Media International Australia

News organisations have traditionally been shy about covering their own affairs. In the nineteenth century, the first mention of the editor of the London Times in the columns of his own newspaper was his obituary – even though the cognoscenti knew he was a significant political force. Early in World War II, The Sydney Morning Herald was outraged by the policies of the Menzies Government in relation to paper rationing and the launching of The Daily Mirror. Its private lobbying and protests were frantic, but the issue was barely canvassed in its own news columns (Souter, 1981: 187ff).

Between December 1986 and March 1987 Australia's media underwent a major shakeup. The old days of three names — Herald and Weekly Times (HWT), News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch) and John Fairfax, with Kerry Packer added for TV and magazines — are over.

In the last few months the face of television station ownership in Australia has changed dramatically. While a year ago it looked as if major owners such as Packer and Murdoch would remain in a dominant position in the television industry for the foreseeable future, now both Packer and Murdoch have sold off their stations, and media watchers are facing a new line-up of television owners.

While, in February 1987, 61% of Australians believed that the Government should restrict the concentration of media ownership in Australia and 48% were concerned by the Murdoch takeover, the very young, the unskilled, and women were least concerned.

Language is a prime site of ideological struggle in South Africa. The state not only defines the hegemonic construct of reality, but it perpetuates and delineates the ethnic, racial, political, historical nd geographical content of what it calls ‘national-states' and racially segregated ‘communities' which fall outside the ‘homelands’.

On 20 February 1987, Nadia Tass and David Parker, the director and producer of the successful feature film, Malcolm, spoke informally to students and staff of the Australian Film, Television & Radio School. The following are excerpts of that talk.

Quantity is more evident than quality in the 1986 crop of British media books. Chronic lack of funding and opportunities for serious long-term research into the media in universities, polytechnics and colleges is reflected in a general absence of sustained reflective work in the publishers' lists. Indeed the one media book published in the UK in 1986 which is stilt likely to be of indisputable value in 1996 is an American book, Roland Marchand's meticulous account of American advertising between 1920–40, Advertising the American Dream. It is, by some distance, the best media book of the year, though it is unlikely to shift perceptions of its subject as markedly as two outstanding earlier studies, Daniel Pope's The Making of Modern Advertising (1983) and Michael Schudson's Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion (1984).

Published research in the public domain concerning use of the domestic telephone is rare. Even the systematic study of the social consequences of the telephone had, according to Wurtzel & Turner (1977) and Dordick (1983), been relatively neglected. Yet as Aronson (1971) has pointed out, development of telephone systems has been intimately tied to modernisation over the past century. Perhaps it is because the telephone is such an integral part of life that it has been ‘taken for granted’ and thus, as Moyal (1987) points out, has not received the research attention it deserves.

Irangate has been fascinating for the stream of revelations which have almost daily magnified the seriousness of the scandal A key theme in media coverage of Irangate has been the remarkable fall from grace of President Reagan. But how is it that this grace was bestowed in the first place?

Not long after midnight on 29 November 1985, a small group of guerillas belonging to the radical organisation Chukaku-ha, slashed the underground communications cables serving the Japan National Railways network in Tokyo and Osaka. They were protesting at government plans to privatise the railway system, but their action was perhaps more important for the way in which it focused attention on a quite different economic and social issue. In a single swift sortie, a handful of people had been able to prevent the movement of some 4.5 million computers, and bring the life of one of the world's largest cities to a temporary halt. Nothing could more effectively have demonstrated the great and growing dependence of contemporary social systems on the communication of information, not only between individual and individual, but also between computer and computer.

In the last decade there has been rapid growth in the availability and use of on-line databases both overseas and in Australia in 1979, 400 databases were listed in the American CUADRA Directory of Online Databases; in 1986, over 3000 were listed. In 1984 there were 67 Australian publicly available databases; by 1986 this had grown to 160 with a further 22 planned (Directory of Australian Databases, 1986). Extensive Australian use of overseas databases became practicable in 1979 when OTC introduced MIDAS, which allowed more economical direct access to the major US systems. Since then large overseas vendors have established offices and agents in Australia: DIALOG in 1979, SDC/ORBIT in 1981. Permagon Info-line and Mead Data Central in 1985.

I am indebted to Stephen Crook for the opportunity to expand the position I presented in ‘What's Happening to Audience Research?’ (MIA, 39:18–22, 1986). I believe that dramatic changes are occurring in the range and scope of studies of media audiences, and that academic audience research (as opposed to research funded for commercial or administrative purposes) has an important role to play in enabling audiences to better understand their attachment to and involvement in media activities. Recent research which demonstrates such interests include Morely (1980 and 1985) Hobson (1982) Ang (1985) Radway (1984), and Hodge and Tripp (1986).