WHAT THE MEDIA'S ABOUT
- The media experience is intense but always remember the essentially ephemeral nature of the beast. You can be scorched, yesterday; made triumphant by it today and tomorrow lie forgotten. It can burn those who work within it as easily as those who are more usually considered its victims. It can seem irresistible to those easily attracted to surface not substance.
- The media these days plays off the usually unstated notion of heroes and villains. It loves both and can turn individuals quickly from to another without pity or remorse or even any sense of irony or self-awareness. It can be blood sport.
- An individual radio, newspaper or more particularly television interview or appearance can create or cool controversy, but opinion change in our community and political process occurs most usually only over time.
- Television has become the most trusted primary source of information about the world around us for most people today. Never mind that television is about surface not substance or that few people can remember substantive details or facts accurately even ten minutes after they have seen news or some other program.
- Television in particular deals with powerful emotions and a limited ability to translate complexities or transmit detailed information. This is a world of images and impressions. It is all here today and forgotten tomorrow. Everything is ephemeral.
How could you miss - Big News? How could you not watch - the team there for you? Channel 7 publicity - Newspapers, journals and magazines, radio and television are part of the entertainment industry. They may also to varying degrees inform and educate depending on their view of their audience. Newspapers set the news agenda each day.
- Television in particular is an expensive and ruthlessly competitive industry in its drive to maximize its audience and thus revenues. To win attention those who seek to use it must entertain as well as inform.
- Tabloid media seek more blatantly to titillate and sensationalise but similar human emotions are also appealed to by the quality media if in a rather more restrained way. We are emotional beings. Emotion helps us communicate important things.
- Media workers reflect at all levels the wider tides of public opinion they themselves help create. They are cultural warriors in wars they often cannot grasp or understand.
- Malice and bias are less likely to be encountered on a regular basis than ignorance and incompetence and the destruction of a stories integrity by its passage through too many hands. If you have been badly mistreated consider the utility of complaint.
- In the past twenty years the profession of journalism has been feminised. Power structures however are still dominated by the usual White Boy's Club.
- Opinion makers include name-player columnists. They are inevitably conservative. Soft and fluffy changes nothing. 'Lifestyle' these days is big and safe.