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Contents
Abstracts
Crumbling Pillars?
Eric Beecher
This article argues that the October 2006 Australian media reforms will almost certainly ensure that Australia’s media will become less free and less sceptical. It suggests that the debate almost entirely centred on commercial factors, and ignored questions about the social role of journalism and its importance to a functioning democracy. With the internet now seeing the decoupling of journalism from advertising and the availability of free content online, there are fundamental questions about how good journalism will be funded and protected that the new laws do nothing to answer.
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Media ownership changes 1987 and 2006: From Alan Bond to CVC
Rodney Tiffen
The changes to media ownership policy in 1987 led to unprecedented instability in Australia’s media with many deleterious consequences over the next few years. The changes in October 2006 are the most far-reaching since then, and it is still impossible to know what their ramifications will be. The most significant move so far has been James Packer’s sale of half of PBL to the international private equity group CVC for $4.5 billion. Analysts have so far neglected to examine what this might portend for the future of Australian media.
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The Digital Action Plan
Jock Given
This article discusses the Australian government’s late 2006 ‘Digital Action Plan’, which details policy changes for the transition to digital television. It suggests that the plan does open up greater possibilities for new services, and so encourages consumers to purchase digital receivers; however, it also suggests that Australia’s approach is characterised by a desire to follow international trends rather than any inventive use of the technology, or policy leadership.
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Media reforms: Telstra’s perspective
Jane van Beelen
Jane van Beelen outlines Telstra’s perspective on the media reforms in the context of convergence. Telstra has argued that allocation of an unassigned 700MHz channel for mobile TV is consistent with the government’s policy objectives of harnessing the opportunities from convergence to achieve diversity in Australia’s media sector, and will enable the efficient provision of mobile TV services. Telstra cautions that these benefits will only manifest if the regulatory settings are right. The regulatory framework for Channel B will need to provide for competitive neutrality, up-front clarity of rights and obligations, market-based outcomes and a ‘light-touch’ regulatory framework.
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Disabled access and media reform
Alex Varley
The recent media reforms were not just about ownership. The quiet revolution was the changes to the captioning provisions of the Broadcasting Services Act. Whilst the amendments tightened up some previous loopholes, they also opened up a range of new areas of potential dispute. There is no quick fix and one thing is clear: if you are disabled, access to the expanding possibilities of digital television is less assured than a firm date for analogue switch-off.
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Is anyone listening? The fate of diversity in digital broadcasting policy
Nhi Pham and Christina Spurgeon
This commentary examines how diversity of content is being addressed in the Howard government’s 2006 media policy reforms. In particular, it identifies which services and providers have an interest in providing genuinely new content on new digital platforms.
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The spaces and places of audience research in Australian television
Chris Lawe Davies and Jason Sternberg
The history of TV ratings and developments in audience measurement has been well documented in Australia, but little attention has been paid to TV networks’ use of ratings in their decision-making processes. This paper examines changes to the structure of the TV ratings industry since 2000, when ATR/OzTAM replaced ACNielsen as the official provider. It also examines the changing functions of audience research by Australian television broadcasters, highlighting three trends. Increased efficiency in ratings provision has made commercial broadcasters more reactive and conservative in programming decisions. At the same time, however, the increasing sophistication of ratings data enables broadcasters to strategically reposition themselves in response to the changing media environment. Market fragmentation has seen increasing importance placed on commissioned and in-house research in a shift away from mass audience capture to establishing and maintaining an audience bond.
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Australian TV news revisited: News ecology and communicative frames
Simon Cottle and Mugdha Rai
There is, we contend, considerably more complexity in the differentiated field and communicative structures delivering television news today than has so far has been acknowledged or explored. These complexities have direct bearing on debates about ‘democracy’, whether approached through the conceptual prisms of critical rationalism or cultural populism. This article reports on recent research which secures added empirical purchase on Australian TV journalism, and does so by analytically identifying, systematically mapping and pursuing into the production domain the repertoire of communicative frames that characterise Australian TV news. We elaborate a new conceptual framework for the study of ‘communicative frames’ and examine how these are deployed differentially within and across the daily news programmes delivered by the ABC, SBS, and Channels Seven, Nine and Ten. These communicative structures, we argue, prove consequential for the public elaboration and engagement of contentious issues and contending identities. They need to be taken seriously in debates about media democracy.
