has argued, ‘journalism is a profession which cannot police its own boundaries, standards or body of knowledge’ and which did not develop as a profession at all but as a trade. As he rightly points out, there are still many in the business of journalism who say the best qualifications are personal attributes (a nose for news) and that the best training is on the job: so how is specialist knowledge standardised? Anyone who has worked in the industry also knows that experience is not necessarily a precursor to employment as a journalist.10 Neither is a commitment to truth. The Rudd government has amended or abolished the most damaging features of the asylum seeker system initiated by the Keating government in 1991 and worsened by the Howard government. When the Tampa sailed into Australian waters in 2001, for example, 85 per cent of Australians agreed with the Australian government’s refusal to allow asylum seekers it had rescued to land. In the aftermath of the shock of September 11, solid journalism found it hard to get a foothold and the news was full of sensationalist reports of riots and lipsewing and the ‘children overboard’ fabrication.11 In 2002 David Penberthy was editor of the Daily Telegraph and used his position to write a piece for his own newspaper about a detention centre – without having visited the centre in question – likening it to a luxury hotel. Four months later, a woman called Ngareta Rossel quietly persuaded Penberthy to come with her to visit Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney’s west. To his credit, the articles Penberthy then wrote were of a decidedly different tone and content. (Penberthy is now the editor of News Ltd’s online paper The Punch.) 6

viously worked for 16 years in tabloid print journalism and com-

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Australian journalist Stephen Feneley has lived in London since

mercial television news and current affairs. In mid-2006 he was a

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2007 with his English wife and children, working mainly as a freelance media trainer and very occasional contributor to Crikey. Feneley started working as an arts journalist in 1994, having pre-

daily contributor to Crikey and writing a weekly column for a liftout arts and entertainment section of the Sunday Age. By email he explained to me that: In the past I’ve got sacked for doing daring things, like taking on Michael Kroger, or bringing attention to my bosses’ conflicting interests. But at the Sunday Age I got sacked because I questioned the paper’s front-page assertion that Charles Blackman was Australia’s greatest living artist. The absurdly positive spin on Blackman was playing out in the pages of both the Age and the Sunday Age while the two papers were studiously avoiding a raging scandal at the National Gallery involving Geoffrey Smith, the co-curator of the Blackman show. Feneley was so irritated by Fairfax’s reluctance to cover the saga that he started feeding documents to a Sunday Age reporter. For my trouble the paper, trading on material I supplied it, ended up claiming as its own work a story that I had broken three days earlier in Crikey (my story had pointed out that Smith had given conflicting evidence about his extracurricular art advisory work in two separate court cases). When I pointed out that the Sunday Age had falsely claimed credit for this story, the editor sent me an email informing me that he was killing my column. According to his email, I was being sacked for two reasons: firstly for ‘doubting the legitimacy’ of the paper’s claim that Blackman was

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Australia’s greatest living artist and secondly for ‘criticising’

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the newspaper’s work on the Smith story. When replying to the email which dismissed him, Feneley pointed out to the editor that it wasn’t the paper’s work he was criticising – he was criticising the Sunday Age for falsely claiming credit for work that was his.12 The above are only two examples which, in very different ways, exemplify the excesses of concentration of media ownership in

Australia – and the power struggle the media ecosystem has called into being is a major weapon in this revolution. Peter Jones, editor of Fairfax’s online forum the Sauce strongly believes we need to let go of the idea that journalists and journalism are exclusively about ‘this’ or ‘that’: Yes, we have a responsibility to the communities we serve, but the way we discharge that responsibility can be as varied as the mediums we have at our disposal to communicate. The question we should be asking ourselves is, ‘With all this great stuff we have to play with, what is the best way we can present this story so as to maximise the understanding of the issues involved?’ He told me he finds some reporting on what he would call the less cut-and-dried aspects of climate-change science and the ridicule heaped upon those who question conclusions drawn by climate scientists ‘to be at times disgraceful, and at the very least unhelpful, when we have vast numbers of people struggling to understand what climate change is and what it means’.13 For Jones, the definition of quality journalism is one that enshrines the idea of journalism as an agent for change, one that empowers rather than enslaves and encourages questioning rather than blind acceptance. Gareth Parker, deputy online editor of the West Australian, says the days of newspapers and journalists handing down important information from on high are long gone. He told me: Specialist readers are almost certainly better informed about

This is absolutely the approach I am trying to take with , using our blogs and live chats to facilitate genuine and respectful interaction and conversation with our readers.14

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embrace this and open their ears. They might learn something.

6

specific issues than generalist reporters. Reporters need to

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Journalism that does not hold to a traditional adversarial agenda is reviving a spirit of critical inquiry, of the ‘press’ as an agent of public interrogation that can hold leadership accountable to the public. Satire is one forum well positioned to ask questions that help clarify any underlying ethics of a situation. This is well illustrated by The Daily Show’s coverage of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. Host Jon Stewart said on his show, after revelations of torture had been made: [the revelations are] difficult for all of us to wrap our heads around. Clearly this is a time for our defence secretary to speak clearly and honestly to the American people about the instances of torture. The show then cut to a sound bite from Donald Rumsfeld: Uhm, I think that, uh [scratches head] I’m not a lawyer, my impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse which I believe technically is different from torture [groans from Stewart’s studio audience] and therefore I’m not gonna address the torture word. Stewart turned to his audience: I’m also not a lawyer, so I don’t know, technically, if you’re human, but as a fake news person, I can tell you, what we’ve been reading about in newspapers, the pictures we’re been

A traditional journalist would most likely repeat Rumsfeld’s comment and hope that the quote would speak for itself, and not engage subjectively as Stewart does. Stewart uses satire to suggest overtly that both the incidences of torture and Rumsfeld’s obfuscation and refusal to speak honestly and clearly are also fundamental viola-

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seeing . . . it’s fucking torture.15

licence to confront political misinformation and demand a measure

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of accountability.16

tions of human decency. Shows like The Daily Show use humour as

The contemporary media-ecosystem has profound implications for how we will perceive and practise democracy and journalism in the coming decades. John Keane, professor of media and politics at the University of Westminster, London, argues that we are living in an age of monetary democracy: . . . a new type of historical democracy defined by the rapid growth of many and different kinds of extra-parliamentary, power-scrutinising mechanisms. These monetary bodies take root within the ‘domestic’ fields of government and civil society.17 The age of monetary democracy began after World War II with the birth of nearly a hundred new types of power-scrutinising institutions: citizen juries, advisory boards, think tanks, public memorials, local community schemes offering information and advocacy and advisory services, archive and research facilities, and the list goes on. However, Keane argues that the very novelty and complexity of monetary democracy make it vulnerable to misconceptions, the chief of which is that the struggle to bring greater accountability to government is a struggle for grassroots democracy or participatory democracy.18 He is arguing that there will always be a gap between the representative and the represented. The power of scrutiny does generate change; as has been discussed throughout this book, all the large public issues since 1945, including military intervention by super-powers, civil rights for minorities and environmentalism, have been generated not by legislatures and governments but by power-monitoring networks that are nearly always made possible by forms of media. Australia is a multi-media-saturated society, 6

time, within affordable global networks. However, the instability

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and the constant public scrutiny potentially makes no one person

and resultant dynamism due to its latticed, porous, viral networks

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or organisation immune. But we have not entered a utopian age. In the media ecosystem, for the first time in history communication can take place through multiple user points, in real or delayed

also lead to contradictions. The widening gaps between rich and poor is one – a large one – as is privatisation of digital networks.19 It will be interesting, for example, to see how the Rudd government’s plans for internet filtering ultimately come into play. We need journalism and people to provide it – to reflect critically upon all received wisdom and to continue to shed light on power.

