W12 Lecture: Investigative Journalism

Most good journalism is investigative, or Shoe Leather Journalism. Investigation in journalism is about discovering truths and deviations from the truth. It should be intelligent (know your purpose and be prepare yourself to encounter troubles), informed (if you are not informed about the basic aspects and facts, you can miss the true story), intuitive (explore your hunches), inside (try to get exclusive information-to do this, the interviewee must be able to trust you), involved (invest your time and effort to be thorough) and interactive (interview, observe, research, watch for leaks, briefings and documents).

Good investigative journalism should be the critical and thorough. Wherever possible, it should provide civic voice to the voiceless, therein becoming the "custodians of conscience" and enablers of social justice-exposing society to itself . By doing this, investigative journalism may hold those with power to account as "the Fourth Estate". This Fourth Estate allows freedom of information so that democracy functions properly. It keeps 'the man'-the government, legislation, the judges/ judiciary and the police etc. on their toes, so they don't get away with injustices against the people by abusing their power.

Bruce gave some famous examples of when investigative journalism and the media have exposed the powerful to bring about justice, including "the Moonlight State", Wikileaks, the Watergate Scandal (the investigations prior to the Frost and Nixon interviews) and the Fitzgerald Enquiry. *There have really been many more instances of this, I think. I mean, any time there is ever a scandal in Parliament, it is always the media who have uncovered it, or at least helped in making it known the the public. As you could expect, the powers being exposed for wrong doing generally try to weasel their way out of the blame *cough cough* Craig Thomson acting as if his Union credit card paid for those prostitutes itself: yeah right! Because of the nature of Australia's governmental and judicial systems, thankfully Thomson is probably not going to get away with his offences. This is not the case in other countries though, where the level of corruption is so high and freedom of speech and press is so severely suppressed that the powerful offenders do get away with their crimes. Not only that, but if the journalists actually manage to expose the things the powerful don't want in the public sphere, the 'messengers' may be literally shot, or worse. It all depends on how corrupt the government and the military etc. are, and how much control they have.

Triangulation of whether what you have been told, what you have seen and what was recorded match up can be a rule for checking the validity of your story. Investigative journalists should take a sceptical-not cynical-approach to the information they discover. A current goal for them should be to improve the quality of their stories, and not follow the trend of churnalism, by being thorough and reliable, checking their sources and doing vast amounts of research. Some advice to keep in mind when compiling an investigative story: check your facts, assume nothing, expect whistle blowers to go and BE crazy. *Investigative journalism can change society and the world...Or maybe that's just because a couple of superheros work for the media?

Some good investigative journalism programs are Australian Story, the 7:30 Report, Four Corners and Hungry Beast. *Hungry Beast was a really accessible, intelligent, interesting and entertaining program, advertised as "Youth Orientated Investigative Journalism", but it's a bit unconventional and offensive at times. Here's a link to a review on it and my encourage it to watch it, it's a great show.
http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/hungry-beast-youth-oriented-investigative-journalism-abc-tv-review/

 -Bon

Annotated Bibliography

Maier, S. (2010). All the News fit to post? Comparing News content on the Web to Newspapers, Television, and Radio. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 87(3/4), 548-562.

Online news content differs to that of legacy media in the way content differs between any media platforms. This online and traditional media content overlap supports journalism’s agenda setting role, as the more a topic is covered, the more import it is given by the audience. In addition, many blogs and other Internet news sources refer back to content of traditional media through links. Study findings supported the article’s stance that online news had only slightly less depth than its heritage media counterparts. Media fragmentation is more disruptive to journalism as the audience is given too much choice, so they only consume news that aligns with their existing views. Due to this, the media have more difficulty setting a common agenda for the fragmented audience. All of the claims in the article are supported by studies, which are explained in depth. However, the studies are based on American media in 2008 and 2009, meaning the findings are less relevant to the current Australian media-scape. The author is a fairly reliable information source on this topic as he is an associate professor in the school of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. The author outlines the limits of the study and suggests that further studies be conducted on this same topic, dispelling the bias it may have had.

