Reportage Medialog

It takes a riot to get Australian news into the world media.

This week we even made SF Gate’s World Views with the unflattering headline: “Australia’s Leb Bashings” the other piece in the column this week was on the international reaction to the US torture policy - fine comapnion pieces:

War, bombings and torture in other places are the routine stuff of headlines, but this past weekend, sun worshippers at Cronulla Beach in Sydney, Australia, got a taste of a different kind of violence — the homemade kind. Reportedly provoked by assaults about a week ago on two lifeguards at the beach by youths described as being of “Middle Eastern appearance,” Sunday’s race riots involved what papers called “thousands of drunken youths.” (BBC/Daily Telegraph/Courier-Mail)

A number of commentators have compared the situation in Cronulla with the recent riots outside Paris. But Gary Sauer-Thompson makes a key distinction:

The race riots at Cronulla on the weekend bring the Australian Right into the foreground. The riots can be connected to what recently happened in France. I agree with Andrew Norton over at Catallaxy that the Cronulla violence is similar to the most recent Sydney riots at Macquarie Fields and Redfern. In both the French and Sydney cases the base economic issues are clear: poorly educated young people fuelled by anger, dispossession and booze/drugs, low incomes and poor job prospects, turning tribal.

However,what happened Cronulla is also different from the events in France. Cronulla turned tribal and became racist, without the police or the political authorities fueling racism, which is what happened in France.

The other key distinction is that the media in both countries have behaved very differently as the Australian Media section reported on Thursday:

French media had a rather novel ethical approach to covering the recent Paris race riots after the images reached saturation point: they simply stopped showing them.

Incensed critics have labelled the move censorship, accusing the French media of political biases and an over-inflated sense of power. Yet others have seen the move as an indication that the media — a powerful social force — could also possess a social conscience.

“We have a unique situation in France at the moment. Because events have been continuing for some weeks, we have the time to consider the impact of our reporting,” says Antonin Lhote, chief editor at Canal Plus, one of France’s privately owned television stations.

“Often when we film something, we are unaware of its impact until later. Our job is simply to witness.

“But here we have the unique opportunity to consider what the images mean and whether they should be shown.”

The difference, Lhote says, is that the station has decided not to show the images it obtains for fear of spreading what he calls a

contagion through the thoughtless dissemination of the images.

“It’s not about the violence,” he says. “Iraq, Tel Aviv, Pakistan … these are all much more violent images. But they are news. This is not news; it is a show. We know there can be a perverse relationship between young men and the media, and they are giving us beautiful pictures … things burning, people running around in the night, it looks wonderful. But what we want to do is draw the distinction between spectaculars and news.”

Any article that begins: “How big are blogs? Bigger than Jesus. Bigger than sex” sounds like it’s going to be yet another blogsploitation spiel. However Daniel Rubin’s article in the Philadelphia Inquirer is a pretty good summary of major blogging trends.

If 2004 was the year blogs entered the language (so says Merriam-Webster), then 2005 was the year they found their voice. Mainstream media embraced blogs, corporations embraced blogs, spammers embraced blogs.

It was a time of great convergence, with indie blogs joining together to capture audience and advertising, as brand-name media shed their institutional voices to go unfiltered where the readers were.

I think it is this friction between the institutional adoption of blogs and their original independent impulse that is one of the most interesting things about the current evolution of the blogsphere. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew internet project makes the point that we are in a key transitional moment:

“The mainstream media opened its arms to bloggers in crisis moments in all sorts of ways,” Rainie says. “We have entered this melding stage of thinking… . We’ve been through anger and fighting. Now we are in the wary-embrace stage. At some point, it will be wholesale endorsement.”

The question becomes will it be endorsement of the form or endorsement of the ethos of the blogsphere.

The Sydney Morning Herald produced one of the earliest mainstream experiments with Margo Kingston’s webdiary. It was a genuine evolving space with a commitment to diversity and discussion that became a community for negotiated discussion not just a bullitedn board. For reasons that still remain unclear Kingston was shafted and had to go independent. She has now retired from the blogsphere, even though others have continued her project.

The Herald has replaced her with The Contrarian which like many mainstream media blogs is a traditional column with a comments facility

The real change will come when mainstream media realise that blogging is a new way of relating to content not just a new way of disseminating it.