bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘The Story So Far …’: The Researcher as a Player in Game Analysis
Authors: Cameron David , Carroll John
Published: March 2018

This article outlines some preliminary research into the learning discourses of computer and video games, as expressed through the printed materials that accompany games, and the instructional elements built into game narratives. This leads to discussion of an interesting methodological dilemma — how does the interpretative ethnographic researcher analyse this content when he or she becomes part of the playing process? How do you analyse the learning mechanisms of games when you are being reflexively engaged in the training materials and systems mapped into the text by the games' designers? This article examines this ‘crisis of representation’ in interpretive ethnographic research approaches to games research.
Half the Story? Olympic Women on ABC News Online
Authors: Jones Dianne
Published: March 2018

A content analysis of the ABC News Online website during the 2000 Olympic Games reveals a select few female role models were available to young audiences. One female athlete was ‘news-privileged’. Cathy Freeman's exposure came at the expense of her Australian team mates, especially those women who won medals in team sports. While the results indicate an improvement in both the extent of women's sports coverage and the range of sports covered, stereotypical descriptions often characterised adult females as emotionally vulnerable, dependent adolescents. Male athletes were never infantilised and were far less likely to be described in emotive terms.
‘Not Unreasonably Denied’: Australian Content after Ausfta
Authors: Given Jock
Published: March 2018

The text of the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA), released in early March 2004, makes more concessions than many in Australia's audiovisual and cultural industries might have hoped, but less than they feared. Its precise impact will depend on how ‘new media’ replaces, subsumes or supplements ‘old media’, and how quickly. AUSFTA institutionalises much lower aspirations about the level of Australian content in emerging media systems than Australians have come to expect in broadcast television. Some will interpret this simply as an articulation of the policy impotence which will inevitably flow from technological change. Others will recognise it as a partial, but historic, concession of Australian policy capacity and a broad acceptance of the long-standing US agenda for the information economy — long and tough protections for intellectual property rights, but increasingly liberal global markets for trading them. This article explains the provisions of AUSFTA and examines their effect on Australian audiovisual and cultural activities.
Flexible Vision: Emerging Audiovisual Technologies and Services, and Options to Support Australian Content
Authors: Griff Catherine , MacRae Drew
Published: March 2018

The Australian audiovisual industry is facing two significant policy challenges — rapid technological change and trade liberalisation — both of which have the potential to limit the scope of government regulatory action to support local content. The Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) brought into focus both of these challenges, with Australia's ability to regulate future audiovisual delivery services becoming a central issue of the services negotiations. This article draws upon recent research by the Australian Film Commission on regulatory options to ensure the ongoing availability of Australian content via new media. Internationally, many new media technologies are now regulated to support local content, and many governments are reviewing content regulation options on digital and interactive delivery systems. This article discusses the merits of the key policy levers available to government in order to support the continued presence of Australian content in new services and delivery technologies.
The Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement: Trade Trumps Indigenous Interests
Authors: Malbon Justin
Published: March 2018

This article argues that the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) selectively recognises and affirms international conventions and agreements that promote the narrow economic self-interests of powerful groups. It does this whilst disregarding those international instruments — including the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity — that seek to recognise and promote the cultural and intellectual property rights of Indigenous people. Although AUSFTA does make some concessions for Indigenous interests by providing negative exemptions from the chapters dealing with trade in services, government procurement and investment, these concessions are relatively weak in the face of the Agreement's pursuit of free trade. Using the model of Chapter 19, which imposes positive obligations on the United States and Australia to promote environmental interests, it is proposed that future Australian FTAs should enunciate positive obligations for Australia's Indigenous people.
The Utility of a Global Forum: Unesco's Significance for Communication, Culture and ICTs
Authors: O'Regan Tom
Published: March 2018

This paper contrasts the role of UNESCO as a global forum, one with a particular remit for dialogue and tolerance, with the more limited attention given to it by local actors. UNESCO forums, declarations and principles are argued to be significant for their capacity to be diffused as common sense in communications and cultural policy-making. This capacity to create shared norms has made UNESCO both important and contentious, with its New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) deliberations in the late 1970s and early 1980s leading the United States and the United Kingdom to withdraw from the organisation. The article considers how UNESCO has shaped its policy interventions in the wake of NWICO, and more latterly the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) in both the cultural and creative industries and in information and communication technology (ICT).
A Convention on Cultural Diversity: From WTO to UNESCO
Authors: Smiers Joost
Published: March 2018