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After all, democracy is another word for the media.

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Notes Encountering Australian journalism 1

See Roy Greenslade, The Guardian and Eric Beecher, Publisher, Crikey and Business Spectator, interviewed ‘Wired for the Future’, Media Watch, ABC Television, 5 May 2008, <www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2235826.htm>

2

See M. Gawenda, ‘Do newspapers have a future? And how long is that future?’, AN Smith Lecture in Journalism, The University of Melbourne, 9 November, 2007, <www.unimelb.edu.au/speeches/Docs/AN%20Smith%20Lecture%20by%20Michael %20Gawenda.pdf>

3

J. Hartley, Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture, Arnold, London, 1996, pp. 77–105.

4

See G. Howell and B. Da Silva, ‘New Media, First Time Voters and the 2007 Australian Federal Election’, Public Communications Review, 1, 2010, pp. 27–30.

5

See M. Hogarth, The 3rd Degree: Frontline in Australia’s Climate War, Pluto Press, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 55–60; C. Hamilton, Scorcher: the Dirty Politics of Climate Change, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2007.

6

T. Eagleton, Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth Century Ireland, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1999, pp. 5, 31; A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971, pp. 3, 6, 16.

7

J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper, New York, 1975, pp. 82–5.

8

T. Moore, ‘Unchaining Aunty’, in D. Glover and G. Patmore (eds), Labor Essays 2001, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2001.

9

For example E. Beecher, Wired for the Future’, op. cit.

10

A. Bruns, A ‘Wikinews: The Next Generation of Alternative Online News?’, Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, vol. 3, no. 1, June 2006

Preface 1

To name a handful, in 2008 alone there were: the Future of Journalism conference, held by the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA – the journalists’ union) in Sydney and Brisbane; a panel titled The Future of Journalism, held at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS); and another panel on the same theme later that year, hosted by UTS and the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) at ABC headquarters in Broadway, Sydney. In December the refereed journal Australian Journalism Review devoted an entire issue (vol. 2, no. 2) to citizen journalism. In September 2009 I visited Cardiff University in Wales for a conference titled, yet again, The Future of Journalism. In November 2009 an event was run by a new group called Media140. Founded in February 2009, Media140 is an independent global platform creating unique multimedia conference-style events to explore the future of the real-time web and its impact on the media industry.

2

J. Mills (series ed.), From Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2005, p. 13.

Introduction 1

2009 was the 10th anniversary of the Vote for Independence. At the time of writing, the Australian Federal Police had recently announced it had started a formal, criminal investigation into the deaths of the Balibo Five.

129

2

Australia Talks Movies: Balibo, Radio National, 11 August 2009. Recorded at the Brisbane International Film Festival, Paul Barclay and Julie Rigg discuss films about Australia and Indonesia, including Balibo, with Robert Connolly and others.

3

The show’s pre-publicity included circulating a media release reporting on a fake study by the fictitious Levitt Institute in order to make a point about lack of source checking by major media outlets. The report was taken up by Australian Associated Press and then widely reported in Australian and international media. The story of the media hoax was then presented as a segment on the night the show debuted.

4

Like many magazines that I have either been on the staff of, written for or loved, ABM no longer exists.

5

H. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, New York University Press, New York and London, 2006.

6

In October 2009 Ashley Townes, a 21-year-old TAFE student from Wollongong, created what is thought to be the first virus to infect Apple iPhones. This virus changed iPhone’s wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop singer Rick Astley. Townes said he created the virus to raise the issue of security.

7

D. Hallin, We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere, Routledge, London, 1994.

8

Mark Scott gave the A.N. Smith Memorial Lecture on 14 October 2009 at the University of Melbourne.

9

See Mills 2005; R. Manne (ed.), Do Not Disturb: Is the Media Failing Australia?, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2005.

10

M. Deuze, Media Work Polity, Cambridge University Press, UK, 2007.

11

L. Danielian & S. Reese, ‘A closer look at intermedia influence on agenda setting: the cocaine issue of 1986’, in P. Shoemaker (ed.), Communication Campaigns about Drugs: Government, Media and the Public, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillside NJ, 1989, pp. 47–77.

12

R. Fidler, Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media, Pine Forge, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1997. Jenkins, 2006.

14

ibid., pp. 26–9.

15

T. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980, pp. 122–3.

16

C. Lumby, ‘Media ethics’, in S. Cunningham & G. Turner (eds), The Media and Communications in Australia, 2nd edn, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW, 2006, p. 307.

17

See G. Meikle, Future Active, Pluto Press, Annandale, NSW, 2002, chapter 2; G. Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia, MIT Press, Cambridge MA/London 2002; M. Wark, Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1999, p. 37; C. Lumby, Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards NSW, 1999; Hartley, Popular Reality, pp. 15, 25.

18

E. Morozov, ‘Iran: downside to the Twitter revolution’, in Dissent, vol. 56, no. 4, Fall 2009, pp. 10–14; A. Burns & B. Eltham, ‘Twitter-free Iran: an evaluation of Twitter’s role in public diplomacy and information operations in Iran’s 2009 election crisis’, Record of the Communications Policy and Research Forum 2009. For one round-up that links to other discussions regarding the potential of video games such as World of Warcraft, see .

19

Burns & Eltham, 2009.

20

N. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Heinemann, London, 1985.

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2–1 3

13

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Chapter 1: The history of the future of journalism 1

Four years previously, The Bulletin had moved around the corner from ACP headquarters at 54 Park Street Sydney to Stockland House at 175 Castlereagh Street. See Gideon Haigh’s impressively detailed article on the demise of The Bulletin, ‘Packed it in’, Monthly, March 2008 (no. 32).

2

S. Lawson, ‘Print circus: the Bulletin from 1880 to Federation’, in A. Curthoys & J. Schultz, Journalism: Print Politics and Popular Culture, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1999, p. 83.

3

ibid., pp. 83–4.

4

ibid., p. 89; also see M. Van Heekeren, ‘The Bulletin and the New Journalism from 1880 to 1918’, in Australian Studies in Journalism, issue 16, 2006.

5

M. Schudson, ‘The objectivity norm in American journalism’, in Journalism, vol. 2, issue 20, Sage, 2001, pp. 149–50.

6

ibid., p. 155.

7

ibid., p. 157.

8

ibid., pp. 158–9.

9

M. Schudson, Discovering the News, Basic Books, NY, 1978.

10

ibid., pp. 159–60.

11

ibid., pp. 162–3.

ibid., p. 93.

15

See, for example, A. Smith, The New Statesman: Portrait of a Political Weekly 1913–1931, Frank Cass & Co, London, 1996.

