I Love the Sound of Ranting in the Morning

“A good journalist always wakes up angry.”

I.F. Stone

by Dr Mark Hayes

(apologies to Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Duvall)

As a new university teaching Semester has just started, or is about to start, here’s an exercise I often deploy early in introductory communications studies tutorials to get students thinking about their media consumption habits.

“How many of you really, really enjoy being shouted at?” I ask, in a friendly voice, smiling at the class.

“Go on. It’s quite safe to respond,” I say, encouragingly. “You are among friends.”

University classes, certainly at an Australian Group of Eight (Go8) sandstone institution, are not usually populated by dunces or dummies. Many students come from private schools, or upper strata public schools, they’re upper or at least middle class in background, they all have up-market laptops, all have mobile phones and most have iPhones or equivalent, and to even be there in this kind of a class, they’d have to have achieved a very high tertiary entrance score as well as survived, even thrived, in the fearsome, ultra-competitive, struggle called Years 11 and 12 of high school.

Who says the data on the MySchool Web Site haven’t been hacked apart to generate crude league tables?

These students are experts at ‘sussing out assessment traps and tricks, at tunneling into the marking criteria to winkle out the cantrips they’re certain are hidden somewhere, and at saying or committing themselves to nothing until they find out it’s for assessment, or they can get some other advantage out of saying what they think the assessor wants them to say.

Being, for the most part, very practiced street level post-modernists, these new communications studies students are very media savvy. They’re saturated in it. They’re like goldfish in the goldfish bowl. A decade or more earlier, to cite Philip Adams’ concise definition, students like these, certified post-modernists, would have probably thought The X-Files was a documentary series.

Until some smart ass with greying hair and beard, glasses, a bad back, calling themselves a ‘doctor’ – Who? – comes along and asks them, “Who here really, really enjoys being shouted at?”

Nobody raises a hand.

Occasionally, a very brave, or reckless, soul pipes up, asking something relevantly acute like, “Is this for assessment?”

Quite occasionally, four eyed gray beard is mildly shocked when a particularly brave or reckless soul, no doubt seeking to curry favor with the tutor because why else would they do it; certainly not in a spirit of actually seeking to engender class discussion or contribute to learning something, pipes up and says something like:

“Of course nobody likes being shouted at!”

Almost a breakthrough! Pedagogic engagement! Might even have momentarily gotten their attention!

“Ok. Can I assume most of you don’t like being shouted at?” he asks, seeking some sort of affirmation.

A few tentative nods, no doubt encouraged by the demonstrated fact that the single participant who dared speak hadn’t been failed, docked some marks, or been verbally lashed for actually speaking in class.

“Right,” says gray beard, leaning on the lectern because his back’s rather bad today.

“Who here today listened to commercial radio or watched commercial television before coming to Uni?”

Class eyes narrow with suspicion, a wave of body language indicates a certain tenseness. ‘Here comes the ambush,’ they seem to be thinking. Their high school experiences have inured them to the certainty there just has to be a trick in here somewhere.

“It’s OK to be honest,” he says, reassuringly, peering over his glasses, “You’re among friends.”

Having created a supportive and welcoming class environment by not verbally dismembering anybody, yet, the class relaxes a little, and a few hands start to be raised.

“Only a few of you started your day by listening to or watching commercial media to get some sort of a handle on today’s news?”

“I usually listen to ABC Radio National Breakfast and AM,” pipes up the earlier brave or reckless student.

Gray beard feigns a heart attack, recovers, and grins broadly, saying “Hold that thought”.

Sensing strength in numbers, with a few hairy eyeballs cast at the quite probably brown nosing freak, others in the class actually commit to something and assert that they only listen to and watch commercial media by a vast majority show of hands. That took a while.

“Ok folks,” gray beard, who actually might have been around when 9/11 occurred, and who will later admit to remembering where he was and what he was doing when he heard JFK had been assassinated too, says, “nobody here likes being shouted at, but almost all of you admit that you only access commercial media. That about right?”

Class nods in general agreement, still alert for the assessment item tacked on to this class exercise.

