|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
ISSN: 1329-878X |
ContentsAbstractsLiz Jacka and Helen Wilson: American Empire: Media and international insecurityThis issue of MIA was conceived at about the time that the November 2003 issue on ‘The New “Others”: Media and Society Post-September 1’ was published. That issue, due to the normal journal lead times, was largely assembled before both the Bali bombing and the war in Iraq, and thus the editors, Liz Jacka and Lelia Green, were not able to give the kind of coverage to those events that they, and we, would have liked. So this issue, in which we include several articles which analyse aspects of the (continuing) Iraq war, is to some extent a sequel to the earlier one. However, editing that issue and observing the unfolding events surrounding the war and its aftermath also led us to begin to ruminate upon the intensification of US world hegemony, and to reflect on the apparent erosion of any counterforce to its continuing economic, military and cultural domination. This posed the question of whether the ‘9/11 thing’ had led to a change in the United States’ role in the world and whether, in fact, what we were confronting was an American empire, with the same kind of total power in the world of the twenty-first century that the Roman Empire wielded in the ancient world. This issue, then, seeks to illuminate the extension of the ‘American empire’ and the resulting deployment internationally of discourses of insecurity, which drive a greater and greater wedge between the ‘free world’ — as George W. Bush likes to call it — and the forces of darkness and barbarism. Marcus O’Donnell: ‘Bring it on’: The apocalypse of George W. BushThis article examines a number of cinematic, literary and journalistic texts in the context of what filmmaker Tom Tykwer calls the ‘aesthetic memory’ of September 11. In particular, it explores the way these narratives relate to deeply embedded Western cultural myths of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic language of American Christian fundamentalism and the heroic narratives of Hollywood film are explored as twin influences on a powerful civil religion dubbed ‘The Captain America complex’ by Jewett and Lawrence (2003a). Steve Stockwell: Dealing with world domination: Lessons from The Powerpuff Girls and friendsHow did the world change on September 11, 2001? While the events of that day may be more the product of shifting geopolitical formations than the cause, September 11 brings into focus the political functions of global media networks and their potential as conduits of world domination. In this context, Cartoon Network provides some insights and challenges for both media theory and the politics of the twenty-first century. World domination is a recurring theme on Cartoon Network in anime products such as Dragon Ball Z and Gundam Wing, in post-feminist products such as The Powerpuff Girls and Dexter’s Laboratory, and in cross-over work such as Samurai Jack and, most intriguingly, Pinky and the Brain, where a super-smart lab rat and his stupid friend are constantly plotting to take over the world. The failure — on Cartoon Network at least — of all plans for world domination invites us to consider means of resistance to aspirational politics on a global scale. Elspeth Tilley: Propaganda — Who, us? The Australian government ‘terror kit’This study tests allegations that the Australian government’s 2003 ‘terror kit’ was propaganda. Because propaganda’s definition and function are contested, content analysis was trialled as a method of clarifying propaganda detection. A propaganda index was developed using both manual and computerised coding, and while each method had limits, together they produced reliable and valid results. Measured against the index, Howard’s letter scored a 62 per cent propaganda rating. Susanne Davies: Shining on in the gloom: 9/11 and the creation of an appearance of consensusThe ‘tyranny of distance’ that once marked Australia’s standing as an outpost of the British Empire may have dissipated, yet there is much to suggest that the insecurities that characterised its colonial status now find renewed expression in Australia’s alignment with American political, cultural and military interests and policies. Assisting in fostering public allegiance to a new American Empire, are some segments of the media that, far from reporting the news, now engage in propagandist style campaigning that collapses time, space, and difference. The ‘Shine On’ Memorial initiated by Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper to mark the first anniversary of the 9/11 bombings exemplifies this approach. Imploring citizens to join in ‘a community memorial’ as ‘a mark of respect to the victims’ and ‘a symbol of hope’, this campaign dug deep into Australian insecurities to manufacture an appearance of consent, and thus operated to mask and delegitimate difference and dissent. Amanda Roe: Graphic satire and public life in the age of terrorThis paper investigates media representations of international insecurity through a selection of newspaper cartoons from some of the major daily Australian broadsheets. Since 2001, cartoonists such as Bruce Petty, John Spooner and Bill Leak (in The Age and The Australian) have provided an ongoing and vehement critique of the Australian government’s policies of ‘border protection’, the ‘war on terror’ and the words of mass distraction associated with Australia joining the war in Iraq. Cartoonists are often said to represent the ‘citizen’s perspective’ of public life through their graphic satire on the editorial pages of our daily newspapers. Increasingly, they can also be seen to be fulfilling the role of public intellectuals, defined by Richard A. Posner as ‘someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments and corporations’. Cartoonists enjoy an independence and freedom from censorship that is rarely extended to their journalistic colleagues in the print media and it is this independence that is the vital component in their being categorised as public intellectuals. Their role is to ‘question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to re-examine rules and institutions’ (Posner, 2003: 31). With this useful — if generalised — definition in mind, the paper considers how cartoonists have contributed to debates concerning international insecurity in public life since 2001. Zoe Hibbert and Amanda Starr: Conflict communication management: Why Australians didn’t See their troops in IraqAs the first conflict to be viewed ‘in real time’, the Iraq war of 2003 was dominated by almost continuous footage delivered by technological and journalistic innovations. In contrast with the unprecedented coverage provided by British and American embedded journalists, little was reported of the role of Australian troops. The Australian media have been highly critical of the way the Australian Defence Force (ADF) restricted media access to Australian troops, claiming that the ADF obstructed the community’s right to know with excessive secrecy and ‘strategic unhelpfulness’. The ADF says it was unable to provide media access because of operational and national security issues specific to this conflict. Research conducted amongst members of both the Australian media and the ADF’s Military Public Affairs section suggests that the debate around access and secrecy is symptomatic of a much larger clash of cultures. The difficulties faced at the media/military interface are partially explained by the fact that current communication theory does little to enhance understanding of what is really happening in conflict situations. Tal Azran: Resisting peripheral exports: Al Jazeera’s war images on US televisionThis paper describes work that is underway to develop a framework for the analysis of media flows from periphery to centre — the phenomenon known in globalisation studies as ‘contraflow’. The framework proposed in this paper challenges the fundamentals of current studies of peripheral exports, which arguably fail to consider Western resistance involved in the representation of peripheral networks due to the presumption that ‘contra-flow’ single-handedly supports the cultural heterogenisation paradigm. The paper suggests that this presumption is outdated, particularly in light of growing tensions in the wake of 9/11, and that ‘contraflows’ which threaten the West can promote cross-cultural polarisation beside heterogenisation. The paper argues that researchers would be in a better position to identify the general tendency of media globalisation if they began to think of periphery–centre encounters more critically through the proposed framework. To illustrate this, the paper examines the case study of US media’s re-presentation of Al Jazeera’s so-called ‘counter-flowing’ war reports through the proposed framework. Akhteruz Zaman: Global diffusion with local dimension: A study of Iraq war news in South AsiaThe reporting of war has always been a tough challenge for journalists. Restricted access to information, lack of consensus about journalists’ role during wartime and the process of news production make the task daunting. The media’s vulnerability is manifested in the pattern of war coverage, which is directly related to a country’s historic, social and cultural perspectives. This content analysis of the 2003 Iraq war coverage in the Bangladesh press shows that, despite the publications’ dependence on Western sources for war news, they rejected the Western definition of the war and echoed the opposing version of it harboured by the country’s elite. Sue Turnbull: ‘Look at moiye, Kimmie, look at Moiye!’: Kath and Kim and the Australian comedy of tasteThis paper traces the genealogy of the ABC comedy series, Kath and Kim, in terms of its production history, the origins of its characters and themes, and its relationship to new hybrid comedy forms such as the mock-documentary (Roscoe and Hight, 2001). Issues such as the gender, class and taste politics of the comedy are explored in an attempt to rationalise the author’s own ambivalent reactions to the show. Particular attention is paid to a number of shopping scenes in which Kath and Kim’s failed suburban aesthetic becomes the source of what McCallum has described as a ‘comedy of recognition’ (McCallum, 1998). It is argued that the question of whether Kath and Kim is judged to be self-celebratory or self-critical has been rendered irrelevant by an extra-diagetic narrative which constructs the series as a little Aussie battler succeeding against the odds. Rob Cover: Digital addiction: The cultural production of online and video game junkiesThis paper examines the ways in which a concept of ‘digital addiction’ is produced in academic discourse, news media and contemporary popular culture. Digital addiction is used here as a collective term for the phenomena of internet/online addiction and addiction to electronic games. By showing how these are produced individually and together in the popular imaginary, the paper explores several of the ways in which the digital is likened to chemical, illicit or hallucinogenic drugs. It is shown that this association is made through normative discourses which work through a reductive and over-simplified representation of a real/virtual dichotomy that favours the real as physical and local over the virtual, which is represented as dangerous, false and addictive. Ben Crowley, Brian Dollery and Lin Crase: A comparative analysis of Australian film assistance, 1997–2001Considerable time has elapsed since the last comprehensive review of Australian film assistance policy. Despite the fact the no universal agreement exists on the aims of national film assistance policies, it is nonetheless timely to consider the overall effectiveness of present film assistance programs in Australia. Accordingly, the limited objective of this paper is to examine some aggregative outcomes of the Australian film assistance program in comparison to similar programs in Canada and the United Kingdom in the areas of film development, film production, film distribution, film exhibition and film performance. Book Reviews Barsamian, David, The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting
|
|
