Posted by: RFM on: October 24, 2008
Watching the BBC News at 6 o’clock tonight, I was amused by the number of times they showed an animated graphic with a downward thrust arrow apparently falling off the edge of a cliff.
It’s an economic downturn, a slowdown, a decline, but is it a recession? Officially, two quarters of negative growth means we’re in [...]
Posted by: RFM on: October 16, 2008
Questions about the key concept of representation in Media Studies can cover everything from race and gender to lifestyle and profession. Anything you see in a media text is a representation of something. Two current continuing news stories rely heavily on the representation of data, for example. The first is the Credit Crunch/Coming Recession; the [...]
Posted by: RFM on: September 30, 2008
Via BoingBoing (see link in sidebar), I came across this story of a man who clearly had an allergic reaction to something he cooked. It’s being represented, here in the Sydney Morning Herald as some kind of mysterious “death by hot chilli.”
Which is nonsense, of course. People die from allergic reactions to food all the [...]
Posted by: RFM on: September 8, 2008
While The Times focuses on a “mastermind” ring-leader who was convicted today of conspiracy to commit murder, other news sites choose to print a picture of all three of those convicted.
The Telegraph places the one with the funny eyes in the middle:
While the BBC put him on the right:
And The Guardian choose to put him [...]
Posted by: RFM on: September 5, 2008
A few quick links to finish off the week.
The Guardian’s Media page reports the latest newspaper ABC figures – and the news is not good for all of the quality dailies: circulation down across the board.
Link..
The Guardian also reports that smart operator Jeremy Clarkson has made a killing through his involvement in a co-production [...]
Posted by: RFM on: September 1, 2008
The reportage surrounding the latest meteorological event to threatenAtlantis New Orleans is typical of the media’s deep, deep problems with science stories. Weather systems, as you should know, are at the cutting edge of chaos theory – the mathematics of non-linear systems. You can throw the Biggest Computer In The World at weather prediction and [...]
Posted by: RFM on: August 27, 2008
This book by journalist Nick Davies is an exposé of the inner workings of modern print media. It’s an important book both for students of media and their teachers, because it exposes the myths inherent in the traditional view of the production and manufacture of news.
The book should also be a bit of an eye [...]