The freaky student looks at the others like they’re brain damaged. This one’s clever. They’ve sussed out what’s coming.

“Nobody here likes being shouted at but almost all of you actively seek out and use commercial media regularly and often, right?”

More affirmative nods of tentative agreement, a few eyes darting about to check to see if Names are being taken somewhere.

“Does that strike you as odd?” Grey Beard asks. “Anybody here heard of cognitive dissonance?”

Gray beard, despite quite significant anecdotal evidence to the contrary, still  lives in hope that somehow, these students, eventually, might become more astute media consumers, and a few might actually stop having the media do things to them and become people who use the media for and by themselves.

Soooo… There we were, ruminating on a recent tome by the German critical theorist, Axel Honneth, with ABC News Radio burbling on the digital wireless, as one does on Friday, February 25, 2011, and our ears were assaulted by the unctuous tones of one Alan Belford Jones, AO, upbraiding Julia Gillard for daring, Daring! to be late for an interview on his 2GB breakfast programme. How dare she keep Mr Jones waiting!

Alan Jones

I, too, was outraged, apoplectic even, at Ms Gillard’s perfidy and lack of basic good manners. But what does one expect from a Labor politician who the previous day had announced Australia was going to have a carbon tax.

I can guarantee you that Ms Gillard would not treat any ABC announcer with such disgraceful lack of courtesy, but we all know that, on the ABC, Labor politicians, all of them, get a free kick, bludgers on the public, taxpayer, teat Labor politicians and ABC staffers all are, every single one of them.

Quite obviously, given the hung parliamentary outcome of the 2010 Australian election, and given Ms Gillard sternly promised Australian voters that were she re-elected there would be no carbon tax, she shredded any claims to legitimacy she might have had as Australia’s elected Prime Minister. She’s a liar.

Anyway, why does Australia need a carbon tax when, in effect, the Government in waiting, led by wise and responsible Mr Abbott, is, at the very least, very highly skeptical indeed about anthropogenic global warming, and quite rightly so too. Harrumph!

In extra-high dudgeon I tracked down Mr Jones’ Page at 2GB and there was assured that:

“[Alan Jones is] Australia’s most popular talkback presenter, Alan Jones is a phenomenon. He’s described by many as the nation’s greatest orator and motivational speaker. Alan has the mind and capacity to make complex issues understandable to the largest Breakfast audience in Australia.”

I’m so pleased and reassured that Mr Jones ‘… has the mind and capacity to make complex issues understandable…’. Thank you, oh thank you, 2GB for facilitating such a one as Mr Jones to explain things like climate change and a carbon tax to inhabitants of Struggle Street across this wide brown land of Australia, like me. Or I’d like Mr Jones to be able to do so but it appears his wonderful radio programme is not broadcast directly here in Brisbane.

Like Marvin the Paranoid Android, I wonder if Mr Jones, AO, also has a brain the size of a planet.

For a taste of how top rating, highly credible – the two being inextricably linked; high ratings = high quality – commercial broadcasting of this kind is done, at least listen to, and even Download the MP3 of this remarkable interview. Keep it for posterity. Stick it in your MP3 or iPod high rotation play list. It just has to be heard in all its aural glory, repeatedly.

Mr ‘I Run Sydney’ Jones, AO, skewered Ms Gillard, made mince meat of her, sliced and diced, and slowly roasted the twitching bits.

Just check out the Comments to this News Corporation report of this especially memorable interview.

Or Mr Jones, AO, even for him and his kind, went so far over the top this time even he needed an escape capsule to return from low Earth orbit.

Seriously, even Sydney’s Daily Telegraph’s Peter van Onselen was sufficiently angry to opine thusly:

“Whether you like or loathe Julia Gillard’s decision to impose a carbon tax as a precursor to an emissions trading scheme, no prime minister should be chastised and condescended to the way Sydney shock jock Alan Jones did [on Friday, February 25, 2011] when he interviewed Gillard on radio.

“It is well known Jones has been ill lately, but his illness clearly hasn’t hampered his haggle for a fight.

“Jones started with the PM by devoting air time to slapping her on the wrist for arriving 10 minutes late.

