Australian Broadcasting Corporation Research Articles

Our Cows and Whales

Our Cows and Whales

Aural Nation: Knowledge, Information and Music in Early Australian Public Broadcasting

When the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) announced the 2017 schedule for the Radio National (RN) network, all but one music programme had been dropped. Removing music from RN in a time of technological change – there are suggestions RN will become a post-broadcast digital platform by 2020 – reflects a deeper relationship between knowledge, information and the arts at the heart Australian public service media. Using historical examples from early Australian broadcasting this article revisits the notion of radio ‘liveness’ in the context of shifting understandings of knowledge production that emerged when radio was ‘new media’. Radio broadcasting’s ability to serve up events to listeners as if they were present had a critical effect on emerging media forms from broadcast concerts to dramatic news presentations. The article situates radio within the shift from traditional knowledge values, championed by music appreciation’s representation of European art-music, to information programming (including sports and news) presented to a new listening subject that was being formed within broadcasting. With the establishment of local practices to exploit the cultural impact of liveness, conventions emerged in the ABC’s national radio service that shaped its information programming for years to come.

The complexity of Adam Hills: celebrity and disability

Adam Hills is a comedian and presenter who achieved celebrity status in Australia in 2005 as the host of a music quiz television show on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Hills has sin...

Communication life line? ABC emergency broadcasting in rural/regional Australia

ABSTRACTAs an emergency broadcast provider, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has a perceived duty to ensure communities are informed during natural disasters through its radio network. This obligation is tested by issues of diversity and distance across rural and regional Australia as well as the structural and resourcing changes taking place within the ABC. This article examines public submissions to a Parliamentary Bill to amend the ABC’s Charter with greater provisions for rural/regional media coverage. The analysis reveals two key concerns regarding emergency radio broadcasting: access inequities including issues with digital replacement technologies; and how the frequency, timeliness, and accuracy of emergency news suffer from decreasing ‘localness’. Upon reviewing the submissions, we argue that the ABC’s Charter and Memorandums of Understanding with state/territory emergency service agencies are currently insufficient in meeting the media access and content needs of rural and regional communities during disasters. We conclude that the proposed Charter amendments would help the ABC to better account for how local contexts shape the effectiveness of its emergency broadcasting.

Teaching Undergraduate Journalism Students Foreign Correspondence: Can It Be Done?

The University of Queensland has conducted five international field reporting courses in India and Vietnam since 2012,1 as well as three more courses based on similar work integrated learning principles (i.e., intensive, immersive and experiential) on campus at St Lucia in Brisbane during the same period. Previous research has found them to be valuable pedagogical innovations that have led to solid academic outcomes. The students themselves have also reported enjoying greater self-confidence, better reporting and technical skills, and increased employment prospects as a direct result of taking part in these courses. Some of that research is re-examined in this article but in a new light, given that the main focus here is on whether these courses in fact deliver on another important promise: to teach the core skills required of a foreign correspondent. To discover what those core skills might be, the researcher explored the extensive literature written by former and current correspondents about their experiences and their lessons learned. He also approached 12 former colleagues at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), all of whom have been high profile international reporters, correspondents and producers, and invited them to offer their unstructured reflections on this question. These insights have then been filtered and assessed through the researcher’s own reflections of working as a foreign correspondent for the ABC in London between 1984 and 1987. The results are both encouraging and challenging. They suggest that while the students and their teachers are largely satisfied with the reporting, technical and personal skills that have been taught and learned, many correspondents consider that their core attributes include extensive experience in senior reporting roles prior to heading overseas, where the basic skills have been honed to the highest degree. That, of course, is something that no undergraduate could ever claim to have achieved.

Innovation, women’s work and the documentary impulse: pioneering moments and stalled opportunities in public service broadcasting in Australia and Britain

This article explores the roles of some of the key women producers, broadcasters and writers who were able to work within the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) from their foundational periods to the 1950s. Despite the predominantly male culture of radio broadcasting from the 1920s to the 1970s, this article considers the significance and long-term impacts of some of these overlooked female pioneers at the forefront of developing a range of new reality and ‘talk’ forms and techniques. While the article draws on primary BBC research, it also aims to address these openings, cultures and roles as they existed historically for women in the ABC. How did the ABC compare in its foundational period? Significantly, this paper contrasts the two organisations in the light of their approaches to modernity, arguing that BBC features, the department it engendered, and the traditions it influenced, had far reaching impacts; one of these relating to those opportunities opened for women to develop entirely new forms of media communication: the unrehearsed interview and actuality documentary programmes.

