ISSN: 1329-878X

Media Wars No 90 February1999 Order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

MEDIA WARS

What is journalism? The view from under a stubbie cap --John Hartley
Researchers into journalism have expressed fears about the decline of the public sphere and the rise of tabloid journalism; the old certainties about what counts as journalism at all, never mind good journalism, can no longer be taken for granted. Meanwhile, the teaching of journalism in universities has some difficult issues to face, and not only because of new technologies in a rapidly internationalising industry. Technical integration goes hand in hand with institutional convergence between government, media and education, while the cultural form of journalism evolves into something not always even recognisable as such. Should journalism educators be teaching or resisting shifts in news from power to identity, word to image, government to entertainment, serious to trivial, public to private?

This paper looks at journalism from the point of view of the reading public rather than a political one, and asks what is at stake in considering journalism in the context of everyday life, personal routines, the private consumption of corporate entertainment and stubbie caps. In this banal but democratic context, journalism competes with other media, and with other knowledge institutions from government to education, to teach critical literacy to publics. Both journalism education itself and cultural research into journalistic forms might benefit from a perspective that focuses on the 'ethics of reading' for publics, and not solely on the power and control of producers.

Genre anxiety in the postmodern public sphere -- Catherine Lumby
This paper examines the roots of contemporary concerns about the influence of poststructuralist theories and aligned disciplines such as cultural studies on media studies, exemplified here by Keith Windschuttle's attack on the latter. Rather than taking detailed issue with Windschuttle's attack on critical theory, I examine the roots of what, I argue, is an anxiety about the shifting boundaries between conventional institutional and discursive arenas. Far from identifying a schism between academic and professional practice in media studies, I argue that recent developments in both fields have fostered a far closer relationship between the two arenas, and that it is precisely this proximity which is engendering anxiety among some commentators.

Cultural Studies and Journalism -- Michael Meadows
The study of journalism has not been - nor should it be - restricted to those who call themselves 'journalists' or 'journalism educators'. The cultural practice of journalism focuses on issues, institutions and events 'from the outside', so it would seem hypocritical to suggest that journalists alone should have the right to critique journalism. This article looks at the usefulness of cultural studies in enabling a critique and analysis of journalism from a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches. Drawing from the work of Gramsci and Canadian journalism educator and cultural studies advocate G. Stuart Adam, it suggests that journalism is a set of cultural practices which frame experience and form public consciousness of the here and now.

Journalism, corporatism, democracy -- Chris Lawe Davies
The corporatising of journalists has been an issue in the United States for most of the current decade. Journalists find themselves increasingly drawn into the commercial strategies of their employers. Indeed, the role of the editor is increasingly also one of publisher. News value is as much a question of how to pursue and capture audience demographics and psychographics as it is about servicing the general democratic needs of citizens.

Similar trends and concerns are evident in Australia. The question is whether this constitutes some kind of crisis for democracy or an evolving communication industry. What is certain is that the work of journalists increasingly needs to be analysed in terms of the 'communications industry' as a whole. It is Windschuttle's failure to any longer look at the industry as a whole, and to insist that journalism is some kind of scientifically pure practice, which leads off this discussion of the corporatisation of journalists.

Public journalism: The media's intellectual journey -- Cratis Hippocrates
Journalism is important to public life: it helps to define public life and mediate debate about it through all its forms, from tabloid press to high-quality broadsheets, and news and current affairs programs. And while many scholars debate the vagaries of which theoretical approach best explains the media, the Public Journalism movement in the United States and Australia is an example of how theory can impact on the practice of journalism. Merritt (1996) describes Public Journalism as an 'intellectual journey'. This paper develops that notion and reflects on how this kind of innovation can be an exemplar to media theorists and practitioners, as well as on how their respective traditions and critiques can evolve an new industry paradigm, designed to bring together the key stakeholders in public policy formulation: the media, political organisations and a range of community groups.

The paper reviews Public Journalism as a movement from its origins in the late 1980s in the United States, refers to American examples of Public Journalism and details how readers, audiences, editors, community groups and political organisations have reacted to this news approach to doing journalism.

What is a journalist in a university? -- Wendy Bacon
This paper argues that those who see no place for media theory in journalism education have adopted an intellectual approach to journalism which is both inappropriate in a university context and serves neither journalism nor audiences well. Rather, the interaction between the professional practice of journalism and theory and research into journalism can be a close and dynamic one in which research can produce innovative journalism and the professional practice of journalism and experiences of audiences can feed into a research agenda. Links between journalism research and journalism professional practice can be found in journalism about journalism and in the everyday talk of journalists and audiences. Three case studies which have arisen during recent experience in teaching journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney are used to demonstrate these points.

