Special Broadcasting Service Research Articles

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Creation and use of SBS’s The Boat; principles for the co-creation of online interactive learning environments for innovative digital pedagogy

ABSTRACT Teachers and students rely more on online-learning environments than ever before, including open, trusted and high-quality online learning resources produced by public broadcasters. For educators, this represents both an inspiration and challenge in the wake of new techologies and online learning environments. This article is a case study of one such online learning environment created by Australia’s multicultural broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), an adaptation of Nam Le’s award-winning short story, “The Boat” (2008). SBS’s The Boat (2015) is an immersive online experience that explores a refugee perspective and is accompanied by SBSLearn online learning materials. The Boat (2015) connects informal and formal learning though the delivery of both SBS Charter-driven content and Australian teachers’ pedagogical perspectives to local and global audiences including students and teachers. This article, co-written by the media producer of SBS’s The Boat (2015), and the educator who wrote the accompanying formal learning resources, shares principles for creating innovative and connected learning environments from different perspectives, including broadcaster editorial, technological innovation and educational design, with an intention to create a pedagogy for seamless access to engaging, immersive environments and principles for broadcaster and educator collaboration. Interviews and observations of broadcaster and teacher practice inform this analysis.

Innovation through co-creation: lessons from an Australian broadcaster and teachers’ collaboration in designing engaging multiplatform education resources

ABSTRACT Lessons from a successful broadcaster and teacher community of practice can inform new approaches to online learning co-design. Co-creation occurred with Australia’s multicultural broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) and education communities, through a co-participation model of working more directly with teachers and young people. SBS also established an online learning hub and innovative digital education resources. This article analyses the curation and co-design approach used by SBS in such a partnership to propose five principles for co-design communities of practice involving broadcasters and teachers. Media producers can learn how to co-create with educators’ to meet the growing demands of students and teachers for engaging online education resources, while also furthering their own mandates as broadcasters. This is the first major study of the production and use of Australian public broadcaster online teacher resources.

Uncovering a Climate Catastrophe? Media Coverage of Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires and the Revelatory Extent of the Climate Blame Frame

The Black Summer of 2019/2020 saw the forests of southeast Australia go up in flames. The fire season started early, in September 2019, and by March 2020 fires had burned over 12.6 million hectares (Werner and Lyons). The scale and severity of the fires was quickly confirmed by scientists to be "unprecedented globally" (Boer et al.) and attributable to climate change (Nolan et al.). The fires were also a media spectacle, generating months of apocalyptic front-page images and harrowing broadcast footage. Media coverage was particularly preoccupied by the cause of the fires. Media framing of disasters often seeks to attribute blame (Anderson et al.; Ewart and McLean) and, over the course of the fire period, blame for the fires was attributed to climate change in much media coverage. However, as the disaster unfolded, denialist discourses in some media outlets sought to veil this revelation by providing alternative explanations for the fires. Misinformation originating from social media also contributed to this obscuration. In this article, we investigate the extent to which media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires functioned both to precipitate a climate change epiphany and also to support refutation of the connection between catastrophic fires and the climate crisis.

If You Are the Oneand SBS: the cultural economy of difference

If You Are the One ( IYATO) is China’s most popular television dating show. Since Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) bought it 6 years ago, the show has attracted a cult following among English-speaking viewers. SBS subsequently purchased several other Chinese reality shows, and the Seven Network launched its own version of IYATO. But none of these programmes have proven to be as enduringly popular as IYATO. Taking an industry studies approach, this article draws on the inside knowledge of one of the authors, and on interviews with several other SBS employees, to shed light on the media industry’s thinking behind importing cultural products from China, particularly against the backdrop of fear and anxiety about China’s influence. We also ask why IYATO has endeared itself to Australia’s English-speaking viewers in ways that the majority of Chinese media content has not, despite the Chinese government’s myriad soft power initiatives.