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Unholy wars: Media representations of the first Bali bombings and their aftermath
Jeff Lewis and Sonya de Masi
Over the past three decades, the Indonesian tourist island of Bali has been appropriated into the Australian national imaginary. For Australians, Bali has become a neighbourhood playground and psycho-cultural land-bridge to Indonesia and the Asian region. With the emergence of a global ‘war on terror’, Bali has also become a primary battleground, dividing the symbolic claims of the Islamist militants against the Western economic and hedonistic empire. This divide becomes crystallised in the Australian news reporting of the Islamist attacks in Bali of 2002 and 2005. Our research has found a common frame of reference in the reporting of the attacks, most particularly as Australian journalists’ reference to a sense of national history, the ‘9/11 wars’ and Australia’s adherence to US foreign policy and cultural hegemony. News reporting tended to subsume the details of ‘Islam’ and Islamic grievance within a more xenophobic rendering of Australian identity and an apocalyptic vision of good and evil.
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Some things we should know about talkback radio
Graeme Turner
This article serves as the introduction to this special issue, but it also presents an overview of the current state of research into talkback radio in Australia. It is only recently that significant interest in researching this format has surfaced, despite its importance within the Australian mediascape. In what follows, I argue that this comparative neglect has had its effects — for instance, we are still working through elite assumptions about the inherently tabloid nature of the format which research into other media such as television has overcome. Most importantly, though, I argue that we need to move beyond the notion that talkback is defined by its demographic profile in order to more fully and more contingently examine its social, cultural and political functions.
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Cash and controversy: A short history of commercial talkback radio
Liz Gould
While many scholars rightly point to the contemporary influence of talkback radio as an increasingly prominent platform for civic and political debate, as talkback radio approaches its fortieth anniversary, little is known about the history and development of the format. It was in 1967 that metropolitan radio stations in Australia rushed to embrace a ‘new’ radio programming format, as talkback radio became formally — and finally — legally permissible. However, the documented history of commercial talkback in Australia began many years earlier and has been punctuated by frequent clashes between radio programmers and broadcasting regulators over issues relating to the nature of programming content. As a platform for the discussion of contemporary social issues, talkback has thrived by courting controversy and debate. The commercial talkback radio format has supported the rise of a small, but highly prominent, group of men and continues to be strongly guided by economic imperatives, as witnessed in recent developments such as the ‘cash for comment’ affair. This article details the growth of metropolitan commercial talkback radio in Australia over the last four decades and looks at the extent to which public policy and economic influences have shaped the development of the format.
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Talkback radio and Australian politics since the summer of 1967
Bridget Griffen-Foley
This article explores the intersections between Australian party politics and commercial talkback radio from 1967 to 1983. It considers the eagerness of individual politicians such as John Gorton and R.W. Askin to exploit the possibilities of ‘dial-in’ radio, addresses how political parties came to view the usefulness (and the dangers) of talkback radio, and assesses the political interventions of Brian White, Ormsby Wilkins and John Laws. In doing so, the article traces the radio industry’s campaign against the ban on pre-election comment, the evolution of the Fairness Code for Broadcasters, and the relationship between media monitoring and talkback radio.
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Hanging her laundry in public: Talkback radio, governmentality and the housewife, 1967–73
John Tebbutt
This article addresses the way in which talkback radio and women radio listeners were implicated in and shaped by social changes in 1960s and 1970s Australia. Two-way, open-line or talkback became a venue where the housewife, as a social figure or subject, was encouraged to voice her opinions: it was crucial in managing the contradictory representations of this figure as the changing conditions of capital, including increased work opportunities for women, moves for equal pay and new forms of consumerism, created new modern identifications for women.
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Mornings with Radio 774: Can John Howard’s medium of choice enhance public sphere activity?
Carolyne Lee
This paper addresses the necessity for program-specific analysis in radio research by focusing on Jon Faine’s Morning Program on ABC Radio 774 (Melbourne). After establishing the present prime minister’s preference for radio appearances over all other types of media, I examine the extent to which Faine’s particular iteration of talkback has the capacity to enhance public sphere activity, given the view that this medium is strategically being utilised by politicians to gain virtually uncontested access to listeners. My examination occurs principally through a morning’s observation of Faine’s program, supported by information from recordings of a constructed week of the program from the previous two months. My findings suggest that, while a certain amount of ‘top-down’ flow of information is unavoidable, some contestation of ideas often occurs, mitigating politicians’ exploitation of at least this particular program. Faine’s program does, moreover, seem to give the impression of an acceptance of listeners’ calls on topics that affect their daily lives, even though only a small number of ‘ordinary’ callers are featured each day. My observations suggest this program does offer processes that enhance public sphere activity, although with some qualifications.
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Jonestalk: The specificity of Alan Jones
Stephen Crofts and Graeme Turner
Alan Jones is among the most controversial, and reputedly the most influential, of talkback hosts in Australia. Governments appear to provide privileged access, and his media campaigns appear to achieve results. However, an increasing number of commentators have argued that his so-called influence is an illusion — the product of indefatigable self-promotion and a gullible public. While debate over what the radio audience might make of Alan Jones continues, in this article we use quantitative and qualitative analyses of the program itself to examine what is distinctive about his performance as a radio talkback host in order to also address the question of how, and to what extent, Jones both seeks and achieves political influence.
