The Ethics of the Daily Telegraph

Since it was announced on the 13th of May, the 2014 Federal Budget has attracted a wide array of criticism from politicians, the media, and the general public.

While the budget had been said by Treasurer Joe Hockey as being “tough but fair” for several months prior to its announcement, as well as claiming that it would usher in the end of the so-called entitlement era, the overall reaction to the budget has been profoundly negative. This reaction has led not only to the widespread criticism of the government and their self-perception of the budget’s overall fairness, but has also led to widespread protests and demonstrations in Sydney and elsewhere.

Much of the protests have focused on the implementation of a bulk billing scheme for Medicare, the harsher requirements that must be met to be allowed the, the deregulation of university fees, and the introduction of new taxes. All of these were explicitly mentioned by the coalition prior to the election under the basis that they would not be implemented, and much attention has been drawn to the hypocrisy of focusing on the previous Labor government’s “broken promise” of not introducing a carbon tax and subsequently introducing multiple new taxes now that they are in power .

Despite the public backlash in the weeks since the budget, the various newspapers and blogging websites run by NewsCorp seem to have elected to ignore the events as they have unfolded. The company, which has an approximate 70% control net of the Australian media landscape, continues to publish stories in its papers and blogs that misrepresent the facts of this public backlash even in the face of external criticism. While this has been occurring for years in Australia and across the world in the company, the skewed coverage is especially jarring in the wake of the release of the budget.

The Daily Telegraph’s coverage of the budget backlash exemplifies this. The Telegraph has traditionally catered to a working-class readership, utilising a simpler and more direct journalistic style to present its stories when compared with rival newspapers. A major part of the newspaper is the sports section, with a circulation of over one million newspapers throughout the Sydney metropolitan area. The mission statement on the NewsCorp Australia website even acknowledges this, stating about the Telegraph that “we’re for Sydney… The Daily Telegraph reflects the values and aspirations of our everyday reader”.

From the outset – even in the weeks prior to the election – it has been obvious that the budget will be ultimately detrimental to families of the working class; while the exact extent of the effects it will have has been debated, the sheer scale of cuts that were introduced have ensured that the impact will be notable [Jericho, 2014]. This is due primarily to the combination of the slashing of various welfare benefits and increasing the costs of necessities for everyday life. Among the cuts are a reduction in hospital funding agreements by $50 billion and pausing the Medicare benefits scheme for around two years, while introducing a $7 co-payment for every visit to a general practitioner along with an increase in the cost of medicine, a move which Joe Hockey defended as being no more affecting to someone’s income as having a drink at the pub [Knott, 2014].

Despite this, the Telegraph has continued to repeat the statements from Hockey and Abbott that the multiple harsh cuts are necessary for regaining a surplus, and that working families and the jobs industry will ultimately benefit in the long-term. The way the Telegraph has gone about this is to simultaneously praise the government for introducing a tough but fair budget whilst demonising the protesters who have spoken out or demonstrated against what they feel is the unfairness apparent in it.

The front page of the May 19th edition of the Daily Telegraph was that of an oversized photograph of a protester at the George Street protest march, with the words “The Ferals Are Revolting” stuck alongside it. The Telegraph went on to describe the protesters as a group of “doctors and delinquents”, and thanks to the framing of the photograph and the words used it makes the protest seem violent and chaotic. The story presented by the Telegraph can be seen as not just inaccurate but grossly inaccurate, as the rally was comprised primarily of young people, pensioners and workers and ended up being conducted in a fairly orderly fashion. The highly negative coverage of the rally that the Telegraph used stands in sharp contrast with the other newspapers that covered the event – which surprisingly includes several other News Corp-owned publications, such as Melbourne’s Herald Sun and the Adelaide Advertiser, which went as far as to offer guides and solutions to prevent the budget from having too much an adverse effect on the family [Staff Writers et al, 2014].