This Face, Here, Now: Moving Image Portraiture

Abstract This article investigates the qualities of moving image portraiture that also illuminate the wider genre of photographic portraiture. The performance of portrait subjects over time brings attention to the triangulation of demand generated through the interaction of artist, subject, and viewer. Serial and group moving image portraiture engages with the power of global culture industries by imbricating these regimes with individual expression and personal desire. This article considers work by Candice Breitz, Rineke Dijkstra, Feng Feng, and Thomas Struth. This recent portraiture is framed by two reference points: Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests from the mid-1960s and a series of television station identifications that show the faces of viewers, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Face IDs. The Screen Tests have been chosen as seminal works that continue to have a significant impact on the genre. The SBS Face IDs, by contrast, have been selected because they operate at the limit of duration and subject presence.

Teaching history through entertainment: the pedagogy of Who Do You Think You Are?

Who Do You Think You Are? is a documentary series about history in which celebrities go on a journey to retrace their family tree and to learn about their ancestry. Originally broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the United Kingdom, it has been adapted in sixteen other countries, including Australia. The Australian version of the franchise has been broadcast since 2008 on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), a public service channel whose stated purpose is to “provide multilingual and multicultural radio, television and digital media services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians”. This article investigates the Australian version of Who Do You Think You Are? as an educational text, which teaches history by exploring a range of eras and historical events through the celebrities’ genealogical investigations. Based on interviews with the producers and textual analysis, it explores the series’ pedagogy and demonstrates that Who Do You Think You Are? aims to teach history through entertainment. It shows how entertainment elements like storytelling and emotions are used as pedagogical tools, and how this “edutainment” model influences the historical and historiographical lessons taught in and by the text. Thus, this article highlights the intrinsic connection between televisual pedagogy (how a programme teaches) and educational content (what it teaches). It is argued that by adopting an edutainment model – and, more specifically, by using storytelling and emotions as pedagogical tools – Who Do You Think You Are? promotes a particular conception of history and of “doing” history, which involves active investigation and personal memories.

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.

Crocodile Tears? Authenticity in Televisual Pedagogy

Crocodile Tears? Authenticity in Televisual Pedagogy

Media Framing of the Muslim World

A succinct and accessible book, with many chapters that can stand alone asreadings for undergraduate or graduate classes, Media Framing of the MuslimWorld: Conflicts, Crises, and Contexts is a welcome addition to the literatureon Muslims and the media. The authors build on three key concepts: the ideathat the media should function, but often does not, as the fourth estate (an independentand critical press); Edward Said’s Orientalism(the West as the perpetuallysuperior Other who must represent the Orient, which is incapable ofdoing so itself), and in its modern form, Islamophobia; and the importance ofhistory and context in understanding key events in the Muslim world (as distinctfrom religious determinism).The book is divided into eight chapters with an introduction and a conclusion:“Islam and the Muslim world,” “Media-Generated Muslims and Islamophobia,”“Image and Reality of Reporting War and Conflict in the Muslim World,” “Asylum Seekers,” “Covering Terrorism Suspects.” “The ArabSpring,” “A Clash of Civilizations?” and “Moving on from 9/11?” The chaptersare not an extended study of a singular type of media representation of Muslims,but rather a bringing together separate elements into a whole so that wecan look at the issues from several viewpoints. I will mention three of thosethat cover topics not often found in academic studies of Muslims and the media.Chapter 3 relates the personal experiences of John Martinkus, a professionaljournalist trying to cover the Iraq war over the last decade for a bookand later on SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), an Australian broadcast company.His story highlights how the increasingly dangerous on-the-ground situationeventually interfered with proper reporting. Not only did it become veryexpensive to hire security, but western journalists were largely confined to reportingfrom safe hotels and subcontracting to local Iraqis or being embeddedwith the military. Martinkus notes that the only Iraqis they could interviewwere those employed by the US military/media or who had a US military gunpointing at them. Journalists living in fear tended to support Washington’s viewas to why they were there and the efficacy of the mission itself ...