Atkinson, C. (2012, April 16). Atheists meet to discuss faith-or lack of it. Retrieved from http://www.atheistconvention.org.au/2012/04/16/atheists-meet-to-discuss-faith-or-lack-of-it-sbs-radio/

The Atheist Foundation of Australia organised the Global Atheist Convention: A Celebration of Reason in Melbourne, held in April this year and which sold almost four thousand tickets. Speakers included prominent atheist authors, scientists, philosophers, comedians and more. They argued that religion has a negative impact on society, using the issues of homosexual rights, abortion and euthanasia as examples. Christianity, in particular, was argued against, though Islam was also criticised. Muslim and Christian groups protested against the convention, which did not affect the large audience numbers. This source was accessed from the website for the Global Atheists Convention, though it was originally aired on SBS Radio. Clare Atkinson’s reporting is unbiased as her story was intended for the public media outlet SBS. This is supported by the neutral tone that Atkinson employs in her objective communication of all the featured protesters’ and speakers’ opinions. In this way, neither the SBS’s or Atkinson’s personal opinions influenced the story. Thus, no ideological or political agenda was forced on the listeners. Agenda setting was employed by the Website managers in including the traditional media story on their page, as, according to Maier, repetition increases an issue’s news value.

Stevenson, C. (2012, April 27). Global Atheist Convention-Sunday, 15 April (Part Seven). Retrieved from thatsmyphilosophy.wordpress.com: http://thatsmyphilosophy.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/global-atheist-convention-sunday-15-april-part-seven/

Chrys Stevenson’s blog piece offers her experiences at, and reactions to the 2012 Global Atheist Convention. Stevenson discusses the fundamentalist Islamic protesters who were mentioned in the SBS Radio piece. She negatively described the actions of the group as an embarrassment to the rest of their community and praised the Atheist convention attendees who argued against the protests. She described the protesters as embodying hate, while the atheists embodied peace in order to highlight the hypocrisy of the protesters. Stevenson employs agenda setting techniques by reiterating the already publicised kiss between a homosexual couple in front of the protesters. She attracts further attention to the story by covering it on her blog with links to other journalism on it, therein making the event more newsworthy. The author of this piece is an Atheist blogger; sceptical and secular activist, historian and freelance writer-with some of her recent articles appearing on The Drum, ABC’s Religion and Ethics and Online Opinion. Stevenson’s professional background is in marketing and public relations; she also wrote most of the media pieces for the 2010 Global Atheist Convention. Stevenson’s style is personal and subjective- she is the sole author, sympathetic to the Atheist point of view because she shares it, meaning that her writing is biased, as is to be expected in the journalism blog format.

Walker, T. (2012, January 17). Global Atheist Convention stimulates Christian evangelism. Retrieved from creation.com: http://creation.com/global-atheist-convention

This online article was written by creationist Tas Walker, an employee of religious organisation Creation Ministries International, who own the website it was accessed from. The writing is biased because of Walker’s affiliation with the company who commissioned the piece, as they both have vested interests in conveying a negative image of the Global Atheist Convention. Walker gave his opinion as though it was fact, stating that media coverage of the Convention would ignore the theist viewpoint by sympathising with the Atheists. The source of this information is the author’s own subjective opinion, making the piece unreliable. The level of bias breaches the amount appropriate for the online article format, where objectivity is required. The SBS Radio coverage of the convention was exemplary of media objectivity, contradicting Walker’s accusation of sympathetic alignment with the Atheist viewpoint, thus supporting that the article is unreliable and bias. A religious agenda is set due to the article’s bias against the convention and that it encouraged readers to buy copies of a newspaper with similar views as the author. This is the agenda setting technique by which gaining more publicity for an issue makes it seem more important discussed in Maier's piece.

W11 Lecture: Agenda Setting

"How the Media 'constructs reality'."

The way individuals perceive reality may be affected by communication through shared language, society and the media.  Journalism has a large role in constructing the public's opinion of the world and issues around them. The four interrelated agendas in the media are what's important to the public, what the decision makers think is significant (policy), what's important to large companies (corporate) and of course, the media agenda.

The agenda is set by the privileging of certain news items (so, Agenda setting is closely related to news values*see W9 Lecture). When mass media presents certain issues frequently and prominently, the audience perceives it as important. More coverage=issue perceived as more important. The media report, reflect, filter and shape the consumers' concepts of reality. The mass media influence the images events make in the audience's minds. Here are some models that explain it better:

Agenda setting as propaganda: in a way it is, as it may have a big influence on what people think is news and even their cognitive and emotional responses to events. These are the two levels of agenda setting: what is salient in the news and how the issues are portrayed (how the viewers feel). *The negative aspects of this are that the reality of events may be warped into untruths and that the audience stops thinking critically about issues-instead relying on what the media tells them. To critically assess propaganda/agendas, Lippmann suggests the viewer should "liquidate judgements, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted.

The example in the lecture of the same stories being portrayed differently, thus setting a different agenda, was rather striking in this photo: 

 Facets of agenda setting:

Media Gate keeping: what the media exposes (or doesn't expose) to the public.