“He seems to forget he is no longer a schoolteacher of young boys; he was speaking to the leader of the nation. An apology from Gillard wasn’t enough, nor was the explanation that she had a prior interview which ran over time (as did Jones’ interview because the PM struggled to get a word in edgeways between Jones’ attacks and the many unprompted recordings he played to her).”

For a bit of sanity, though, we sought out the ABC’s Barrie Cassidy [and we all know what he's like don't we; one-time press secretary to Labor PM Bob Hawke; 'nuff said].

Commenting on PM Gillard’s ‘interview’ with, more like haranguing by, Alan Jones, and, on the same morning by Melbourne’s equivalent, Neil Mitchell (who came for Ms Gillard with a fence paling rather than borrowing Jones’ iron bar), Mr Cassidy opined:

“Hopefully, elected politicians on all sides of the political divide were listening and making the judgment that you can stand up to such posturing and leave unscathed.

“Most of the shock jocks are preaching to the converted; adjusting their rhetoric to match what they believe are the particular prejudices of their audiences. Few of them, as a result can turn a vote.”

Quite so.

I’ve long since agreed with one of the USA’s most famous journalists, I.F. Stone, who once said that, ‘A good journalist should always wake up angry’ and have long since, upon awakening and feeling all is right in my world, actively sought out something, a media comment, an Op-Ed column in, usually, The Australian, which quickly removes any sense of bonhomie I might have had and replaces it with a suitably grumpy mood.

Because I don’t get Alan Jones on my wireless, crystal, AM, or digital models, in Brisbane, I think I’ll replace my mighty MacBook Pro’s start up chime with a clip from Mr Jones’ memorable ‘interview’ with Ms Gillard so, I too, like a very worrying majority of my first year university communications students, can start my day by being shouted at.

Media Effects, Censorship and Fiji ~ Updated

by Dr Mark Hayes

I’ve added an Update on March 24, 2011, below, which seems to reinforce several points in my original argument.

Plus another short addition on March 25, 2011 too.

Reports about a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry early in 2011 entitled ‘Social network media exposure and adolescent eating pathology in Fiji’ have gotten me thinking, again, about the Fiji military dictatorship’s rigorous media controls which themselves were evidenced, again, when a story about the declining condition of the largest pot of money in Fiji, the National Provident Fund, was banned from local publication.

(Thanks to Pacific Scoop, A/Prof David Robie, and the Pacific Media Centre for these spurs to further thought about practical media censorship.)

As I was preparing this post, yet another Fiji journalist was hauled in by the regime for a talking to, apparently about a story they’d published on maintainence problems in the Fiji sugar industry.

Communications Fiji Ltd, operator of the Pacific’s largest radio network and of Fijivillage.com, has helpfully dobbed its main cyberspace competitor, Fijilive.com, into the regime’s Media Industry Development Authority because Fijilive’s owner, Yashwant Gounder, hasn’t lived in Fiji for over a year. This is a flagrant violation of the regime’s Media Decree, which requires media owners to have lived in Fiji for at least six months of the last year. Go Get ‘Em!

(Confirms my point about the Fiji media’s extreme solidarity, usually not, whereby an attack on one outlet is usually responded to as a business opportunity by the others.)

Add to the foregoing other recent reports that the dictatorship’s Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA), imposed by the regime’s June, 2010, Media Decree (1.7 Meg PDF), and chaired by Professor Subramani, at one time based at USP, has commenced consulting with stakeholders about how to go about its business.

And a couple of statements on the regime’s web site about ‘Different roles of the media’ from the Director of the Information Ministry, Ms Setaita Natai, and a report headed ‘Accurate message brings peace and respect’ about a Fijian-language workshop mounted by Fiji Media Watch.

As an aside, worthy and well meant though the efforts of the tiny NGO, Fiji Media Watch, have been for many years, they’re on a hiding to nothing in a wholly commercialised media environment like Fiji. If it’s one thing that makes the Fiji media only slightly less suspicious than a competitor getting an advantage, it’s anybody trying to dilute or critique the believed impact of the media’s main content – advertising. As a quite reliable rule of thumb, commercial media hate advocates of media literacy. If media literacy was applied to the Fiji regime’s media efforts, an NGO like Fiji Media Watch could well get the same treatment as other perceived regime opponents or critics.

