Week 8

In class this week we again looked at the issues of representation in the media. Kate Carragher brought up some interesting issues in her presentation:
Representations in the media can be stereotypical and through this can perpetuate stereotypes within society – these stereotypes become so common that they eventually seem ‘natural’ and unmediated. This demonstrates the real power and responsibility that journalists have in the moulding of their words – they can (inadvertently or not) increase the marginalisation of minority groups or at least increase the stereotypes that exist in society.
Journalists have the powerful position of not only reporting on events – but shaping the readers’ or viewers’ perceptions of these events. Their words mould our understanding of issues and occurrences.
Photographic journalists share the same powers and responsibilities – the framing and composition of their photographs determine the viewers’ perspective on the subject.
Kate discussed the issue of identifying characteristics of a person that make them different from the majority – for example their ethnicity. Is ethnicity really an important issue to be reporting on? – unless it is the reason for the issue in the first place? If a person is Caucasian – their ethnicity is not identified in print media – but this is not the same for other races or ethnic groups – why is this??? It seems to be totally irrelevant to me- and only a tool for increasing racial and ethnic stereotypes.
Another interesting point was that it is often left to media bodies or journalists themselves to pick up on ill-representations in the media – eg – Mediawatch – is this really effective – should it be the responsibility of an independent body?
Most often, it is through complaints by certain groups in society (often the victims of misrepresentation) that bring such issues to light.
Kate mentioned also that people are becoming more media savvy and are able to read into the representations that are present in journalists’ works.
This is probably true to a degree – but I think that there is still a large amount of society that do not question everything that is represented to them in the media.
Literary Journalism:
· The main issue with this type of journalism that was identified in class was the potential for literary journalism to slip into narrative or for the facts to be lost with the literary techniques and structuring that this genre requires.
· An interesting technique that Christina mentioned was character-splitting – where, to avoid defamation – a journalist split one character from her ‘story’ into 6 different characters. I believe that this is completely losing the truth of the story. It may get the essence of the story across – but the facts are not there.
· This is something that I think is the real benefit of literary journalism. The essence of the story is better conveyed to the readers/viewers. However the essence of a story is a subjective understanding and therefore I question it being considered journalism. What do you think??