Andrew DElder banged on about this over at Politically Homeless for ten years. He was spot on. Go and dig randomly into his archive. That an independent researcher from Ryde could dispense more useful observatiion of the intersection between government and governed than Grattan, Benson et. al. said a lot.
Andrew DElder banged on about this over at Politically Homeless for ten years. He was spot on. Go and dig randomly into his archive. That an independent researcher from Ryde could dispense more useful observatiion of the intersection between government and governed than Grattan, Benson et. al. said a lot.
My only observation to this, very correct, author, is that they are not interested in working class lives. the senior bureaucracy, the corporate world, the judiciary; none of them give a rats about whether you're alive or dead beyond your use as a shovel or as a bank account to be emptied. Thius is neoliberalism my freind. It has become fashionable of late to say that neoliberalism is in its death throes or some such, but far from it - it's just evolving into its next phase to monetise late stage capitalism. This dystopia - as it is for millions of Australians - can get a lot more dystopic indeed.
I worked as a journalist for nearly two decades. I gave it us. Seldom look at media these days. Found your article by accident. Keep it up, but don't wait for the media to save us, they're there to do something completely different. And there's no "good media" it's all just lazy press mrelease rewrites from communication grads who aren't hosing out a meat pulverising machine in three degrees at 4am.
I too trained as a journalist and worked in the media for a period - I got out after less than a decade because I realised in my 20s I should not - and didn’t want to - be the one telling entire communities how or what to think.
The excuse for poor analysis and lack of depth in stories used to be “churn”. Simply getting the required centimetres to fill pages. But that was in the days when your primary journalistic weapons were a (landline, rotary…) phone and a set of car keys. If you covered a bushfire, you were standing right amongst it, and if you couldn’t find a working landline, you had to drive until you did to file.
Similar excuses are made now. But it’s not because they have 64 or 120 pages to fill; it’s because they have endless URLs to populate. Literally unlimited space - and unlimited potential mouse clicks to attract. The churn still exists, but it now has its roots in the attention span of carefully-targeted audiences.
Additional to the pressures to produce endless streams of copy, classism *is* a dire issue in today’s media. There’s no doubt about the case made by Joel. Three years of education in a single institution, with the end result being a bit of paper and a start most likely with the organisation where you did your 2nd/3rd year industry experience unit. An expanding number of graduates still live at home. They’re numerically adults, but have little further life experience than when they stepped into high school. B and they’ve never set foot in a Centrelink office.
But the issue doesn’t end with class or privilege. There has been a huge shift in how the media sees itself. The “fourth estate” was - and I use that word deliberately - one which self-supervised. The fourth estate understood it was a branch of public service. That is ensconced in our media landscape - the very structure of our broadcast licences, for example.
The licences providing public airwaves for use by private and public interests were constructed with the national interest in mind. The self-governing of (for example) the print media by a single, voluntary-membership council was a similar nod to the media’s need to serve the public. The fourth estate was mature enough to train its journalists to value independence, and more importantly integrity and ethics. And train them to ask questions of power - whether that was the local council or millionaire business owner in country Victoria, or holding the PMO to account.
As cadets, we weren’t treated by our employers as cheap, full-production models of the journos who’d been around a few years. We were expected to make mistakes. Require supervision. And training.
Recently I’ve done degree studies in media: partly for fun and partly because I entertain the idea of getting “back into it”, putting my money where my mouth is. A dry ethics class hasn’t got spots on the lecture from the old grizzly sub editor who stored a spare case of Melbourne Bitter under his desk. For emergencies. The outcomes of on-the-job-training and university degrees are worlds apart. I’ve done both, so I can stand behind that statement, even keeping in mind the inherent subjectivity of me being the case study.
Every media business throughout history has been out to make a profit; or at the very least, not cost more than it made. But today’s focus on finances, along with the pre-packaged “fully-trained” expectations placed on graduates means inexperienced people, of all classes of society, are being pushed into prime positions, by default. Positions that influence what our country - and world - will look like in the not too distant future.
If these graduates say no, or tackle a
story from an angle that doesn’t meet their employer’s wishes, all of a sudden, maybe their click stats take a dive. They’re no longer reaching their audience. And they’re waved goodbye - often into the rapidly converging land of PR, where at least pushing the interest of their employer is a noble(r) pursuit.
The truth of the problem with our media today isn’t the journalists - on the whole, journos do what they’re told, angle-wise. Always have. That’s how they get published. The real change in our media is the organisations themselves. They no longer act in the public interest. They are there for their proprietors, or that proprietor’s “supporters”; advertising money is exponentially more powerful today than it was 30 or so years ago - and it was pretty hefty even back then.
The bones of our media have become brittle and editorial independence is a rare beast these days. What we know as our “mainstream” media is no longer worthy of the title “fourth estate”.
That title is now owned by independents who struggle daily to get their stories out. It all goes back to who is actually running the organisation, and their values, regardless of the age or class or experience of the journalist.