RAN: Remote Area Nurse: SBS protocols, grassroots collaboration and the quality miniseries

ABSTRACTRAN: Remote Area Nurse is a six-part mini-series first broadcast on the Australian Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in 2006. Described by co-producer Penny Chapman as ‘the first screen fiction set in Torres Strait islander [sic] culture’, the series is loosely based on the work of the health centre on Masig, a tiny island in the central group of Torres Strait Islands. This article traces the working modes of the largely non-Islander production team, as they followed the guidelines and strategies laid out in SBS's ‘The Greater Perspective: Protocol for the Production of Film and Television on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities’ (1997). In light of interplay between protocol and the production team, the article explores how a modally conventional mini-series nevertheless successfully made space for Islander collaboration, and attracted online engagement and approval from both Torres Strait Islanders and others.

Special Broadcasting: Cultural Diversity, Policy Evolutions and the International ‘Crisis’ in Public Service Broadcasting

Public broadcasters internationally are facing challenges from technology, competition in multi-channel environments and criticisms of being out of touch with audiences. Some public broadcasters, such as the United Kingdom's BBC and the ‘pillarised’ public broadcasting system in The Netherlands, were founded almost a century ago. Their models, based on particular views of the public interest and audiences, now struggle to maintain relevance in rapidly changing, culturally diverse societies. Pure market models do not cater well for the complexities of cultural diversity. Public broadcasters with specific remits to represent diversity, such as Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, Nederlandse Programma Stichting (NPS) in The Netherlands and Australia's Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), although themselves products of specific historical moments and policy contexts, allow for more responsive relationships to multicultural societies. Although traditionally seen as more marginal, these newer models may find themselves central to arguments for ongoing funding of public broadcasting.

"That History Should Not Have Ever Been How It Was": The Colony, Outback House, and Australian History

In 2005, Australia’s public broadcasters each produced ‘reality history’ programs: The Colony, which screened on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in January, 1 and Outback House, produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in mid-year. Australian audiences had previously enjoyed British and American ‘reality history’ programs like Frontier House and 1940s House, and the local versions proved popular: The Colony drew SBS’s largest audiences for an Australian-made program since 2001, and Outback House attracted audiences of around 1 million per episode (Australia’s population is around 21 million). 2 Both The Colony and Outback House promised that participants and viewers would “step back in time” to different periods of Australia’s colonial history, a history that has been bitterly debated in the public domain in Australia’s “history wars”. 3 These debates have centred on conflicting interpretations of Indigenous-European history and the violence of colonisation, and have been fought not just between academics, but also politicians and neo-conservative newspaper commentators. The history wars form part of the cultural backdrop to these programs, alongside the success of the reality TV genre, which has cultivated knowing and critical audiences familiar with its constructions and artificialities. Both these factors influenced the public reception of the programs, coupled with debates over the ways Australian history is taught in schools (Clark 2006), and the preponderance of British and American history documentaries on our television screens (Arrow 2005).

Narrating Community: Multiculturalism and Australia's SBS Television

Australia's Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Television is unique as a specifi cally multicultural public broadcaster. The manner in which SBS addresses and recognizes different modes of community is also distinctive. As a national broadcaster, SBS Television observes the uniformity of a nationally defined community through reflecting the interests of a dominant culture and audience. However, formations of community that are not as static or reified will also recognize themselves as communities through the way they respond to the address of SBS as a narrowcast television service. This article will examine not only the history and changing role of SBS Television within the shifting topography of Australian multiculturalism but also the differing notions of community that are rehearsed across SBS programming practices. It will then turn to the individual documentary texts in the Hybrid Life series to explore how community and collective identity can be narrated at the localized level of the subject.