16

A. Curthoys & J. Schultz, Journalism: Print Politics and Popular Culture, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1999, pp. xiv–xvi.

17

H. Molnar & M. Meadows, Songlines to Satellites: Indigenous Communication in Australia, the South Pacific and Canada, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2001, p. 22.

18

M. Rose (ed.), For the Record: 160 Years of Aboriginal Print Journalism, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1996.

19

See E. Webby (ed.), Colonial Voices: Letters, Diaries, Journalism and Other Accounts of Nineteenth Century Australia, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989.

20

T. Moore, ‘Does the Left need a sense of humour?’, Sydney Papers, Winter 2007, vol. 19, issue 3, pp. 50–1.

21

H. Mayer, The Press in Australia, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1964.

22

R. Kirkpatrick, ‘House of Unelected Representatives: the provincial press 1825–1900’, in Curthoys & Schultz, p. 20.

23

ibid., pp. 31–4.

24

T. Moore, ‘Bohemians in the street: bohemian writers, politics and cultural activism’, paper presented at Literature and Politics, 3rd Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Literature, July 6–7, 2009.

25

Curthoys & Schultz, 1999, pp. 70–1.

26

B. Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 74–116.

27

Hartley, 1996, pp. 15, 25.

1 5–2 3

14

P A G E S

ibid.

T O

Lawson, 1999, pp. 87–90.

13

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12

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2 3–8 P A G E S T O N O T E S

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28

ibid., p. 25.

29

R. Tiffen, ‘Political economy and news’, in S. Cunningham & G. Turner (eds), The Media and Communications in Australia, 2nd edn, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW, 2006, p. 28.

30

E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/NY 1979.

31

R. Streitmatter, Voices of Revolution, Columbia University Press, New York, 2001, p. 281.

32

Founded by Jeremy Heimans and David Maddens in 2005, the GetUp.org.au site’s initial campaign aimed to keep the Howard government accountable as it took control of the Australian Senate in August 2005, the first time an Australian government has controlled both Houses of Parliament since 1981.

33

N. Klein, No Logo, Flamingo, London, 2000.

34

For example, see the book by UK media studies academic Chris Atton, Alternative Media, Sage, London, 2002, who draws on the work of UK scholar John Downing.

35

Hartley, p. 6.

36

Hartley, ibid; The Politics of Pictures, Routledge, London, 1992; and The Uses of Television, Routledge, London, 1999.

37

ibid.

38

Habermas quoted in A. McKee, The Public Sphere: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2005, p. 5.

39

The bourgeois public sphere that Habermas argued began to exist in the 1700s was, as he saw it, a zone of mediation between the private, social and economic concerns of individuals and the concerns of public life. As well as a nascent press, it included institutions such as political clubs, literary salons, coffee houses, drinking establishments and other public meeting places. The principles of the public sphere involved an open discussion of all issues of general concern to ascertain general interests and the public good. The existence of the public sphere presupposed freedoms of speech, a free press, and the right to participate in political debate and decision-making. Habermas argued that the bourgeois public sphere made it possible to form public opinion that opposed state power and that, for the first time in history, individuals and groups could shape public opinion and therefore directly influence political practice. (D. Kellner, ‘Habermas, the public sphere, and democracy: a critical intervention’, in L.E. Hahn (ed.), Perspectives on Habermas, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 2000, p. 263.)

40

McKee, 2005, p. 5.

41

E.S. Herman & N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon, NY, c.1979, c.1988; E.S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End Press, Boston, c.1979.

42

R. McChesney, Capitalism and the Information Age, Monthly Review Press, NY, 1998.

43

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony suggests that it is only the ruling class that create and implement ideas in a society, leaving no room for ordinary citizens to contribute. He characterises hegemony as ‘a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria . . . between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups . . . the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point’ (A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971, p. 182). The re-establishing of hegemony opens it up to potential challenges – counter hegemony – through which subordinate groups challenge the structure of society. Traditional forms of Marxism have held that change would come about in advanced capitalist societies, such as those in Western Europe, as a result of the revolutionary actions of the industrial working class. There have been important debates among sociologists and social theorists, including notably Noam Chomsky, Robert McChesney and Edward S Herman (Chomsky 1992, 1996, 1997; Herman & Chomsky,

1979, 1988; McChesney, 1998 about the role of the working class as a major agent of change in advanced industrial societies, some arguing that it is still the major potential change agent, but most seeing the industrial working class as not only shrinking numerically but as also being more bound into consumer capitalism than ever before. (R. Bocock, Hegemony, Ellis Horwood Ltd, Sussex, 1986, p. 13.) 44

Herman & Chomsky, pp. 1–12.

45

‘Studies of voting behaviour and political activism showed a steady decline in allegiance between the major classes or occupational categories on one hand and the major political parties on the other . . . Since the late 1960s . . . the class voting index has been in major decline.’ The main symptoms of these changes are a progressive decline in class voting, falling support for the major political parties and the rise of new political forces such as civil and human rights and the feminist movement. (S. Crook, J. Pakulski & M. Waters, Postmodernization: Changes in Advanced Society, Sage, London, 1992, p. 139.)

46

See for example Roy Morgan Research, finding no. 4195, 14 August 2007.

47

A. Melucci, Nomads of the Present, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1989, pp. 170–3.

48

S. Hall & M. Jacques, New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, New York University Press, New York/London, 1989.

49

S. Scalmer, Dissent Events: Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002, p. 174.

50

ibid.

51

See D. Armstrong, A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America, J.P. Tarcher, 1981 and J. Aronson, Deadline for the Media: Today’s Challenges to Press, TV and Radio, Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1972.

52

F. Moorhouse, Days of Wine and Rage, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1980, pp. 5–10.

53

F. Webster, ‘A new politics?’ in F. Webster, Culture and Politics in the Information Age, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, p. 1.

54

Meikle, 2002, pp. 60–1.

55

See John Downing’s essay ‘Alternative media and the Boston Tea Party’ in J. Downing, A. Mohammadi & A. Sreberny-Mohammadi (eds), Questioning the Media, 2nd edn, Sage, Thousand Oaks, California, 1995, pp. 238–52.

56

J. Hamilton, ‘The inter-not’,

57

Jenkins, 2006, pp. 13–14.

58

<www.abc.net.au/news/indepth/featureitems/s1596452.html>

Hallin, p. 175.

4

ibid., p. 176.

5

S. Cunningham & G. Turner (eds), The Media and Communications in Australia, 2nd edn, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2006, p. 7.

6



2 8–4 1

3

P A G E S

Jay Rosen’s blog PressThink: . N. Postman, ‘The social effects of commercial television’, in R. Andersen & L. Strate (eds), Critical Studies in Media Commercialism, Oxford University Press, New York, 2000, pp. 48–9.

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Chapter 2: Private versus public media

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7



8

<www.voanews.com>

9

James Murdoch delivered the MacTaggart lecture to the Edinburgh International Television Festival on 28 August 2009.

10

M. Day, ‘Online payment pessimists face content reality check’, The Australian, ON MEDIA, 19 October 2009.

11

ibid.