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grants everybody the right ‘to freedom of opinion and expression … to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’. Article 27 asserts that everybody has the right to participate freely in the cultural life of their community and enjoy the arts. In many countries, there is a growing perception that free trade agreements have debilitated these and other rights, and that consequently cultural identity is unsettled, and cultural diversity threatened. Concern about multinational conglomerates’ influence over cultural production and circulation, and a desire to ensure that countries can continue to make cultural policies and regulate their cultural markets without contravening commitments made as part of multilateral trade agreements, have contributed to efforts to develop a Convention on Cultural Diversity. UNESCO has now taken on this task. This article discusses the grounds for this Convention, and outlines some of the principles which will underpin it, as well as some of the problems it raises.
From Multimedia to Digital Content and Applications: Remaking Policy for the Digital Content Industries
Authors: O'Regan Tom , Ryan Mark David
Published: March 2018

This article analyses the two policy moments of digital content industries policy development of the Keating (1992–96) and Howard (2001–04) governments. In bringing these two moments into dialogue, our aim is to illuminate and evaluate the broader policy frameworks, and the political and policy contexts, which gave rise to and subsequently shaped these different digital content strategies. The Keating government connected culture and services to harness multimedia as a vehicle for cultural expression and as a new economically viable growth industry suited to a convergent information age. The Howard government's innovation agenda has reconstructed industry development priorities for the digital content industries, influencing their conception as inputs and enablers for both the ICT and broader industries in an information economy framework. The article concludes with an evaluation of the assumptions and priorities, shortcomings and advantages of these two quite different approaches to developing digital content industries.
From the Margins to the Mainstream: Creating Value in Queensland's Music Industry
Authors: Hearn Greg , Ninan Abraham , Rogers Ian , Cunningham Stuart , Luckman Susan
Published: March 2018

As elsewhere, the music industry in Queensland comprises two tiers. The first tier is composed of products and services engaged by major music labels and commercially successful artists who at times attract significant sales. The second tier — or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘grassroots’ (Gibson, 2002) — largely consists of independent musicians, production personnel and producers attracting both niche and at times mainstream audiences. Characterised by informally networked micro-economies, independent artists, niche markets and the exploitation of new technologies, the second tier is also of interest to cultural researchers, who have tended to concentrate on subcultural music communities and music produced outside of the mass market first tier. A mapping survey which examined the Queensland music industry in terms of size, location, income and activity is complemented by interviews with musicians, label owners, production personnel and others involved in the music ‘scene’. We explore how second-tier practices (such as a reliance on social networking to achieve recordings and performance opportunities, as well as DIY culture and innovative business approaches) offer alternative methods for ‘doing music’ and generating value in the creative industries.
Genre Diversity and the State's Hegemony over Free-to-Air Television in New Zealand
Authors: Wood Brennon
Published: March 2018

The commercialisation of New Zealand television in the 1990s has provoked debate between those who hold that markets increase diversity and those who believe that competition produces homogeneity. Focusing on the formal structure of program types, this article uses a range of statistics to assess historical shifts in the entropic breadth of genres, the stability of this mix, shifts in modality and variations by channel. In keeping with the convergence hypothesis, the findings indicate a general trend towards stabilisation, domination by entertainment and increased hybridity. However, entropy has remained consistently high. Moreover, entertainment declined and information rose throughout the 1990s. These unexpected results are an outcome of market partitioning established by state television in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than either the advent of neo-liberal variety or a decline of public service diversity, this analysis emphasises the state's persistent hegemony over the free-to-air market.
‘Bring it on’: The Apocalypse of George W. Bush
Authors: O'Donnell Marcus
Published: March 2018

This article examines a number of cinematic, literary and journalistic texts in the context of what filmmaker Tom Tykwer calls the ‘aesthetic memory’ of September 11. In particular, it explores the way these narratives relate to deeply embedded Western cultural myths of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic language of American Christian fundamentalism and the heroic narratives of Hollywood film are explored as twin influences on a powerful civil religion dubbed ‘The Captain America complex’ by Jewett and Lawrence (2003a).
Propaganda — Who, Us? The Australian Government ‘Terror Kit’
Authors: Tilley Elspeth
Published: March 2018

This study tests allegations that the Australian government's 2003 ‘terror kit’ was propaganda. Because propaganda's definition and function are contested, content analysis was trialled as a method of clarifying propaganda detection. A propaganda index was developed using both manual and computerised coding, and while each method had limits, together they produced reliable and valid results. Measured against the index, Howard's letter scored a 62 per cent propaganda rating.
Resisting Peripheral Exports: Al Jazeera's War Images on us Television
Authors: Azran Tal
Published: March 2018

