Peculiarities of Australian Media - Article Example

06 June 2008 Australian Media Recent years, Australian media lost its unique educational appeal from thesources of news and education to intertwinement media only. Traditionally, the national medium for mass communication, magazines have played an important role in American politics, education, culture, acculturation, and socialization. Magazines not only have informed but also have provided entertainment and recreation to countless isolated families during times when these pleasures were few and far between (Biagi 31). The most popular magazines used for analysis are The Weekend Australian Magazine, Girlfriend, WHO. One would be hard-pressed to visit any Australian home and not find a magazine of some kind. Moreover, magazines, like other print media, appeal more to the intellect than to the senses and emotions of their audiences. Magazines became volatile commodities with the advent of television but were able to sustain their territory because they were not as transient as the broadcast media. They are more permanent than newspapers, with a longer readership span; and magazines remain in readers' homes for weeks, months, and sometimes even years. Since the beginning of magazines in Australia, those with the highest circulation have been aimed at female audiences. The editors announced they would no longer depend on advertising for economic support; instead, they solicited private donations. Magazines have been responsible for the dissemination and proliferation of information to masses of people. As the first national medium, magazines have been at the forefront of the transmission of ideas, information, and attitudes from person to person, city to city, state to state, country to country, and continent to continent. Magazines appear in many forms and formats. Magazines have been so successful in their attempts to communicate with the masses that other media have often emulated them. Newspapers have become more like magazines in marketing methods, writing style, and format (Lester 75). Every year for the past decade there has been the creation of television programs promoted as newsmagazine shows. Still women's earnings are rising compared with men's, a fact that helps make women a consumer group of vital interest to the mass media. In addition, many women who do not work outside the home exercise a considerable voice in making purchases. For years advertisers have recognized the buying power of women consumers and targeted messages to them via the mass media. The movement of women into the labor market has enhanced advertiser interest in reaching a female audience (Biagi 38). This situation stems from the fact that traditional news values represent conflict, controversy, power struggles, political battles, and changes in the status quo--all elements linked to the masculine domination of society. Women, as a group, have not been key players in the political, economic, and military developments that make headlines. Women's activities traditionally have been seen as unworthy of prominent news coverage, either on the front pages of important newspapers or on nightly network newscasts. Women's news generally has fitted into the "soft news" category of entertainment or feature material (Lester 71). The rankings of newspapers on coverage of women in the Women, Men and Media study underscored this point. Apart from their relative absence in the news, the images of women in other areas of mass communications have come under attack. Researchers consistently have found the portrayal of women in advertisements at stereotypical levels. These facts explain entertainment nature of contemporary magazines aimed to bring pleasure and delight instead of education and informing functions (Biagi 35). Since the future can only be understood in terms of the past, it may be instructive to quickly note the history of women's efforts to influence media content. Feminists have been trying for one hundred years to attack the pervasive stereotypes used in media portrayals of women as well as the frequent absence of women from media coverage, with its implicit message that women are not important. It appears that women today continue to strive for a "fairer" depiction in the mass media (Lester 91). Yet depiction varies widely, depending on what segment of the total women's audience is being addressed. The examples of WHO and Girlfriend show that women's audience is split along age, class, racial, life-style, and cultural lines. Feminists themselves break into separate political groups. Numerous problems arise in attempting to decide what "fair" depiction should be, especially in an advertiser-dominated, male-controlled media structure (Biagi 38). Because entertainment often is at the margins of culture, there is a tendency on the part of politicians and social critics to condemn it. Yet it remains our greatest hope for newprop and the enhancement of the popular culture. By contrast, sports has transformed itself into an extraordinary commercialism, often more business than a mecca for sports heroes. More importantly, it idealized the diversity and creativity of its audiences and stimulated their imaginations. However, as an art form that depended on ticket sales for its success, its descents into profit taking made film industry to attack for debasing the popular culture. Without question, the popular culture and The Weekend Australian Magazine has become the vessel of participatory democracy -- in politics, race, religion, the environment, trade, and almost every other concern -- and the new propaganda as well as the old has played a dramatic role in the emergence of each of these concerns (Lester 33). The examples of the Weekend Australian Magazine, Girlfriend, WHO show that interspersing of the bizarre and the meaningful has made the task of differentiating information and entertainment as difficult as drawing distinctions between information and propaganda, a task that the old and the new propaganda will make more possible to address. Even the information highway, with its transporters, sites, and interactive capabilities, has supplanted its wealth of knowledge with a marginal playground of entertainment and involvement. Certainly, there will be resistance to the freer use of the term propaganda. Journalists, particularly, will be reluctant to think of themselves as propagandists, whether the old or the new (Biagi 61). The very ownership of new means of communicating