The BBC Charter Review

Both the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) are being subjected to close scrutiny, but from different quarters. During the lead up to the British general election in 2015, the Cameron Conservative government issued a Green Paper, BBC Charter Review, July-October 2015, which broke new ground in terms of the scope of such an enquiry for its level of institutional criticism. Whilst ostensibly the document only purported to raise options for future change, and invited public submissions for consideration, there has been widespread concern about the possible serious intentions of the government for the corporation’s future. Though the ABC appears to be subject to much less vitriolic attack than its British counterpart, it too faces a range of threats and abuses. Paradoxically, such aggressive scrutiny comes at a time when both broadcasting corporations enjoy record audiences, continuing high levels of public trust, and on-line market leadership as a result their successful development of new digital platforms.

The BBC Charter Review

Both the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) are being subjected to close scrutiny, but from different quarters. During the lead up to the British general election in 2015, the Cameron Conservative government issued a Green Paper, BBC Charter Review, July-October 2015, which broke new ground in terms of the scope of such an enquiry for its level of institutional criticism. Whilst ostensibly the document only purported to raise options for future change, and invited public submissions for consideration, there has been widespread concern about the possible serious intentions of the government for the corporation’s future. Though the ABC appears to be subject to much less vitriolic attack than its British counterpart, it too faces a range of threats and abuses. Paradoxically, such aggressive scrutiny comes at a time when both broadcasting corporations enjoy record audiences, continuing high levels of public trust, and on-line market leadership as a result their successful development of new digital platforms.

Surviving the post-broadcast era: The international context for Australia’s ABC

While much of the discussion of the current condition of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has been very much located within the Australian context, there is some point to widening the frame and considering the situation of the ABC within a more international context. In many locations, the rationale for the public broadcaster – the provision of information, education and entertainment for the public good – has not easily survived what has been dubbed the post-broadcast era, increasingly shaped by commercialisation, neo-liberalism, de-regulation and privatisation. The tendencies in the Australian context are not as clear as the international ones, however, and so the comparison between the international and the national contexts frames the account developed by this article.

The Safety of Al Jazeera English Journalists in Egypt

The imprisonment of Al Jazeera English (AJE) journalists (Australian Peter Greste, Egyptian-Canadian national Mohamed Fahmy, and Egyptian Baher Mohamed) in Egypt between 2013 and 2015 reflected the recent ten agenda items of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) about the safety of journalists (Poyhtari & Berger, 2015). Building on the relevance of press theories (Siebert, Peterson, & Schramm, 1956; Curran, 2002) as well as developmental and peace journalism (Carpentier, 2007 cited in Cammaerts & C arpentier, 2007) as a theoretical basis, this paper examines the twenty-one month reportage of the AJE case by public broadcasters such as AJE, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It assesses whether the UNESCO’s Safety of Journalist agenda was covered. A “mixed method” (Kolmer, 2008), quantitative and qualitative content analysis research design, was used. Four hundred and ninety-five articles from the three broadcasters’ coverage were analyzed in two stages which overall began from the day (December 29, 2013) of arrest of the AJE trio until a week after Fahmy’s and Mohamed’s final release (September 30, 2015). The analysis found that items noted in the UNESCO’s Safety of Journalists’ agenda were not overtly spelt out in the coverage by the broadcasters but cloaked under a wider press freedom framework that hung over the case. Findings also reflected the critical need to address the safety of journalists in Egypt and other parts of Africa, despite the democratic awaking of the 2011 Arab Spring.

