Gail Phillips

Reporting Diversity: The Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Australia's Television Current Affairs Programs

A recent study of ethnic diversity in Australias television news showed that diversity of race, culture and religion is largely absent from the news services, unless people from ethnic minorities are posing a social problem of some kind. A parallel study of Australias nightly current affairs programs has yielded similar results: like news, they represent Australia as an ‘Anglo’ nation. When ethnic minorities are featured, they tend to occupy peripheral roles, and where they are allowed a central role, it is usually to be shown as threatening and menacing to the Anglo mainstream. The industry codes of practice explicitly state the standards that should apply in reporting on race, culture and religion, yet only the public broadcaster, the ABC, follows the guidelines in the representation of diversity. The reporting practices on the commercial stations deliberately or unwittingly encourage a sense of racial hierarchy in which the Anglo dominates.

Reporting The Global Financial Crisis

During the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, the financial press attracted criticism for its coverage: specifically that it did not provide any forewarnings to the general public; that it lacked sufficient scepticism when reporting on financial and economic trends; and that reporters were too close to the sources they used for information. This paper argues the GFC represents only the latest manifestation of dissatisfaction with the financial press, with similar concerns being raised in previous financial crises such as the recession of the late 1990s and the Dot Com boom in 2000. The paper presents the results of a longitudinal tri-nation quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the reportage in three mainstream newspapers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia across three decades, along with industry insights provided by interviews with reporters in each of the countries studied. The interviews and empirical evidence indicate there has been a decline in mainstream financial journalism standards since the 1980s, as the media have faced increasing institutional, ideological, and industrial pressures.

Teaching Journalism students how to tell indigenous stories in an informed way: a work integrated learning approach

Australian journalism schools are full of students who have never met an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and who do not know their history. Journalism educators are illequipped to redress this imbalance as the large majority are themselves non-Indigenous and many have had little or no experience with the coverage of Indigenous issues. Such a situation calls for educational approaches that can overcome these disadvantages and empower journalism graduates to move beyond the stereotypes that characterise the representation of Indigenous people in the mainstream media. This paper will explore three different courses in three Australian Tertiary Journalism Education Institutions who use Work Integrated Learning approaches to instil the cultural competencies necessary to encourage a more informed reporting of Indigenous issues. The findings from the three projects illustrate the importance of adopting a collaborative approach between the industry, the Indigenous community and educators to ensure a significant impact on the students’ commitment to quality journalism practices when covering Indigenous issues.Australian journalism schools are full of students who have never met an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island person and who do not know their history. Journalism educators are ill-equipped to redress this imbalance as a large majority are themselves non-Indigenous and many have had little or no experience with the coverage of Indigenous issues or knowledge of Indigenous affairs. Such a situation calls for educational approaches that can overcome these disadvantages and empower journalism graduates to move beyond the stereotypes that characterize the representation of Indigenous people in the mainstream media. This article will explore three different courses in three Australian tertiary journalism education institutions, which use Work-Integrated Learning Approaches to instil the cultural competencies necessary to encourage a more informed reporting of Indigenous issues. The findings from the three projects illustrate the importance of adopting a collaborative approach by industry, the Indigenous community and educators to encourage students’ commitment to quality journalism practices when covering Indigenous issues.

Asbestos Memories: Journalistic ‘Mediation’ in Mediated Prospective Memory

Margaret Page and Ted Grant grew up in the blue asbestos mining town of Wittenoom in Western Australia in the 1950s. Both died from mesothelioma decades later. They remembered playing in the asbestos tailings that were everywhere and spoke about the betrayal they felt later when they realized the impact of that exposure: … we used to climb up on the piles of tailings and slide down… and find the little bits of asbestos fibres in the tailings and…peeling the fibres to see how many fibres we could get out of this. If we had known the danger or our parents were told of the dangers, no way would they have let us children do those things. (Page, 2008) There was nothing ever said, nobody knew. And then I find out in later years that in 1898 they knew about it, in 1926 they had a symposium, in 1936 they also had another one. So they knew in 1956 the dangers of asbestos and they were still mining it.(Grant, 2008)

The production-based PhD: An action research model for supervisors

Purpose – This paper aims to demonstrate how action research methodologies can help to define and clarify the pedagogical role of the supervisor in production-based research (PBR). A major challenge in supervising practice-related research is trying to disentangle and articulate the theory embedded within practical projects. In journalism, which is still a relatively new discipline in academe, supervisors and students are often operating in under-theorised areas with no pre-existing theoretical roadmap. Action research has shown itself to be a useful methodology for structuring and explaining practice-related research, which in journalism would encompass PBR in the field. This paper shows how the action research paradigm is equally useful in describing and clarifying the supervisor’s role in these sorts of projects. Design/methodology/approach – The paper looks first at practice-related research and the main challenges for candidates and supervisors in trying to align PBR with academic paradigms. Using ex...