One reason given for the disparity between the other publications and the Telegraph is the way that the management and editors of the paper see a need to tailor it to their audience. A common attitude that seems to be held is that Sydney has a much harder, cruder readership when compared with another city such as Adelaide. This attitude held by the newspaper’s editors would account for the vitriolic and often vicious headlines that have been splashed over the front page. It is entirely possible that the attitude presented by the Daily Telegraph and its reporting staff is simply a class-based bias, one that has existed for decades and prevailed due to the attitudes of successive editors of the paper.

In comparison to the Telegraph is The Australian, another newspaper owned by News Corp that can be considered a more “sophisticated” publication. While it too has a leaning towards a conservative ideology, the overall tone of the paper is much more restrained and even-handed than the Telegraph, with online news articles actively discussing the implications of the budget’s impact on families [Crowe, 2014].

Is it possible that the reason for this difference is due to the Australian’s status as a higher-end newspaper with a more intelligent target audience? While there is some evidence of bias in the journalists that work for the paper, it has shown a reasonable amount of coverage towards the budget and the reactions that have resulted. One area that it has provided decent coverage for is the impact of university fee deregulation, which has been predicted to cause an increase in HECS debts six times over within the next ten years [Trounsen, 2014].

The coverage of the protests is just one example of the tactics that the Daily Telegraph is utilising to try and sell the budget to its readers. Another of these tactics – as mentioned earlier – is the outright ignoring of key issues and protests as they occur and presenting either a skewed viewpoint of the issue, or to use something else entirely. Whether or not this tactic has been successful is debateable, as the Telegraph’s distribution has declined by 10% as a result of the waning power of print media. This is not a localised event, however, as print media worldwide has been falling in stature and influence thanks to the rise of the internet and the blogosphere – an opportunity for journalists to self-publish and present news articles the way that they want without the restrictions of several editors.
Another event that the Telegraph has kept quiet about is the $882 million tax rebate offered to News Corp by the Australian Taxation Office late in 2013. The opportunity to cover the rebate was lost by the Daily Telegraph, an action which holds absolutely no suspicious quality in light of their heralding of the 2014 budget, but was covered by non-News Corp papers such as The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald [Farrer 2014]. It is currently believed that this may have contributed to the pre-budget deficit that the government has been desperate to get rid of, or to possibly use it for further justification for their massive cuts in the budget.

Ultimately, the attitude of the Daily Telegraph and its writers to the 2014 Federal Budget is a reflection of the attitudes of its editors. This is an unsettling one, as the newspaper itself claims to be a reflection of what the people want or need to hear, and yet at the same time treats its readership with a thinly-veiled contempt. This attitude is an extremely worrying one as it indicates exactly the kind of news that the paper believes its readers should have: something that drums up their emotions and does little to inform.

References

Crowe, David; “Budget hit to families not so severe, government analysis shows”, The Australian, May 24, 2014 (accessed May 29, 2014) <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/budget-2014/budget-hit-to-families-not-so-severe-government-analysis-shows/story-fnmbxr2t-1226929382749#&gt;
Farrer, Martin; “Rupert Murdoch’s empire receives $882m tax rebate from Australia”, The Guardian, February 17, 2014 (accessed May 28, 2014) <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/17/rupert-murdoch-receives-882m-tax-rebate&gt;
Jericho, Greg; “Family tax benefit cuts will hurt the average family more than a levy”, The Guardian, May 8, 2014 (accessed May 27, 2014) <http://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2014/may/08/family-tax-benefit-cuts-will-hurt-ordinary-australians-more-than-a-levy&gt;
Knott, Matthew; “Less than two middies: Joe Hockey defends $7 GP fee”, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 15, 2014 (accessed May 29, 2014) <http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/less-than-two-middies-joe-hockey-defends-7-gp-fee-20140515-zrdb6.html&gt;
Trounsen, Andrew, “HECS debt set to balloon”, The Australian, May 30, 2014 (accessed May 30, 2014) <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/hecs-debt-set-to-balloon/story-e6frgcjx-1226936499663#&gt;
Tiffen, Rodney; “Col Allan, Murdoch’s $100 million man”, Inside Story, August 15, 2013 (accessed May 26, 2014) <http://inside.org.au/col-allan-murdochs-100-million-man/&gt;
Staff Writers et all, “How the 2014 Federal Budget will affect you and your family”, The Advertiser, May 13, 2014 (accessed May 28, 2014) <http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/how-the-2014-federal-budget-will-affect-you-and-your-family/story-fni6uo1m-1226916700069&gt;
No author listed, “Then and now: the Abbott government’s broken promises”, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 14, 2014 (accessed May 28, 2014) <http://www.smh.com.au/business/federal-budget/then-and-now-the-abbott-governments-broken-promises-20140514-zrcfr.html?utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=outbrainamplify&gt;

