Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

TV news bashes youth and incites ignorance

By Malcolm King - posted Wednesday, 13 August 2008


This article is about how Australian TV news and current affairs has cast youth as irresponsible brats, turned its back on exposing corruption while creating a multimillion dollar circus that would make Caligula laugh.

Apart from a few newspapers of record such as The Australian, The Herald Sun and The Sydney Morning Herald, the notion of balanced reporting has completely disappeared. Once upon a time it was critical for a reporter to cover both sides of a story. Now it’s a rarity.

You’d never see Caroline Jones, Jana Wendt or Andrew Olle do a story on exploding dishwashing machines, alien abductions or the mad old woman with 80 cats who confronts the camera crew with a shotgun. It’s like a dumbed down version of the old Melbourne Truth newspaper.

Advertisement

News, current affairs reporters and readers are using dramatic theatre techniques such as asides and posing rhetorical questions in their stories. So the Scottish king MacBeth asks, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” The lead anchor from the Channel Ten news desk asks, “How long will police let these hoons terrorise our streets?”

There are the chatty introductions by the newsreaders as if prologue-like, they are setting the scene for the news. The audience has to suspend belief during some news stories where it is so obvious the reporter got it wrong, i.e., “did he say Quebec was the capital of Canada?”

Is it a purely Adelaide phenomenon that TV news portrays the 15-24 age group as binge-drinking, drug-taking, speeding P-platers? I have just traveled through Italy, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia and none of these nations’ media treat their 15 to 25-year-old audiences with such disrespect or contempt.

Critics say that young people have few or no values. That’s like saying all Hawaiians surf or all tall people are good basketball players. They say young people are too passionate, too inexperienced, and too dangerous. But remember, Edward Teller was 44 when he invented the hydrogen bomb. I will talk about the fallacy of generalisations later.

I have yet to hear a young person be reported by any media on ways to save and use water. Remember the dictum: “more are ideas are good. One idea is bad”? If ever you want to further disenfranchise a group from the body politic, the best thing to do is ignore or demonise them. And that’s just what Australia’s news and current affairs TV have done.

I have been guilty of using the same ridiculous generalisations that the media throws up to classify individuals who happen to be born within a set of years. It took me some time to realise that two academic papers I’d written on prevailing attitudes to tertiary education by the baby boomers, were in fact rubbish.

Advertisement

The fallacy lay in using other people’s generalisations about the boomers. People such as Bernard Salt make a living by allegedly “taking the social temperature” of these age cohorts and then, like the Delphic Oracle, make pronouncements as if they were the truth rather than statistics.

Are these studies valid? No. Are replicable? No - but who cares? Can we categorise a whole generation? No. Can we categorise a section of that generation? No. Can we generalise about generations? You can have a crack at it but you need to stand a long, long way back and it’s not the job of social researchers. It’s the job of historians. In 100 years time we might get some ideas about very general traits of people we have branded the baby boomers and generations X,Y,Z and F.

TV news and current affairs have been treating us like chumps for too long. I’m not suggesting that they should give us 20 minutes of dry economic news every night but the ability (apart from SBS’s Karen Middleton or the most excellent Brian Thomson) to give meaning and context in a 20-second grab of an important local or national event is missing. It’s not the news. It’s some pictures with a voice over.

So it’s a triple whammy. If you run the lowest common denominator stories on a powerful medium and the content is unsubstantiated, one-sided and/or inflammatory, then one has a recipe for, as the Marxists used to say, false consciousness or more aptly, filling ones head with rubbish.

There’s a place for rubbish on TV. The Channel Ten News has almost cornered the market although its sports coverage is very good. The Bold and the Beautiful can be interpreted as an extended metaphor for Rudd’s cabinet meetings, although I’m not so sure about the Bold part. I’m all for eliminating ambiguity and shades of grey and there’s no better medium for delineating the heroes (us) from the villains (them).

Except when you want to know something important. For example, does anyone know whether house prices in the capital cities are rising, falling or remaining static? In Adelaide, for the past two months all the news services have run contradictory stories on house prices. Last month they were falling in some suburbs by as much as 10 per cent. Last week they were going up by 12 per cent. So they swung 22 per cent in the last two months? Bollocks.

It would take an enterprising journalist half a day and do some research on house prices, match the claims of the various Real Estate Institutes and see whether or not they’re correct. An easy story although the head line: “Real Estate Agents Lie” is hardly news.

Once upon a time there used to be seven values that reporters relied upon to determine whether a story was news (apart from the fact that it was new). They were: Impact, Conflict, Timeliness (it’s happening now), Proximity (close geographical or cultural association), Prominence, the Unusual (man bites dog) and Currency (for example, the rise of the green movement).

Now Conflict and the Unusual have buried the others.

Let’s turn our attention again to Australia’s much under reported and maligned youth. Can anyone remember the Oaktree Foundations Zero Seven campaign? About 700 young people including many under 16, traveled across the country telling people that the Government should lift its aid from 0.35 per cent of Gross National Income to 0.7 per cent. And when the ALP formed Government, that’s exactly what they did.

One would have thought that was worth some TV news. Alas, no. According to the 2006 Census of Population and Housing, there are about 2.9 million young people aged 15-24 years living in Australia, 14 per cent of the total Australian population. Think of the ratings! Alas, no.

According the TV news and current affairs, Australia’s youth has gone missing in action. They are certainly not watching the tripe dished up as news by the networks.

TV news and current affairs can’t descend much lower. Four years ago all of the nightly news networks ran pictures of a water skiing squirrel. The next story up was George Bush Jnr discussing the state of the war in Iraq. Once upon a time that would have been taken as tacit editorial comment. Now it’s part of the seamless product that fails to inform and serves to inflame the worst angels of our nature.

Make that squirrel Head of TV News and Current Affairs - at least he has got balance.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

3 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Malcolm King

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Article Tools
Comment 3 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy