David Nolan

Global humanitarianism and the changing aid-media field: “Everyone was dying for footage

The crucial interaction between humanitarian agencies and the media has been researched in the past but today it continues to evolve and change—and not for the better. This article, drawing on accounts from communications managers working inside the worlds major aid agencies (Red Cross, Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision, CARE and Médecins sans Frontières), examines how communication strategies designed to raise awareness, funds and support have assimilated to todays pervasive “media logic”. In the increasingly crowded and competitive field of humanitarian agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) now seek to “brand” themselves in the media; they purposefully use celebrities and produce regionalized and personalized “media packages” to court media attention; and they reflexively expend time and resources warding off increased risks of mediated scandals. In such ways, aid agencies have become increasingly embroiled in the practices and predilections of the global media and can find their organizational integrity impugned and communication aims compromised. These developments imperil the very ethics and project of global humanitarianism that aid agencies historically have done so much to promote.

Mediated multiculturalism: newspaper representations of Sudanese migrants in Australia

While multiculturalism has been central to the Australian political and social landscape since the 1970s, it has been recently challenged, with the (re)emergence of discourses of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘integration’. In this paper, we engage with these contests by focusing on newspaper coverage of Sudanese Australians around the time of the 2007 Federal Election. We ask: how did the Australian print media represent Sudanese people during this period? In addition, what do such representations suggest about contemporary media discourses around multiculturalism? Drawing on a content analysis of 203 newspaper articles published in The Age, The Herald Sun and The Australian, we argue that dominant media discourses are both influenced by and contribute to integrationist agendas that situate Sudanese Australians as outsiders to the Australian mainstream, thereby providing a significant challenge to contemporary multiculturalism.

Journalism, education and the formation of 'public subjects'

In debates surrounding the role of universities in teaching journalism, a range of critical voices have stressed the importance of moving beyond the limiting frame of an assumed industry—academic dichotomy, while some also point to the structural forces that underpin the persistence of this frame. A consideration of such factors suggests that, while this critical move may be laudable, enacting such a shift in practice is likely to require more than simply good intentions or critical moralism. To this end, this article argues for an approach that considers how both educational and media institutions may be defined as key sites in the production of both journalists and audiences as public subjects. Such a framework, it is argued, supports a more critical analysis of the role played by industry, practitioners and universities as active stakeholders in formations of journalistic professionalism, and the manner each are being impacted by trends toward professionalization.

‘The things that we have to do’: Ethics and instrumentality in humanitarian communication

This study critically reflects on a schism evident in debates surrounding ‘humanitarian communication’. On one hand, it is approached as embodying an ideal of ethical practice. On the other, ideal humanitarianism is deployed as the grounds for a critique, whereby ‘humanitarian practice’ is seen as compromised by exigencies and political-economic influence. Drawing on the testimony of humanitarian communication practitioners within major international agencies, we argue this also reflects a felt tension within the field, where practitioners are very aware of the practical constraints and material influences to which they are subject. In both cases, however, an assumed opposition between the ‘practical’ and the ‘ethical’ tends to position ‘humanitarian ethics’ as an ahistorical ideal that stands apart from, and acts as a check on, instrumental action. This paper argues that a more historically grounded analysis suggests a more complex interrelationship between ethical and instrumental concerns.

“PUBLIC EDITORS” AND MEDIA GOVERNANCE AT THE GUARDIAN AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

This paper examines the columns of Ian Mayes, the first Readers Editor of The Guardian, and of Daniel Okrent, the first Public Editor of The New York Times, to provide an empirically grounded and theoretically informed analysis of the emergent role of newspaper public editors. To do this, the paper positions the emergence of public editors as part of a wider trend towards the adoption of mechanisms of media accountability, and engages with academic literature that has positioned this trend within an emergent paradigm of “media governance”. The empirical dimension of the paper is grounded in quantitative and qualitative analysis of columns written by Mayes and Okrent during their tenure as public editors at the two newspapers, as well as key organisational documents. The findings of the data analysis suggest that, in the context of debates around media accountability and governance, there is a need to consider forms of governance such as public editors in the context of broader social and organisational concerns with declining trust, managing corporate risk and providing external demonstrations of legitimacy, and a renewed and targeted emphasis on journalistic professionalism.

Journalism and Professional Education: A Contradiction in Terms?

