David Blackall

Making News Today: a tool for adoption of ethics principles using technology¿supported television journalism

There are movements internationally towards curricula that incorporate values and citizenship education. In Australia, this movement has been illustrated with the adoption of a national curriculum in values education. This has arisen from the perceived need for citizens to hold values around the rights and responsibilities of functioning within a democracy. The Making News Today programme has been designed to develop a range of literacies enabling learners, for example, to read the media beyond the interests of the elite. The programme incorporates a journalistic process for television news production for middle school students using laptop and handheld video technologies, with embedded ethics and values education. The article reports on an analysis of the implementation of this programme with middle school students in Australia with reference to student adoption of ethical stances in the journalistic process and the implications for the use of this project in developing ethics, values and citizenship as part of the curriculum process.

Environmental Reporting in a Post Truth World

The science publication Nature Climate Change this year published a study demonstrating Earth this century warmed substantially less than computer-generated climate models predict. Unfortunately for public knowledge, such findings don’t appear in the news. Sea levels too have not been obeying the ‘grand transnational narrative’ of catastrophic global warming. Sea levels around Australia 2011–2012 were measured with the most significant drops in sea levels since measurements began. This phenomenon was due to rainfall over Central Australia, which filled vast inland lakes. It was not predicted in the models, nor was it reported in the news. The 2015–2016 El-Niño, a natural phenomenon, drove sea levels around Indonesia to low levels such that coral reefs were bleaching. The echo chamber of news repeatedly fails to report such phenomena and yet many studies continue to contradict mainstream news discourse. Whistle-blower Dr. John Bates exposed the U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) when it manipulated data to meet politically predetermined conclusions for the 2015 Paris (Climate) Agreement. This was not reported. Observational scientific analyses and their data sets continue to disagree with much of climate science modelling, and are beginning to suggest that some natural phenomena, which cause variability, may never be identified.

David Robie. 2014. Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific

David Robie. 2014. Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific. Auckland: Little Island Press. An Interview with Its Author1

Q&A with Syed Nazakat, Investigative Journalist on the Frontline

Syed Nazakat is a special correspondent for the news magazine, The Week, in Delhi. He has reported on politics, defence, security, terrorism and human rights issues in 17 countries. Nazakat has won numerous national journalism awards for his investigative stories on India’s secret torture chambers, India’s rendition programme in Nepal, arms trafficking in Bangladesh and an insider report on the Al-Qaeda rehabilitation camp in Saudi Arabia.