Media Inquiry

Posted on August 8, 2011 by sydneyzoetrope

Why News Ltd should support Media Inquiry?

In the aftermath of the phone hacking scandal in the UK, Australians support for one company owning nearly 70% of print media outlets has collapsed!

This sends a very clear and strong message that the newspaper outlets in this country have lost any potential mandate to be it implied, or otherwise to carry on with reporting news stories around an agenda based framework.

A description which very comfortably fits with how News Ltd operates in general, and frankly that would be a very diplomatic way of looking at how News Ltd fits into this.

A much more blunt way of putting it would be that they need to submit to the public demand that they should face a dismantling of their control because they do a spectacularly lousy job.

People across the board regardless of personal politics now think that these people need to be held account for the damage they’ve done to the reputation of good journalism in this country.

Not too mention the damage they’ve done to the country’s cultural identity.

Looking back over the various incidents that demonstrate News Ltd’s incompetence it would be very hard to disagree with such a blunt assessment.

Who can forget how The Daily Telegraph under the editorship of David Penberthy brought down then NSW Opposition Leader: John Brogden. Then after that they proceeded to kick Brogden, while as many observers called Brogden “Political Dead Meat” with no real news worthy value as he had resigned the leadership.

Rightly the Telegraph was accused of hyena journalism and readers and members of the public could be forgiven for thinking that in the same way the paper has accused Labour union bosses of being faceless men in removing various state and federal leaders over the last few years. The Telegraph had acted in the exact same way in removing a more moderate leader of the coalition in favour of bowing to the conservative side of the party that the paper aligns itself with.

Even ‘footy’ fans weren’t immune to such gutless behaviour; just last year the Melbourne salary cap controversy exposed similar tactics in how News Ltd waters down the flames.

Just like the excuses made in the UK Phone Hacking Scandal, News Ltd asked the public to trust that the management of the company had no idea that laws were being broken and that any illegal activity was the work of a couple of rogue administrators within the organisation.

It all sounds a little bit too easy and familiar, especially when News Ltd willingly censored the breaking news story on the phone hacking scandal in the UK.

All but The Australian newspaper failed to report on the controversy, even then the report itself was about twenty six words long.

If News Ltd seriously expects the public to buy that the way in which it deals with itself out here is not reflected in the exposing of its gutless tactics in the UK then not reporting on the story itself is a great way of taking a dump on your on credibility.

News Ltd need to and should support an inquiry into Media regulation of ownership if not to save their own credibility then at the very least to assure it’s readership and other sections of the organisation that they don’t have anything to do with news reporting, that they do support the best and most indiscriminate way of going about setting the national agenda.

Not supporting an inquiry would mean they believe they are above the concerns of the general public, which of coarse they’re not.

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A Call To Arms

Posted on August 1, 2011 by sydneyzoetrope

How do you make your mark? How do you get a message out there that it’s important to yourself but you think would be a good thing for other people to hear as well.

Sounds incredibly serious but it doesn’t need to be – humour can be just an important tool in communicating a message. It allows people to look at something, laugh but take the issue at hand seriously.

Considering that today we have access to an unprecedented amount of distribution networks such as you tube and face book, I believe it presents people with a unique opportunity to forge their own voice within the murky and ethically ambiguous world of media that exists in the present climate.

How do we go about this? Simple. We pick up a camera and go out and shoot whatever we want. It really is that simple, I mean lets face it nobody’s going to win an academy award straight way so why bother worrying.

Lets get out there and put together video content that we can upload onto these sites and give each other the opportunity to screen our works and ply our craft so we can develop our skills in determining our own version of what the media industry should be.

Doing this would give us the credibility in establishing ourselves as industry leaders by simply giving a damn.

As you can see from our videos section, we here on Sydney Zoetrope have just spent a couple of afternoons together coming up with a few (hopefully) funny videos that shows that people don’t need state of the art facilities to be creative.

So here’s the challenge to our readers, go out there and do something creative with a video camera, sound recording or whatever tickles your fancy and upload it.

Be fearless, be funny, it doesn’t matter just as long as you get out there and do something.

From there we can start formulating Ideas and media campaigns on how we can move forward and get the public motivated to be interested enough to demand quality and locally made content expressing dynamic and varied ideas for all.

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Media Reform

Posted on July 19, 2011 by sydneyzoetrope

Following the disgraceful actions of the News of the World paper in the UK, Greens leader Bob Brown has rightly called for a an inquiry into Media Regulation in Australia.

To say that it’s about time would not be an overstatement , the vitriol and bile spewed out daily by the Murdoch media is reaching fever pitch especially with the introduction of the carbon tax this week by the federal government.

Liking the tax or not with regard to how it’s reported is irrelevant, people deserve to have the facts reported to them without news stories deliberately framing the articles in question to align with the political and business interests of the owners of such publications.

The influence and personal bias of the News owner Rupert Murdoch is so clearly evident now that trying to deny it especially in the wake of the allegations against the company in the UK make any defense of News as a partisan and effectively self regulated company untenable.

Which of coarse brings us to how we can solve this problem, with the very straightforward answer of Media reform.

Media Reform that not only covers the reform of how the print media is owned and operated but reform to who is also able to own television, film distribution and film production in the country.

For far too long now the divisions between the interests of businesses such as News Ltd and not having as much Australian Film/TV production is of benefit to a company that boasts at having made more drama production through it’s pay TV interests than the national broadcaster.

Not that it’s wrong for Pay TV to have a high turnaround in drama, indeed it’s to be commended.

The benchmark however should always be set by the national broadcaster, the BBC is a good example of this.

There’s really no doubt that due to the British public having access to a well funded national broadcaster that they have quite rightly taken the News of the World Scandal to heart and have acted appropriately to stop any further acquisitions by the Murdoch media to send a very clear message – don’t stuff around with our media and learn to respect our right to better informed public debate.

It’s something hard to argue with which I suspect is the reason why CEO’s .Editors and Journalists of all stripes are very quick to deny any accusations of bias or wrongdoing.

I do however think that Australia has become the exception to this- we’ve had commentators with vested interests in who is in government accuse without any basis in fact that the ABC holds it’s own bias towards the left side of politics.

This is of coarse absolute rubbish, and it would be wrong to really even give a response to this sort of nonsense at risk of giving even the minuscule amount of credibility to such commentators.

However through this attack on the media industry at large it’s important to see opportunity.

That opportunity is for Journos, Editors, TV and Film crews and Artists across the board to seize leadership on the issue of Media regulation and the importance of having a thriving non-commercial public broadcaster that advocates and demands quality on the behalf of taxpayers on a national level.

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