12

When talking at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

13

M. Latham, ‘ABC push comes to shove’, Australian Financial Review, 26 November 2009.

14

M. Cordell, personal communication 2009.

15

M. Cordell, ‘The future of journalism needs journalists’, newmatilda.com, November 2009.

16

E. Beecher, private communication, 2009.

17

The board members are: Professor Michael Bromley, Head of School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland; Bronwen Clune, Director of Norg Media; Chris Graham, co-founder and editor of the National Indigenous Times newspaper; Jonathan Green, editor, Crikey.com; Steve Harris, strategic consultant; Elaine Henry OAM, Chief Executive Officer, the Smith Family; Chris Masters, freelance reporter and author and Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland; Gerard Noonan, freelance business journalist, chair of Media Super and active in the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors and the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees; Julianne Schultz AM, founding editor of Griffith Review and a professor at Griffith’s Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, a member of the board of the ABC and the Arts Minister’s Creative Australia Advisory Group; Dr Margaret Simons, freelance journalist, author and lecturer at Swinburne University; Melissa Sweet, freelance journalist and author, with adjunct positions at University of Sydney School of Public Health and University of Notre Dame’s medical school (Sydney campus); and Julian Thomas, Director of the Institute for Social Research and Professor of Media and Communications at Swinburne University.

18

See <www.spot.us>, <www.digidave.org>, <www.crikey.com.au/topic/foundationfor-public-interest-journalism>

1

S. Harrington, ‘Not all journalisms are in crisis: unorthodox news forms and public knowledge’, paper, Conference of Journalism in Crisis, University of Westminster, London, 19–20 May 2009,

2

See T. Moore, ‘Does the Left need a sense of humour?’ in Sydney Papers, Winter 2007, vol. 19, issue 3, p. 48. ‘The term carnivalesque was coined by Soviet literary academic Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to a topsy-turvy spirit of riotous festivity, famously unleashed in the carnivals of Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, in which the lower orders deployed misrule, play, humour and vulgarity to subvert authority.’

3

See L. Dennehy, ‘Wild goose chasers’, Herald Sun, 15 November 2007, p. 18; L. Dubecki, ‘Chaser Team walks a fine line on cutting edge of comedy’, Age, 9 June 2007, p. 5; S. Kirby & W. Stanley, ‘Police chief fails to see funny side’, Hobart Mercury, 7 September 2007, p. 4; T. Wright, ‘A funny thing happened on the way to APEC’, Age, 8 September 2007, p. 3; S. McLean, ‘Offensive Chaser declares war on dead celebs’, Daily Telegraph, 18 October 2007, p. 3.

4

Moore, 2007, pp. 54–6.

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4 2–5 5

Chapter 3: This is not news

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5

See J. Gray, J.P. Jones & E. Thompson, ‘The state of satire, the satire of state’, in J. Gray, J.P. Jones & E. Thompson (eds), Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, NYU Press, New York/London, 2009.

6

J. Schultz, Reviving the Fourth Estate, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p. 8.

7

C. Lumby, ‘Outside in: journalists and academics in the public sphere’, in D. Carter (ed.), The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2004; C. Lumby & E. Probyn, ‘Introduction: an ethics of engagement’, in C. Lumby & E. Probyn (eds), Remote Control: New Media, New Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2003, p. 1.

8

M. Deitz, ‘Great pretenders: ethics and the rise of pranksterism’, 2003 in Lumby & Probyn, pp. 230–42.

9

M. Heywood, The Ern Malley Affair, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1993, p. xvii.

10

See S. Caterson, Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds, from Plato to Norma Khouri, Arcade Publications, Melbourne, 2009 and I. McIntyre, How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti and Political Mischief Making from Across Australia, Breakdown Press, Melbourne, 2009.

11

M. Deitz, ‘Watch this space: culture jamming, activism and the capitalist culture wars’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2006.

12

Lumby & Probyn, 2003, pp. 2–3.

13

See M. Grattan & D. Jopson, ‘Black fury explodes over stolen children’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 April 2000; M. Grattan, ‘Howard just doesn’t get it’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 April 2000; D. Jopson, ‘Herron is not being honest’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 April 2000.

14

Personal interview with Russell Weakley, 23 January 2002.

15

, accessed 2 February 2002. Personal interview with Mickie Quick conducted 25 February 2002.

17

TAMPA DAY: Guerilla Art Installations Unveiled in Sydney by We are All Boat People 4:51pm Mon Aug 26 ’02. Modified 4:19 p.m. Saturday, 14 September 2002, accessed 31 October 2004.

18

ibid. For other groups responding to asylum seekers in Australia issue, see: . Volunteers in Support of Asylum Seekers, Australia . Indymedia, Melbourne . Rural Australians for Refugees . No One is Illegal, Melbourne . Boat-People . No Border . Virtual People Smuggler . Refugee Action Collective . XBorder . Les Sans Papiers . [mime] Migrating Memories . Virtual Palestine . All accessed 26–31 October 2005.

Schultz, 1998.

22

Langer, Tabloid Television, Routledge, London and New York, 1988.

23

I. Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, Routledge, London and New York, 1991; Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, Routledge, London and New York, 1996.

5 6–7 1

21

P A G E S

<www.dolearmy.org> accessed 7 May 2002. ibid.

T O

19 20

N O T E S

16

135

7 1–8 1 P A G E S T O N O T E S

136

24

V. Nightingale, Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real, Routledge, London and New York, 1996.

25

J. Hurst & S. White, Ethics and the Australian News Media, Macmilllan Education Australia, Melbourne, 1994, p. 3.

26

A. Coleman, ‘Creating a monster’, .

27

Personal interview, 2005.

28

Moore, 2007, p. 55.

29

Wark, 1999, p. 37.

30

ibid., p. 37.

31

D. Hebdige, Subcultures: The Meaning of Style, Routledge, London, 1979.

32

ibid., p. 39.

33

Institute of Public Affairs, vol. 59, no. 3, October 2007.

34

S. Powell, ‘Visitors take issue with security steps – APEC 2007’, Australian, 8 September 2007, p. 11; Wright 2007, p. 3; J. Baker, ‘Chaser Team gets last laugh on police’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 April 2007, p. 11.

35

See B. McNair, Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World, Routledge, London, 2006.

36

S. Harrington, ‘Not all journalisms are in crisis’, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/21080/1/ c21080.pdf

37

Moore, 2007, p. 51.

38

Moorhouse, p. 23.

39

<www.onlineopinion.com.au> posted 16 June 2009.

40

See McNair, 2006, and R. Johnson, Cash for Comment, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000.

41

E. Schlosser, ‘The kids are alright’, in Columbia Journalism Review, no. 41, 2003, pp. 276–30; McNair 2006, p. 64.

42

A. Day, ‘And now, the news? Mimesis and the real in The Daily Show’, in Gray, Jones & Thompson, 2009, p. 86.

43

ibid., p. 98.

44

G. Bahm, ‘Stephen Colbert’s parody of the postmodern’, in Gray, Jones & Thompson, 2009, p. 124.

45

ibid., pp. 132–3.

46

ibid., pp. 132–6.