This paper describes work that is underway to develop a framework for the analysis of media flows from periphery to centre — the phenomenon known in globalisation studies as ‘contra-flow’. The framework proposed in this paper challenges the fundamentals of current studies of peripheral exports, which arguably fail to consider Western resistance involved in the representation of peripheral networks due to the presumption that ‘contra-flow’ single-handedly supports the cultural heterogenisation paradigm. The paper suggests that this presumption is outdated, particularly in light of growing tensions in the wake of 9/11, and that ‘contraflows’ which threaten the West can promote cross-cultural polarisation beside heterogenisation. The paper argues that researchers would be in a better position to identify the general tendency of media globalisation if they began to think of periphery–centre encounters more critically through the proposed framework. To illustrate this, the paper examines the case study of US media's re-presentation of Al Jazeera's so-called ‘counter-flowing’ war reports through the proposed framework.
Copyright, Media and Innovation: Then and Now
Authors: Putnis Peter , Clark Eugene
Published: March 2018

This paper introduces the articles in this issue of MIA on the theme of ‘Copyright, Media, and Innovation’. The paper also provides a context for these articles via a discussion of historical and contemporary issues in copyright law, particularly in relation to new technologies.
Fan-Based Production for Computer Games: User-Led Innovation, the ‘Drift of Value’ and Intellectual Property Rights
Authors: Humphreys Sal , Fitzgerald Brian , Banks John , Suzor Nic
Published: March 2018

Fan-based or third party content creation has assumed an integral place in the multi-million dollar computer games industry. The emerging production ecology that involves new kinds of distributed organisations and ad hoc networks epitomises the ‘drift of value’ from producer to consumer and allows us to understand how user-led innovation influences the creative industries. But the ability to control intellectual property rights in content production is critical to the power structures and social dynamic that are being created in this space. Trainz, a train simulation game released by Brisbane developer Auran, which relies heavily on fan-created content for its success, is used as a case study. The licence agreements between Auran and the fan creators are analysed in order to understand how the balance between the commercial and non-commercial is achieved and how the tension between open networks of collaboration and closed structures of commercial competitive environments are negotiated.
Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks
Authors: Crawford Kate
Published: March 2018

The media debate surrounding music downloading has reached a point of unproductive polarisation. Much of the commentary from peer-to-peer companies on one hand, and from the music industry on the other, has been highly customised rhetoric. This rhetoric commonly uses a discourse of ‘us versus them’ as the limited frame of reference: industry versus pirates, or legitimate practices versus illegitimate practices. Such claims deny the complexity of both the music-sharing phenomenon and the copyright developments related to it, effectively obscuring any legal, philosophical and technical intricacies and masking the networked interrelationships between the production and consumption of creative works. This paper seeks to move beyond these oppositional terms to consider the emerging ‘technological ecologies’ of peer-to-peer networks, the role of encryption, copyright recontextualisation and the ‘mash-up’, and the emergence of what media theorist Bernard Schütze calls ‘remix culture’.
A ‘New Wave’ in British Television Drama
Authors: Cooke Lez
Published: March 2018

In recent years, American television drama series have been celebrated as ‘quality television’ at the expense of their British counterparts, yet in the 1970s and 1980s British television was frequently proclaimed to be ‘the best television in the world’. This article will consider this critical turnaround and argue that, contrary to critical opinion, the last few years have seen the emergence of a ‘new wave’ in British television drama, comparable in its thematic and stylistic importance to the new wave that emerged in British cinema and television in the early 1960s. While the 1960s new wave was distinctive for its championing of a new working-class realism, the recent ‘new wave’ is more heterogeneous, encompassing drama series such as This Life, Cold Feet, The Cops, Queer as Folk, Clocking Off and Shameless. While the subject-matter of these dramas is varied, collectively they share an ambition to ‘reinvent’ British television drama for a new audience and a new cultural moment.
The ‘Sailor’ and the ‘Peasant’: The Italian Police Series between Foreign and Domestic
Authors: Buonanno Milly
Published: March 2018

