Screen vs Life

There are 2 very big problems that are becoming glaringly obvious at Australia’s multicultural public broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). First, is it’s clearly partisan reporting on political news. Second, its political partisanship is explicitly racist and bigoted. Take for example SBS's representation, or lack thereof, of Candice Owens. Owens is a black female political activist in the US who rose to fame on social media when her satirical video on coming out as conservative went viral. She has since teamed up with conservative heavy weights such as Turning Point USA and PragerU to launch a career as a political activist and pundit. Most notably, Owens the brainchild of Blexit , a movement that aims to educate black Americans about how politicians exploit black American concerns to gain their vote, and encourages them to ‘exit’ the democratic party.  Even if you disagree with her politics, Owens is indisputably an independent, strong, articulate, black woman, w...

There has been a discernible change in Melbourne, and not for the better. As I smile at fellow customers in the super market, or greet neighbors as I walk down my street very few people greet or smile back. In fact, it would seem that most people have decided that it is too scary to even make eye contact lest THE COVID leaps from my body and into their eyeballs. Only a week ago, while careful to maintain their distance, strangers still smiled at each other and joked about the strange times that we had come to live through. So why the change? Whether or not you agree with the recent measures taken by Daniel Andrews’ Government in Victoria, there are a few rhetorical strategies utilized by this government, and indeed, the mainstream media, to galvanize support for the return to lockdown, and which is successfully driving a wedge between citizens, neighbors and families.   Take for example oft repeated phrase that our medical workers are “on the frontline”. What does it mean to insist...

Cultural Policy Studies emerged as a distinct subfield within Cultural Studies in the early 1990s, and is distinguished from its parent field by its focus on activism through policy. Adherents of cultural studies have traditionally aimed to illuminate how power is maintained by an elite few in the West through its examination of cultural practices and meanings. Cultural policy studies goes one step further and involves itself within the institutions that actively regulate the cultural industries such that the inequalities exposed through cultural studies scholarship might be eliminated. The huge problem with this approach is that it is a blatant program of social engineering, and one which lacks any foundation of ethical principles to guide its practitioners.  Insofar as the field is founded upon the philosophies of the French postmodern thinkers of the 1960s and 70s such as Michel Foucault, who deny the possibility of objective truth, cultural value (criteria of artistic ...