UpDate – March 24, 2001 -

Two stories in the censored Fiji Times for Wednesday, March 23, reported on a Fiji Media Watch seminar the previous day.

As an aside, all Fiji media are subject to often intrusive censorship, with censors usually stationed in Newsrooms actively vetting copy, and, as the Fiji Times and Fiji TV found out over Easter, 2009, it is forbidden under Section 16 of the still operative Public Emergency Regulations (PER) – Fiji’s so-called ‘Rule of Law’ – to inform readers, listeners, or viewers that their news has been subjected to regime censorship.The PER were supposed to be removed when the regime introduced its Media Decree in the middle of 2010 but they’re still in force.

As a matter of style and for accuracy, I always insert the word ‘censored’ before the name of a Fiji media outlet because its news output has been subjected to routine and probably intrusive regime censorship.

The first censored Fiji Times story was headed Media Affects Children’s Behaviour and reported, in part:

Ministry of Education principal education officer Tomasi Raiyawa said the media worked on theories of exploitation in order to remain sustainable.

Speaking at a workshop organised by the Fiji Media Watch, which focused on the impact of the media on the world, Mr Raiyawa said the media worked like bullets where they penetrated recipients whom he described as sitting ducks.

The audience, he said, was passive to the point where the media was allowed to “vesumona you”.

Vesumona is a composite of two Fijian words, ‘vesau‘, which refers to ‘talking in a foreign language, jabber, chatter, or talk unintelligently’ and ‘mona‘ means ‘ the brain’. In other words, the media ‘messes with your head’.

The story continued: “Mr Raiyawa said a contentious issue was the impact of the media on society, particularly on the argument of the effect of violent action movies on children”.

There is considerable evidence from a range of disciplines – psychology, education, media effects studies – pointing to a desensitization to extreme violence by adolescents and children exposed to severe, repetitious, and violent computer games, but the exposure has to be very significant, almost routine, and reinforced by other factors, including peer legitimation and the user’s social environment. Children particularly, but also many adolescents, can lack the socialization and psychological development needed to clearly differentiate between realistic, if obviously fictional, dramatic, violence and real life violence.

Equally important, and the heroic folks at the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre and the Fiji Women’s Movement who work tirelessly against Fiji’s domestic violence epidemic amply know this, extended exposure to media violence, including but not exclusively to violent movies, crime shows, and similar – Walker Texas Ranger was once a staple on Fiji TV for years – can give apparent legitimation to quick, violent, solutions to personal or individual frustrations or grievances.

Both very broad outlines of applicable research findings, immediately above, are heavily caveated, as are the very large number of studies done on the pressing issues of the complex impacts of repeated, extreme. violence exposure on, separately, adolescents, children, and adults, and the related effects of fictional, though realistic, violence exposure to apparently offering a quick solution to real life issues.

Mr Raiyawa’s reported remarks, though, seriously misrepresent the available, reliable research findings on the pressing issues on which he is reported speaking. He’s essentially arguing that children exposed to media violence are turned into violent sociopaths: “Mr Raiyawa said the media worked like bullets where they penetrated recipients whom he described as sitting ducks”; completely discredited hypodermic needle theory of media effects.

The second story in the censored Fiji Times for Wednesday, March 23, was blandly headed ‘Ministry highlights idea‘ and appears to report on other points Mr Raiyawa made at the Fiji Media Watch seminar on Tuesday, March 22, 2011:

There were “… four types of philosophies in the media world”.

“Oh, no, here we go again,” Dr Hayes groaned. ‘“Four Theories of the Press regurgitated. Hasn’t this guy, and his Education Ministry, figured out that the Soviet Union ceased to exist around 1991, and let’s see if he discourses on the Authoritarian Theory deployed in its Fijian context?”

“The first, world philosophy, was where the paparazzi reigned in a realm of sensationalism, sex, beauty, drugs and politics, he said at a community-based workshop organised by the Fiji Media Watch ù an organisation that raises awareness on the impact of the mass media.

