Goodbye Mr Grass Roots
An era of sorts came to an end this week with the death of cartoonist Bob Browne in Port Moresby General Hospital. He was the creator of Mr Grass Roots, perhaps Papua New Guinea’s most loved comic character, which the magazine Islands Business once called “the social conscience of PNG”. Browne’s life and work could almost be read as an allegory of change in the Pacific Islands’ largest nation. Browne arrived in PNG as a British volunteer … Read entire article »
Filed under: Featured, Journalism, Media
Look-at-me journalism all the rage from Cairns to Cairo
You can tell journalists have lost the plot when they start reporting on themselves. A rash of “look what happened to me” reports has broken out amongst journalists covering the unrest in Egypt and the ham-fisted attempts by the Egyptian authorities to intimidate them and impede their work Of course, one doesn’t actually need to look so far afield for examples of reporters making themselves the news when covering major breaking disasters such as floods, cyclones and … Read entire article »
Filed under: Featured, Journalism, Media
One man’s meat …
It’s all very well – and probably necessary – to expect the peddlers of hate to bear some responsibility for Saturday’s multiple murders in Pima, Arizona, if only because of the atmosphere of hatred their rantings helped to create. It is too early yet to say what drove 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner to kill or wound 20 people, including a US Congresswoman, a Federal Court judge and a nine-year-old girl. Was it partly the crass ravings … Read entire article »
Filed under: General, Journalism, Media, Society
2010: That was the year that wasn’t
Had it not been for WikiLeaks, 2010 might have gone down as another forgettable year for the media in Australia and around the world. There were few outstanding examples of great journalism,[i] no breathtaking, game-changing technical innovations, not even any great “end-of-an-era” events at which we could pause and take stock. Admittedly, the human inclination to see the start or end of decades as somehow symbolically significant is irrational and therefore it shouldn’t surprise us when years … Read entire article »
Filed under: General, Journalism, Media
When humour is no laughing matter
The so-called Muhammad cartoon controversy in Denmark led to killings, death threats and worldwide protests in what Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at the time was his country’s worst international crisis since World War II. In June 2009, a sketch on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Chaser comedy program about dying children making wishes caused national outrage and led to the suspension of the weekly series and the sacking of the ABC’s head of … Read entire article »
Filed under: Featured, Journalism
Women and war reporting
Around the world, women are playing an ever more active role in journalism and the media. In many countries they now enjoy equal opportunities with men, and more and more of them are in senior management roles running media organisations. Once upon a time this would have been quite rare, even in developed nations. Just 30 years ago, for every Katherine Graham publishing The Washington Post there were hundreds of women who could only dream of … Read entire article »
Filed under: Journalism
Who will blink first?
As the war of wills between the military and the media in Fiji intensifies, the growing question is: Who will blink first? So far, Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s army-backed regime is clearly in front. It has imposed strict censorship of local media, ejected foreign correspondents, closed down ABC re-transmitters and threatened internet usage. These measures have been rigorously enforced by the army, with military censors in newsrooms and armed soldiers overseeing the arrest and questioning of local and foreign journalists. Bainimarama … Read entire article »
Filed under: Journalism, Media
Vultures or doves? When journalists can do harm in covering tragedy.
The horrific scenes of bushfires in Australia have flashed around the world, uniting people in a shared humanity. In the Black Saturday infernos, 173 people died and 414 were injured, hundreds of homes were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests, farms and fields were burned in the worst natural disaster of its kind to strike Australia in its recorded history. There would be very few people anywhere in the world who, have seen or … Read entire article »
Filed under: Journalism
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