The future of digital archive collections: Augmenting public service media geo-locative archives

During 2011, the now defunct ABC Pool (abc.net.au/pool) project developed an experiment that sought to combine emerging augmented reality (AR) technology with the archival collection of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The MyBurb project attempted to alter experiences of Australian suburbs by augmenting ABC archives in contemporary suburban environments to explore the blur between physical and digital spaces with its citizens. Mobile media, specifically geo-locative AR applications such as Layar are “one of the most widely used mobile AR applications” (Liao & Humphreys, 2014, p. 2) and challenge the sociological implications of hybrid spaces as “[m]obile interfaces … allow users to be constantly connected to the Internet while walking through urban spaces” (de Souza e Silva, 2006, p. 261). The project was successfully implemented, but was rarely utilized by the audience it sought to engage, revealing a division between aspects of the ABC’s remit and engaging its audience through mobile technology and environmental hybridity. This observation supports the cultural production gap Hesmondhalgh (2007) identified between the production and consumption of cultural goods, which I argue could be facilitated through technological intermediation as part of the broader concept of cultural intermediation (Hutchinson, 2013; Maguire & Matthews, 2010; Negus, 2002). How then could cultural intermediation facilitate the collaborative production of cultural goods to include the affordances of geo-locative media while avoiding the disconnection between the MyBurb project and its stakeholders? The data presented within this paper represents 3 years of research at ABC Pool where I was embedded as the community manager/researcher in residence.

Soil news - the soil carbon and climate policy journey in Australia and the role of different media

‘Enough soil carbon to mitigate climate change is a big ask’ was a litmus piece in the October 2012 edition of Agriculture Today. The paper was the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries’ flagship research, advisory and farm management vehicle, published monthly in The Land for 20 years, on the web since 2005 until December 2012. The October 2012 story dovetailed with Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) television Lateline reporting that the Federal Coalition's (from now on Government's) climate policy could not demonstrate that storing carbon in Australian soils would achieve the major proportion of a target to reduce Australia's greenhouse emissions by five per cent on 2000 levels by 2020. It also provided background for the ABC's FactCheck verdict that voters in 2013 federal election were not hearing “the full story on climate research”. The real story is how to inform urban Australia's poor understanding and lack of connection to how land managers must maintain and where possible improve soil quality for food security and food production as we adapt to climate change. And if you are in the business of information delivery or providing content, how do you choose your distribution channels to target as wide an audience as possible? One fundamental yardstick to avoid disenfranchising and discriminating against some people who want, and rely on, your information is to continually critically assess how fast high speed internet is reaching marginalised rural areas. Print is still the preferred news medium for the majority of farmers.

Repositioning the innovation rationale for public service media

Abstract The values that gave rise to the ethos of public service broadcasting (PSB) almost a century ago, and which have provided the rationale for PSBs around the world across that time, are under question. This article argues that the process of reinvention of PSBs is enhanced through repositioning the innovation rationale for public service media (PSM). It is organized around a differentiation which is part of the standard repertoire of innovation studies – that between product, process and organizational innovation – as they are being practised by the two Australian PSBs, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). The article then considers the general problematics of innovation for PSBs through an analysis of the operations of the public value test in the context of European PSM, and its, to this stage, non-application in Australia. The innovation rationale is argued to be a distinctive via media between complementary and comprehensive roles for PSM, which in turn suggests an international, policy-relevant research agenda focusing on international circumstances in which the public broadcaster is not market dominant.

Framing and dominant metaphors in the coverage of North Korea in the Australian media

Through the selective allocation of attention, framing and metaphors in covering foreign affairs and countries, media narratives often act to delegitimise, marginalise and demonise international actors. Focusing on Australian reportage of North Korea in The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2012, this paper explicates how the framing mechanisms utilised in media point to media complicity in reinforcing a negative, adversarial orientation towards North Korea. It also discusses implications for how Australians view the North Korean people, Australian–North Korean relations, and policy pertaining to Northeast Asia more broadly.

John Forbes, the Australian Poet: Representations of National Identity inA Layered Eventon ABC Radio National

John Forbes was an Australian poet who lived from 1950 to 1998 and was one of the so-called 'generation of 68' who were deeply influenced by contemporary American poetics and culture. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)'s Radio National paid tribute to Forbes's life and work in 1999, in the posthumous radio adaptation A Layered Event. This article analyses representations of national identity in A Layered Event, using Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the 'arboreal' or unified versus the 'rhizomic' or networked. I argue that, through edited biographical interviews on the one hand, and adaptations of Forbes's poems on the other, A Layered Event cultivates two distinct images of national identity - arboreal and rhizomic - and that it plays these off against each other. The article asks why Forbes and Forbes's work is represented in these ways in the program. I use this reading of A Layered Event to reflect on the ABC's role as a national public service broadcaster at the turn of the millennium. I argue that A Layered Event's handling of national representations may be read as an allegory for the ABC's negotiation of its Charter aim to 'contribute to a sense of national identity', in an age of increasingly trans-national and fragmented identities and audiences.