“When my namesake Tom Cruise came to Fiji for a holiday, the media trailed him,” Mr Raiyawa said in a lighthearted moment at the Fijian Teachers Association building at Knollys Street in Suva.

“Fiji fell into the third world philosophy where media coverage focused on development and the improvement of lifestyles.

“I’m certain, our media in Fiji is mixed up,” he said of the category the country’s media fell in.”

OK. Now Dr Hayes gets it.

Mr Raiyawa is advocating a form of development journalism, such as sketched out by development scholar, Susan George, in The Guardian in 2009.

I have absolutely no problem with this, just as I have no problems with peace journalism, a parallel sub-field of journalism which was discussed at USP Journalism late in 2010, and later discussed by former USP Journalism head, Shailendra Singh, at a conference I attended in Auckland in late 2010.

My very grave concern about advocating or even deploying peace and/or development journalism in a place like Fiji, though, lies in the risk of selective capture of these very worthy ideas and advocated practices by a military dictatorship so that some of the popular empowerment and media literacy components in these fields get diluted or even warped to serve, in practice, the interests of the regime which, to be sure, deeply infected with Group Think as it is, has thoroughly conflated Fiji’s developmental interests with its own survival.

The second censored Fiji Times report ended:

The local media was yet to take up its role in development, [Mr Raiyawa] said.

And Fiji, he said, was coming into the fourth world philosophy where there was State control.

Yep. Vinaka vakalevu for clarifying where you’re really coming from, Mr Raiyawa, principal education officer of the Fiji Education Ministry’s executive support unit.

If he really wants to update his knowledge of media theories from a normative perspective, he really should read, carefully, Normative Theories of the Media Journalism in Democratic Societies by Clifford Christians et.al. (2010). But Fiji is by no means a democratic society. It’s a military dictatorship.

Update of March 24, 2011 ends

Short UpDate on March 25 -

Pacific Media Watch has this additional item - ‘Education official hits out at ‘junk food’ media

It is all very well to castigate the media for running very cleverly crafted junk food ads – these things are extremely carefully piloted, tweaked, and tested by highly educated and skilled psychologists, marketers, and production crews; nothing is left to chance – or the implied criticism of what, on my recollection of Fiji’s media, was (and probably still is) its incessant, raucous, and repetitious pushing of credit as a means to get all the stuff you don’t need now, otherwise your neighbors, extended family, whoever, will look down on you.

The media had also given rise to neighbourly competition and subsequently theft, [Mr Tomasi Raiyawa, principal education officer of the Fiji Education Ministry's executive support unit] told participants at the Fiji Media Watch’s community based workshop in Suva earlier this week.

Families could barely make ends meet and were led to steal to meet the needs and wants of their respective families, he said.

Through the media, culture and taste has changed, Raiyawa said.

OK, Mr Raiyawa and the military dictatorship for whom you ultimately work and obey, if you want to get really serious about the issues you quite properly raised at the Fiji Media Watch gathering, start deploying your censors into the sales and marketing divisions of the Fiji media and implement a ‘clean up campaign’, like the regime says it’s doing on corruption, to ‘clean up’ the Fiji media’s real content, its advertising to deal with the genuinely serious matters you’ve identified in your recently reported comments and criticisms.

- Original Post Continues -

I was, and remain, very puzzled about the genuine justifications for the rigorous and intrusive media censorship imposed by the Fiji regime during Easter, 2009, through its Public Emergency Regulations (PER), particularly Section 16 – never made entirely clear who caused the ‘emergency’ -, then the serious reasoning behind and research informing the Media Decree, and then its enabling agency, MIDA. The only material available comes from a study of the Fiji media by Dr James Anthony commissioned by the Fiji Human Rights Commission and released in February, 2008.

