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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
Can journalism survive modern media warfare?
If truth really is the first casualty of war, is journalism itself among the victims of the conflict in Gaza? If truth suffers in the charged atmosphere of death and destruction, can proper professional and ethical objective journalism survive intact and can journalists – the truthmongers – still tell war’s stories fairly and accurately for the rest of us to understand? It is a question many thoughtful journalists have asked over the years from places as … Read entire article »
Filed under: Journalism
When journalists fall from grace – sometimes they’re victims too
The jailing of an Australian foreign correspondent in Singapore for drug taking highlights yet again that dangers for journalists come in many forms. Worst of all are the hundreds of deaths every year of journalists working in their own or other people’s countries. These continue to be tolled out regularly on professional websites such as the Committee to Protect Journalists at http://www.cpj.org/, together with the thousands of media workers seriously injured every year while doing their … Read entire article »
Filed under: Journalism
Who is killing SBS?
To say The SBS Story is hagiographic might be to overstate the matter — but not by much. Part-funded by the Australian Research Council as part of a linkage project with SBS, this book veers between genuine independent academic critique and the kind of slick corporate giveaway that could easily have been commissioned by SBS’s own marketing department. This is a shame for readers wanting to know why Mary Kostakidis really resigned, why David Stratton and … Read entire article »
Why media freedom is important to us all
It is a sad truth of journalism that we are often liked best when we are at our worst, and disliked most when we are at our best. Or, at least, that seems to be so in the often rocky relationship between the media and those in authority, whether in government or big business. Very few governments like a free and unrestrained media. They dislike us when we criticise their policies or performance, they despise us … Read entire article »
Filed under: Journalism, Media
When campaigning journalism backfires
A decision by an Australian court that an accused paedophile must be set free because he cannot get a fair trial sends yet another clear warning about the limits of campaigning journalism in free democracies. The accused man, Dennis Raymond Ferguson is, according to many people in Queensland and in that state’s media, the kind of man who should never be allowed into the community – and certainly not near children. For obvious legal reasons, this column … Read entire article »
Filed under: Journalism
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