Michael Bromley

Objectivity and the Other Orwell: The tabloidism of the Daily Mirror and journalistic authenticity

The emergence in the UK of ‘the new tabloid journalism’ in the form of the ‘re-born’ Daily Mirror between late 1934 and 1936 was challenging to the simultaneously nascent journalistic norm of objectivity [3]. The Mirror was not the only national newspaper in the UK in the 1930s to articulate the commercial appeal of a burgeoning professionalism in journalism with the traditional open partisanship of the daily press—to demand of its reporters and correspondents what it expected of its leader writers [4]. However, the Mirror’s ‘formula for tabloid journalism was uniquely simple—bread and circuses’ [5]. As one of its chief architects, Hugh Cudlipp, recalled 60 years later, it consisted of ‘exposing unpleasant truths as well as reporting titillating news about the superstars in every sphere’ [6]. George Orwell was caught in this warp of facticity—‘a professional and public duty’ to ‘non-biased reporting’ [7]—and the weft of having ‘some political or social cause to argue for’ [8]. He believed that objectivity served to bolster the journalist’s ambition ‘to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which any observer necessarily suffers’, while also providing the basis for discussing ‘serious questions’ and advocating ‘coherent and intelligible’ policies [9]. This ‘intellectual liberty’ was not discernible in the market-driven press, though, as it called for ‘hack work’, which reduced a journalist to ‘a minor official’, directed at worst ‘to write lies or suppress ... important news’ and ‘to distort and caricature reality’. Orwell felt strongly that the public was complicit in creating this state of affairs [10]. For a writer ‘of scrupulous intellectual honesty’ this was an intolerable situation, which would compel him ‘to falsify ... [his] subjective feelings’ [11]. Not surprisingly, then, Orwell denigrated ‘cheap journalism’ which he characterized as ‘made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself’ [12].

Understanding Public Relations in China Multiple Logics and Identities

To contribute to critical public relations (PR) and communication research, the authors employ an institutional perspective in examining how actors conceptualize PR and make sense of PR practice in relation to their shared and competing logics. Specifically, they highlight the primacy of logics and identities in the social construction of PR by exploring how a wide range of actors interpret and understand PR in Chinese cultural contexts. In conducting 40 semistructured interviews with PR agency consultants, in-house PR practitioners, media journalists, and industry association officers, the authors have found multiple and competing logics within the field that, in turn, confer reconciled identities on Chinese PR. The Chinese cultural contexts serve as a repertoire for stakeholders to draw institutional logics and legitimize their interpretations of PR practice in China.

Chilling Out - But Not Yet 'Cool': New Media Training in a UK Journalism School: A Further Report on 'Journomorphosis'

From rather tentative beginnings seven years ago, the World Wide Web has assumed enormous importance to journalism: as an Australian journalism school faculty member observed recently, being online is now seen almost everywhere as ’sexy and modern’.’ The World Wide Web in particular has become an everyday part of most newsrooms.’ Moreover, five years ago no more than 8 per cent of people in the USA went online once a week or more for news: by comparison, in 2000 over 56 per cent of American internet users said they logged on to ’read news’.3 Not only in Australia and the US but also in the UK, these factors, and relatively high salary levels, have made the web an attractive place to practise journalism.’ While some fall-out resulted from the dot-com crisis in 2000, the numbers of online journalists remained large, and new web ventures continued to offer employment opportunities for more.5 What were previously exclusively singleor bimedia organisations have broadened their activities to include text, audio, video, graphics and design elements in multi-functional information, entertainment and/or retail sites which hope to win over not just audiences but advertisers from more traditional media outlets.~ 6

The 'new majority' and the academization of journalism

The academization of journalism is reliant on the development of the field founded in scholarship demonstrated through the publication of research in peer-reviewed specialist journals. Given the profile of journalism faculty, this means inducting practitioners into a culture of critical research. In Australia at least, this cohort of neophytes is predominantly comprised of middle-aged women who were surveyed about their personal attitudes to research. They were mostly open to the idea of becoming researchers but were inclined to proceed cautiously without necessarily severing their ties with practice. There was evidence to suggest that a generally positive orientation to research was not capitalized on and that they remained uncertain about the role of research. On the other hand, they appeared not to have adopted the orthodoxy of implacable opposition to scholarly inquiry. The change in gender composition in the academy may provide, contrary to historical, but more in line with contemporary, evidence, a renewed impetus to the project of academizing the field.

