Geoffrey Craig

Perpetual Crisis: The Politics of Saving the ABC

In recent years there has been a rally to ‘save’ the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This paper explores the assumptions about the national broadcaster which often inform such rescue attempts. The ABC seems to have entered a state of ‘perpetual crisis ‘following government funding cuts, political accusations of bias, issues of structural change and the Mansfield inquiry. Even more than usual, the identity, functions and future of the national broadcaster have become a public issue. While fully supporting a strong national public broadcaster as a space for public contestation, I argue that saving the ABC should not render it ‘safe’, returning it to some prior privileged state and established identity. Rather, drawing on an ‘agonistic model of democratic politics’. I argue that the ABC needs to be conceptualised as a site which produces ‘dilemmatic space’ and that the crises of the ABC are those which necessarily constitute the institution as a public broadcaster.

Everyday Epiphanies: Environmental Networks in Eco-Makeover Lifestyle Television

This article offers an analysis of the New Zealand eco-makeover program, WA

Reclaiming Slowness in Journalism

TED! It outlines how eco-makeover programs are an emerging sub-genre of the makeover phenomenon of lifestyle television where people and homes are subject to transformation by lifestyle experts, culminating in the revelation of the transformation at the end of the program. The article argues that the featured families in WA

Aotearoa/New Zealand Print News Media Reportage of the Environment

TED! experience “everyday epiphanies” where they learn about their implication in existing environmental networks and they are ushered into new, more environmentally friendly networks. Drawing on actor-network theory, the article deconstructs the featured environmental networks, examining the roles of the program hosts, the transformations in the subjectivities of family members, and the functions of everyday household technologies and objects. The article argues that the significance of the program resides in the way the revelations make visible previously concealed linkages between families, everyday objects and practices, and the broader social and environmental domain.

Kevin’s Predicaments: Power and Celebrity across the Political and Media Fields

This article outlines an argument for the value of slowness in journalism. It makes an initial argument that our experiences of modernity are not singular experiences of speed and geographical dislocation but increasingly complex negotiations of different temporalities and spatial contexts and given this we also require different forms of fast and slow journalism. The article explores how journalism operates at particular speeds because of the comparative advantage of timeliness and also because there is a need for journalism to align itself with the temporalities of the institutional fields on which it reports. It discusses how various types of slow journalism act as interventions in the field of journalism, highlighting the political economy of fast journalism, and providing an alternative to dominant forms of contemporary journalistic practice. The article then focuses on the necessity and importance of slowness within contemporary journalism through a discussion of the concepts of critique, complexity and difference. It is argued that slowness is required for the journalistic task of critiquing power relations that are increasingly manifested in the mastery of the speed of public life. It is also argued that slowness in journalistic practice helps in offering effective scrutiny of public issues that are characterized by informational and conceptual complexity. Finally, it is argued that contemporary democracies involve growing levels of pluralism and proliferations of difference and that slowness is necessary in the representations and understandings of diverse identities, value systems and cultural practices.

Power to the People?: Lifestyle Politics and Public Communication in New Zealand Electricity Grid Protests

This article is based upon a month-long survey of the reportage of New Zealand environmental news in the countrys metropolitan daily and Sunday newspapers. The study examines topics such as the coverage of different environmental issues, the frequency and distribution of different types of sources accessed for the news stories, the distribution of environmental news across different sections of the newspapers, and the ratio of news stories to opinion articles. The article concludes that ‘the environment’ is often interpreted through an economic and business framework in newspaper reportage. This is reflected in the prominence of particular kinds of environmental issues in the survey, such as climate change and electricity/energy production and consumption, and the dominance of bureaucratic and corporate/industry group sources in environmental news. The increasingly problematic nature of ‘the environment’, and the growing importance of the impact of environmental change on economic life, particularly in a national economy that remains heavily reliant on agriculture, is evident in a high proportion of ‘op-ed’ articles in the survey and a high proportion of environmental news stories in the business sections of the newspapers.

Political Participation and Pleasure in Green Lifestyle Journalism

This article grounds the concept of political celebrity in the contexts of the differentiated media or journalistic field, and it also investigates the functions of political celebrity in the exercise of political leadership where individuals must negotiate the relationship between the political and media fields. Through a discussion of the changing political fortunes of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, the power of political celebrity is attributed to particular structural negotiations between the political and media fields, and also to exploitations of the temporality of political cycles, and the ephemerality of the currency of political celebrity. It is also argued that political celebrity is an unstable phenomenon, partly because it encapsulates a tension between different conceptualizations of subjectivity, where the positing of an autonomous, authentic self competes with a more situational and performative understanding of the self and that this latter understanding of political celebrity is exacerbated in the contexts of post-broadcast democracy.

Dialogue and dissemination in news media interviews

This article explores the increasing politicization of “lifestyles” and outlines an understanding of the concept of “lifestyle politics.” This is conducted through a case-study discussion of protest actions against the upgrading of the electricity grid on the north island of New Zealand. The article also evaluates the exercise of the lifestyle politics of the protesters through a discussion of their use of the public communication process regarding the grid upgrade proposal and their mobilization of public opinion. Lifestyle politics is located in the contexts of theories of “life politics” (Giddens 1991) and “individualization” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). The article argues that the concept of lifestyle extends beyond the pursuit of leisure and consumption practices and that lifestyle politics involves the expression of individual rights, the management of risk in everyday life, and a consciousness about the social responsibilities associated with a given lifestyle.

The media, politics and public life

This article examines the reportage of green lifestyle practices across the online sites of major British newspapers. The articulation of “green lifestyle journalism” in the study is suggestive of its complex identity, given its implication in existing orders of consumption while also expressive of emerging everyday practices that potentially and variously challenge those orders of consumption. The study enquires into whether such green lifestyle journalism stories are, in fact, reported across different online sites, and if so, in which publications and how such stories are classified within online menus. It also examines the range of reported environmental lifestyle practices and how they are attributed with meaning, including their engagement with the concept of pleasure and its association with political participation. The study reveals that the pleasures associated with sustainable living are often marginalized, and instead an ethical consumer is commonly posited who is variously cognitively deficient, worried about the environmental consequences of their everyday behavior, or concerned about their inability to realize their desires to engage in sustainable lifestyle practices. The article also examines those instances when the pleasures of a more sustainable lifestyle are represented as deriving from the implementation of environmental practices and technologies in everyday, domestic contexts, and also when they are illustrated as the product of civic and political engagements with issues of sustainability.

Culture and the Politics of Alternative Food Networks

This article analyses the nature of the dialogue of broadcast news media interviews and their public dissemination and argues that political interviews are fundamentally contestable and indeterminate encounters. In contrast to theoretical and journalistic accounts that see conflict and disagreement in news media interviews as problems that need to be minimized and overcome, this article states that the dialogical account of language employed in the work of Bakhtin and Vološinov and agonistic political theory more accurately capture the communicative dynamics of news media interviews. It follows that the function of journalistic interviewers should be cast less in terms of producing consensus and mutual understanding and more in terms of keeping the political open.