(I readily admit to a certain wry amusement when admitting the foregoing puzzlement, as I’m actually quite sure there’s no serious, verifiable, or highly informed media theory or media effects research informing the Fiji regime’s media restrictions or the work of the MIDA. I’m engaging in heuristics, a ‘thought experiment’, probing the issue as if there were some heavy duty media scholarship informing the regime’s media ‘policies’ when, in reality, I’d certainly get more sense from peering into a tanoa of yagona than doing a scholarly deconstruction of the Fiji dictatorship’s media ‘policies’. But let’s play along for the purposes of this exercise…  I’m also deliberately setting to one side informed debates about, and criticisms of, the genuine capacity, or otherwise, of Fiji’s journalists.)

Firstly, a journalistic practice point.

Whenever I see media reports about serious scholarly studies which deserve a closer look, I always go to the source and download the original study. Of course, to do this, one needs access to, and knowledge about how to navigate through, academic or professional databases, usually only available through University libraries.

Then there’s a second point. Serious scholarly studies, such as reported in professional journals like The British Journal of Psychiatry, have been rigorously peer reviewed, and thence can be, and deserve to be, taken very seriously indeed. Very occasionally, poor quality science slips through, or a dodgy study gets published, but science’s self-correcting mechanisms almost always deal with such very rare incidents.

Thirdly, I certainly tunnel into the methodology deployed in studies such as this one reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry lest it be exposed as having all the methodological validity of a very bad public opinion poll or a University class teaching evaluation (i.e., virtually none). It wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near even a preliminary review panel were it in any way flakey.

This study looks very strong indeed.

I won’t rehash the material on Pacific Scoop or on the Pacific Media Centre from this valuable study, and suggest readers go find the original study for yourselves one way or another.

So, what does a very good study into media exposure and adolescent eating pathology in Fiji have to do with media censorship in the same country?

Lots; because both broad issues have to do with media effects upon audiences.

The recent Fiji study into adolescent eating pathology confirms some of the very best general research into media effects on audiences:

“Our study findings are consistent with previous reports that mass media consumption has an adverse impact on eating pathology. These findings are novel, however, in supporting the possibility that indirect media exposure – operationalised in this study as peer network exposure – may also promote risk for eating pathology. They also compliment previous research that has established peer and family-mediated influences as risk factors for eating disorders… Efforts to address the recent degradation of nutritional health in Pacific Island countries might expand to scrutinise the effects not just of culturally Western food products, but also of transnational mass media imports that may promote unhealthful behaviours. Importantly, if second-hand exposure to media content is, indeed, harmful to children, as this study supports, then the recommendation to parents to limit screen time may be inadequate to protect children from the risk imposed by their social milieu” (Becker, et.al., Brit.J.Psych, 2011 198 43 – 50 at 48 & 49).

In other words, particularly on younger members of audiences, but not exclusively so, at least in part because their self- and body identity formation is still variably plastic, the influence of the media, especially television, on their eating habits is amplified or at least solidified by peer interaction over against any direct effects of exposure to media messages which impact on eating behaviours. This can be very carefully extrapolated into probable media effects on adult audiences and their behaviours on consumer choices, voting preferences, and so on.

This confirms the core of what’s called the Lazardsfeld Two Step Flow view of media effects on audiences. (Ok; that’s a Wikipedia entry on this small but very influential part of the vast and complicated Literatures on media effects but it’s a good starting point. Internet Quality Evaluation Filters Always Engaged UQ Library advice 74 kb PDF.)

In general, the media doesn’t tell its audiences how to think about some issue. The media more likely tells us what issues we might think about, but how we actually think about some issue is largely formed elsewhere.

As far as I am aware, and I’m always open to being corrected and pointed to supporting evidence, despite the rigorous media censorship imposed in Fiji since Easter, 2009, not one advertisement for so-called junk food has been censored.

Seems the censors in Fiji are only focusing on journalistic messages in the local media, and ignoring the other, much more significant content, at least in terms of time and probable, repetitious, impacts. Of course, journalistic messages, the media content increasingly squeezed between the advertising – that’s the mass media’s really serious content – entertainment, sport, and community service announcements, is imbued with greater credibility, or allegedly so.