Applying the categorisation made by Walter Benjamin as regards popular storytelling — stories told by sailors, and stories told by peasants, the former being internationally oriented and the latter locally based — this paper reconsiders the history of Italian police drama as in transition from ‘foreign’ or international to ‘domestic’ or national/local storytelling. This transition follows three phases: the adaptation of foreign classics in the first two decades of the Italian television; the emergence of the domestic voice in the 1970s and 1980s, when locally based police series were produced, although in the context of a television supply widely internationalised by massive slates of foreign imports; and the establishment and popularity of the now hegemonic formula, all'italiana, from the 1990s onwards. The contemporary police drama is now a fully localised genre, yet this doesn't disguise the footprints of a transnationalisation which is still underway, whereby the sailor's and the peasant's voices converge and merge.
‘Local (People) Mean the World to US’: Australia's Regional Newspapers and the ‘Closer to Readers’ Assumption
Authors: Ewart Jacqui , Massey Brian L.
Published: March 2018

The intersections between journalism and democracy are explored in this paper through an analysis of the ‘voices’ through which the news is ‘told’ by specific segments of the Australian print media. We argue that evidence of the extent to which a newspaper fulfils its roles to democracy and society is partially found in the range of sources quoted in the news stories it publishes, and in the prominence and dominance it gives to various types of sources in those stories. Our goal was to quantify the validity of the widely held assumption that, in Australia, regional newspapers are closer than metropolitan newspapers to their readers. This suggestion guided our content analysis of the types of news story sources quoted or paraphrased in the general news published in four regional newspapers and one metropolitan newspaper in one Australian state. The assumption of closeness to readers for Australian regional newspapers did not hold up well in this test.
Wilderness and the Loaded Language of News
Authors: Lester Libby
Published: March 2018

This paper addresses the politicisation of the idea of wilderness in the Australian news media, and questions how journalistic labelling in news copy intensified this process. It is based on research into the coverage of the Franklin Dam blockade in the summer of 1982–83, the first wilderness campaign to attain global stature. Specifically, it analyses the coverage of the 10-week protest in the Melbourne Age and the Hobart Mercury, and draws on the work of Allan Bell, Teun van Dijk and Roger Fowler to discuss how journalists and their readers formed an ‘alliance of shared meaning’.
Words, Ontologies and Aboriginal Databases
Authors: Christie Michael
Published: March 2018

Aboriginal people are increasingly making use of digitising technologies for their cultural and educational work. However, databases are not innocent objects. They bear within them Western assumptions about the nature of knowledge, and how it is produced, which may inhibit or undermine the intergenerational transmission of Aboriginal knowledge traditions. Words (or text strings), for example, have a particular constitutive function in Aboriginal epistemology, which implies a rethinking of traditional structures and uses of metadata. Knowledge and truth are understood more in terms of performance than content, which implies something about how digital resources are to be configured and represented. This paper looks at collaborative work done developing a database to support the ongoing work done by Yolngu (northeast Arnhem Land Aboriginal) people in keeping their knowledge traditions strong.
Digitising Knowledge: Anthropology and New Practices of Digitextuality
Authors: Salazar Juan Francisco
Published: March 2018

This article examines the subject of digitisation of cultural knowledge in light of the new intertextual possibilities within visual anthropology made possible by digital media. The article argues that new media present several challenges and opportunities for decolonising anthropological research through processes of documentation, visualisation and collaboration. These aspects will be examined by concentrating on a collaborative documentary video produced with the participation of indigenous Mapuche media-makers in Chile. The final product — a 48-minute documentary — was in part an attempt at testing how visual sampling and remixing of authored footage could be conceived as a novel form of collaborative storytelling in practice-based research.
Think Global, Act Global: Corporate Content Streaming and Australian Media Policy
Authors: Murray Simone
Published: March 2018

Australia's media policy agenda has recently been dominated by debate over two key issues: media ownership reform, and the local content provisions of the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement. Challenging the tendency to analyse these issues separately, the article considers them as interlinked indicators of fundamental shifts occurring in the digital media environment. Converged media corporations increasingly seek to achieve economies of scale through ‘content streaming’: multi-purposing proprietary content across numerous digitally enabled platforms. This has resulted in rivalries for control of delivery technologies (as witnessed in media ownership debates) as well as over market access for corporate content (in the case of local content debates). The article contextualises Australia's contemporary media policy flashpoints within international developments and longer-term industry strategising. It further questions the power of media policy as it is currently conceived to deal adequately with the challenges raised by a converging digital media marketplace.
Localism and Networking: A Radio News Case Study
Authors: Josephi Beate , Phillips Gail , Businoska Angela
Published: March 2018

