The Accidental Olympian

So how many people do you know are fast approaching their 40th birthday, play a sport where they wear ballet shoes and a lycra body suit, and are on the verge of making their first Olympic games in that sport after taking it up barely two years ago?

Derryn Harrison is not your average person. He's been riding motocross since he was - as he puts it - "knee high to a grasshopper". He rode safari bikes, an extreme version of motocross that involves riding vast outback distances at great speeds across the harshest terrain imaginable (think Paris to Dakar rally and you'll get some idea), for ten years and numerous visits to intensive care, including one infamous accident that is Harrison's claim to fame as it was the lead in to Channel Ten's Sportsworld. He was once rescued by the Queensland Coast Guard after getting caught up in a cyclone while attempting to jet ski from Brisbane to Hamilton Island. And in recent years he's taken up Formula Ford racing - a sport that his mother regards as "relatively safe" compared to what he was previously doing - and currently drives for the team that he founded and owns. Oh, and on top of that he's an extremely successful businessman and entrepreneur who helped found Radio Rentals and currently runs his own investment and incubation company.

And the sport he's competing in is widely regarded as one of the most dangerous of all winter Olympic sports, where competitors hurtle down a concrete and ice chasm lying horizontally on a tiny sled without brakes barely a few inches off the surface at speeds exceeding 140 kilometres per hour. It's the sport that marked its Olympic debut at the 1964 Innsbruck Games with the death of Polish-born British Olympian Kazimierz Kay-Skrzypeski during a practice run, and early this year Brazilian Renato Mizoguchi suffered massive head injuries from an horrific crash during a World Cup event at Cesana Pariol in Italy. That sport is Luge.

I meet Harrison for the first time on a Thursday evening in an upmarket North Sydney bar, just down the road from Harrison's office and not far from his Milson Point penthouse apartment with its sweeping views of Sydney Harbour and the bridge. With his shoulder length blonde hair still damp from his nightly gym session, stylish dark brown suit and pink striped open-neck shirt, my initial impression is of someone slightly younger than most of the twenty- to thirty-something's scattered around the room. However from my sources I knew he was quite a bit closer to 40 than first impressions suggested - exactly how close depends on who you choose to believe, Harrison himself who claims to be 36, or a mutual friend and his profile on the Australian Formula Ford website that lists his year of birth as 1966 - but either way, I suggest to Harrison that perhaps it's a little unusual for someone of his age to be attempting to make their first winter Olympics in a sport as dangerous and physically demanding as luge.

"Oh, absolutely", says Harrison, "and totally unexpected."

A couple of years ago Harrison and some friends in the States, all competitors in a number of different high speed sporting disciplines, were trying to find a sport they could compete against each other in without anyone having an unfair advantage.

"Car racing, downhill skiing, motor cycles… we all had an obvious advantage over one another", explains Harrison, "and luge was just one of those things that came up, and the more I looked at it the more I thought, 'Gee, I'd like to have a go at that.'"

And so he did. And then he came back and tried to find out if there was anyone else competing in the sport back in Australia, and found that there wasn't - at all.

So a year ago Harrison took a team of younger male athletes to Calgary for some intensive training in the hope that one or two of them would come through and challenge for a spot at February's Turin Winter Olympics. A few accidents later, and through either injury or shear fear there was, as he puts it, "Only one silly bugger who was willing to start off the top".

"And that was me."

I get a sense, though, that even if one of those younger athletes had come through, he would have been pushed all the way by Harrison.

"He's a very ambitious person", says former Brumbies rugby player and Harrison's fitness trainer, Josh Birch. "Not many people can travel down the ice at the speeds he does, especially in Australia. His background in motocross and motorcar racing really helps him in terms of cornering and I think he's got a distinct edge. I think that's a huge reason why he's so successful."

Playing devil's advocate, I ask Harrison if perhaps it's more an indictment of the lack of luge athletes in Australia than any great natural ability on his part that has lead to his Olympic opportunity?

"Oh absolutely", he agrees. "Bottom line is that I didn't go into the sport to go to the Olympics. I went over there [to Calgary] to have a go, and thought, 'This is a bit of fun'."

You might be excused for thinking that this is all just a bit of a lark for a successful businessman and playboy bachelor in his mid to late thirties with a bit of money to throw about, but Harrison does appear not only driven to achieve himself, but also to help others to achieve.

After his initial failure to find any Australian luge participants, his perseverance eventually lead to him tracking down twenty-four year old Hannah Campbell-Pegg who was then in the process of changing from bobsled to luge, and who is now Australia's sole female representative in luge. Together, as Harrison tells it, they went through the process of forming the Australian luge association from scratch, though I get the impression that much of that process and the initial funding came from Harrison himself.