Media Advocacy: promoting a particular message.

Agenda Cutting: the majority of what's happening in the world isn't making the news because of news value, i.e, One Direction concerts are dwelt on, but not AIDS, and so people care less about it.

Agenda Surfing: The media jumps on the bandwagon of topics receiving a lot of coverage, and tends to mirror existing portrayals of the issue.

Diffusion of News: decisions when, how and where to release news.

Media Dependence: the more dependent a person is on media, the more likely they are to be affected by its agenda.

All of this theory relies on the public paying close attention to the information they are consuming, whereas, with intermittent attention or interest in public affairs, the public is less likely to be subject to the influence of the media's agenda. Not to mentions all the people who have already formed their opinions independent of the news, who are disinclined to be swayed by the agenda.

*If you pay attention, you can see the way the media agenda sets the political reality. For example, the 'controversies' revealed about politicians in the media, and even to a less extreme degree, the spin the media puts on policies etc., influences what the politicians talk about.

-Bon

W9 Lecture: News Values

Salutations all. I ought to explain here, that I won't be writing my posts in point form anymore. It was time for me to face the facts: it looks terrible, especially because the 'points' are just sentences with a hyphen at the start. I will eventually rid my earlier posts of this troublesome nuisance, but for now, this post will be a teaser of what is to come.. Enjoy. :)

The degree of prominence media outlets give to stories, and the attention payed to them by the audience constitutes news values. In other words, the measure of how 'newsworthy' a story is, is based on how much interest people take in it--if no one cares about a particular event, it won't appear. It's because of news values that only a small amount of stories that are happening, are published.

Current determiners of news values are a story's impact, audience and the pragmatics of it. To have news value, stories must be hard-hitting, interesting and relevant to the audience (so they will buy into it). In addition, the source of the news i.e. press releases and ethics, influence an item's news value.

The inverted pyramid reappears: the more newsworthy a story is, the earlier it appears. "If it bleeds, it leads"- gore, violence and tragedies tend to lead. (This is a common complaint of my parents- "There's too much violence in the media. We don't want to see that.") So I guess an argument can be made that this also puts people off, therein decreasing the item's news value.

News values differ across countries and cultures. We can also see a difference in news values between commercial and public media outlets, i.e channel nine's focus on local areas in Brisbane etc. versus SBS's coverage of international stories over insignificant local ones. With local media outlets, generally, "If it's local, it leads"...which doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Harold Evans, the editor of The Sunday Times calls editors the human sieves of the torrent of news, saying that for them, a sense of news values is more important than their command of language. But knowing what is newsworthy is dependent on practise and instinct, rather than logic and there is no formal code, as it is transient, and news-service specific.

International news values: negativity (blood), proximity, recency, currency (ongoing investigations etc.), uniqueness ('dog bites man' is old hat: 'man bites dog' has news value), simplicity (faster to absorb in our fast-paced modern era), predictability, presence of elite nations or people (if the Pope wears a sombrero, it will be more newsworthy than me wearing one) and where it is an exclusive.  Some others: drama, visual attractiveness, entertainment value, importance (I can't believe this is just an 'other', what is the world coming to?), brevity, educational value, timeliness*, emotional value, controversy, surprise, positive news, agenda of news service, celebrification of the journalist (how high-profile the reporter is), surprise, follow-up.

*I thought I ought to throw in a reference to Mothers Day somewhere in here, as it would be a very timely inclusion, and that is a news value. Happy Mothers Day!

In theory, the more news values one story has, the higher the newsworthiness (additivity hypothesis). Maybe it's like having all the different colours and flavours of skittles or Jelly beans (throw-back to the week two lecture!!). But complemenarity hypothesis states that these factors tend to exclude each other.

If you thought that was the end of it...another model of news values for good measure:

In descending order of news value-significance, proximity (incl. historical and cultural background), conflict, human interest, novelty and fame/prominence (celebrities doing stuff, pretty much).

To the nitty-gritty now, what are the threats to news values? With the current rapid production of the news because of fast technology, there is less research being done, leading to erroneous news. This can be called 'churnalism'- the news cartel is hyper-commercialised and mass-produced, causing one stagnant viewpoint to predominate and bad quality of the end-product. PR battles with journalism to make their client appear in a better light, distorting the truth. Additional to all these:  ethics, geographic impossibility of reporting and censure may effect news values.

Not to mention the massive power-shift between the audience and the media. With all the ways that the former "audience" can broadcast themselves and create their own content, the public are now deciding their own news values. Power to the people, I say!

-Bon