In Contemporary Australian Media Is It far More Important to Entertain Than to Educate - Essay Example

In contemporary Australian media is it far more important to entertain than to educate Australian media is among the few others in the global domainwhich has transubstantiated its style of representing and method of operation within a short span of time. The media industries in Australia have undergone and through an incessant changes and it claim to be a true mirror of the society. When the media industry was in its nascent stage it actively participated in country's affairs and received a mixed reaction from the indigenous people. It is believed that on the one hand republic media coverage explicitly problematized the meanings of the nation, an on the other it provided structured access to people. The media coverage offered a concrete context for a national response to the question whether Australia should become a republic (O'Shaughnessy, pg 185). The contemporary Australian media has diversified into a more intricate operational structure and digressed from its old way of functioning. In the recent epoch, the unrestrained growth of Australian media has made it an important subject of studying if it is performing the dual job of entertaining and educating or has it streamlined its purpose to offering nothing but entertainment Like many other media industries in the world, Australian media industry is also dominated by a group of multi-billion dollar corporations which forces their will and on the various forms of Australian media like, television, radio, internet and newspaper. Television is among the most influential tools of media which forms a quasi-indispensable part of the daily life of an Australian. The cultural mingling and confluence of different external sources have a collective impact on the integrity and reverence of this audio-visual form of media in the country. Ever since mainstream professional television was launched in 1956, the broadcasters had striven to influence the lifestyle of the people. Since television is a part of the media industry, it cannot escape the general trend of this perennially lucrative industry to attract the customer with their uniqueness and fatten their profit margin. In the pursuit of making a name for itself in the media industry, the television channels try to produce shows and programs without considering much about its educative value and the type of message they are conveying. Australia has currently 6 free-to-air networks which include ABC, Seven Network, Nine Network and SBS. Considering the expanse of Australia, each of these channels covers a large region and thus has the potential to influence a bigger audience. From the people's point of view it is expected that every media industry should aim at distributing information that concerns its audience and entertain them with light-hearted shows. Be it the television or any other form of media, it is their onus to maintain the equilibrium in their content so that they do not get inclined on one aspect overlooking the other completely. ABC network has its number of channels operating all over Australia. These main government-owned TV channels seem to understand their social obligation to educate their audience and enrich them culturally. Starting from showing documentaries to critically acclaimed plays, the channels bring before the people the deeper subjects of the world. This widely broadcasted Australian channel has a proper segmentation of shows which are broadly categorized into children's adventure shows, documentaries, and talk shows with the celebrities and political stalwarts. The channels are also consistent in broadcasting religious shows along with the travelogues and wildlife shows. The edifice of success which ABC has built for itself is not based on the foundation of entertaining motive only. Some of the long running programs in Australia like, Mr Squiggle, Play School, Children's media program Behind the News, A Big Country and Music icons Countdown and rage may have the element of entertainment but they also come with an affirmative educative value. The online version of ABC has an open forum which is dedicated entirely for receiving ideas and comments on plethora of issues from the natives and the people across the globe. This mechanism is of great advantage since ABC identifies the social problems straight from the components of the society and inculcates awareness among the others. Subject like increasing in-flow of irradiated, bleached, and genetically modified food products, excessive packaging and marketing and banning of same sex marriages are put forward in these forums making the issues more transparent before the larger audience. Special broadcasting service is another government-funded Australian public television network which also has a large target audience. This television service was established with the aim of providing multilingual and multicultural radio and television services which will inform, educate and entertain the citizens. This will lead to the true reflection of Australia's multicultural society. Thus, SBS has set its priority towards educating the society with essence of entertainment to add to the recreational vale of their channel. SBS TV allocates a major part of its morning schedule to subtitled foreign-language films and news bulletins in languages other than English. The shows on current affairs concentrate more on international affairs than the ABC and many other commercial networks. This nationally available channel also shows a good number of documentaries and news which concerns the global sphere. Sports coverage of this channel has a strong focus on international sports. Although the element of entertainment is there, there has been no paradigm shift in its motive of enriching the people with its content high in educative value. This Australian TV channel was slow in adopting the trend of showing advertising breaks during programs. It started showing advertisements only at the end of 2006, and that too with an intention of increasing fund for the commission of multi-cultural drama and documentaries, and to popularize World News Australia's shift to a one-hour format. These contributions of the channel have their origin in a firm belief that it is the role of media to educate the people in an entertaining manner. Considering the fact that Australian film industry is comparatively a new inclusion in the world film industry, their representation of Australian culture and the social and political issues is commendable. Australian film industry has gifted a host of thought-provoking movies which are rich in their educative value and laden with the major issues that troubled the continent for long. While the film 'The Fringedwellers' raises the question of the need of stereotyping aborigines, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a sensitive handling of the racial problem in Australia (Johnson, 1987). Film industry of Australia perhaps got it one of the best films in their history with the release of Rabbit-Proof Fence. Robert Manne opined that it is a major film on the subject of Stolen Generations. The film is sensitive to the ideologies of the country and has an impending significance on the culture (D'aeth, 2004). Australian media continues to play a pivotal role in disseminating information about food and health. After an