The Broadcasting Services Act 1992 ushered in a new hands-off approach by government which, in the case of radio, permitted commercial broadcasters to double their investments in individual markets through the two-station policy while removing any onerous commitments to local content. Since then, there has been concern about the flow-on effect this may have had, with Peter Collingwood's 1997 study of commercial radio confirming that levels of local content were reducing as levels of networked content were increasing. He bemoaned the fact that a by-product of the self-regulatory regime was a reduction in the amount of publicly available information against which performance could be gauged. Since 1992, only one detailed study of local radio news has been done, Graeme Turner's 1996 examination of radio and television news in the Brisbane market. Now a parallel study has been conducted in Perth, giving an insight into localism and networking six years later.
DVD Time: Temporality, Audience Engagement and the New TV Culture of Digital Video
Authors: Cover Rob
Published: March 2018

DVD use and the reported purchase of DVD players have grown markedly in recent years, and in 2002 Lyall Johnson claimed this was growing at the rate of 80 per cent annually. As a digital narrative format, it provides a means of viewing televisual products alternative to broadcast traditions and, significantly, beyond the ‘timeshifted’ video cassette in its analogue and serial format. From a perspective which considers the aesthetics of television production and spectatorship through new digital forms of dissemination, DVD has arguably motivated a style of viewing that sponsors the longer narrative arc, provides greater control to the viewer in terms of how the program is watched, its frequency and the sequence in which a series is viewed, and alters the temporality of television viewing in terms of shifting control of the viewing experience away from a centre—periphery broadcast network to the consumer, audience member or user.
Research Outputs in the Creative and Performing Arts: ‘Australianising’ an International Debate
Authors: Green Lelia
Published: March 2018

This paper positions current Australian discussions about practice-led research within international, national, historical and policy contexts and relates them to the developing pedagogical debate around performing and creative arts doctorates. Arguing that the creative industries offer benefits across the economy, it suggests that recognition for the research methodology specific to practice-led disciplines and the creative industries is overdue. The discussions in this paper, and in this theme issue of MIA, are all the more critical as a result of their articulation with the imminent introduction of the Research Quality Framework (RQF), which will allow nuanced, rigorous and internationally benchmarked evaluation of the quality and impact of research outputs. The RQF and the proposed research assessment panel for ‘creative arts, design and built environment’ herald the way for wider acceptance of practice-led outputs in the Australian research environment.
Practice-Led Research and Scientific Knowledge
Authors: Grech John
Published: March 2018

Practice-led research can sometimes develop discourses that are not always consistent with the grammatical logics of academic language. However, practice-led research can reproduce and/or explain what happens when an individual encounters things and events in the world. This dynamic may thus open up innovative ways of codifying and authenticating knowledge gained from the performance of everyday life that might otherwise remain inexplicable (or seem irrelevant or disconnected within the existing structures and grammars of scientific discourse). Such practice-led research can lead to new forms of expression in order to understand the individual's subjective experience. Thus, while practice-led research may challenge (and sometimes upturn) established methods of logic and rational argument, it also enables a researcher to develop explanations of events and encounters in the world that may otherwise not be accessible to them. Creative work can also make the impact of scientific research available to those who may not have a thorough working knowledge of scientific and academic discourses in the relevant discipline. The paper discusses these issues while focusing on a creative project/website developed through practice-led research.
Documentation in Performance-Led Research
Authors: Stapleton Paul
Published: March 2018

This article begins by setting the question of why practitioner-researchers engage in the practice of documentation within the context of academic research conventions. The assumption that performance requires documentation for dissemination is brought into question through reference to Caroline Rye's provocative suggestion that documentation should be banned from the ‘practice as research in performance’ debate to bring into view transitory and provisional forms of dissemination. The article goes on to inquire into documentation's capability to provide knowledge that is similar in nature to the contributions of live performance, and to question whether documentation and performance should be defined as oppositional practices. These concerns are then addressed through the presentation and evaluation of philosophical notions surrounding the concept of ‘liveness’, drawing on the writings of Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander and Martin Buber. The focus then shifts to examine how audiovisual documentation may become a dialogic knowledge-producing encounter. This question is pragmatically addressed through the presentation of a documentation method which is designed to articulate provisional and divergent perspectives on creative research processes. The article then concludes by evaluating the role of documentation in mixed-mode research (drawing on the work of Susan Melrose), while pointing towards a growing recognition of the need for a new model of performance-led research validation that accounts for the corroborative relationship between performance and documentation practices.
Assessment Practice in Fine Art Higher Degrees
Authors: Holbrook Allyson , St George Jennifer , Ashburn Liz , Graham Anne , Lawry Miranda
Published: March 2018