Media content which, apparently, has been processed or generated by journalists in information processing factories called Newsrooms, causes Fiji’s censors and the military dictatorship far more concern than almost endless, repetitious, very cleverly crafted, localised and imported (thence cheaper) advertising, some of which is, on the basis of the recent British Journal of Psychiatry study, significantly influencing adolescent eating behaviours, not so much directly but through a two-step flow of peer reinforcement.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, the Fiji regime’s all but explicit intent is nothing less than the re-working or re-programming of the Fijian psyche to eliminate corrosive, incendiary, ethno-nationalism.

To achieve this, they’ve imposed rigorous journalistic censorship, which has given extra energy to the most ‘reliable’ Fijian ‘public service’, the Coconut Wireless. At least Fiji’s incessant rumour mill never fails, unlike the notoriously unreliable water and electricity supplies. The content, of course, varies from extremely accurate to genuinely incendiary and fantastic.

That’s where journalists step in as information gatherers, refiners, refractors, and professional communicators, sieving the rumours, discarding the rubbish, seeking out the facts, balancing the opinions, and assisting their audiences to to make sense of it all. Good journalism is a very important corrective to the Coconut Wireless.

The media effects theory informing the censors and their masters in the Ministry of Information, including dictatorship appointed Permanent Secretary, Australian expatriate, former Fairfax sales executive, Ms Sharon Smith-Johns, appears to be the ‘hypodermic theory’ – I publish a media message and you are affected by it (rush to buy my product, change your voting preference, riot in the streets, and similar). As a former, senior, sales executive for a leading Australian media corporation, you’d think she actually knows her stuff when it comes to applied media effects theory and research. To be sure, under her control, the regime’s PR does seem to have improved from the earlier days when Lt. Colonel Neumi Leweni headed the Information Ministry.

Of course, the ‘quality’ or ‘impact’ of the message is relevant, so couple a very cleverly crafted message, which might even include a ‘dog whistle‘, with a sound knowledge of what makes the target audience tick, and the hypodermic effect should occur.

What the regime is actually doing is selectively withdrawing certain, quite limited, kinds of media content. Given that they haven’t published the detailed guidelines for the censors deployed in Fiji’s newsrooms – what gets through, what gets chopped – informed observers, like me, are left to reverse-engineer particular incidents to figure out why a journalist was hauled in to explain themselves.

If the sugar industry is failing, which it is, or the National Provident Fund needs some serious investigation, which it does, then why are stories about these issues censored or even suppressed, or, as in the most recent case, a story which passed a censor nevertheless had the journalist hauled in to explain themselves.

My sources have long complained that far from having anything but the vaguest ‘guidelines’ – ‘no politics’ – the censorship is often arbitrary, capricious, or even revengeful, with the censor on the day even cutting or removing a story apparently just to get back at or irritate a particular journalist or editor. Always with the real threat of being able to whistle up militarised police or, much worse, serious, armed, military muscle to enforce Fiji’s new ‘legal order’, the Rule of Fists and/or Glock.

Keep this up, so goes a crude deployment of negative reinforcement psychology – I’ll stop censoring you when you reliably report ‘correctly’ – and Fiji’s psyche might, eventually, be re-wired. So goes the apparent hypodermic effect theory.

Problem is, as an informed reading of the implications of the recent study on ‘Social network media exposure and adolescent eating pathology in Fiji’ for wider media effects confirms, the hypodermic effect of media doesn’t work, either through injection or withdrawal, so imposing rigorous censorship almost certainly doesn’t, and won’t, achieve the sought-after result.

Even allowing for highly varying levels of education, literacy in English and vernacular, media literacy, media access, and a population of some 800,000 people skewed to a younger demographic, the attempted re-wiring or re-programming the psyche of a place like Fiji through attempted censorship of just some media content is very seriously contradicted by the best available global media effects theory and research, including high quality studies focusing right down on to Fiji and its adolescent audiences themselves.

You’d really think that when a regime has its hands on all the resources of state, they’d do much better with their media controls and propaganda than the Fiji regime is currently doing.