47

See P. Dahlgren, ‘Democracy and the media’, in K. Brants, J. Hermes & L. van Zoonen (eds), The Media in Question: Popular Culture and Public Interests, Sage, London, 1998, p. 289.

Chapter 4: The media virus 1

According to a report in The Guardian.

2

Deuze, 2007.

3

Bruns, 2006, ibid.

4

The first of the Indymedia sites began in Seattle in 1999 when activists were inspired to collaborate and share resources, ability and energy. The site that was set up became a blueprint for the demonstrations in Philadelphia and LA for the major party conventions, and then for the World Economic Conference in Melbourne. The Indymedia group in

Melbourne is based around an online open publishing website allowing anyone to add text, sound, photos and video footage. The software for this was first developed in Sydney but premiered in the protests in Seattle in 1999 at the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). For an explanation of the development and use of the free software see .

I. Ang, G. Hawkins & L. Dabboussy, The SBS Story: the Challenges of Cultural Diversity, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008, pp. viii–xix.

8

ibid., pp. 1–4. See also R. Patterson, ‘SBS TV: forerunner of the future’, in Media Information Australia, no. 66, 1992.

9

ibid., p. 10.

10

ibid., p. 17.

11

ibid., pp. 176, 182–3.

12

Led by the success of the Koori Mail, which began in 1991. See H. Molnar & M. Meadows, Songlines to Satellites: Indigenous Communication in Australia, the South Pacific and Canada, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2001, pp. 23–5. For a history up until the 1990s, see Michael Rose’s collection For the Record: 160 Years of Aboriginal Print Journalism, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1996.

13

ibid., p. 26.

14

ibid., p. 29.

15

Quoted in J. Hartley & A. McKee, The Indigenous Public Sphere: The Reporting and Reception of Aboriginal Issues in the Australian Media, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp. 170–1.

16

In 1998 two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs sent an email to a hundred or so people they knew. It was a call to Congress to ‘Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the nation’. Thousands signed the online petition in the next few days and by December when Clinton had been censured, MoveOn had half a million members. It now has more than five million members.

17

A. Coombs, ‘How cyberactivism changed the world’, in Griffith Review (24), Participation Society, ABC Books, Brisbane, 2008, pp. 103–11.

18

The varied groups that made up the demonstration were there to protest about issues that have become familiar in the last decade or so. According to members of these groups, these issues included the rights of workers in the Third World; the growing disparities of wealth and income within and between societies; the extension of corporate values into all facets of human existence; the lack of compensation for those individuals and groups who were the losers under free trade agreements; and the effects of unrestricted industrialisation on the environment.

19

Lumby, Gotcha, 1999, p. 154. In relation to the defeat of Prime Minister Paul Keating’s Labor government see M. Seccombe, ‘Labor’s pain begins’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 1996, p. 28 and G. Kitney, ‘The man who stuck his head in the sand’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 1996, p. 28. In relation to the future of the Labor Party see P. Kelly, ‘Saving Labor’, Australian, 10 August 2002, p. 19 and D. McKnight, ‘Storming the picket fence’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 July 2002, Spectrum, p. 8. On the rise of smaller political parties see C. Forbes, ‘Street smarts, green power’, Australian, 8 June 2002, p. 2. For the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party see M. Kingston, Off The Rails: The Pauline Hanson Trip, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards Sydney, 1999.

20

M. Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia: the Dark Side of Economic Reform, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 164.

8 1–7

Jenkins, 2006, p. 219.

7

P A G E S

6

T O

A. Bruns, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, Peter Lang, New York, 2005.

N O T E S

5

137

21

D. Fletcher & R. Whip, ‘One Nation and the failure of political leadership’, in I. Ward, M. Leech & G. Stokes (eds), The Rise and Fall of One Nation, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2000, pp. 73–85.

22

For the proliferation of zines and e-zines see Atton, Alternative Media, chapter 3; S. Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, Verso, London, 1997. John Labowitz’s archive of web-based e-zines () is considered ‘probably the most comprehensive list available on the internet’ by the editors of the Etext Archives. For the democratic potential of the internet see Meikle, Future Active chapter 2. For information about communities and individuals in cyberculture see D. Bell, An Introduction to Cybercultures, Routledge, London 2001.

23

See Klein, chapter 16 of No Logo, ‘A tale of three logos’, which details campaigns against McDonald’s, Shell and Nike, which stand out for having reached beyond activist circles into public consciousness. Also see ‘Nike protest update’, Labour Alerts, 18 October 1997; ; N. Gordimer, ‘In Nigeria, the price for oil is blood’, New York Times, 25 May 1997.

24

See . The website states that many of the social justice activists involved with Indymedia are not against globalisation of community, justice and resources, but rather ‘protest the economic globalisation coordinated by the powerful few that results in their profiting from the work of the majority of the world’s population’. Atton, Alternative Media . J. Downing, ‘The independent media center movement and the anarchist socialist tradition’, in N. Couldry & J. Curran (eds), Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Lanham/Boulder/New York/Toronto/Oxford, 2003, p. 13.

27

Spring Pamphlet, the Greens. Couriers brought vital images and lists of injuries to the Sydney Alternative Media Centre (SAMC) bureau, so the s11 spokespeople were always up to date and able to speak to community, corporate and government media outlets – a combination of real and virtual technologies. They took footage to the Indymedia offices to upload on the website, delivered charged video-recorder batteries to those in need of them, and delivered important documents to the legal observers situated all around the protest. On 12 and 13 September, (i)Xpress was integral when communications between first aid and legal observers’ radio communications broke down.

28

P. Schlesinger, ‘From production to propaganda’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 11, no. 3, 1989, pp. 282–306; P. Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998; J.A. Kuypers, Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues, Praeger Publishing, Westport, Conn. 2002.

29

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci defines hegemony as the process by which dominant groups persuade subordinate groups to agree to an unequal social structure; it’s the process of making, maintaining and reproducing the governing sets of meanings of a given culture thereby naturalising and legitimating the power of the dominant group. Gramsci also argues that, because hegemony has to be renegotiated in order to be maintained, it is an unstable entity (Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1971). John Downing argues that although Gramsci never used the term, the notion of counter-hegemony has become fairly common among writers influenced by his thinking as a way of categorising attempts to challenge dominant ideological frameworks in order to replace them with an alternative framework. Downing argues that many alternative media belong in this frame, and that Gramsci’s perspective offers a fresh way of understanding alternative media – when the capitalist state tries to control and censor information, alternative media can be seen as trying to disrupt the silence, counter the lies, and provide the truth. (J. Downing, Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements, Sage, Thousand Oaks/London/New Delhi, 2001, p. 15).