Implementing Digital Television in Australia

TX Australia (TXA) is a joint venture company owned by Australia's three metropolitan commercial television networks. TXA owns and operates two broadcasting towers in Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth, and three in Melbourne and Brisbane. These towers are used to broadcast the analog and digital services of the Seven, Nine, and Ten commercial television networks and the digital service of the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC), in each city. Standby facilities, or alternate transmitters, for the national Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) analog service in Sydney and for SBS digital television services in each mainland capital city are being installed at TXA transmission sites. Many commercial and community FM radio services broadcast from the TXA towers, as do telecommunications services offered by mobile telephone service providers and other telecommunications services. This paper outlines the philosophy and architecture of the transmission systems deployed by TXA. It also looks at why the company chose digital transmitters supplied by two manufacturers for the main transmission sites, and discusses the levels of redundancy to be built into the TXA digital television transmission network.

Transformation in South Africa: a Legacy Challenged

Rarely has any country made such radical changes in all aspects of its life as post‐apartheid South Africa. The museum and heritage community was seen as a principal actor in bringing about a new democratic society based on a truthful, unflinching examination of the past and a creative, participatory approach to the future. These efforts are described by Dr Amareswar Galla, Director of the Australian Centre for Cultural Diversity Research and Development at the University of Canberra and founder of a national programme for interdisciplinary and holistic studies in heritage management. He has spent a substantial part of the past five years as a specialist adviser and facilitator for new policies, corporate plans and transformation documents in the cultural and heritage sectors of South Africa, including the National Parks system. His work earned him the South African Museums Association inaugural presidential award for outstanding service for transformation planning and training in 1997. He is also a Director of Australia’s Board of Special Broadcasting Service, Chairperson of the Asia Pacific Organization of ICOM and Chairperson of ICOM’s Cross‐cultural Taskforce.

The Tshwane Declaration: Setting Standards for Heritage Tourism in South Africa

With more and more tourists eager to visit the new South Africa, a responsible and responsive heritage policy was seen as an urgent national priority. Amareswar Galla, director of the Australian Centre for Cultural Diversity Research and Development at the University of Canberra, was invited to serve as visiting professor during 1997 at the University of South Africa and to work as a specialist adviser, researcher and facilitator for the drafting of the Tshwane Declaration. His efforts earned him the inaugural presidential award for outstanding service for transformation planning and training granted by the South African Museums Association. He is the founder of a national programme for interdisciplinary and holistic studies in heritage management in Australia and a director of the country’s Board of Special Broadcasting Service as well as general secretary of the Asia Pacific Organization of ICOM and chairperson of ICOM’s Cross‐cultural Taskforce.

Public Service Broadcasting in Australia

Australia is probably unique in having not one but two public service broadcasting organizations--the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). The ABC is the older and larger of the two and was originally modeled on the British Broadcasting Commission, whereas the SBS is a distinctively Australian innovation. The ABC operates six radio networks and two television networks, and the SBS operates one radio and one television network. Both public broadcasters are funded directly by the federal government, although SBS supplements its income by limited advertising. Although both the ABC and SBS occupy eminent positions in the broadcasting system and in Australian cultural life generally, they are not able to rest on their laurels. They are currently in the process of redefining their roles in the new multichannel broadcasting environment, and at the same time responding to political pressures to become more commercially oriented. This process of change is causing difficulties and uncertainty, particularly for the ABC.

Representing SBS and Australia to the World

The objectives of SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) Television and SBS Radio in participating in and promoting Australian multiculturalism are presented. The efforts made by SBS in producing multicultural programming and exporting them in order to effectively represent Australian cultural diversity to the world are discussed.

Radio and the Civil War: Reporting Yugoslavia

The tendency of Croatian families in Australia to rely on the radio coverage of Pierre Vicary of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to obtain information during the Yugoslav Civil War in 1991 is analysed. This shift from the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) and television news in general as sources of information is considered to highlight the shift in their opinion on sources of authentic and instant information.