General Articles

Development and 'desetatisation' in European cultural policy -- Alison Beale
An analysis of European cultural policy supports the argument that the European Union (EU) is first and foremost an economic union. This paper traces two policy styles in European cultural policy: one oriented to deregulation and privatisation; the other concentrating on social development. It argues that the creation of de facto cultural policy by the European Commission in its audiovisual policy is an important indicator of the direction of EU cultural policy. The paper examines some of the implications for national cultural sovereignty of both audiovisual policy and the move to deregulation and privatisation in the wider cultural sector. It looks at initiatives of the Council of Europe and UNESCO to establish international cultural policies for social development to counter the effects of globalisation on the cultures of Europe. It concludes that this counter-effort is lagging in the European context, and that the tendency to describe culture as a resource does not help to distance the social agenda from the dominant commercial one.

The arts as industry -- Lisanne Gibson
There is a discursive split in Australian arts policy between subvention of the arts justified in terms of 'humanistic' objectives and subvention of the arts justified in terms of 'economic' objectives. It is possible to locate the emergence of this particular split to the 1976 Industries Assistance Commission Report, Assistance to the Performing Arts. Over the last two decades, these policy objectives have been constructed as in competition. This paper traces the history of the construction of the 'arts as industry' in Australian arts policy. In conclusion, it queries the more recent terms in which 'arts as industry' policy objectives have been set as in opposition to 'public provision' models of arts subvention.

Redefining 'industry': Young people and cultural policy in Australia -- Mary Ann Hunter
This article considers the place of youth arts and cultures in the cultural industries approach to cultural policy. It argues that the 'covert economic overlay' (Brokensha, 1996: 101) of the Australian National Culture-Leisure Industry Statistical Framework privileges certain processes in a 'government convenient' model of industry inputs and outcomes, and that the assumptions of this model are challenged by youth-specific and community-based modes of production. Furthermore, it argues that the philosophies and practices of contemporary youth-specific arts organisations have the potential to redefine 'culture industry' and contribute to a 'coherent new paradigm' of cultural policy (UNESCO, 1995: 232). This paper makes these arguments by examining the place of youth arts and cultures in the existing environment of cultural industrialisation, by considering recent government policy responses to young people's cultural activity and by addressing long-term policy issues for the support of young people and cultural development.

The Press Cable Monopoly 1895-1909: A case study of Australian media policy development -- Peter Putnis
In 1909, the Australian Senate conducted a Select Committee of Inquiry on Press Cable Services to Australia in response to claims that a monopoly of such services was in operation and had been organised by a cartel of key Australian newspapers in conjunction with Reuters Telegraph Company. Its report, and the extensive transcripts of evidence that accompany it, provide a detailed insight into arrangements for the receipt and distribution of overseas news in Australia between 1895 and 1909. The Inquiry, in its majority report, declared the arrangements to be 'a complete monopoly' in that they ensured that there was only one source of supply in Australia of press cables from the outside world. This paper analyses the findings of the Australian Senate Inquiry and the evidence put before it in terms of the light these shed on Reuters' modus operandi in Australia. It also provides an early case study of Australian government media policy development.

Cleaning up the grunge -- Jen Webb
In 1996, Triple J's 'Unearthed' competition awarded the Central Queensland prize to Andalusion, a grunge band of four young high school students. Since winning this award, the band has been transformed from a group of musical amateur-enthusiasts to a semi-professional band with an industry manager, recording contracts, video and CD recordings, steady (paid) gigs in public venues and a clear career trajectory. The band's music is also changing from semi-heavy grunge, deeply inflected by teenage angst, to a more reflective and developed sound. In other words, it seems that they have been relocated from the private sphere to a position as one of the providers of public culture.

This paper focuses on the conditions under which, and the institutional arrangements through which, relatively marginalised subjects can become legitimated as agents of the cultural industries and creators of authorised cultural products. By drawing on discussions with the band members and a reading of their audio and visual work, and through theoretical perspectives offered by Pierre Bourdieu, it investigates the logic of creative production and its agents, and identifies the capital necessary to enter the field. The paper also discusses the extent to which artists operating within the cultural industries are necessarily products of its discourses.