30

See, for example, T. Colebatch, ‘Labor Left divided over s11 protests’, 28 August 2000, on <www.theage.com.au>, accessed 29 August 2001; P. Kelly, ‘Biting the hand that needs

N O T E S

T O

P A G E S

8 7–9 0

25 26

138

it’, Australian, 6 September 2000, p. 15; I. Salusinszky, ‘Comrades, you lost the war of economic ideas’, Age, 28 August 2000, p. 17; A. Bolt, ‘Weasel words in s11 violence talk’, Herald Sun, 31 August 2000, p. 18; D. Baker, ‘Some bayed for blood, and that’s what they got’, Age, 11 September 2000, p. 27; M. Dunn, M. Buttler & M. Edmonds, ‘Forum Fort’, Herald Sun, 11 September 2000, p. 1; M. Dunn & J. Silverii, ‘Activists aim to break barricades: keep out of the city’, Herald Sun, 11 September 2000, p. 4. 31

P. Carlyon, ‘Revolution Number s11’ in Bulletin, 8 August 2000, pp. 32–3.

32

For analysis and details of issues that ‘anti-globalisation’ protesters oppose, see M. Castells, The Rise of The Network Society, 2nd edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000. Also see K. Viner, ‘Hand to brand combat’ in The Good Weekend, Sydney Herald, 11 November 2000, pp. 69–72; Klein 2000, chapter 15.

33

According to a report in the Australian Financial Review on 16 September 2000 and quoted in Scalmer, Dissent Events 2002, p. 210.

34

G. Meikle, 2002, p. 94. The groups planning to attend the protest tried to emphasise their commitment to non-violence. In Green Left Weekly on 9 September 2000, Sean Healy reported on a meeting with Victorian Trades Hall Council secretary Leigh Hubbard, textiles union secretary Michelle O’Neill, Construction and Mining Union national secretary John Maitland, Friends of the Earth national liaison officer Cam Walker, Earthworker chairperson Moss Cass and Australian Greens senator Bob Brown. They joined three representatives from the s11 alliance – Steve Jolly, Nicole Oke and high school student Katie Neville – at a media conference at Trades Hall to back the s11 protesters. Said Bob Brown: ‘We’re protesting because of the growing gap between rich and poor, the disempowerment of the poor and empowerment of the wealthy, which has handed multinational corporations de facto world government. This is a prescription for social chaos.’

35

While British sociologist Jock Young coined the term ‘moral panic’ in 1971, it was Stanley Cohen who popularised the concept in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1972, p. 17.

36

Among theorists of moral panics, the characteristics most commonly agreed upon are a high level of concern, which is amplified in the media, and a general increased level of hostility towards the assumed perpetrators. See E. Goode & N. Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance, Oxford UK, Cambridge USA, Blackwell, 1994, p. 33.

37

Another key intervention in moral panic theory was made by Stuart Hall, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson & John Clarke, writing about the media-generated moral panic over race and crime in London in 1972–73. Hall et al.’s argument in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, London, Macmillan, 1978, p. 17 attempts to explain why and how ‘weak and confused statistical evidence came to be converted into such hard and massively publicised facts and figures’ as well as how such ‘facts’ came to be identified as evidence for a belief in the dramatic rise of ‘violence crime, particularly mugging’. Cohen, 1972.

39

D. Humphries, ‘Left fury over Carr’s “fascists”’, <smh.com.au>, 15 September 2000, accessed August 2001. Yet by the time the protests were over, an inquiry into police violence had been announced by the Ombudsman. P. Mickelburough & M. Dunn, ‘Police protest probe’, Herald Sun, 15 September 2000, p. 15.

40

Kelly, ‘Biting the hand that needs it’, G. Sheridan, ‘Raging against machine’, Australian, 5 September 2000, p. E10; Salusinszky, ‘Comrades, you lost the war of economic ideas’, A. Bolt, ‘Peace shot to pieces’, Herald Sun, 12 September 2000, p. 19; A. Wood, ‘The poor have never had it so good’, Australian, 5 September 2000, p. 9.

P A G E S

41

In his piece in The Bulletin on 8 August 2000, ‘Revolution Number S11’, Patrick Carlyon also reported that similar demonstrations were ‘characterised by shattered glass, tear gas and arrests’, adding that Seattle was marked by looting, the firing of rubber bullets and 600-odd arrests when an estimated 40 000 protesters disrupted a World Trade

139

N O T E S

38

T O 9 0–3

42

G. Strong, ‘Erratic demonstrators unite in circuit of success’, Age, 14 September 2000, p. 9.

43

A. Cockburn & J. St Clair, Five Days that Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond, Verso, New York, 2000.

44

Mickelburough & Dunn, ‘Police protest probe’. See G. Costa, ‘Right saves Bracks from s11 censure’, Age, 22 October 2000, p. 8; M. Shaw, ‘Bracks avoids ALP criticism over s11’, Age, 23 October 2000, p. 1. On the ABC news radio program The World Today (20 September 2000, 12:40 p.m.) it was reported that, while Steve Bracks was coming under fire from grassroots ALP supporters and trade unions, he was still ‘riding high in the opinion polls’. Compere Damien Carrick began the segment by explaining that Bracks had been consistent in his praise of police handling of the protest. Callers into the program spoke of their anger and shame at the Premier’s behaviour. Members of the Williamstown ALP branch, the Premier’s own branch, passed a motion condemning the Premier’s stand. The Elsternwick branch followed, with the branch treasurer Marlene Campbell saying that the branch had expressed concern that the Premier appeared to endorse the police action in removing their name tags and in the violent way in which they went into the crowd. The secretary of the ALP branch in Newport resigned from his position. The Victorian Trades Hall Council passed a unanimous motion condemning the Premier’s stand. State Secretary of the AMWU, Craig Johnson, said the Premier had lost touch with his traditional supporter base. The consensus among callers to ABC Radio also seemed to be that Bracks had lost touch with his traditional supporter base.

45

On 16 September, the number of protesters being treated for injuries was reported in The Age. ‘Behind the Battle of the Barricades’, by Murray Mottram & Sophie Douez, noted that police were wearing capsicum spray cans on their belts and that ‘media cameramen and photographers who identified themselves were not spared. Two photographers from The Age were thrown to the ground, one was struck with a baton.’ The second day of the protest ended with ‘claims of Victoria’s most brutal police assault on non-violent demonstrators since the 1970s’. At 7.30 p.m., scores of police in riot gear had led a baton charge on more than 1000 protesters blocking busloads of delegates from leaving. As well as investigating indiscriminate beatings by police, the police complaints ombudsman, Dr Barry Perry, announced he would investigate who had ordered the charge and why.

46

See J. Passant, ‘Why s11 presents a threat to Labor’, <www.theage.comau/news/ 20000919/A5821–2000Sep18.html>, accessed August 2000, 2001. See also P. Kelly, ‘Global reach’, Australian, 16 September 2000, p. F05.

47

Quoted in Coombs 2008, p. 106.

48

ibid., pp. 108–9.

49

Quoted in H. Huijser & J. Little, ‘Democracy under fire: the uses and abuses of democracy in the public sphere. GetUp! for what? Issues driven democracy in a transforming public sphere’, in Transformations Journal, issue no. 16, 2008. ibid.