Indigenous Voice Closing the Gap and Putting Communication for Social Change into Practice

Australian journalism schools are full of students who have never met an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and who do not know their history. Journalism educators are illequipped to redress this imbalance as the large majority are themselves non-Indigenous and many have had little or no experience with the coverage of Indigenous issues. Such a situation calls for educational approaches that can overcome these disadvantages and empower journalism graduates to move beyond the stereotypes that characterise the representation of Indigenous people in the mainstream media. This paper will explore three different courses in three Australian Tertiary Journalism Education Institutions who use Work Integrated Learning approaches to instil the cultural competencies necessary to encourage a more informed reporting of Indigenous issues. The findings from the three projects illustrate the importance of adopting a collaborative approach between the industry, the Indigenous community and educators to ensure a significant impact on the students’ commitment to quality journalism practices when covering Indigenous issues.Australian journalism schools are full of students who have never met an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island person and who do not know their history. Journalism educators are ill-equipped to redress this imbalance as a large majority are themselves non-Indigenous and many have had little or no experience with the coverage of Indigenous issues or knowledge of Indigenous affairs. Such a situation calls for educational approaches that can overcome these disadvantages and empower journalism graduates to move beyond the stereotypes that characterize the representation of Indigenous people in the mainstream media. This article will explore three different courses in three Australian tertiary journalism education institutions, which use Work-Integrated Learning Approaches to instil the cultural competencies necessary to encourage a more informed reporting of Indigenous issues. The findings from the three projects illustrate the importance of adopting a collaborative approach by industry, the Indigenous community and educators to encourage students’ commitment to quality journalism practices when covering Indigenous issues.

Book Review: Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Community MediaFordeSusan, Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Community Media, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2011, ISBN 9 7802 3024 3576. x+214 pp.,

Media International Australia founded in 1946 under William Paley, while Chapter 4 examines the work at rival radio networks NBC and ABC, and the growing span of subjects these broadcasters found worthy of attention. By 1948, broadcasters were under attack, as related in Chapter 5. The networks’ attentions were turning to television and, increasingly, the broadcasters and journalists were being tainted by the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Cold War was intensifying with the communist takeover of China and Soviet nuclear testing. And then there was Korea. Chapter 6 draws the curtains on this brief period of dedicated public service broadcasting by commercial radio networks in the United States, and the final chapter, optimistically entitled ‘Lose No Hope’, considers its legacy for later audio documentary production. By 1951, Ed Murrow and his one-time collaborator Fred Friendly had moved to television – Murrow to NBC, Friendly to CBS. Television was the medium of choice for US citizens, leading radio writers were blacklisted and UN forces (mainly from the US) were experiencing defeat in Korea. The Prague Spring had become business as usual in US media. Radio Utopia adds a welcome chapter to the saga of the development of US broadcast media, complementing recent works such as Points on the Dial (Alexander Russo, 2010) and Radio’s Civic Ambitions (David Goodman, 2011). It also stands as a reminder of the damage done to the free flow of information by political partisanship and corporate venality. — Vincent O’Donnell, Producer Arts Alive, Associate RMIT University and University of Melbourne

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Australian journalism schools are full of students who have never met an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and who do not know their history. Journalism educators are illequipped to redress this imbalance as the large majority are themselves non-Indigenous and many have had little or no experience with the coverage of Indigenous issues. Such a situation calls for educational approaches that can overcome these disadvantages and empower journalism graduates to move beyond the stereotypes that characterise the representation of Indigenous people in the mainstream media. This paper will explore three different courses in three Australian Tertiary Journalism Education Institutions who use Work Integrated Learning approaches to instil the cultural competencies necessary to encourage a more informed reporting of Indigenous issues. The findings from the three projects illustrate the importance of adopting a collaborative approach between the industry, the Indigenous community and educators to ensure a significant impact on the students’ commitment to quality journalism practices when covering Indigenous issues.Australian journalism schools are full of students who have never met an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island person and who do not know their history. Journalism educators are ill-equipped to redress this imbalance as a large majority are themselves non-Indigenous and many have had little or no experience with the coverage of Indigenous issues or knowledge of Indigenous affairs. Such a situation calls for educational approaches that can overcome these disadvantages and empower journalism graduates to move beyond the stereotypes that characterize the representation of Indigenous people in the mainstream media. This article will explore three different courses in three Australian tertiary journalism education institutions, which use Work-Integrated Learning Approaches to instil the cultural competencies necessary to encourage a more informed reporting of Indigenous issues. The findings from the three projects illustrate the importance of adopting a collaborative approach by industry, the Indigenous community and educators to encourage students’ commitment to quality journalism practices when covering Indigenous issues.

Teaching Journalism Students How to Tell Indigenous Stories in an Informed Way

While the broadcast industry as a whole may be abuzz with the potential for new survey methodologies, the Australian commercial radio sector retains a more pragmatic perspective. Joan Warner, Chief Executive Officer for the commercial radio industry body Commercial Radio Australia, talks about radios place in the multimedia environment and the hurdles new survey technologies will have to overcome to deliver the sort of data the industry will be prepared to trust. Joan was interviewed by Gail Phillips.