This article revisits a set of long-standing debates to suggest how the role of universities in providing a ‘professional education’ in journalism might be (re)considered. Existing arguments over journalism education identify a need to move beyond the limiting frame of a presumed ‘industry–academic dichotomy’ to develop a more critical approach to professional education. While supporting this direction, this article draws on work suggesting that a more careful consideration of both the concept of professionalism and its implications for stakeholders is required. It argues that, by approaching professionalism as a discursive and socially valorised basis of identity rather than simply a series of ‘traits’, a more analytical perspective on how universities are both subject to and implicated in processes of ‘professionalisation’ is gained. These processes situate universities as both major stakeholders in, and an increasingly important influence on, emergent formations of journalistic professionalism.

‘We are not North Korea’: propaganda and professionalism in the People’s Republic of China

This article draws on an empirical analysis of the testimonies of Chinese journalists to (re)consider the nature of professionalism in contemporary Chinese journalism. We draw on earlier work by a number of scholars to develop an analysis of the testimonies in order to trace both how professionalism is shaped by cultural, social, organizational, institutional and political influences, and how these work to shape everyday journalistic practices and outputs. We conclude that professionalization is best understood not as a shift towards an ideal version of autonomous, public service–oriented journalism, but instead as a process informed by diverse and somewhat contradictory influences, including many that are internal to China as well as some that are near universal. Not only are journalists clearly concerned to be distinguished from ‘propagandists’, but editors also engage in tactical practices and organizational strategies that allow a meaningful autonomy from the state. These are not only influenced by conflicting normative discourses of journalism but have also become both a necessity for establishing the legitimacy of individual journalists and news institutions and to facilitate their viability in highly competitive news markets.

Media and the politics of belonging: Sudanese Australians, letters to the editor and the new integrationism

ABSTRACT Nolan, Burgin, Farquharson and Marjoribanks focus on media as a significant site through which a politics of belonging is played out, focusing particularly on coverage of Sudanese Australians. To this end, they analyse letters to the editor that concern Sudanese Australians in three Victorian newspapers in 2007, a highly significant year in which this group became the focus of significant levels of (predominantly negative) media coverage. Through textual and thematic analysis, the authors demonstrate how such letters worked to reiterate and extend a politics of ‘integrationism’ that, without entirely departing from Australias commitment to multiculturalism, has rearticulated the latter along neo-assimilationist lines. In doing so, they show how, in many letters, Sudanese Australians are problematized for their failure or refusal to ‘integrate’ in ways that involve an explicit or implicit process of racialization. In the process, the article also critically considers the important role performed by media in the politics of belonging, particularly through their reiteration and contestation of the politics of race and multiculturalism in Australia. Rather than simply a matter of reproducing a hegemonic politics, it shows how such processes, despite the marked limitations of their framing within a ‘race debate’, also serve to demonstrate significant fault lines in the politics of belonging.

The problems of populism: celebrity politics and citizenship

In contrast to approaches that frame the ‘populism’ of celebrity politics as a ‘dumbing down’ of politics, this article draws on an approach that seeks to understand the social conditions, political rationalities, and organizational networks that shape populist mobilisations. In light of this approach, it considers two case studies of contemporary populist politics from the US and Britain, both of which implicated celebrities (albeit in notably different ways): Bruce Springsteen’s response to the ‘Bridgegate’ scandal surrounding New Jersey Governor and aspirational Republican Presidential candidate Chris Christie in 2013; and the interventions of comedian and actor Russell Brand in the lead-up to the 2015 British general election. In addressing ‘the problems of populism’, it highlights two issues: firstly, the fraught and risky nature of market-oriented celebrity politics that appeal to the affective investments of consumer-citizens; and secondly, the necessarily reductive nature of populism itself.

Populism in theory and practice: Analysing celebrity politics

This paper draws on a case study of celebrity campaigning during the 2012 US Presidential election to critically engage with the problem of how to understand and analyse the role of celebrity in contemporary democracy. In doing so, we draw on work that has considered how recent US politics has been underpinned by ‘competing populisms’. These have sought to articulate, and performatively enact, different versions of ‘the people’ to achieve cultural identification and electoral endorsement. We argue that although it is important to understand how populist politics are produced and performed, a problem that arises in studies of celebrity politics is that, too often, these also adopt a populist approach. That is, a division between ‘elites’ and ‘ordinary’ (or ‘everyday’) people is simply assumed as a fundamental and given division in society, rather than as a particular articulation of society, and democracy, whose particular histories and contemporary formations require deeper investigation.