Screen vs Life

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is the nation’s multicultural public broadcaster, and as such, its core mandate is to “inform, educate and entertain all Australians, and in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society” ( SBS Charter  ).  Like other public broadcasters, Britain's BBC and Australia's ABC for example, SBS was instituted as a public sphere, the function of which is to uphold liberal democratic values by providing a forum of free speech within which everyone can debate matters of collective importance, as equals, irrespective of their political views. In principle, the explicit multicultural mandate of SBS recognized that such equality had not historically been afforded to those with non-English speaking backgrounds, and attempted to rectify this lack of access to the public sphere by featuring non-white faces and voices.  Yesterday, I read a couple of articles circulated by SBS on Facebook which seems to indicate that the ...

The steady stream of commentary that continues to slam popular TV shows like GoT for perpetuating "rape culture" is logically untenable. The crux of the argument is that such TV programs are overly reliant on sexist tropes, which function to reinforce patriarchal authority and female oppression out here in the real world. A principal presumption bolstering this argument is that the representation of women getting raped by men is a trope; one that furnishes the plot with a female victim, and provides the male protagonist with the motivation he needs to spring into heroic action and save the day. In GoT, this trope certainly remains prevalent, however we must also acknowledge the prevalence of the trope of the "disposable" male, which sees countless male characters deposed and mutilated. Let's go through some notable examples: Theon "Wreek" Greyjoy is raped and castrated with the assistance of two sadistic women. Gendry, the bastard heir to t...

It’s time that media discussion and debate about gender inequality establishes some ground rules, namely logical consistency. Reading Clementine Ford’s opinion piece ‘ Male privilege extends beyond the airwaves ,’ written for the ABC’s drum, brings this to bear. This is a cut-and-dry feminist argument that the lack of women in Australian media is detrimental to female equality in society at large. The evidence offered is quite staggering. For instance in talk back radio this time last year there were only 17 female hosts to 123 male hosts. Moreover, Ford’s critique of the ABC program Q&A is spot on, which regularly populates its panel of experts with a 4:2 ratio of men to women. Interesting she ‘guesses’ that if this ratio was in reverse, there would be a vocal audience backlash. To this last point I would caution that conjecture is not evidence. It is, however, the logical inconsistency of Ford’s central proposition with which I take issue. Ford states: ...

The Code of Practice guiding the conduct of TV and radio broadcasters is outdated and should be scrapped. Key reasons supplied by   broadcasters ,    in a report released by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), include the difficulty of sourcing adequate G-rated programming for the day time schedule, declining revenue as advertisers shift their investments to the web, and the costs of responding to code-related complaints. In addition to these financial complaints, I see three broad problems with the Code of Practice, and indeed regulatory bodies like the ACMA, which ultimately prevent broadcasters from maintaining their relevance for Australians.  Media is dynamic, bureaucratic regulation is not.   As evidenced by ill-advised attempts to adapt existing intellectual property laws to digital media, top-down regulation will at best, play catch up with technological development, and at worst,   cripple creativity an...