Nonviolence, Media Freedom, Egypt and Fiji

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

T.E. Lawrence

Post by Dr Mark Hayes (Brisbane)

Browsing the dead tree edition of the Sydney Morning Herald for February 19, 2011, at Page 13, my weary eye chanced upon an article tagged ‘Inspiration’, headlined ‘Unassuming author helps write history‘ by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and sourced to the New York Times. Me being me, and always ‘going to the source’, I energized the mighty MacBook Pro and tracked down the original article. The New York Times helpfully assembles resources and other background materials so start there.

Some focused Googling (excuse the irritating neologism    ) added quite a few other materials to my trawl on Gene Sharp, including this long interview on a US public radio station (13.3 Meg MP3; excuse the irritating donation pleas) and a fairly recent edited interview on YouTube.

This last item was occasioned after Gene was ‘outed’ as an American agent funded by the CIA to destabilize Iran, Venezuela, and generally being a Bush administration stooge. Several sources promptly, and vigorously, debunked this nonsense.

The genial Gene Sharp

However, the ‘Gene Sharp is a CIA agent’ fantasy surfaced again in Fiji in June, 2008, when then Fiji Human Rights Commissioner, Dr Shaista Shameem, released a report (2.41 Meg PDF) into the deportations of Fiji Sun publisher, Russell Hunter, and later, Fiji Times publisher, Evan Hannah, which, among many other very interesting things, uncovered a perfidious plot to destabilize the then ‘interim’ government by a cabal of media, lawyers, and foreign funded NGOs distributing and inspired by Gene Sharp’s The Anti-Coup booklet. Shock! Horror!

Dr Shaista Shameem clearly pulled down Gene Sharp’s entry on Wikipedia, selectively Googled some other stuff to bolster her paranoia and conspiracy theory, and evaluated that rubbish in a way that would get her failed in any half-decent high school or university subject.

Around the time of the 2006 Fiji coup, in Boston, USA, Ms Jamila Raqib, a staffer with the tiny non-violence think-tank, The Albert Einstein Institution, founded by Gene Sharp, was e-mailing copies of the institution’s 72-page The Anti-Coup Handbook to every email address she could find in Fiji.

“Individuals whom we were able to actually reach (I am excluding a number of emails that were returned to me as ‘undeliverable’) included a diverse group of more than 200 human rights organisations, government bodies, civil society groups, business councils, religious associations, as well as radio, television, newspaper, and web media networks to bring their attention to our publication,” Ms Raqib told me in an email at the time. Radio Australia also reported on this activity.

What annoyed me was that, drawing on an illegal, stolen, and selective e-mail trawl probably obtained by the Fiji military, or helpfully provided by a coup-supporting stooge inside Fiji’s largest ISP, Connect,com.fj, Dr Shameem didn’t out me as another source of subversive and inciteful materials because I, too, had e-mailed several Fiji contacts with copies of The Anti-Coup.

Gene Sharp, apparently, also terrifies the local military dictatorship in the South Pacific, not without reason, it seems.

News 2.0 on the radio

A conversation with Colin Peacock on Mediawatch, 6 February 2011

I like talking to Colin Peacock. He interviewed me about News 2.0 today and it was very lively. I think I did a reasonable job.

 

On Public Address radio with Russell Brown and Damian Christie on 6 February 2011. Can journalism survive the Internet?

News 2.0: Can journalism survive the Internet? Reviews so far

Some reviews of News 2.0.
For the record

This is an excellent book, a must-read for every journalism student, tutor, journalist, media manager and academic media-watcher.

Newzwire Jim Tucker

Hirst is undoubtedly the right person to tackle the job, having previously co-authored Journalism Ethics and Communications and New Media and here all that expertise is used to illuminate the precarious state of journalism in the digital age.

Artshub Matt Millikan

Hirst suggests one of the main reasons people turn online for their news is a mistrust of mainstream media by the public. Overall, the book was an interesting read.

The Fringe Magazine Scott Wilson

And the first…Alan Knight, professor of journalism at UTS, Sydney

Mainstream  journalism has failed the public interest, reckons author, Martin Hirst.  Citizen journalism is too feeble to provide a viable alternative. The future looks grim.

Fortunately,  Dr Hirst believes that pessimism of the intellect should be coupled with optimism of the will.