Faking the balance

This post will discuss the balance presented within our media and questions whether contested issues are really contested or just skewed.

 

There’s no denying that the media plays a very influential role in shaping the debate around issues and the general populations opinions. Yet the discourse surrounding climate change has been shaped on a false balance (Ward 2009). As Ward (2009, p. 14) explains “in reporting on climate change and the findings in the physical and earth sciences defining it, US reporters [sic: consistent with Australian reporters] for many years practiced what critics contend is a “false balance”, providing space disproportionate to its scientific credibility to perspectives running counter to what is now widely accepted as the “established” scientific judgement’. Therefore reporters have been balancing opinions about science when in fact they would have been better off evaluating and reporting evidence based science (Ward 2009, p. 14).

Ebola vs. Terrorism: who counts more?

This post will discuss new values according to media outlets and the nation state’s (of which the media outlet belongs to) ideals and questions whether there is a relationship between the two. 

 

In Australian media recently, we have been hearing a lot about terrorism. It seems the world has become a very dark place according to international media events. Chouliaraki (2008, p. 329) states that “the ways in which the media portray and narrate the suffering of the far away others has always been controversial”. Chouliaraki (2008, pp. 329-330) goes on to say that “in the past this has raised critical questions about the power relations between the West and the ‘rest’ and about stereotypes of the ‘poor South'”. After last weeks tutorial discussion about Ebola I started to wonder, why do we hear about one type of global suffering more than the others?

It’s the same shit, Sherlock

This post will discuss the archetypes of detective narrative and progressive they have become.

The character of Sherlock Holmes has almost become axiomatic within literature. We all know who he is, even if we haven’t read the original stories. Holmes has become more then just a detective character, he has become a cultural icon. Sherlock Holmes as the detective figure has had a long trajectory within British culture stemming back to Edgar Allen Poe. The success of Holmes relies upon a set codes utilised within the literature, which more than usually informed by social codes of that era. Jann (cited in Krasher 1997, p. 425) states that historical readings portray Holmes as a representative of social order, who contains chaos through the use of “indexical codes of body and behaviour”. While Thomas (cited in Krasher 1997, pp. 425-426) describes Holmes as “the literary personification of a cultural apparatus by which persons were given their legitimate personalities by someone else” i.e. Holmes. In other words, Holmes is representative of a true English man and therefore his actions and words are English, and through our appreciation of this we understand English men to be like Holmes.