would create new appetites for communication, taking the form of a positive feedback loop, a synergy that generated new communication energies as each fueled the other. And the more communication that was generated, the more inventive the high-tech communication industry would be in meeting and exploiting those needs. This would be a dynamic process with the promise of including everyone at some point and at some level. Despite the gaps and disparities, this held the greatest promise of ensuring access to the popular culture for everyone (Lester 75). Cyber space would become the ultimate news. New information and entertainment products would demand even more. The result was that consumer applications were being slowed down when they should have been speeding up. The challenge was to build up volume and structure rates in ways that would meet needs and forestall competition from other sources (Biagi 34). Mainstream journalists continue to seek nirvanas in their adoptions of techniques of objectivity, the new journalism, and public and civic journalism. But journalists who once were anointed as insiders now are once removed, and as such they are caught up in their private searches for nirvanas. They have become alienated from many of their sources and wide sectors of their audiences (Biagi 39). The Weekend Australian Magazine news has also lost much of its mass appeal, devolving into infotainment, simulated reality, and paid news. Certainly there is potential for news where new media forms reach out to new audiences, but one must question whether this brings more members into the popular culture or simply creates an old theater of the bizarre. Meanwhile, media is under attack as the bearer of messages, and its critics want to shoot the messengers. One example is the research that condemns media for desensitizing children to violence and exploiting the popular culture with lurid sex and pornography. But both violence and pornography are largely in the eyes of the beholders. The programs sounded more like a few leaders dominating a mass culture than a diversity of opinions expressed in a popular culture (Zelezny 88). Self-selected and screened audiences echoed their hosts, which produced more affirmation than interaction. On most of these shows the screening of callers assured monologues that only pretended to be dialogues (Lester 55). The modern Australian audience expects hot stories and new fashion features, new ideas and creating solutions instead of educational materials and teaching. Put another way, what the pollsters do is ask members of all kinds of publics questions which should properly be asked of particular publics. Carried to the extreme this would mean asking a highly technical engineering question of a miscellaneous collection of people containing only a handful of engineers qualified to answer and calling the result the "public opinion" of the group as a whole (Zelezny 26). Even though most of the issues about which the pollsters seek answers are ones on which the president presumably can act, it does not follow that everyone eligible to cast a vote for president or congressman is qualified by interest or information to participate in the poll. State and nation often are used incorrectly as synonyms which, except coincidentally, they are not (Lester 22). The former is an artificial agency --a political or governmental association existing for the purpose of taking care of an important phase of life. It includes many publics, but a public can exist beyond the borders of any particular state to include members of other states. Obviously race and nation are not synonymous even coincidentally. A nation, as is true of a public, can contain a range of racial types (Biagi 87). As a matter of fact most members of homogeneous groups do think alike as regards such matters, but the explanation is to be found, not by attempting to separate the study of man from that of his environment, but by recognizing the inseparability of the two. In other words, much of what has been called human nature must be regarded as human or social behavior (Lester 71). That is the modern point of view of what, for want of a better name, is called the habits and attitudes school of thought (Zelezny 88). Its theories and findings to date have stood the tests of scientific checking much better than was true of any of its predecessors, even though the moderns see the problem as much more complicated and do not expect to discover any simple formula by which to analyze or predict human thought and action. Such, at least, is what he ought to mean, as the translations are pretty good meanings (Biagi 77). Perhaps magazine industry acknowledges the individual's grasp of events so rewardingly as humor -- the political and social commentaries, the streams of consciousness of stand-up comics, the barbs of political cartoonists, the inversions of reality acted out by comic strip characters, and the satire of public figures such as politicians, columnists, and commentators, each skewering the other as the situation permits (Zelezny 75). In sheer volume, variety, and its synergy with politics and the arts, humor contributes to a consciousness of total. Polls and focus groups showed that the voters got a lot of information from late-night comedy sketches. Indeed, political humor in the Weekend Australian Magazine took on the aura of total as the lines between show business and politics became increasingly blurred (Biagi 31). In sum, recent years magazines propose readers entertainment and humorous stories instead of educational materials and news. They recognize that for public opinion to exist every member of a public does not necessarily have to be informed or even interested. Thus, they imply that some of those whose individual opinions go to make up the composite public opinion count for more than do others. A danger which a newspaperman must avoid is to consider public opinion as merely synonymous with majority opinion without taking into consideration the size of the articulate group he has in mind and ignoring the quantitative aspects of the different individual opinions involved. Works Cited 1. Biagi, S. Media/Impact: An Introduction to Mass Media. Wadsworth Publishing; 8 edition, 2006. 2. Lester, P. M. Visual Communication: Images with Messages. Wadsworth Publishing; 4 edition, 2005. 3. Zelezny, J. D. Communications Law: Liberties, Restraints, and the Modern Media. Wadsworth Publishing; 5 edition, 2006. Read More