The study reported in this paper investigates the examination of fine art doctorates, and specifically how fine art examiners convey their assessment of the exegesis and exhibition in their written reports, drawing on 42 PhD fine art reports. Fine art examiners provided significant amounts of negative appraisal overall, little formative comment, and frequently wrote about the process of examination. Poor candidate engagement with relevant literature was identified as the key reason why examiners were harsher in their recommendations than colleagues in allied fields. The reports resonated with the ‘newness’ of examination in the field, the assessment language showed marked differences between the exegesis and the exhibition, and the relative emphasis in assessment centred on the exegesis.
Talkback Radio: Some Notes on Format, Politics and Influence
Authors: Turner Graeme , Tomlinson Elizabeth , Pearce Susan
Published: March 2018

This paper presents early results from an ARC-funded research project on the content, audience and influence of Australian talkback radio. Drawing upon the analysis of data from a survey of three talkback programs — John Laws and Neil Mitchell from the commercial sector and Australia Talks Back from the ABC — the paper focuses upon two aspects: the topics canvassed and the participation of the callers. Although very preliminary, the results of this survey narrow down the kinds of questions we need to ask as we move towards more sophisticated analysis of this media format.
‘Rafferty's Rules’: Australian Legal Dramas and the Representation of Law
Authors: Bainbridge Jason
Published: March 2018

This paper explores the problems involved in representing the Australian legal system on film and television, how these problems are addressed, and what commentary these texts are making about the practice of law in Australia. It is suggested that the formal and dress requirements of the Australian legal system make the trial process a ritual based around the reification of the lawyer and the stigmatisation of the accused — in short, a degradation ceremony — and that Australian legal dramas reflect this. But because of this lack of dynamism in the courtroom, Australian legal dramas must seek alternative sits of drama — often domestic, and invariably outside the courtroom. In this way, they present a more holistic view of the lawyer/judge's life, reinterpreting court proceedings (and the institution of law itself) as a repressed set-up by actively displacing dramatic tension outside the courtroom, thus denying the courtroom the centrality it occupies in American representations and, by extension, American culture.
Too Soon: The Government's Media Ownership Proposals
Authors: Curtis Simon , Dwyer Tim , Wilding Derek , Wilson Helen
Published: March 2018

In response to Minister Helen Coonan's discussion paper on media reform released in March, the authors survey the recent history of media ownership policy with particular reference to the Productivity Commission's visionary 2000 report on broadcasting. They argue that the present proposals fall short of the plan laid out in this report and are premature pending further development of digital media.
‘Truth in Advertising’: The Impossible Dream?
Authors: Crawford Robert
Published: March 2018

For an industry that deals with the public perception of images, it perhaps ironic that advertising itself has long suffered from a severe image problem. The industry has long been equated with exaggerations, distortions and falsities. Critics and the industry alike have looked to the possibility of truth in advertising to redeem its reputation. The discourse of truth in advertising that occurred in the advertising industry ranks during the early twentieth century provides a revealing insight into the way that the ‘magic system’ of advertising has been constructed. Reaching a high point in the 1920s, concerns about truth would recede over the course of the 1930s and 1940s as the industry moved to embrace new forms of technology. By examining the rise and fall of this discourse, this paper reveals the advertising industry's fervent desire to improve advertising's status whilst illustrating the way in which technological developments not only affected the industry, but also its ability to ever be completely truthful.
The ABC and the 2006 Federal Media Reforms
Authors: Jacka Elizabeth
Published: March 2018

This article dissects the implications for the ABC of the current Australian government media reforms. If the quality of policy development and discussion of such changes to key media laws and policy is poor in general, the level of consideration of the role of public broadcasting is worse. The author also considers other perennial dilemmas such as advertising on the ABC, governance and political interference, concluding that the new communications landscapes makes the ABC and public service broadcasting more necessary than ever — yet it is still awaiting a thorough exploration and adequate public discussion.
Digging for Disability
Authors: Newell Christopher
Published: March 2018

This article reads media coverage of the May 2006 Beaconsfield Gold Mine rescue through the lens of disability. It argues that disability is essential to the way discourses of heroism, masculinity and nationalism were constructed in the rescue of the miners. However, the importance of disability to this, and other aspects of media, politics and society in Australia, was not well recognised — yet raises important questions.
Censorship of Sexually Explicit Materials: What Do Consumers of Pornography Have to Say?
Authors: McKee Alan
Published: March 2018