Additional, detailed information on the data which underlies this article, but which was unsuited to the confines of a normal journal article, is freely available on the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies website. There is also information on the data analysis of Graeme Turner's broader research project on talkback radio, of which this article forms a part.
Jonestalk: The specificity of Alan Jones - Data and Analysis
Talkback Radio in Australia - Data Tables
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Talkback, community and the public sphere
Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley
This paper explores the relationship between the audience of commercial talkback radio and the actual existing democratic public sphere in Australia. Drawing upon Anderson’s (1987) notion of an imagined community and Warner’s (2002) discussion of publics, the paper suggests that two different but entwined modes of address operate around the talkback audience. The first centres on the active creation of an imagined community brought into being and maintained through host and caller interaction, whilst the second, which is dependent on this prior formation, involves the audience being treated as a political public within the public sphere.
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Local voices, ‘talkback’ and commercial regional FM radio
Kate Ames
Commercial FM stations in Rockhampton, Sea FM and Hot FM, have been operating in the city since late 2000. Previously owned by competing networks (Sea FM by RG Capital Radio and Hot FM by DMG), they are both now owned by Macquarie Regional Radioworks. The push for listeners has always been through the stations’ breakfast programs. Traditionally, commercial FM breakfast slots have been marked by comedy or humour-oriented teams. Interaction with these teams in a metropolitan environment has not been studied academically, but studies of interaction between listeners and presenters of breakfast programs in the Rockhampton and Gladstone region reveal that talkback in a traditional sense has emerged as a vital component of the programs, at times focusing on serious local issues. This paper reveals the results of analysis of interaction between listeners and breakfast presenters on Hot FM and Sea FM. It shows that the commercial FM stations provide an important opportunity for locals to voice their opinions on local issues in a format generally renowned for its light-hearted approach to engaging listeners. Where previously ‘talkback’ has been associated with ABC and commercial AM stations, this paper will consider definitions of talkback in terms of its application in a regional setting, and reveals the popularity of the format for a demographic previously ignored in the Central Queensland media landscape.
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The interactive audience: A radio experiment in community-building
Gail Phillips
The internet has provided us with a global laboratory to watch community-building in action. However, its role in the virtual universe is one that the more humble radio has had at the local community level since its inception. As soon as one-to-one communication gave way to one-to-many broadcasting, community-building began, based on the shared listening experience — ranging from families gathering around the wireless to local or national audiences tuning in simultaneously. Talkback made radio interactive by bringing the listener into the program, but it also gave program-makers the chance to gain first-hand experience of who was actually out there. This paper describes a radio talkback experiment which unexpectedly exposed the power of the relationship audiences can build with radio. Based on a ‘can you help’ formula, the program found passionate drivers within its audience members to belong, to bond, and to do good works that contribute to the social good.
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‘Stay on the line …’: An analysis of callers to talkback radio in Australia
Sarah Gillman
This paper considers the question: who is calling talkback radio in Australia and why? It suggests that callers should not be regarded as one large homogenous group. Instead, it argues that talkback callers pick up their phones for a number of reasons, from genuinely seeking information to seeking company and, since September 11, to make sense of their world. In doing so, this paper looks at the ways in which callers are integrated into programs and the ways in which they contribute to the creation of radio content and public debate. Finally, this paper analyses the small group of repeat callers who, like ‘Sylvia of Turner’, become, as Todd Gitlin calls them, familiar strangers, and analyses the role of producers and announcers in the construction of the celebrity talkback caller.
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REVIEWS
Edited by Kitty van Vuuren and Angi Buettner
Bauer, Laurie, Holmes, Janet and Warren, Paul, Language Matters
Brereton, Pat, Hollywood Utopia
Cox, Robert, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere
Curnow, Jenifer, Hopa, Ngapare and McRae, Jane (eds), He Pitopito Kôrero nô te Perehi Mâori: Readings From the Maori-Language Press
Dwyer, T., Wilding, D., Wilson, H. and Curtis, S., Content, Consolidation and Clout
Hardt, Hanno, Myths for the Masses
Inglis, K.S., Whose ABC?
Jaikumar, Priya, Cinema at the End of Empire
Lynch, Marc, Voices of the New Arab Republic
Mac, Wayne, Don’t Touch That Dial
Neill, Karen and Shanahan, Morris (eds), The Great New Zealand Radio Experiment
Shakespeare, Tom, Disability Rights and Wrongs
Terry, Janice J., US Policy in the Middle East
Torney-Parlicki, Prue, Behind the News: A Biography of Peter Russo
Watson, James and Hill, Anne, Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies and Dictionary of Media Studies
Xigen Li, Internet Newspapers
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