investigative research of over 400 articles on nutrition, the researches have drawn a conclusion that the information is represented in strict adherence to what was recommended by the nutritionist and the doctors. The content of the Australian television shows are also scrutinized to gauge the rate of accuracy at which they impart information and it has been evaluated that these shows cannot be accused of any manipulation of facts (Coveney, Pg 115). Magazines are accepted as the core part of media consumption for the majority of Australians and an indispensable part of the media industries in this country. Some of the popular magazines like, Australian Women's Weekly, Woman's Day, Reader's Digest, New Idea and better Homes and Gardens cover an assortment of significant topics that every contemporary Australian prefers to know about. The important aspect of most of the popular Australian magazines is that they are not driven by the motive of pleasing their advertisers and focus more on informing the readers. Their content is produced in lieu of what their readers expect to get from them rather than what their advertisers want it to be (Bonner, pg 189, 190). Australian media has progressed to include a wide range of media technologies including national newspapers, a nationwide network of community radio stations and an interactive compressed video-conferencing network owned by the Indigenous communities in Central Australia. There has been a continuous reluctance by mainstream media to shift from its narrow perspective on Indigenous affairs and thus it has become quite obvious that Indigenous media sector has to be relied on to fill the enormous information gaps. The unsuitability of mainstream television is also to be questioned (Meadows, pg 205). According to environmentalist David Suzuki, television industry of Australia has failed to spread the message of ecological threat to our planet effectively. Suzuki went on to explain that television informs its audiences in a way that is disconnected from the past and it assumes a global monoculture than identifying the huge cultural diversity existing on or planet. Australian media industry and too a large extent the television industry have rendered bits and pieces of information to the audience and thus the industry suffers from the problem of lack of context (Meadows, pg 206). According to Linda Benn, most of the commercial Australian TV channels win the favor the audience in the guise of entertaining them. The other researchers are of the opinion that television channels are varied like the people who are watching them. This leads to the development of an intimate connection of audience and the subject of discourse and the entertaining shows broadcasted in the channels (Cunningham, pg 33). It has been observed that Australian journalists encountered a persisting difficulty in negotiating with the cultures they seek to represent. It seems as if they have the ability to deal only with disruptions to the everyday, rather than reflecting the everyday itself, as they claim to do (Meadows, pg 203). This difficulty in reflecting the everyday is perhaps compensated by focusing on entertainment shows which further take the audience away from the reality. The media industry of the country is often regarded as the factory form of entertainment in terms of its methods of presentation and ready availability. Lippman believes that the Australian community relies mostly on the information regarding the socio-cultural and political issues. He also affirmed that although Australian media can play a significant role in communicating and soliciting ideas about various sensitive matters and informing them about each other, yet in reality the industry is not performing its task (Bennett, pg 320). The television and magazine industry in Australia have their sway over a large population and it is to be noted that they are centralized and owned by large corporations in connivance with government. It is believed that the whole media industry of the country is influenced by the coalition of government and the corporations. The question of educating people is kept aside in a time when majority of media houses act as propaganda organs for the government. Australia is often considered as a specimen that has not been able to assure the quality and independence of broadcasting by the media. The media sector is also pin-pointed for never been subjected to various levels of regulation. Cheap productions and more inclusion of unworthy programs just for the sake of entertainment is a common practice in many sectors of media and it is done at the expense of the right of the consumers to be enlightened and be knowledgeable. The intellectuals feel that with a little bit more professionalism, the media industry of Australia can produce high quality news programming and other educative shows. They need to be put in a regulatory environment. The media sectors in Australia are growing in a rapid scale and it seems to be potential enough to cater to the needs and tastes of the society they are serving. In a cosmopolitan country like Australia where multi-culturalism is the keyword, these media sectors try to formulate new strategies to attract the audience. There are gaping discrepancies among the various forms of media operating within the country in matters of presentation and handling of issues. While some sectors consider entertainment as the major tool to get closer to their audience, some stick to the actual principle of media and emphasize on the educative value of their content. The contribution of Australian media to report to the society about the matters of interest affecting them cannot be undermined. In the contemporary times Australian media industry is flooded with a variety of options and more channels for information communication is now available. This has directly led to the less control of the information imparted by these forms of media. The mounting media influence over Australian society is a matter of concern and that gives freedom to thee media houses to digress from their real motto of educating the people and indulge in broadcasting shallow entertainment shows that do little good to the society. It is to be borne in mind that if Australian media is analyzed for its motives and values, it can certainly be an informative source rather than being only entertainment oriented. References Coveney, John. Food, Morals, and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating. 2000 Routledge Meadows, Michael. Voices in the Wilderness: Images of Aboriginal People in the Australian Media. 2001, Greenwood Publishing Group Cunningham, Stuart; Miller, Toby and Rowe, David. Contemporary Australian Television 1994, UNSW Press Bennett, Tony and Carter, David. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. 2001, Cambridge University Press Johnson, Colin. (1987). "Chauvel and the centring of the Aboriginal male in Australian Film". The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 1 (1), available at Reading Work - 7(a) D'aeth, Tony Hughes. (2004). "Which Rabbit-Proof Fence Empathy, Assimilation, Hollywood". Australian Humanities Review, pg 4, available at Reading Work - 7(b) Bonner, Frances. Magazines, pg 189 -190, available at Reading Work - 5(a) O'Shaughnessy, The Nation and National Identity, Problematizing the Nation, pg 185, available at Reading Work - 2(a) Read More