N O T E S

T O

P A G E S

9 3–7

Organisation meeting. What Carlyon did not uncover in his research about the Seattle forum was that, while Clinton was expressing sympathy for the protesters, his aides were ordering Seattle Mayor Paul Shell to use all available force to clear the streets (CNN reported that Clinton had sent in a contingent from the US military). In their book Five Days that Shook the World (2000), the respected American journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, who were both present for the five days of the Seattle demonstration, write that: ‘Despite fear mongering by police and the Clinton administration, the evidence of a civilian riot was non-existent. With tens of thousands of demonstrators on the streets for a week, under near constant assault by cops, there were no firearms confiscated, no Molotov cocktails discovered and no police seriously injured – though many later claimed disabilities for stress, anxiety and exhaustion’ (pp. 46–51).

50 51

ibid.;

140

52

Huijser & Little, 2008, p. 7.

53

J. Pickerill, ‘Radical politics on the net’, Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, pp. 266–82.

54

Meikle 2002; D. Rodan & M. Balnaves, ‘Democracy to come: active forums as indicatator suites for e-participation and e-governance’, in A. Macintish & E. Tambouris (eds), ePart 2009, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2009.

55

ibid.

56

A. Bruns, ‘Citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian Federal Election’, in eJournal: A Refereed Media Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 75–89.

57

J. Wilson, ‘The future of journalism? YouDecide2007 and journalism as social networking’, Australian Journalism Review, vol. 30, 2008, no. 2, pp. 23–33.

58

T. Flew & J. Wilson, ‘Citizen journalism and political participation: the Youdecide project and the 2007 Australian Federal Election’, in Creating Value: Between Commons and Commerce – Conference of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, 25–27 June 2008, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, Brisbane, Australia.

59

ibid.

60

A. Bruns, 2008.

61

ibid.

62

ibid.

Chapter 5: We’re all journalists now 1

The announcement regarding ‘YouTube Direct’ was made in late 2009.

2

The website of Matt Drudge, a US online reporter who started out doing star gossip and movie ratings, was the first to reveal Monica Lewinsky’s affair with President Clinton. Drudge had the attention of the American news media in January 1998 when he learned that Newsweek, owned by the Washington Post group, had held back from publishing an account of President Clinton’s sexual activities with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Drudge got confirmation of the story from a New York literary agent, wrote a report, and published it on his site.

3

I. Hargreaves, Journalism: Truth or Dare?, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.

4

T. Cook,

5

M. Massing, ‘The news about the internet’, in New York Review of Books, 13 August 2009.

6

24 November 2004, personal interview. 25 January 2003, personal interview.

8

M. Kingston, ‘The future of fair dinkum journalism’, in J. Mills (ed.), From Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power, Miegunyah Press and Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures, Carlton, Vic., 2005, pp. 8, 82.

9

Full story at , accessed 8 September 2005.

accessed 29 April 2005.

12

Matt Price’s story ran a week later: ‘Bushwhacked’, Australian, 20 October 2003, Media section, p. B01. Price’s article detailed how most agreements allowing Australian access to Bush during the visit were trashed by the White House press corps and presidential minders.

13

, accessed 29 April 2005.

9 7–1 0 8

11

P A G E S

T. Blair, personal communication.

T O

10

N O T E S

7

141

14

The Norwegian container ship Tampa responded to distress calls from Palapa, a wooden ship carrying 433 asylum seekers, but was refused permission to enter Australian waters. See R. Balint, Troubled Waters, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005.

15

Quoted in Lumby & Probyn, 2003.

16

K. Lane, ‘Crikey! Lone Wolf web publisher outrages Australia with “immersion journalism” and a giant foam suit, online renegade stands tall’, posted 14 August 2001, accessed 10 October 2003.

17

Personal interview, 13 Jan 2004.

18

E. Beecher, personal communication and press release.

19

Personal communication.

20

P. Colgan, speech, Social Media Summit, Sydney, 2009.

21

T. Burrowes, blog Mumbrella.

22

M. van Niekerk, http://www.editorsweblog.org/analysis/2008/03/future_of_journalism_ series_fairfax_mike.php

23

M. Owen-Brown, personal communication.

N O T E S

T O

P A G E S

1 0 8–2 8

Chapter 6: Conclusion – unfinished business

142

1

J. Schultz, ‘Openness, collaboration and participation’, in Griffith Review 24: Participation Society, Winter 2009, pp. 7–10.

2

T. Moore, ‘The ABC fades to black: has John Howard won?’ .

3

ibid.

4

T. Moore, ‘A new vision for ABC Television’, Sydney Papers, Autumn 2008, p. 79.

5

ibid., p. 86.

6

ibid., pp. 79–85.

7

Quoted in M. Massing, ‘The news about the internet’, New York Books, vol. 56, no. 13, 13 August 2009.

8

M. Latham, The Latham Diaries, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2005, p. 1.

9

A. Crabb, paper at Media140, Eugene Goossens Hall, ABC, Sydney, 5 November 2009.

10

Hartley, 1996, pp. 35–6.

11

S. Varga, ‘Dark times’, in J. Schultz, Griffith Review 24: Participation Society, Winter 2008, p. 175.

12

S. Feneley, personal communication, 2009.

13

P. Jones, personal communication, 2009.

14

G. Parker, personal communication, 2009.

15

G. Baym, ‘The Daily Show and the reinvention of political journalism’, paper presented at Faith, Fun and Futuramas, 3rd Annual Pre-APSA Conference on Political Communication, Chicago Illinois, 2004.

16

ibid.

17

J. Keane, ‘Monitory democracy and media-saturated societies’, in Schultz, 2008, p. 81.

18

ibid., p. 87.

19

ibid., pp. 99–102.

Index

ABC see Australian Broadcasting Commission activism 65–6, 67, 80–1, 84, 97, 123 s11 ‘anti-globalisation’ protest 30, 85–6, 87–94 see also GetUp! organisation; pranks; underground magazines Age, The 18, 114 alternative media 31–3, 34 Amalgamated Press 20 asylum seekers 65–7, 84, 123 audience 71, 82 Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) 44–7, 84–5, 118–19 Australian Communications and Media Authority 19 Australian Foundation for Public Interest Journalism 49–52 bias 106–7 blogs balance of viewpoint 108 Blair’s blog 104–9 and citizen journalism 94–7 ethical issues 108–9 issues 120 and natural disasters 103 proliferation 101–3 Voice of America (VOA) blog 42 books see print media broadcasting Community Broadcasting 83 multicultural broadcasting 82–3 public broadcast 43 Bulletin, The 15–18 capitalism 38 censorship 31 Centrelink 68–70, 73–4 ‘chaos’ phenomenon 75–6 Chaser’s War on Everything, The [program] 54–6, 72–3, 74–5, 76, 77 citizen journalism 81–2, 84–5, 90, 94–7, 98–100, 101 Climate Clever-er [commercial] 96 Colbert Report, The [program] 56, 79, 120

comedy (black) 77 community media 84–5 Crikey.com [online news site] 47, 80, 110–12, 123 culture cultural change 118–19 history of the prank 58 importance of new social movements 28–30 political culture and the Vietnam War 86 Current Affair, A [program] 61, 68–70 Daily Show, The [program] 78–9, 120 democracy 29, 127–8 Desperately Seeking the Audience 71 digital media 45–7, 53 DIY media 38 Dole Army 68–70, 73–4 economic reform 25 Ern Malley hoax 58 ethics blogs and ethical issues 108–9 codes of ethics 29, 57, 59–60, 108 media ethics 71–2 expose´ 103 Facebook 117, 122 Fairfax Media 18, 47, 114 Fairfax Online 114 ‘fake’ news 54–8 Foundation for Public Interest Journalism see Australian Foundation for Public Interest Journalism freedom of speech 64–5 Fugger Letters 38–9 GetUp! organisation 25, 80, 84–5, 94–7 globalisation 30, 85–6, 87–94 Google 36–7 graffiti 67 Hanson’s One Nation Party see One Nation Party Hungry Beast [program] 72 Independent Media Centres (IMCs) 88 Indigenous media 21, 83