"I don't take any funding out of the association", says Harrison. "We do get some funding from the Australian Olympic Committee, but we made a decision twelve months ago to put all the funds we raise to getting Hannah to the Olympics, given that on comparison she has a better chance of getting in than I do. She's wanted to do it her whole life, it's something important to her."

What seems more important to Harrison is paving the way for someone else's success in the sport. "He's definitely a giver more so than a taker," says Birch, "just one of those genuinely sincere people who put a lot back into [their] sport."

Birch believes that even if he weren't to qualify for the games, Harrison would be just as thrilled to have opened the path for someone like Campbell-Pegg. "He's done everything in his power [to help her]", claims Birch, "and that would be fantastic for him."

Harrison's own comments back this up.

"I could think of nothing better than identifying a couple of young athletes here and having two women and two guys in the Olympics in 2010", enthuses Harrison. "That would give me an enormous sense of achievement."

But don't make the mistake of thinking that Harrison has a lack of ambition to make the Torino Olympics himself. A year-long training regime that has included riding wheel sleds down the hills of Narrabeen, being strapped to the top of car roofs in order to improve aerodynamic body positioning, and two-hour return journeys for his regular five-thirty a.m. training sessions out at Baulkham Hills ice rink would suggest otherwise.

"His real motivation is the challenge to become an Olympian in such an unusual sport for Australia," says close friend and business Colleague Louise Taylor. "It's all about believing you can live the dream, taking the steps to make it happen, [and] seizing any opportunity along the way."

And despite the unavoidable Jamaican bobsled "Cool Runnings" type comparisons from the European and North American competitors, who regard the idea of an Australian competing in the luge as a bit of a novelty, we actually hold a rather unique place in luge history. The first international luge race took place in 1883 in Davos, Switzerland, involving twenty-one athletes from seven countries, and it was an Australian student, Georg Robertson, along with Peter Minsch, a mailman from Switzerland, who won the four kilometre race in a time of just under nine minutes. So for a country that has never had a luge representative at the Olympics, what are the chances of Harrison ending this long drought between Australian successes and qualifying for the Turin Games?

"I am an absolute long shot", he says, "and I've never made any bones about it." But, he adds, there is a small window of opportunity, a very small window, "And so you've gotta put your hand up and say, 'Christ, we're here now let's have a run and see how we go!'"

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Mediazation and its role within public communication

The advent of mass communication has had a profound impact on the modes of experience and patterns of interaction characteristic of modern societies. For most people today, the knowledge we have of events that take place beyond our immediate social milieu is a knowledge largely derived from our reception of mass-mediated symbolic forms (Thompson, 1990: 216). A media culture has emerged in which images, symbols, and spectacles help produce the fabric of everyday life, serving as the ubiquitous background and often the highly seductive foreground of our attention and activity, dominating leisure time, shaping political views and social behaviour, and providing materials out of which people forge their very identities (Kellner, 1995: 1,3). But unlike the dialogical situation of a conversation, in which a listener is also a potential respondent, mass communication institutes a fundamental break between the producer and receiver, in such a way that recipients have relatively little capacity to contribute to the course and content of the communicative process within the public sphere (Thompson, 1990: 218-219).

This mediazation of popular culture - that is, the way in which symbolic forms in modern society have become increasingly mediated by mechanisms and institutions of mass communication - is a central feature of modern social life. Technological change has always been crucial in the history of cultural transmission - it alters the material substratum, as well as the means of production and reception, upon which the process of cultural transmission depends (Thompson, 1990: 75) - and with the huge advances in communication technologies over the past century the media have come to established a decisive and fundamental leadership in the cultural sphere. Simply in terms of economic, technical, social and cultural resources, the mass media command a quantitively greater slice than all the other, more traditional cultural channels that survive (Hall, 1977: 341).

But despite an apparent increase in the number of sources of information, there is much concern about how the current communicative process helps the public understand the world outside their immediate experience (Curran & Seaton, 1997: 1). Even with news and documentaries, the pressure to be 'entertaining' - to hold audiences by being immediately accessible and stimulating - overrides all other considerations, and causes a strong prejudice in favour of familiar stories and themes, and a slowness of response when reality breaks the conventions (Ibid, 1997: 277, 278). In addition, in the three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, how possible is it to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility (Chomsky, 1989: 10)? The result is that news and news values are becoming narrower, more sensational, and more trivialized (Curran & Seaton, 1997: 1).

It must be understood of course that the mainstream media in general, and the US media in particular, are commercial media, subject to intense competition for audiences and profits. As a result, the first objective of the media is, and always has been, to attract an audience, hence both press and broadcasting have sought to provide instantly appreciable material that is loosely described as 'entertainment' (Curran & Seaton, 1997: 3), in the broadest sense of the word. Even the "non-commercial" ABC and SBS in Australia are constantly under pressure from government ministers to justify their budget allocations by way of community relevance, most easily understood by said ministers from a review of audience ratings. Media culture is a form of industrial culture, organised on a model of mass production and is produced for a mass audience according to genres, following conventional formulas, codes, and rules. It is thus a form of commercial culture and its products are commodities that attempt to attract private profit by giant corporations interested in the accumulation of capital (Kellner, 1995: 1).