Public Service Media and Social TV: Bridging or Expanding Gaps in Participation?

The public service media (PSM) remit requires the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to provide for minorities while fostering national culture and the public sphere. Social media platforms and projects – specifically ‘social TV’ – have enabled greater participation in ABC content consumption and creation; they provide opportunities for social participation in collaborative cultural production. However it can be argued that, instead of deconstructing boundaries, social media platforms may in fact reconstruct participation barriers within PSM production processes. This article explores ABC co-creation between Twitter and the # 7DaysLater television program, a narrative-based comedy program that engaged its audience through social media to produce its weekly program. The article demonstrates why the ABC should engage with social media platforms to collaboratively produce content, with # 7DaysLater providing an innovative example, but suggests skilled cultural intermediaries with experience in community facilitation should carry out the process.

Aboriginal military service and assimilation

In 1957, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio ran a 30-minute feature entitled 'The Story of Douglas Grant: The Black Scotsman'. The broadcast narrated the life of Douglas Grant, an Aboriginal man raised in a white Sydney family who served in the First World War. Brian Hungerford reported: 'It [Grant's story] means that if you take a newborn baby straight from its mother, you can bring it up to fit into any society at any level. There is no inherent mental or emotional difference between the primitive man and the civilised one'. How Douglas Grant's life sits as an assimilation narrative and the role of military service in that account is complex. Whereas the ABC and other media reports promoted Grant as a 'poster-child' for assimilation, by his death in 1951 the unfulfilled promises of equality left Grant questioning whether Australian society would ever allow Aboriginal people to assimilate.

‘I know exactly who they are’: Radio presenters’ conceptions of audience

Abstract Since Horton and Wohl’s recognition of the para-social relationship, there has been an interest in understanding the relationship between presenters and audiences beyond commodification models. But while the relationship has long been named, little is understood about the process from ‘inside’ the presenter experience: what audiences mean to presenters, how the relationship is constructed and becomes real in the absence of face-to-face contact when, for the most part, the presenter can only know the audience as an abstraction or a projection. This article will explore the way Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) talk radio presenters construct their audience as a dialogue partner, and the way that the on-air self is managed, in line with the corporate expectations of their employer, to achieve the appropriate symbolic indicators of friendship, sympathy, companionship, disclosure and intimacy. The findings are based on interviews with leading ABC radio presenters.

Engaging, Persuading, and Entertaining Citizens

This paper draws upon public sphere theories and the “mediatization of politics” debate to develop a mapping of the Australian political public sphere, with particular reference to television. It discusses the concept of a “political public sphere,” and the contribution of both non-traditional news media genres, such as satirical television and infotainment formats, to an expanded conception of the political public sphere. It considers these questions in the context of two case studies: the Q&A program on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and its uses of social media and interactive formats to engage citizens, and the comedy program Gruen Nation, also on the ABC, which analyzed the use of political advertising to persuade citizens during the 2013 Australian Federal election.

How Does A Prime Minister Speak?

This paper investigates how political subjectivity is framed and expressed through language use in television political interviews. The paper argues that Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field provide a useful framework for analyses of political subjectivity in news media interviews, but it also argues that the more sociological emphasis of Bourdieu’s theory cannot sufficiently account for the constitutive importance of discourse in the agency of the habitus and the boundaries and authority of different fields. As such, the analysis also draws on critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how Prime Ministerial discourse involves negotiations of different constitutive features of an individual subjectivity, and also negotiations between a particular habitus and the exigencies of the journalistic and political fields. Through an analysis of interviews of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on influential Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) programmes,Insidersand the7.30 Report, it is argued that the Prime Minister attempts to exercise political authority through an ensemble of discourses, initiating different relations with the interviewers, political colleagues and opponents, leading public figures in other fields, and the Australian public.