This article attempts to bring a new set of voices into public debates about censorship in Australia — those of consumers of pornography. Forty-six consumers — chosen to provide the most diverse range of voices across gender, age, sexuality, income, place of residence and state/territory — were interviewed in detail. Interviewees consistently distinguished between beneficial and harmful pornography. The main issue was consent, with child pornography, bestiality and violent pornography being singled out for condemnation. The interviewees noted that public debates about pornography in Australia tend to favour conservative religious positions. All interviewees agreed that censorship was necessary; they particularly focused on the need to keep sexually explicit materials away from children. They evinced a strong distrust of politicians and bureaucrats, and mostly presented a classical liberal line. Several of the consumers had children of their own: all of these interviewees argued that their children should not see sexually explicit material and had strategies in place to ensure that their own did not.
Media Education: Authority, Identity and Value — An Editorial Dialogue
Authors: Bragg Sara , Buckingham David , Turnbull Sue
Published: March 2018

In this ‘dialogue’ article, the three editors of the special issue debate three key themes arising from the articles that follow. We discuss the dilemmas posed by the institutionalisation or ‘authorisation’ of media education within the formal education system; persistent questions about the role of media education as an intervention in the processes of students' identity formation; and the vexed debate about judgments of cultural value and their relevance to the field. The discussion suggests some shared themes and some clear differences between Australasian and British perspectives, which emerge from their overlapping but distinctive histories.
Globalisation, Nationalism and Post-Socialist Media Education
Authors: Imre Anikó
Published: March 2018

The article examines contemporary attempts in education to come to terms with the effects of globalised media and the waning authority of the nation-state. It compares current debates regarding the role of electronic media in US education with the state of media education in post-socialist Eastern Europe, where the desired accession to the European Union, accelerated technological changes and the entry into a globalised economy have induced thorough reforms in the structure and content of national education and set in motion intense negotiations about how electronic media are shaping the values and identities of the next generations. The essay focuses on the achievements and ambivalences of the newly introduced Hungarian national media education curriculum and parallel, state-supported print reading initiatives.
Teaching for the Revolution: The Long March of Media Studies
Authors: Turnbull Sue
Published: March 2018

This paper constitutes a form of auto-ethnography, reflecting on my career as a teacher of media in the United Kingdom during the 1970s and in Australia in 2006. The biographical method was chosen in order to affirm the value of media education in relation to the personal experience of both the student and the teacher, and to question the authority and value of the various Media Studies curricula as they have evolved over the last 30 years within the institutions of the school and the university. This account constitutes part of a larger project on the part of the author entitled ‘Moments of Intensity’, which is concerned with issues of affect and aesthetics in the experience of teaching media and popular culture.
Life after Hobbits: The New Zealand Screen Industry in 2006
Authors: Lealand Geoff
Published: March 2018

This article considers the state of the New Zealand TV and film industry, drawing upon the first comprehensive survey by Statistics New Zealand, and discussing a number of notable new productions. It also considers New Zealand film and television on Australian screens and concludes that, while they often dwell upon and magnify differences, such trans-Tasman cultural exchanges have yet to capture the similarities between the two countries.
Universal Service in Australia: A Mechanism Worth Keeping in an Open Telecommunications Environment
Authors: Cameron Lucy
Published: March 2018

This article revisits universal service in Australian telecommunications, a much-contested topic — not least with the looming Telstra full privatisation and the availability of broadband and mobile technologies. It discusses the main types of universal service strategies advanced in the contemporary debate, and develops a new proposal in which local and regional governments would play a central role.
Testimonial Current Affairs: The Australian Story Approach to Celebrity
Authors: Bonner Frances
Published: March 2018

Australian Story has developed a distinctive approach to both current affairs and the presentation of stories about celebrities. It has been subject to criticism for both of these, but the article argues that this is misguided, drawing on recent work on celebrity and particularly on John Langer's analysis of the ‘other news’ to point out how pervasive ‘human interest’ style stories are throughout news bulletins and conventional current affairs, and noting how many of these concern celebrities. Calling on a large number of episodes, it demonstrates that the program is capable of acting to set news agendas and of continuing existing news coverage — both prime duties of current affairs programs — and that it uses its celebrity coverage in particular to perform these functions. It also identifies the role of the testimonial as central to what is special about the Australian Story approach.
Bollywood and ‘Grocery Store’ Video Piracy in Australia
Authors: Athique Adrian Mabbott
Published: March 2018

This article seeks to examine the ongoing struggle between narrowcast media piracy practices serving migrant communities and the attempts currently being made by players in the Indian film industry to legitimate, and thus capitalise on, the circulation of Indian films in key offshore markets. This article poses the question of whether an alternative network of distribution is likely to emerge which might supplant Asian food stores as the primary distribution network for Indian films, and to place this problem within the existing framework of cultural practices surrounding Indian films in Australia.
We too are Green: Public Relations, Symbolic Power and the Tasmanian Wilderness Conflict
Authors: Lester Libby
Published: March 2018