Consequently, mainstream television, newspapers and news magazines do not want to alienate consumers, and thus are extremely cautious in going against public opinion and the official government line (Kellner, 1995: 199-201). It could in fact be said that media are becoming less about news - in the sense of things that citizens in a democracy need to know to exercise informed choices - and more about scandals and attracting audience attention (Curran & Seaton, 1997: 259). As a result reality itself has given way to a media produced 'hyper reality' in which "the medium and the real are now in a single nebulous state whose truth is undecipherable" (Baudrillard in Kellner, 1989: 69).

What has resulted is a media culture that induces individuals to identify with dominant social and political ideologies, positions, and representations (Kellner, 1995: 3), with an apparent saturation through every medium of the social or political message, creating audiences whose loyalties are tied to brand named products and ideologies and whose understanding of social reality is mediated through a scale of commodity satisfaction (Schiller, 1979: 23). There is an opposing suggestion that the press and broadcasting have always exaggerated, distorted, and suppressed, thus they have little overall effect on political life. The trouble with this view, however, is that the role of the press and broadcasting has changed, with arguably the power of the media increasing remarkably over the last fifty years. There are now fewer alternative sources of information, while the control of the media has become concentrated in ever fewer hands (Curran & Seaton, 1997: 3).

Noam Chomsky takes this further, referring to the "propaganda model", where the "mainstream media serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity", with no essential difference between American (and western) news media and those of totalitarian countries (Herman & Chomsky, 1988: xi). This view is certainly supported by this excerpt from Douglas Kellner, in his book about the 'Gulf TV war':

"On August 7, 1990, the same day Bush announced that he was sending US troops to Saudi Arabia, a front page story in the Washington Post claimed that in a previous day's meeting between the US charge d'affairs, Joseph Wilson, and the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, Hussein was highly belligerent, claiming that Kuwait was part of Iraq, that no negotiation was possible, that he would invade Saudi Arabia if they cut off the oil pipes which delivered Iraqi oil across Saudi territory to the Gulf, and that American blood would flow in the sand if the US sent troops to the region.

A later transcript of the Wilson-Hussein meeting revealed, however, that Hussein was cordial, indicated a willingness to negotiate, insisted that he had no intention of invading Saudi Arabia, and opened the door to a diplomatic solution to the crisis. The Post story, however, was taken up by the television networks, wire services and press, producing an image that there was no possibility of diplomatic solution and that decisive action was needed to protect Saudi Arabia from the aggressive Iraqis."

According to Kellner, the Bush Administration and Washington Post disinformation and propaganda concerning the Iraqi's readiness to invade Saudi Arabia worked effectively to shape media discourse and public perception of the crisis to legitimate Bush's sending US troops to Saudi Arabia (Kellner, 1995: 203), reinforcing research that shows people are particularly vulnerable to persuasion about subjects of which they have no direct experience. Since few people have first-hand experience of politics in general, and in Saddam Hussein in particular with the previous example, and the press is still regarded as an especially authoritative source, the findings suggested that the effects of media on political opinion might be particularly strong (Curran & Seaton, 1997: 273).

But the true effects are probably a little more complex than this view assumes. For example, a vigorous debate has raged about the role of media in comprising national defense and in particular foreign policy, which is increasingly governed by the 'body bag' factor; thus while the American public can be made to back foreign intervention, they do not like to see on their television screens even one American harmed by fighting (Curran & Seaton, 1997: 251). So maybe recipients do have some capacity to contribute, in so far as recipients are also consumers who may sometimes choose between various media products and whose views are sometimes solicited or taken into account by the organisations concerned with producing and diffusing these products (Thompson, 1990: 219).

Generally, a perception of the cultural consequences of the control of various media products is based on a view of the mass media as primarily manipulative agents capable of having direct, unmediated effect on the audience's behaviour and world view (Fejes, 1981: 287). But it is has been argued that individuals attend to media messages with varying degrees of concentration, actively interpret and make sense of these messages and relate them to other aspects of their lives. Audiences may indeed resist the dominant messages - media culture itself provides resources that individuals can appropriate, or reject, in forming their own identities against dominant models. Media culture thus induces individuals to conform to the established organization of society, but it also provides resources that can empower individuals against that society (Kellner, 1995: 3). Rather than viewing these individuals as part of an inert and undifferentiated mass, we should leave open the possibility that the reception of media messages is an active, inherently critical and socially differentiated process, that the 'receiver' of any 'message' is never passive, but is an active producer of meanings (Gardner, 1979: 5; Thompson, 1990: 218).

