Limitation of Professional Objective Journalism, Mechanism of Control of the Underpin Media Production - Assignment Example

Week 1 L1. 1. What is professional objective journalism? Professional Objective journalism means practicing journalism with absolute disinterestedness, fairness, factuality and non-partisanship. Sociologist Michael Schudson argues in Discovering the News (1978), “The belief in objectivity is a faith in 'facts, distrust in 'values,' and a commitment to their segregation." It also refers to the existing principles of newsgathering and reporting that give emphasis to eyewitness reports of events, substantiation of facts with several sources and "balance." Besides, it refers to Journalist’s institutional task to act as a fourth estate, an individual body which subsists apart from large interest groups and government. L1.2. What are some of the limitation of professional objective journalism? Some critics argue that Professional objective journalism in a way does disfavour to the people because it fails to try to find the actual truth. This is because such objectivity is almost impossible to apply in practice. For example, newspapers inescapably acquire a point of view in choosing what reports to cover, which to feature as cover story, and what sources to quote. Media critics Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) have illustrated a propaganda model that shows how in practice such a concept of objectivity ends up big time supporting the viewpoint of powerful corporations and government. It is difficult to curb preconceived notions always. Week 2 L2.1 Where does meaning come from? Meaning is the capacity to “make sense” of the world and of ourselves. The human capacity for language sharing and comprehension involves the ability to make meaning. We are brought up in the social systems of language and symbols. Meaning is thus constructed by human beings. Our first source of meaning is our family as it is through family that we come in contact with institutions that make meaning. The key institutions that produce meanings are the education system and the media.  These institutions are meaning making machines.  Society is a pool of meanings as media and other institutions operate within it and our learning is based on the meanings obtained from society. Professional communicators such as journalists, public relations professionals, advertising, film makers, musicians, politicians etc. are employed to make meaning in the contemporary system. The relationship between meaning and the mass media is that often, meaning is manipulated by those who control the media and they are the power elites. L2.2. How is meaning rooted in power relationship? Power relationships between people are central variables to be mapped by anyone trying to understand why a particular set of meanings circulates at a certain time and place. It is precisely the unique texture of each time and place that provides the key insights into the nature of any ‘meaning’. However, as power shift takes place so the dynamics of meaning production change too. That is why mapping the mechanics of meaning-production is necessarily a highly contextual exercise in terms of time, place and shifting power relationships. Social and economic elites conspire to misuse the power of media to misguide the masses with a “false consciousness”. Week 5 L5. 1. Discuss some of the “mechanism of control” of that underpin media production. In contemporary age, there are chiefly two main contenders that act as controlling agencies that employ mechanism of control on the media. They are Capitalists and the State. However, since the media is growing larger and complex day by day, both, the private owned business and the state public sector ownership, have agreed to follow the moderate path of similar control mechanisms. It is worth noting that off late, there has been a new kind of controlling unit, which is the Community media ownership, run by the actors of the civil society. The public sector influence over the media is directly and indirectly controlled by the government, which in turn are the power elites. L5. 2. How do the media defend the interest of dominant groups with society? Habermas ((German(1962)English Translation 1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp. 305) in his theory has explained how the dominant groups with the society use media to its benefits. He argues that the dominant groups involve the manipulative tactic of deploying media power to procure mass loyalty, consumer demand and “compliance” with systemic imperatives and thus limit the ideas.Recently; media ownership is shifting largely to the powerful private sector, which undoubtedly, is the dominant section of the society. Such niche media are run according to the logic of top down, manipulative communication, produced by professional communicators who target that niche to generate profit for their employers. Week 6 L6.1. What is audience labor? Most advertisers view audiences as labourers and they want them to work harder. Audiences work by informing themselves about brands, crafting product-centric lifestyles, integrating products into their social life. Advertisers exploit the audiences in two ways. One, by making the audience watch more ads (but this often leads to diminishing returns because of audience fatigue, audience tuning out, message clutter) and two, by making audiences watch ads more efficiently (by directly targeting ads to particular consumers).  