This paper asks how the incorporation of public relations and marketing strategies into political debate over Tasmanian wilderness, in particular the appropriation and deployment by industry and government of powerful symbols traditionally associated with the environment movement, challenges not only the always tenuously held power of the movement but also the power of the media. Drawing on textual analysis and interviews with journalists, activists and government and industry public relations specialists, it places recent developments into an historical context and is thus able to identify the nature and impacts of this ‘turn’ in the 30-year conflict. Specifically, it examines three key carriers of meaning for the environment movement — words, images and protest — and considers how their symbolic power can be harnessed by ‘authorities’ against both their traditional sponsors, the challenger groups, and their carriers, the news media.
The Production of a Television Event: When Gunston Met Gough at Parliament House
Authors: Davis Wendy
Published: March 2018

This paper considers 1970s television character Norman Gunston's coverage of the dismissal of Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam on 11 November 1975. The paper explores the power of television comedy to intervene in the construction of a political event and transform it into a joke. Specifically, the paper describes how Gunston's comic practice of carnival mobilises resistance to the usual view of the Whitlam dismissal. The paper also considers television's capacity to transform a political episode into a television event resonating with the technology's cultural force. In particular, the paper considers Deleuze's (1995a). proposition of the connection between television and cultural operations of control. Exploring Deleuze's suggestion, the paper proposes that the Gunston–Whitlam television event demonstrates television's potential to produce a mode of resistance to control — a point about which Deleuze is not particularly optimistic (1995a: 76; 1995b: 175). With this critical perspective on Gunston's intrusion into an Australian political crisis, the paper provides an explanation of the way television comedy can transform and shape our understanding of such an event.
Television Satire, Democracy and the Decay of Public Language: John Clarke's Verbal Caricature
Authors: Roe Amanda
Published: March 2018

This paper examines the contributions of John Clarke to the field of political satire through his interviews with straight-man Bryan Dawe on ABC TV's The 7.30 Report. Clarke's work represents one of the last vestiges of what was once a vigorous satiric tradition in TV comedy, specifically the practice of political caricature. There was The Mavis Bramston Show in the 1960s and The Naked Vicar Show in the 1970s, while The Gillies Report in the 1980s was probably the best example of sustained political caricature in television comedy. Even in later sketch-based shows such as Fast Forward and The Late Show in the early 1990s, political caricature was a significant component of the material, whereas it seems to have all but disappeared from current television comedy. The paper investigates the disappearance of this type of comedy from Australian television screens and also discusses why the longevity, consistency, not to mention accuracy, of Clarke's satire is so important in the current political climate. Clarke's political caricature is almost entirely language-based, expertly parodying the spin-doctored rhetoric of our elected representatives and business leaders. This leads to a secondary focus of the paper, which is a discussion of Clarke's unique form of satire in the context of what an historian (and former satirist) identifies as ‘the decay of public language’.
Changing the Face of Advertising: Australia's Advertising Industry in the Early Days of Television
Authors: Crawford Robert
Published: March 2018

Long before Australia's first commercial television broadcasts in 1956, advertising agencies and advertisers had been preparing themselves for what they believed would be the greatest ever selling medium. The creation of a new outlet for advertisements was not the industry's sole cause of excitement. Having dominated commercial radio, the advertising industry looked forward to extending its influence. These dreams, however, were only partially fulfilled. While television enabled the industry to broadcast its commercial messages in a more effective way, legislation prevented it from controlling television in the way that it had with radio. This would have a significant impact on the relationship between the two industries. By examining television's impact on the advertising industry, this paper demonstrates that the medium of TV not only altered the face of advertising; it also caused a fundamental change in the structure and operation of Australia's advertising industry.
Reporting Australian Television News: Professional Practice in the Analogue-to-Digital Transition
Authors: Alysen Barbara
Published: March 2018

In the 50 years of Australian television, the one constant in the nightly schedule has been the news. The story of television news is usually told from the perspective of the news consumer. Even when the set of professional practices that produce news is analysed, the frame used is usually that from in front of the box rather than behind the camera and microphone. The result is that the process of reporting and the way it has changed over time has been given less attention than it deserves. Now, as the medium continues the transition from analogue to digital, Australian television news reporting is undergoing a series of shifts — in its methods of delivery and the tasks that reporters perform. These changes affect the nature of journalistic practice, which in turn bears on the product audiences receive.