 

Understanding Communication and What I’ve Learned

Over the past ten weeks of Understanding Communication I have learned a great deal about the different ways we communicate.

This newfound knowledge ranges across the topics of media ethics, the concept of privilege, the representations of indigenous Australians in the media, and gender roles. More importantly, though, the course has taught me about how we define these topics and has helped me to analyse them in a much greater capacity. One example of this is in the changing representation of indigenous Australians in the media, and how this representation is continuing to evolve.

The topics that we have learned about during the course have reflected many of my own interests; having studied a journalism course at TAFE last year, the topic of ethics in the media was one that I found particularly interesting, and this interest helped the group task later in the semester when we had to find an interview subject.

The topic I have found the most interesting was the most recent one: satire. It might have been due to my already-standing interest in the subject but I found the lecture to be funny and engaging, and provided an in-depth look at something that most people dismiss as being fairly uncomplicated – I now know there are two primary types of satire, Horatian and Juvenalian, the difference being that the former is reasonably light-hearted while the latter is quite serious and dark.

But of course, there’s still some more topics to learn about, and I look forward to them…

Bibliography

Carrell, A. ‘Historical views of humor’, (2008, The Primer of Humor Research, pp. 303-332)
Cheng, W. ‘Humor in intercultural conversations’, (2003, Semiotica, vol. 146, pp. 287-306)
The Onion, ‘James Cameron Says Future of Movies Will Be Watching Them Sitting on his Lap’ (2014, web article, http://www.theonion.com/articles/james-cameron-says-future-of-movies-will-be-watchi,35935/)

Indigenous Australians in the Media

One of the key things I’ve noticed over the past four weeks of Understanding Communication is steadily changing depiction and representation of indigenous Australians in the media.

Since European colonisation the perspective of indigenous peoples and culture has been almost exclusively through a European lens, which has led to some vast misrepresentations over the past two centuries. Since the 1967 referendum to recognise them as citizens and the repealing of Terra nullius in 1992, however, the representation of indigenous Australians has been increasingly seen from their perspective, which can ultimately lead to a much fairer perspective of issues that affects them and their communities.

Redfern Now, a television series that is broadcast on the ABC, is considered an important drama series because of this. It is not only performed and written by members of the indigenous community, but offers a non-European perspective of living in present-day Redfern. The episodes of the series cover a wide range of topics but Episode 6 I felt to be most important, as it dealt with the issue of deaths in police custody when a young man dies of internal injuries in a holding cell.

The issue has been officially acknowledged since at least 1987, when the four-year Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was established, but while it concluded in 1991 by stating that police violence was not a factor in these deaths over 269 have occurred since then. Redfern Now shows not only the immediate investigation of such an event, but also the way that the man’s family and his community are affected – the perspective it provides is important as it is not detached from the situation, but placed directly into the fallout as it occurs.

Bibliography:
Morton-Thomas, Patricia; “My Family Is Calling For Justice” (2012, https://newmatilda.com/2012/12/06/my-family-calling-justice)

“Redfern Now: Pretty Boy Blue (S1E6)”, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2012)

Jakubowicz, Andrew, “Week 6 Indigenous Communication” (Lecture, University of Technology Sydney 2013)

Gender Roles and Tracks Magazine

13-year-old surfer Olivia Bowers posted an open letter to Tracks, a monthly magazine focused on surfing that refers to itself as the “Surfer’s Bible”, criticising their portrayal of women both in the publication and on their website.