143

Indymedia 87–90 internet 19, 26, 32–3, 36–7 lifestyle, entertainment, and celebrity news online pages 102 links to news 40–1 mullet strategy 41–2 see also blogs; ‘networked’ journalism; online media; technology interviewing 16 (i)Xpress 89 Jeffed.com [website] 110 journalism alternative, citizen and accidental journalism 81–2, 84–5, 90, 94–7, 98–100, 101 bias 106–7 collaborative spaces 94–7 commitment to the truth 123 contributions 46–9 criticisms 19 domain 27–33, 120–1 emergent forms 54–8 Fifth Estate 122–3 Fourth Estate model 27, 29 the frontline 112–16 history of the future of 15–35 journalism consumers 115–16 ‘networked’ journalism 80–1 New Journalism 16 newsletters – first business model for news 38–9 and objectivity 16–17 and one-upmanship 78–9 participatory journalism and YouDecide2007.org 97–100 partisan nature 16, 22–3, 27 popular press phenomenon 21 potential crisis in 39 power of scrutiny 127–8 provincial press 22 qualifications 123 quality journalism 114–15, 119–20, 125 radical journalism 22–3 reportorial integrity 20 serious journalism 21 test sites 49–53 Journalism Online 53

I N D E X

Latham Diaries, The 121 Living Room Wars 71

144

magazines see print media mainstream media 81–2 coverage 21, 91–2 crisis of trust 25, 86–7

disenchantment with news reporting in 81 media alternative media proliferation 31–3, 34 changes 32 collaborative spaces 94–7 commercial media 44–9 community media 84–5 crisis of trust 25, 86–7 digital media 45–7, 53 DIY media 38 and ethics 29, 57, 59–60, 71–2, 108 functions of media companies 71 Independent Media Centres 88 Indigenous media 21, 83 mainstream media 21, 25, 81–2, 86–7, 91–2 media activism 97 media consumers 71, 115–16 media genres 54–8 media ownership 123–5 ‘mediatised politics’ 30 multicultural media 82–3 non-traditional media 26 online media 24, 26, 62–5, 102, 112–16 people, politics and the mediascape 24–7 popular press phenomenon 21 pranks and media savvy 59 print media 20, 21, 23–4 private versus public media 36–53 propaganda model 28 stakeholders 42–4 subversive media 91 technology and new media 33–4 media ecosystem (new) 81–2, 83–4, 101, 127–8 GetUp! organisation 25, 80, 84–5, 94–7 s11 ‘anti-globalisation’ protest 30, 85–6, 87–94 YouDecide2007.org project 85, 97–100 Media Watch [program] 61–2 mediascape 24–7 Middle Australia Project 25 military conflict 67, 86 modernity 26 moral panics 92–3 see also violence mullet strategy 41–2 multicultural media 82–3 National Indigenous Radio Service 83 natural disasters 103 ‘networked’ journalism 80–1 New Journalism 16

New Media Index 40 new social movements (NSMs) 28–30 newmatilda.com [website] 46–7 News Corporation 36–7 News Limited 47 newsletters 38–9 newspapers see print media non-traditional media 26 Not on the Wires [digital reporting cooperative] 53 NSMs see new social movements objectivity 16–17 One Nation Party 87 one-upmanship 78–9 online media 24, 26, 62–5, 102 Crikey.com [online news site] 47, 80, 101, 110–12, 123 the frontline 112–16 Oz [magazine] 77

Race Around the World [program] 60, 72 radical journalism 22–3 resource documents 102 s11 ‘anti-globalisation’ protest 30, 85–6, 87–94 Safran, John 60–1 satire 54–8, 60–1, 126 satirical games 62–5 scrutiny (power of) 127–8 social media 38, 56, 101, 113–14, 117, 122–3 see also blogs social movements 28–30 Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) 82–3 Spot.Us [website] 49–50, 52 Stolen Generations 63 Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real 71 subversive media 91 Sydney Morning Herald, The 18, 114 syndication 116 technology and capitalism 38 digital media 45–7, 53 internet 19, 26, 32–3, 36–7 and new media 33–4 online media 24, 26, 62–5, 102 technological development 24 Today Tonight [program] 68–70 Twitter 113–14 as the Fifth Estate 122–3 underground magazines 31, 77 Unleashed [online opinion pages] 48–9 Vietnam War 86 violence 93–4 see also moral panics Webdiary 104–9 Webwank [website] 62–5 Weekend Australian 18 Woomera Detention Centre 66 YouDecide2007.org project 85, 97–100 YouReport 34 YouTube 38, 56, 101

I N D E X

partisanship 16, 22–3, 27, 96 penny papers 16 petitions 84 Pew Research Centre 19, 40 politics 81–2, 86, 97–100 alternative media connection 34 GetUp! organisation 25, 80, 84–5 importance of new social movements 28–30 ‘mediatised politics’ 30 modernity to postmodernity shift 26 move from mainstream politics 86 people, politics and the mediascape 24–7 reporting of 30 YouDecide2007.org project 85, 97–100 see also ‘fake’ news; pranks; satire popular press phenomenon 21 portable devices 37 postmodernity 26 pranks 54–67, 68–70 history 58 Make a Wish skit 76, 77 press, the 29 see also journalism print media 20, 21, 23–4 Printing Press as an Agent of Change, The [book] 23–4 privacy 71 private media 36–53, 120–1 propaganda 28 provincial press 22

public media 36–52, 53 the ABC 44–7, 84–5, 118–19 public broadcast 44–9 public sphere 27–30, 120–1

145

Australian Encounters series Cambridge University Press Australia, in partnership with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, presents Australian Encounters. Combining original scholarly research and elegant, accessible prose, this series engages with important Australian issues that span current society, politics, culture, economics and historical debates. It brings new thinking and fresh perspectives to these issues that are so vital to Australian society.

Series Editor Dr Tony Moore is Lecturer in Media and Communications and Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University.

Forthcoming titles in the Australian Encounters series Power Crisis: The self-destruction of a state Labor party Rodney Cavalier A former minister’s explosive account of the self-destruction of the New South Wales Labor government, which has had four premiers in five years. Based on exclusive interviews with ex-premiers Iemma and Rees, it asks, ‘What went wrong?’.

Curtin’s Empire James Curran Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sydney argues for a revision of the popular myth of wartime Prime Minister John Curtin as an opponent of the British Empire.

The Importance of Being Innocent Joanne Faulkner UNSW philosopher Joanne Faulkner critiques the construction of children as innocent and asks what it means for children who fail to meet these idealistic criteria.