Week 6- Commercial Media

Commercial Media. Media for the masses? Pandering to the advertisers? Editors and producers more worried about their ratings than the content and quality of their stories and reporters. I had no idea what to expect from week 6. Reassurance that everything would be okay? Dire warnings of my future in journalism?

Admittedly the first few slides did nothing to ease my mind. Here was proof that the readers, viewers and listeners meant nothing.  Well, that's not quite right. Their choice of soap and cereal meant something. It meant something to the advertisers who could target certain audiences.

Gore Vidal is a person I have always greatly admired. He is unusually articulate, well-spoken, intelligent and thoughtful. His biting wit has been the bane of many Republicans (and a few Democrats) over the past few decades. Whilst researching Independent Journalism for this blog I stumbled across this wonderful clip of him on YouTube talking about the state of the media. I think he has summed up in a matter of minutes with his elegant language just how dire Commercial Media can be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWODMla3IWk

Of course this is coming from an American. Does this relate to Australia? One only needs to read Australian broadsheets. The national newspaper The Australian is undoubtedly right leaning, and more and more the Opinion columns are working their way into news. This isn't necessarily a criticism; they are one of the few newspapers to constantly tackle the hard issues. Queensland's newspaper The Courier Mail doesn't engage with enough real issues for one to confidently form an opinion on any lean or bias they may have. Unless one follows the Brisbane Broncos, then it's the best source of news in the country. The following link is for a very interesting article that The Monthly ran on the editor-in-chief of The Australian Chris Mitchell http://www.themonthly.com.au/power-rupert-murdoch-and-australian-s-editor-chief-united-states-chris-mitchell-sally-neighbour-3589.

For a (hopefully) non-biased look at how the media cover stories we watched a clip from ABC show Media Watch.
http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3424273.htm
This clip highlighted some of the big negatives of the Style of Commercial Media, dumbing-down and tabloidisation. The need to create headlines and compete for audiences means an escalation of attention grabbing headlines. Like an old fashioned arms race, news outlets compete with one another for a larger audience by whatever means necessary, especially with the ad revenue for newspapers dropping.

I'm really looking forward to the next lecture, which will be on Public Media. Looking back on this post it reads very much as an attack on Commercial Media, but I happily admit I read The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald just as often as I read ABC online. It will be interesting to look at Public Media with a critical eye.