For example, advertisers directly target particular kinds of audiences through customised vehicles like Google or Facebook as opposed to broadcast television. Dallas Smythe (2001) came out with the theory of audience labor. He recommended that, instead of selling cultural works (and their fixed ideologies), the culture industry sells audiences to advertisers. They offer the audience a “free lunch” - a television show, stories in a newspaper, music on the radio. This free lunch is shared with advertising. In this way, the labor of the audience is commoditised. As by viewing the advertisement, the audience executes labor for the advertiser, which eventually pays the advertiser through the choices by the members of the audiences to buy the product. Week7 L7. 1. How do media help to create different types of identities? Ans. Identity is constantly under construction.  Identities are not static and frozen, but are fluid constructions.  They are socially defined.  Identity emerges through social practices, and in particular, through communication (language, the media, etc.).  Cultural identity is always bound in a particular social context, is always under construction, is negotiated, subject to constant transformations. Identities (and the social status, power, meanings attached to them) are products of history, power relationships, and culture.  Types of identities: individual identities, group identities, ethnic identities, class identities, religious identities, gender identities, national identities. Identity is often experienced and expressed in terms of ‘difference’, through a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’.  The ‘them’ is also called the ‘other’, which is largely done by media. In western societies, like Australia, Muslim’s are often stereotypically portrayed as an ‘other’. The ‘other’ can be both external and internal to a society. European identity is expressed as an ‘us’ against an American ‘them’.  To the European identity, America is an ‘external other’.  Often immigrant groups within society are categorized as an ‘internal other’. Examples of this include Muslim immigrants in Europe (and Australia), and Mexican immigrants in the US.  Thus, we can see that in this way, media plays a key role in generating collective identities like ‘the nation’ or ‘community,’ or international or supranational or even global identities. So, media helps majorly in creating identity. Week8 L8.1. How do media rituals create representations of the social world? Representation is tied up in media rituals. Media rituals are routines that are dependent on institutional structures.   Media rituals rely on socio-political structures (government, PR, institutional sources and routines). In centred media ritual, journalists and institutional sources interact to make ‘the news’.  The press and the government are unified.  Journalists ‘feel free to invoke a generalized ‘we’ and to take for granted shared values’. While in de-centred media ritual, journalists take a more tabloid approach, interacting with ‘the people’ instead of institutional sources.  According to Durham (2008), ‘Tabloids do not present a normative or institutionally legitimated objectivity to support its construction of reality.  Rather it constructs a cultural consensus with viewers based on four characteristics.’ According this media ritual, the society is represented keeping the following factors in mind. The focus is on highlighting a personal narrative, giving privilege to visuals over analysis, referring to the human interest story more than sourced news and focusing on the immediate issues of daily life. Durham criticised this type of ritual. He opined, ‘Rather than seeing well researched, well written, reflective news, viewers often see newsgathering in the raw.  What was once the raw ingredient of journalism is now the product’ (Durham 2008). So, Media does not only reflect reality but rather represents a new version of reality. It mediates how we construct our lives and thus media rituals create representations of the social world, which is actually a version of reality. Week9  L9.1. What role do professional communicators play in constructing “legitimacy” for ruling groups in society? The relationship between the professional communicators and hegemonic elites does not look like a simple one way, transmission of messages, with professional communicators simply and uncritically producing messages at the bidding of the ruling groups in the society. However, a complex set of relationship exists between them. These communicators ensure of existing political decision making as legitimate and existing coercive arrangements i.e. justice, policing and military systems, as legitimate, they can be relied upon to “ask the right questions” and produce reports and images that confirm the existing hegemonic arrangements. Successful hegemonic dominance involves achieving a naturalised and routinized system for staffing the culture industries, especially the newsrooms with intellectuals who broadly accept the discourse and practices of the ruling hegemony. Hegemonic closure of discourse is most effective when those involve in media training programmes, media staffing decisions and establishing media work practices routinely take decisions that confirm the discursive needs of the existing hegemonic order, and set up mechanisms to clone themselves. When hegemonically ‘appropriate’ decision making is routinized, ruling elites need not intervene to secure their discursive needs, and discourse closure becomes naturalised and opaque, and thus legitimised. Read More