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.