Field maturation in journalism: The role of hackademics as a ‘motley crew’

The academization of journalism is dependent on faculty in the field embracing critical research evidenced by publishing in relevant peer reviewed journals. This involves a four-step process, beginning with recognizing that critical research is central to determining the field, which presents a specific challenge to the majority of journalism faculty who transfer to the academy from practice. Journalism faculty who were or had been practicing journalists were asked how they valued critical research. Their responses indicated that, while generally viewing critical research as purposeful, they held it to be weakly integral to their roles in the academy. It is suggested that this reflects their prior experiences as journalists in a particular moment in time; uncertainty about what constitutes ‘research’, and a failure to translate external impetuses to build research into an internal research culture, caused by their shifting and uncertain roles in motley crews of creative and academic production.

The first cyberspace election

The claim may have been more muted, but it was still &dquo;The Sun wot won it&dquo;, the paper claimed the day after Labour’s General Election victory. All the same, the role of journalists and the media in the British electoral process remains problematical. A gently self-deprecating item, carried by BBC-TV’S Breakfast News on 18 April, presented the other side of the story: it told of the annoyance of the people of Glenlivet, who collected z10,000 to erect a booster transmitter to be able to watch television, only to find the schedules dominated by politics. As a media event, the 1997 General Election turned people off in considerable numbers. Heeding the research which shows that readers, viewers and listeners want their voices heard and responded to in a dynamic partnership with their papers, magazines, television and radio, and given the unprecedented opportunity of the longest campaign this century, the media deployed all the weapons available to them to involve the public at large, from cosmetic badging through investigative journalism to the now standard phone-in and audience participation programming. Readers, viewers and listeners were polled in advance on what they felt the issues were. Coverage (the BBC) and editorial views (the Sun and News of the TJ1Jrld) were tailored accordingly. Panels of voters, fbcus groups and random interviewees were rounded up, tracked and paraded regularly. ITV went so far as to label their 500 &dquo;The People’s Election&dquo;. In that spirit, viewers and listeners were invited not only

Michael Bromley (The University of Queensland, Australia)

ANDERSON, BENEDICT. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). CHALABY, JEAN. The Invention of Journalism (London: Macmillan, 1998). CONBOY, MARTIN. Journalism: A Critical History (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004). FISH, STANLEY. Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980). GLEASON, ABBOT, GOLDSMITH, JACK and NUSSBAUM, MARTHA, eds. On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005). HARTLEY, JOHN. The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media (London: Routledge, 1992). ISER, WOLFGANG. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). KOVEN, SETH. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004). LUTES, JEAN. Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 188

From noted ‘phenomenon’ to ‘missing person’: A case of the historical construction of the unter-journalist

Tim Hewat was celebrated during his tenure at Granada Television as one of the most influential journalists working in Britain in the second half of the 20th century, but then largely forgotten for 30 years.This is explained as a function of the specific historicization of journalists, reflecting both academic prejudices and occupational values.The history of journalism is largely devoid of the lived experiences of the majority of its practitioners. Hewat’s case indicates that journalists disappear from history when they step outside the domains of valorized media institutions and journalism hierarchies that contribute to notions such as the Fourth Estate. Mobilizing Paul Thompson’s category of ‘underclasses’, this article argues that this reductionism has largely rendered the majority of journalists historically invisible and classified them as unter-journalists , a kind of sub-category which does not comply with a priori norms.

Farewell Old Friend or Bye-bye Bully Boy?: The Closure of a 'Media Icon' and Challenging the 'Free Press' Paradigm

The closure of The Bulletin magazine was widely reported and commented on by journalists and others in the media who sought to apportion blame for this rupture, to explain it as an aberration and to reassert the norm of the ‘free’ press and the Fourth Estate. In the past, such paradigm repair would have gone unchallenged as those in the media controlled what appeared there. With the advent of accessible digital information and communication technologies, however, members of the public are encouraged to have their say. This study compared the ways in which journalists and their sources and members of the public framed the closure of The Bulletin. In the era of dialogic mediated communications, journalists and others in the media can no longer assume that contrary voices will be silenced.

Review: Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News, and Power in a Globalised WorldMcNairBrian, Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News, and Power in a Globalised World, Routledge, London, 2006, ISBN 0 4153 3913 1, 248 pp., £16.99.

Media International Australia system of representative government, but rather at the unfinished project of democracy as an idea and ideal.’ (p. 135) What I particularly liked about this book is the powerful application of the principles and analytical tools developed in media and cultural studies (and scorned by conservatives) to the writings of Team Australia. The book is therefore not only an attack on conservative opinion, but also an engaging example of how to do text analysis. — Kitty van Vuuren, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland