AsiaPacific
MediaEducator

Issue No. 4, January - June 1998

For complete articles, please fill in the subscription form and post to:
The Graduate School of Journalism, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia.

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Alaine Chanter
A Better Way Forward: Research On Media And Violence In The Pacific
Pacific researchers exploring the relationship between violence, media and their societies, are likely to be disappointed by the media-violence debate in the West which is characterised by inconclusiveness and a type of intellectual poverty which Pacific researchers would do well to avoid. This article suggests that in analysing the media's possible role in engendering violence, we are not simply concerned with representations of conflict and violence in the media. Rather, we may find that representations far removed from social turmoil can engender knowledges conducive to violence.

Wendy Bacon
Engaging Theory And Practice ln Journalism Education
Keith Windschuttle's campaign against media theory would not have been receiving so much comment if a reprint of his article in the conservative magazine Quadrant had not received an extraordinary amount of space in The Australian's Higher Educational Supplement. A few weeks later, he was given a spot on Radio National's breakfast show.
This public exposure for Windschuttle's on going campaign against media theory in university based journalism education comes at a time when competition between Australian universities, suffering from Federal government cuts, is intense. In the biographical notes at the end of the Higher Education piece, Windschuttle did not mention his close connection with Macleay College, a private institution, where journalism, hospitality and other courses are offered.

R. Warwick Blood
Not My Culturalist Debate: Journalism And Methods
That Keith Windschuttle's potent poke in a culturalist eye should provoke so much response among journalism and mass media educators is an interesting situation. While it is refreshing to see a lively debate played out in public, one hopes it will lead somewhere, especially given his call for development of Australian theory textbooks written by practitioners. Many in journalism education would support Windschuttle's fundamental characteristics of practice: journalism upholds a realist view and an empirical methodology; journalism's ethical obligation to audiences is paramount; and journalists should be committed to good writing.

Grahame Griffin
Public Journalism And Press Photography: Ritual, Conflict And Consensus
Given its predilection for depicting the ritualistically affirmative and unifying moments of community life, press photography has more in common with public journalism than might first meet the eye. Public journalism, like press photography, seeks to promote the participation of ordinary people in consensus-building and community. Both give the impression of encouraging us as citizens to confront and challenge the problems and conflicts we confront in our everyday lives. But photographs have been known to fabricate unity and community. Does this suggest another, perhaps less salutary, link between press photography and public journalism?

Cathy Greenfield & Peter Williams
The Importance Of Social And Political Literacies: In Defence Of Cultural And Media Studies
In 1991, teaching in a BA (Communication) in South Australia, we wrote the following: Cultural & Media Studies' major concern is with the historical formation, social organisation and cultural communication of meaning (the forms of, say, information and pleasures/"entertainment") which have definite social and political effects or outcomes for different sorts of audiences of such media as television, film, video, radio, the printed press, magazines, literature, etc. To put this in another way, Cultural & Media Studies describes and analyses the government or management of the human and technological resources and techniques used in the production of socially effective meanings.

Martin Hirst
Looking Out From Terra Nullius: Journalism, Modernity And The 'Vacant Lot'
Keith Windschuttle's recent defence of journalism education (1998a: 41) brought a storm of protest from cultural and media studies theorists (The Australian, 25 March 1998). It is with faint damnation that I find myself praising Windschuttle. While I acknowledge that some media theory is good for journalism students, I question the usefulness and validity of much that the postmodernists believe in.
I criticise cultural studies as an attempt to colonise the "terra nullius" of journalism theory (Hartley 1996: 39) and would argue strongly that journalism education should be taken seriously in universities as a legitimate cross-disciplinary field of study (Guerke & Hirst 1996, Hirst 1998).

Julia Ravell
Cultural Studies Critics Miss The Point
Keith Windschuttle's attack on cultural studies' relevance for journalism education (The Australian, 25 March 1998) is characterised by a simplistic genealogy of cultural studies and conveniently elided the contribution to journalism education made by crossover works on media and popular culture written by scholars working outside the academy such as Catherine Lumby (1997) and Mark Davis (1997). Windschuttle's concept of "cultural studies theory" is made monolithic by a selective version of its Frankfurt School antecedents and an assertion that it is blind to the practical exigencies of hard news reporting.

Kenneth Starck
Influences of A 'Third Culture' On Journalism Education
As we enter an era driven by technology and "new media," we are all searching for the journalism of the next millennium. Part of this emerging "new journalism" must have a strong intercultural dimension suited to the global forces shaping a world moving toward increased interdependence and interconnectedness. Yet intercultural journalism has barely appeared on the journalism education scene. This article describes the author's experience with the cultural dynamics of teaching journalism in China, Romania and Finland and efforts to incorporate the experience into the American journalism classroom.

Roger Patching
Keeping At Bay Media Studies Onslaught In Journalism
It will come as no surprise to anyone knowing my background that I have been opposed to the media studies/cultural studies onslaught for more than a decade in my own institution and in the wider media community. I was in the audience privately cheering when The Poverty of Media Theory, was given its first outing at the 1995 Journalism Education Association conference in Christchurch, New Zealand (Windschuttle 1995, 1998). The media theorists were given both barrels at that conference with my close friend and colleague Myles Breen (1995) taking on one of their gurus, John Hartley, for what many journalism academics with a professional background in the media consider at best ill-informed. Hartley's now oft-quoted line 'the difference between journalists and academics is simply this; academics must cite their sources; journalists never do' (1996: 26) gave many of us a good laugh.

Robert Stone
Control Without Repression: China's Influence On The Political Economy Of Hong Kong Press System
While much has been written about the recent shifts in editorial stance of the Hong Kong press in anticipation of the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China, little attention has been paid to the causes of these changes. This article examines the political economy of the Hong Kong press system in the decade leading up to the sovereignty transfer and accounts for editorial changes by tracing structural changes in the pattern of ownership.

Diana Stover Tillinghast
Keeping In Touch With The Chinese Homelands: Use Of Chinese Media In The US
Increase in Chinese immigration in the United States over the past decade has resulted in the growth and vitality of Chinese media as well as competition for market share. Although a number of recent content analysis studies have examined the coverage of specific events such as Tiananmen and its aftermath and Hong Kong's return to China, relatively little research has been conducted from an audience perspective. This study provides cross-sectional baseline data that can be used in future longitudinal studies to determine whether, how, or to what extent Chinese-language media use in the United States has changed over time.

Keith Windschuttle
Cultural Studies In Journalism Education: Obscurantism Equals Profundity?
This essay first appeared in Quadrant, May 1998. It revisits the intellectual conflict between media/cultural theorists and vocational-oriented journalism educators. The author argues that the convoluted theorisations and postmodernist verbiage used by cultural/media theorists to expound their ideas and assumptions are so obscure that very few people outside the field can understand what is being said, nor see their relevance to journalism education. Obscurantism is assumed to equal profundity. The author asserts that journalism educators should draw from their professional experience, write their own textbooks and develop their own 'journalism theory'.

RESEARCH NOTES

Sun Wanning
Diaspora Online And Postnational Chineseness
This article outlines the issues and concerns in a case study of Chinese News Digest web site (www.cnd.org). The study represents the initial phase of a three-year project, which is concerned with the relationships between media, narration and post-national identities in the contexts of Chinese communities now living in Australia, Southeast Asia and North America. The case study examines the relationship between cyber technology and potentially new ways of imagining the nation. The article also outlines the author's paradigm shift as a migrant to show that one's intellectual journey is necessarily is related to one's personal journey, and the direction of one's intellectual work is (and should be) more often than not driven and navigated by the fear and desire, joy and anxiety of oursevles as individuals.

COMMENTARY

Kurt Brereton & Gregor Cullen
Locating The Critical Space In Teaching Graphic Design And New Media
Theory is often thought of as a carrybag into which is tossed various ideas, -isms, concepts and thoughts that can then be "welded" to graphic design products in a concrete and vivid way - a notion of theory as value-added service. We end up with a split between theory and design which defeats the role of theory as a critical and analytical part of the design business or education program. This article argues that it is a false economy to have such an oppositional split between theory and practice or studies and production.

Morris Jones
CNN Talkback Live: As Good As It Gets?
The ideal of a popular gathering of citizens to participate in journalistic endeavours has been rarely realised. Many of the regular media programs that actually do employ a "talk" format with audience participation are primarily concerned with topics so sleazy that it is embarrassing to speak of them as journalism. This article describes a television talk show, CNN Talkback Live, in Atlanta where the ideals of trying to introduce genuinely people oriented journalism are bound by organisational and journalistic constraints.

BOOK REVIEWS

PEARSON, Mark (1997)
The Journalist's Guide to Media Law,
Allen & Unwin, Sydney. ISBN 1 86448 434 9
Reviewed by Jeanette Zanotto - Queensland University of Technology

KINGSBURY, Damien (1997)
Culture And Politics: Issues In Australian Journalism On Indonesia, 1975 - 93 Australia-Asia Papers No. 80. Centre for the Study of Australia Asia Relations.Griffith University, Brisbane, Qld. September.
ISBN 0 86857 782 0. pp.161 + xii
Review Essay by Martin Hirst - University of Western Sydney - Nepean