The Shortcomings of Australian Tabloid Media

Here's a few words on tabloid media in Australia. The quotes are taken from text books: I'll reference them as a 'comment' when I get home. I feel strongly about this, and just as strongly about misrepresentation (generally) within tabloid media. It's a bit scrawly (I originally wrote it in speech format), but I'd love to hear comments from anyone who takes the time to read it.
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The Australian Media Industry is a funny one. It’s not like the engineering, science, or medicine industries, because when we study it, right from day one we learn to critique it. We learn of its shortcomings, we learn how it has been semi-corrupted by corporate motivations. We also learn not to take it all as truth, and we learn to keep in mind certain things when we consume the media. But, unfortunately, a lot of people don't have the knowledge to take this approach to consuming news media.

I’m going to argue that the domination of tabloid news in Australian news media has and will continue to fail the Australian peoples’ requirements for truth and objectivity in the media. Which is simply a fancy way of saying that tabloid news is hopeless when it comes to effective journalism.

Tabloid news presents its hopelessness in two ways:
• In the age of information it does not contribute to providing information
• In the age of multiculturalism, tabloid media is pedalling Australian society backwards.
• I will also express my ideas on how we ought to consume tabloid media so as not to fall subject to its shortcomings

Sparks and Tulloch (2000) identify tabloidisation into three indicators:
• Range: the inadequate coverage of real/hard news
• Form: the simplification of press formats at the expense of necessary complexity .: easily understood illustration and simpler vocabulary and presentation
• Mode of address: outlines the relationship between the journalist and the reader as more casual and jovial. In tabloid media, the journalist tends to produce what the reader already wants to consume, so the consumer doesn’t really learn anything.

We supposedly live in the age of information, where now more then ever, we have access to facts and figures at our fingertips. And through globalisation, we see more of the outside world than ever before. Isn’t this a romantic idea? But I think that the information we receive now through the media is becoming less and less informative. Bill McKibben calls it the age of missing information. I believe that the news media has the potential to improve our knowledge of the world, but largely it doesn’t. I also believe that there’s a severe lack of in-depth current affairs programming in Australia.

One example of this was during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky calamity in 1996, when current affairs media went ga-ga finding out and sensationalising rumour, gossip and unsubstantiated stories.
And more recently when poor old Johnny Brogden let go a slip of the tongue (2005) after a few private drinks and as a result copped an absolute thrashing by the media, to the point where he wanted to take his own life!
Interestingly, in the days following princess Diana’s death, tabloid magazines and newspapers—who had previously hounded her incessantly, publishing any picture of her they could get their hands on—suddenly decided to publish pictures of her helping the sick and assisting her children. They suddenly decided to grant Diana the loyalty and respect she previously didn’t receive.

This is how news media conducts itself in pursuit of ratings, but is this what we want from the media, tabloid concoctions dominating front pages? It’s news media’s obsession with ratings that has corrupted their purpose and blurred their vision with regards to the role Australian commercial news media should play in society. That is the role of informing Australians on events and current affairs occurring locally and around the globe accurately, without dominant discourse or bias.

I also have concerns over the fact that news and public affairs are morphing into entertainment and tabloids dominating over mainstream media by focussing on personalisation of news, story selection and framing. That is, news media sources will intentionally choose and personalise a news story into a particular frame or dominant discourse. For example, yet another story on politicians misspending taxpayers’ money. You can just about hear Ray Martin saying it. This technique has facilitated the rise of infotainment and the advertorial—horrible words. They basically mean information presented as entertainment and advertising presented as an editorial.

Not only does tabloid news provide us with weak, inaccurate information, this weak, inaccurate information provides content that is detrimental to cultural diversity. I was watching Today Tonight a few weeks ago and they ran a segment on a group of young Muslim males, supposedly documenting their lives in an inner-city Australian suburb. During the segment, one of the men said 'we will never integrate'. He was referring to the willingness of Muslims to integrate into Australian society. This one statement caused uproar all over the papers and TB radio of people disgusted with Muslims, saying that they aren’t welcome if they don’t want to adapt to Australian society and so on.

On Media Watch a few weeks later, they discovered that the entire statement was more like 'we will never integrate like other cultures integrate because our culture is very strict and what is seen as integration of one culture may be different from another'. Why would T-T take out these justifying remarks? To achieve exactly what it did achieve: outrage amongst Australians against the Muslims. People were absolutely 'fuming'.

This type of tabloid activity is not exclusive to tv programs, it also occurs in similar instances in the press, on the radio and on the internet.

But it’s not all bad news. We can be subject to tabloid media as long as we recognise it as such and understand what it is. There’s no doubting that tabloid news contributes to Australian news media, but it shouldn’t dominate over important, informative journalism. It has its place in 6.30pm timeslots on tv, half-sized newspapers and glossy magazines. Other than that, it shouldn’t interfere. We must also establish within society that tabloid news is not informative or accurately representative of the world in which we live.

Tabloid press is like Talkback radio: it should be labelled as such and received in a way that the audience knows it is sensational, opinionated and biased.

I’ll end with an idea from Julianne Schultz (2002) and an idea of my own. Schultz believes that the press has used the fourth estate rhetoric to achieve greater power and influence than it could otherwise enjoy. The idea of the fourth estate is that the press is the fourth source of maintaining a representative democracy, next to parliament, the executive and the judiciary. I’ll go a step further and say that media in general has exploited the fourth estate label and betrayed its consumers by presenting tabloid news as hard news, when in fact it is not. The shortcomings of Australian news media lie on this idea. Tabloid news is hopeless when it comes to effective journalism, and the sooner we all acknowledge this, the sooner Australian news media can regain its role in Australian society.
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Image sourced from 'Girlfriend' web site, url: 144.140.25.180/ Images/ACF92E8.jpg (2005). Accessed September 7 2005
Schultz, J 2002, The Press, in Cunningham, S & Turner, G, The Media and Communications in Australia, Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin
Sparks, C and Tulloch, J 2000 Tabloid Tales, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield
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Thanks for reading. I'd be more than happy to discuss the issue, so feel free to comment: positively/negatively.
`till then,

Chris