In her letter, Bowers expresses disappointment at noted absence of female surfers in the magazine. She also mentions that when they actually do appear, they are almost always represented by bikini models on beaches or posing in rooms, and are not actually representative of the sport of surfing. After saying she and a “posse of female surfers” will spread word and refuse to purchase the magazine, she says further that “It’s a shame that you can’t see the benefits of an inclusive surf culture that in fact, would add a whole lot of numbers to your subscription list.”

Bowers’ letter highlights the current gender gap in terms of the representation and recognition of women in sports, as well as the attitude towards women in the media. While the editor of Tracks, Luke Kennedy, said in a response to Bowers that the magazine did not have a “no girls” stance and had run stories about female surfers in the past, he also stated that women were not the primary audience and that would account for their lack of coverage.

The statement could be seen as a vast generalisation, especially considering that the most famous Australian surfer from the past decade is probably Layne Beachley, but it does seem to reflect the idea of sport being a strictly male activity. Bowers highlighted this further in an interview, where she stated that she is no longer allowed to play interschool football due to her age despite being in the girl’s league. The idea of sport being a strictly male activity has also been highlighted elsewhere, such as the now-infamous Ellyse Perry post on Cricket Meme where a number of male users posted pages of misogynistic phrases and abuse directed at her despite (or perhaps in light of) the meme proclaiming her skill and achievements in the sport.

It is possible that the under-representation may be influenced by responses from male readers such as the Cricket Meme incident, where the “new lad” personality is cultivated and aided by the anonymity of posting on the internet. In addition, the focus on women as object may be a holdover from the influence of the so-called lads mags in an attempt to draw new readers by utilising sex appeal.

Bibliography:
Steger, Jason; “Olive Bowers hits out at surfer sexism” (Sydney Morning Herald Online, http://www.smh.com.au/sport/olive-bowers-hits-out-at-surfer-sexism-20140329-35qei.html)

Andreou, Alex; “Looking gorgeous in sequinned socks – a very Tory answer to the sports gender gap” (The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/21/tory-gender-gap-cheerleading-sports-conservative-agenda)

Oakes-Ashe, Rachel; “Ellyse Perry meme sparks sexist abuse” (Daily Life, http://www.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/dl-sport/ellyse-perry-meme-sparks-sexist-abuse-20140131-31q1t.html)

Ross, K. 2010; “Gendered Media : Women, Men and Identity Politics” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham. ISBN 9780742554061)

Ethics and Flight MH370

One of the most widely-followed news stories from the past week is that of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. Just over a week ago, the plane – which was scheduled to fly from Malaysia and into Vietnam – disappeared less than an hour into its flight. The story broke very early on, a matter of hours after air controllers lost sight of the plane on their radar systems, and has remained in the news ever since. Despite the media coverage, no trace of the plane has yet been found and no hints as to its fate have been discovered.

The coverage of the case so far seems to have started off in a balanced manner, which is surprising considering the media frenzies which can occur around accidents of a large scale such as these. Of note was the early reporting of several passengers on the plane using stolen passports; there was some initial speculation that they might have been used by terrorists, but it was also stressed that the details weren’t known, and a few days later it was revealed the passports were being used by refugees. Much attention has been

Over the past few days, as new details have emerged about the plane’s disappearance and authorities have begun to regularly release information, speculation over the plane’s ultimate fate has begun to branch off into a number of different directions. Unlike some other high-profile events that have recently occurred, the coverage of Flight MH370 has remained surprisingly consistent, with new details and speculation being reported upon and being referred to as speculation, rather than fact. This probably has something to do with the nature of the incident; as of writing, the search for the missing plane involves ten countries and covers three major bodies of water, and the media could be using their power to try and assist the investigation.

In terms of ethics in the media, I believe the coverage of the MH370 investigation has been highly ethical – surprisingly so – with a low amount of sensationalism and an attitude of reporting facts as they come in.

Bibliography:
Info & Image Source: http://engtechmag.wordpress.com/tag/flight-mh370/