This week was about commercial media which includes TV channels such as 7,9,10, Go, Gem, 7Two, 7Mate... you get the picture. Commercial media is media that is run for profit, and either survives or fails depending on business success. Basically, without an audience to take in the information and be exposed to the advertising, it would fail. It comes in three main forms: subscription, sponsored or subsidised. How I understand it: Foxtel, advertising or government funding. Because it is heavily sponsored, it's main functions include propaganda (think Fox news) and delivering news and information to the mass quickly. I mean, let's be honest, people are far more likely to watch channel 9 news than the ABC, purely for it's entertainment value.
Bruce then talked about social responsibility of the media in a democracy, which calls for media to be:
- truthful, comprehensive and an accurate depiction of the day's news
- a forum for the exchange of debate
- an accurate representation of society
- to give the public full access to 'the day's intelligence', so keeping politicians honest
I feel as if in commercial media a lot of this social responsibility is lost or neglected, despite the fact that there are legal implications for ignoring their responsibility. One example that Bruce gave where legal principles were applied was the issue with Kyle Sandilands, who is now bound by ACMA to say nothing that may be deemed offensive to women or girls.
This idea that I discussed was then gone on to be described by Bruce, who explained that with commercial media focussing on advertising and sales, and social media being an editorial forum, what occurs is an 'Ethical Wall' between the two (like the separation of church and state in a political sense).
Even though I believe that commercial media can neglect it's social responsibility, I understand it has other functions that serve society well. One we learnt about was that commercial media aims to reduce the temptations of a monopoly within the media, where all the news and information that a country gets does not just come from the one source. However, this isn't really happening in Australia, as a large percentage of news is owned by Murdoch, and the supply of news should not be tainted by money or power. This is possibly why the style of commercial media was described in the lecture as corrupt, lacking quality and lacking social responsibility, which in turn results in this "dumbing down" theory or "Mickey Mouse news": the more entertaining (and perhaps less factual) the news is, the bigger audience they are likely to attract, which means money for the news companies.
Some challenges of commercial media talked about in the lecture were ideas that I had not thought about prior to starting this course. The fact that there is a "fragmentation of the audience", and different channels are becoming more and more specific to smaller groups of people makes it difficult to attract large audiences and the kind of profit that the larger companies want. This also attributes to this "dumbing down" theory, as there is less money for quality production which results in cheap, nasty reality TV shows for example.
I quite enjoyed this lecture. It made me think about a lot of the issues that exist in commercial media that need to be either stopped or fixed. For example the monopolisation of Australian news. Hopefully over the next few years other commercial media companies will have the opportunity to create more of the media that we consume as society, to create better quality media and a more equal view of the whole of Australia.
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