Skip to main content

Taking the media to task

Jay Rosen is an outspoken media critic and journalism professor at New York University. In his keynote address at the 2011 New News Conference as part of Melbourne Writers Festival, he deconstructs the current state of political journalism in the US and in Australia, saying they have much more in common than most of us want to believe.

Some of the problems Rosen identifies include the media treating politics as entertainment, politicians peddling perception as reality, and press gallery journalists priding themselves on being "insiders". It's happening in Washington and Canberra, he says, and it's not just the Murdoch press and Fox News. According to Rosen, the ABC also has a case to answer.

Offering solutions for the future, he argues that a better knowledge of and respect for politics could change everything.

Jay Rosen is a media critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University. He has been on the journalism faculty at NYU since 1986. From 1999 to 2005, he was chair of the Department. Rosen is considered one of the founders of the idea of "citizen journalism". His book about the subject, "What Are Journalists For?" was published in 1999. He has run the blogsite "Press Think" sinice 2003.

Listen to Rosen speak (and even watch) at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Big Ideas here.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more