And, let’s not get started on the topic of how the corruption of power structures within which the media operates effect the stories we see. That’s another essay all together.
Andrew DElder banged on about this over at Politically Homeless for ten years. He was spot on. Go and dig randomly into his archive. That an independent researcher from Ryde could dispense more useful observatiion of the intersection between government and governed than Grattan, Benson et. al. said a lot.
My only observation to this, very correct, author, is that they are not interested in working class lives. the senior bureaucracy, the corporate world, the judiciary; none of them give a rats about whether you're alive or dead beyond your use as a shovel or as a bank account to be emptied. Thius is neoliberalism my freind. It has become fashionable of late to say that neoliberalism is in its death throes or some such, but far from it - it's just evolving into its next phase to monetise late stage capitalism. This dystopia - as it is for millions of Australians - can get a lot more dystopic indeed.
I worked as a journalist for nearly two decades. I gave it us. Seldom look at media these days. Found your article by accident. Keep it up, but don't wait for the media to save us, they're there to do something completely different. And there's no "good media" it's all just lazy press mrelease rewrites from communication grads who aren't hosing out a meat pulverising machine in three degrees at 4am.
I too trained as a journalist and worked in the media for a period - I got out after less than a decade because I realised in my 20s I should not - and didn’t want to - be the one telling entire communities how or what to think.
The excuse for poor analysis and lack of depth in stories used to be “churn”. Simply getting the required centimetres to fill pages. But that was in the days when your primary journalistic weapons were a (landline, rotary…) phone and a set of car keys. If you covered a bushfire, you were standing right amongst it, and if you couldn’t find a working landline, you had to drive until you did to file.
Similar excuses are made now. But it’s not because they have 64 or 120 pages to fill; it’s because they have endless URLs to populate. Literally unlimited space - and unlimited potential mouse clicks to attract. The churn still exists, but it now has its roots in the attention span of carefully-targeted audiences.
Additional to the pressures to produce endless streams of copy, classism *is* a dire issue in today’s media. There’s no doubt about the case made by Joel. Three years of education in a single institution, with the end result being a bit of paper and a start most likely with the organisation where you did your 2nd/3rd year industry experience unit. An expanding number of graduates still live at home. They’re numerically adults, but have little further life experience than when they stepped into high school. B and they’ve never set foot in a Centrelink office.
But the issue doesn’t end with class or privilege. There has been a huge shift in how the media sees itself. The “fourth estate” was - and I use that word deliberately - one which self-supervised. The fourth estate understood it was a branch of public service. That is ensconced in our media landscape - the very structure of our broadcast licences, for example.
The licences providing public airwaves for use by private and public interests were constructed with the national interest in mind. The self-governing of (for example) the print media by a single, voluntary-membership council was a similar nod to the media’s need to serve the public. The fourth estate was mature enough to train its journalists to value independence, and more importantly integrity and ethics. And train them to ask questions of power - whether that was the local council or millionaire business owner in country Victoria, or holding the PMO to account.
As cadets, we weren’t treated by our employers as cheap, full-production models of the journos who’d been around a few years. We were expected to make mistakes. Require supervision. And training.
Recently I’ve done degree studies in media: partly for fun and partly because I entertain the idea of getting “back into it”, putting my money where my mouth is. A dry ethics class hasn’t got spots on the lecture from the old grizzly sub editor who stored a spare case of Melbourne Bitter under his desk. For emergencies. The outcomes of on-the-job-training and university degrees are worlds apart. I’ve done both, so I can stand behind that statement, even keeping in mind the inherent subjectivity of me being the case study.
Every media business throughout history has been out to make a profit; or at the very least, not cost more than it made. But today’s focus on finances, along with the pre-packaged “fully-trained” expectations placed on graduates means inexperienced people, of all classes of society, are being pushed into prime positions, by default. Positions that influence what our country - and world - will look like in the not too distant future.
If these graduates say no, or tackle a
story from an angle that doesn’t meet their employer’s wishes, all of a sudden, maybe their click stats take a dive. They’re no longer reaching their audience. And they’re waved goodbye - often into the rapidly converging land of PR, where at least pushing the interest of their employer is a noble(r) pursuit.
The truth of the problem with our media today isn’t the journalists - on the whole, journos do what they’re told, angle-wise. Always have. That’s how they get published. The real change in our media is the organisations themselves. They no longer act in the public interest. They are there for their proprietors, or that proprietor’s “supporters”; advertising money is exponentially more powerful today than it was 30 or so years ago - and it was pretty hefty even back then.
The bones of our media have become brittle and editorial independence is a rare beast these days. What we know as our “mainstream” media is no longer worthy of the title “fourth estate”.
That title is now owned by independents who struggle daily to get their stories out. It all goes back to who is actually running the organisation, and their values, regardless of the age or class or experience of the journalist.
And, let’s not get started on the topic of how the corruption of power structures within which the media operates effect the stories we see. That’s another essay all together.