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.

There’s been lots of speculation about Katie Couric leaving her successful morning spot on the Today show and replacing Dan Rather as CBS’ main news anchor. This raises many interesting questions about the nature of journalism and the development of celebrity journalists. The New York Times reports:

Reports of her impending flight from “Today” to sign on as Dan Rather’s successor as evening-news anchor at CBS have dwarfed most other talk in the television-news business, even the official designation this week of Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas as the anchors of ABC’s newscast, succeeding the late Peter Jennings.

Rumors have floated out of CBS and elsewhere about potential offers of $20 million a year for seven years, and about some unusual window in Ms. Couric present contract that would allow CBS to snatch her up this month, long before her deal ends on May 31. But in an interview yesterday Ms. Couric herself dismissed most of that - especially the rumor of a contract window, which she said was false.

“Obviously my contract is up in May; that’s the one thing that is actually true,” she said. “I am in the process of figuring out what I want to do.”

She did not deny that CBS News might be in the mix of that decision. “I am really fortunate and flattered that I have some opportunities, a variety of opportunities,” she said. “I am trying to make a thoughtful decision while being in the middle of this media spotlight, which I am trying to ignore.”

Couric herself notes that “her personality” suits the Today show format, but maybe the changing nature of news also demands a new type of anchor:

“Every day I get jazzed about this show,” she said. And she acknowledged that “Today,” which asks her to take on roles as varied as interviewing victims of terrorist bombings and singing duets with Bette Midler, is a show that fits her many talents

“I do think my personality in many ways seems tailor-made for this format,” she said. But she added that she believed the broader television news business was changing. “People don’t want to see robo-anchors regurgitating whatever is on the teleprompter in front of them. They want people to be natural, people who feel things, who react to things.”

Those comments may be music to the ears of Leslie Moonves, the CBS chief executive, who has openly discussed his desire for a news anchor who would break the old “voice of God” model of network news.

So will she be getting “jazzed” for the CBS news and what might this mean. One satire site considers the possibilities:

Good evening. I am Katie Couric and here is tonight’s news.

Another car bomb went off in downtown Baghdad today, marking a further escalation in the violence that has plagued Iraq over the past two and a half years. There is still no official word on how survivors of the bombing feel about the upcoming Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes baby.

Ellen Gray from The Philadelphia Daily News asks whether Couric’s statement that she wants to be taken seriously as a journalist is compatible with her prospective $20million deal with CBS:

For all I know, Couric feels the same about her work, and views that $20 million as just a sign of respect, which is how many well-compensated people view their salaries, assuming they’re getting enough to pay the mortgage and care for their families decently.

The problem, though, is that $20 million starts to sound like real money, even in a business where they throw it around pretty freely….

Will it be the news-gathering capabilities of CBS News, an operation that’s at least as important to an anchor’s credibility as whether he or she dresses up for Halloween?

Or will it be Couric herself, who for $20 million a year might not be able to say no to CBS honcho Les Moonves’ apparent hopes for a brighter, more entertaining half-hour, one that’s probably not going to guarantee her a mention in the same breath with Walter Cronkite?

She speculates that perhaps Couric should negotiate down in terms of money but up in terms of control if she really wants to take on the mantle of “serious”. Gray ends with an amusing take on this:

Instead of demanding respect in the form of money, she could trade away a few million for control - and win real respect.

As they might say on those credit-card commercials:

“Reading the news a half-hour a night: $8 million.

“Contributing to ‘60 Minutes’: $5 million.

“Never having to interview another runaway bride or ‘reality’ show castoff: Priceless.”

For a long and serious look at the anchor wars check out David Blum’s recent New York Magazine featureand the Chicago Tribune’s take on Couric

Comedian John Doyle (Roy & HG) had some pretty feisty things to say about the state of the Australian media in his Andrew Olle lecture.

Declaring at the outset that his journalistic credentials were “none” ….He railed against proposed changes in media ownership laws that would allow players to own radio, newspapers and TV in the same market.

He also called for more funding for ABC drama, and criticised media companies for focusing their spending on improving systems of delivery.

“In the end, delivery and delivery systems are meaningless. Content is all that matters. Rubbish is still rubbish, be it on an old 21-inch black-and-white HMV or in high definition through the digital set-top box.”

Doyle said the only places to find diversity were at the ABC or SBS. The commercial news services were exact copies of each other, he said; he had seen Seven’s Today Tonight and Nine’s A Current Affair air the same story at the same time on the same night.

In the end its hard to argue with these broad brush conclusions but why was he up there in the first place. It doesn’t help our understanding of what’s happening in the Australian media to have a comedian with no qualifications get up and make a series of generalisations. Using Doyle as a brand personality to give this lecture is indicative of the very lack of serious news and current affairs culture that he is decrying.

Andrew Olle probably liked a laugh but if the lecture in his honour is supposed to be about the media why not get someone who knows what they are talking about.

Bush is being criticised for not acting fast enough and for a lack luster, even humorous, speech when he first addressed the plight of New Orleans. The New York Times has become increasingly strident in its editorials over the last few days:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

Bush doesn’t seem to have either a natural sense of compassion or even a natural political instinct on these occasions when symbolic leadership is most needed. Either Clinton or Reagan would have acted immediately and made us feel that they were involved personally and politically with the crisis. This symbolic act of the leader is of such importance and has real impact on the course of actual events by creating a buoyant atmosphere for recovery. But there is a difference between a genuine act of symbolic leadership, which requires engagement, reflection and action and a staged media event. Increasingly it is difficult for both politicians and the public to distinguish between the two.

A story has just emerged about how deliberately the Bush team stage managed the tour of the crisis zone. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu has just released a statement:

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.

This has been reported by the wires and some blogs but doesn’t appear to have been picked up by the mainstream press yet.

It is confirmed by at least one report from a viewer of a German news service who says the German account of Bush’s tour differed markedly from the CNN account:

There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president’s visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of ‘news people’ had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

Technorati Tags: Bush and Katrina

A new survey has shown that 51% of US journalists use blogs editorsweblog reports:

According to the latest Annual Euro RSCG Magnet and Columbia University Survey of the Media, 51% of journalists, combared to 11% of all US internet users (according to eWeek), are using weblogs regularly and 28% rely on them for their daily reporting. By contrast, only 1% of journalists believe in their credibility. The study is based on responses of 1,202 journalist from the US and other countries worldwide (no further details regarding the other countries given on Euro RSCG Magnet ). Of journalist who reported using blogs 70% use blogs for work-related tasks: they use blogs to find story ideas, researching and referencing facts, finding sources and uncovering breaking news. However, only few journalists post on blogs or have their own blogs. “Such activities might be seen as compromising objectivity and thus credibility.”

Steven S. Ross, associate professor at Columbia University and a partner in the study said on Euro RSCG Magnet: “As blogs continue to gain in popularity, quality and influence, it is becoming imperative that journalists and journalism students continue to integrate blogs, especially blogs that cover technology, into their reporting practices. A number of credible and influential Weblogs – such as Scobleizer, Gizmodo, and Boing Boing – provide an invaluable trove of research, story ideas, and other information that current and future journalists would be remiss not to leverage in their reporting.”

The low general score on credibility contrasted with the high level of use is fascinating. I believe it shows the coexistence of two competing paradigms currently at work in the media sphere. The credibility issue is one firmly rooted in traditional understandings of objectivity while the use of blogs is rooted in a new multimodal journalism practice that is still trying to formulate an appropriate epistemology.

Technorati Tags: blogging and journalism