Introduction to the media landscape

Question 1

How can we define and delineate the media landscape?

Answer 1

• Old vs New
• Electronic vs Print
• Mass vs Narrowcast
• Hot vs Cold
• Public vs Private
• Does a medium need a mass audience?
• Does a medium need to be ‘serious’?
• Does it need to matter to people?

Question 2

How is media a medium?`

Answer 2

• The press “causes political life to circulate through all the parts of that vast territory” (Tocqueville in Graber 2003)
• Media as (apolitical) tool of dissemination (see Lasswell, Lazarsfeld)
  
  • Is anything ‘Apolitical’? Probably not.
• Vital in pre-industrial times - a luxury now?

Question 3

What is the alternative to media as a disseminating medium?

Answer 3

• We can define the ‘media’ as an environment - ‘medium’ in the biological/transport sense
• ‘Cultural’ approach (see McLuhan, Care, Hall)
• Possibly shouldn’t/can’t delineate

Question 4

What is the typical view of media and politics?

Answer 4

• “Media as fourth estate”
  
  • Are they an institution? No
• Graber Framework

Question 5

Broadly what is the Graber framework?

Answer 5

• ‘marketplace of ideas’
• ‘voice for public opinions’
• ‘surveillance function’
• ‘watchdog function’

Question 6

How is the media a marketplace of ideas?

Answer 6

• Diversity assumption, but…
  
  • Groupthink?
  • Do gender/ethnicity/race/religion matter?
  • Commercial concentration
• Tendency to converge on a ‘mainstream’
  
  • Chicken or egg?
• ‘Overton window’ of what is acceptable

Question 7

How is the media a voice for public opinions?

Answer 7

• Again chicken and egg; who defines the public opinion? The public or the media?
• Do polls count here?
  
  • What’s the normative implication?
• Also again: mainstreaming; diversity; concentration etc
  
  • What would ‘providing voice’ look like?: Voicing the normatively good thing to voice, or voicing what the public demands most?

Question 8

How does the media fulfil surveillance functions?

Answer 8

• Surveillance of democracy/politicians
• More subjective
  
  • Is it in the public interest to investigate/cover politician’s sex scandals etc
  • Is their a public interest at all? What is it?
• Tied up with ‘objectivity’ claims
  
  • What is ‘good’ or ‘proper’ surveillance?
  • What is ‘public interest’?
• Tension between governments/political actors and media
  
  • How much surveillance is allowed?
  • Quid pro quo relationships
    
    • Or just journalists and politicians friendly?

Question 9

How does the media fulfil watchdog functions?

Answer 9

• Like surveillance, but more extreme
• Everyone thinks they’re Woodward and Bernstein
• But no one can/will fund it

Question 10

What is Australia’s media landscape

Answer 10

• Still predominantly ‘traditional’
  
  • Beware the tendency to conflate your own expereinces/habits with the rest of the country’s
  • ‘Canberra bubble’
• 2016 Survey Results
  
  • Flawed methodology: online survey respondents, all ‘news users’
  • So be skeptical about figures such as 52% of respondents reporting social media as their most popular source of news
• TV, Print, and radio still main source of news (52.3%); top source of news among online media is through website or apps of newspapers (21.7%)