Of course, there is also the view of Baudrillard, who refers to the 'silent passivities' of the 'indifferent masses' that scandalously resist the imperative of rational communication, preferring the 'spectacle' to reason (Baudrillard, 1983: 10, 13, 14), or as Todd Gitlin describes, a popular "will to be distracted and deceived, a will not to know" that has been endemic in western civilization long before global media corporations and government propaganda machines arrived on the scene (Gitlin, 1997). So while accepting that the free flow of information and communications is essential to a democratic society (Kellner, 1995: 338), maybe we also need to accept that the media are not a force in themselves, and this scapegoating may mistake a catalyst, or even a symptom, for the cause, investing the media with a magical importance they do not possess (Curran & Seaton, 1997: 2).

The deployment of technical media brings with it a potential reorganization of social relations themselves, in the sense that the new media make possible new forms of action and interaction in the social world, and a reconstitution of the boundaries between public and private life in modern societies (Thompson, 1990: 217). While there is much debate on how media culture intersects with political and social struggles and helps shape everyday life, influencing how people think and behave, how they see themselves and other people, and how they construct their identities (Kellner, 1995: 2), we can see that a view of the signification process of the media as a whole is much more useful for understanding the role of the media in the production of ideology. It must supersede the view inherited from an outdated epistemology in which receiver and the means of transmission are passive or 'mute' (Gardner, 1979: 6). Huge changes are gathering speed, but in order to deal with these, we need evidence not speculation. Perhaps what we need, as we consider how communication and information may be reshaping our institutions and how we live, is a little more skepticism and a lot more evidence (Curran & Seaton, 1997: 262).


References

Baudrillard, J. (1983), In the Shadow of The Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext

Chomsky, Noam (1989), Necessary Illusions: Thought control in democratic societies, London: Pluto

Curran, James & Seaton, Jean (1997), Power Without Responsibility: The press and broadcasting in Britain, London: Routledge

Fejes, F. (1981), 'Media imperialism: An assessment', Media Culture and Society, Vol. 3(3), pp. 281-9

Gitlin, Todd (1997), 'The Anti-Political Populism of Cultural Studies', in Ferguson, M and Golding, P (eds.), Cultural Studies in Question, London: Sage

Gardner, Carl (ed.) (1979), Media, Politics and Culture: A Socialist View, London: Macmillan

Hall, S. (1977), 'Culture, the media and the "ideological effect"', in Curren, J. et al. (eds.), Mass Communication and Society, London: Arnold

Herman, Edward & Chomsky, Noam (1988), Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media, New York: Pantheon

Kellner, Douglas (1989), Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Cambridge: Polity Press

Kellner, Douglas (1995), Media Culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern, London: Routledge

Schiller, H. I. (1979), 'Transnational media and national development', in Nordenstreng, K. and Schiller, H. I. (eds.), National Sovereignty and International Communication, New Jersey: Ablex

Thompson, John B. (1990), Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical social theory in the era of mass communication, Cambridge: Polity Press

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Communication as Control

"The second preeminent theme in Australian thinking about the use of communication is the extent to which it has been viewed as a form of control."

While concern in Australia about communication and control had been evident from federation, with the Commonwealth government taking responsibility for posts and telegraphs and the new technology of wireless, the concept of communication as an agent of societal control might be traced back even further, to our convict origins and the law and order requirements of the early pastoral and urban elitists. From those early days, Australia's free settlers seem to have been obsessed with the idea of recreating in their new environment a social structure like they had left behind, based predominately on the simple ideas of human nature and social hierarchy that had prevailed in Britain when believers in democracy were thought to be dangerous radicals (Bertrand, 1978: 1; Pullan, 1984: 36).

The British belief system could be traced back even further of course, with the English judges of the Middle Ages believing that God had not given the common man the capacity for thought or that debate was the way to truth, that what was should be and that to question the truth was a heresy and sedition. These primitive ideas of the nature of man are a direct result of the dominance of the church at the time, demonstrated by the Church of Rome in the rules of the Papal Index of 1564 that found it appropriate to censor the Word of God, a view that had a very long life as it turned out: these rules were reprinted in nearly every subsequent Papal Indexes up until 1900. So since truth was by the definition of the church unquestionable, it followed that questioning it was not only a mistake, but also an evil (Pullan, 1984: 12, 39), punishable not only by God but by the laws of a 'civilised' society.

The British colonists also had a more recent experience that contributed to their concerns about the power of unregulated communication. The spread of ideas through the printed word to American colonists, who were remarkably literate and well informed on political matters, had been a major factor in the development of a revolutionary ideology (Jowett, 1986: 52). The British were determined to avoid the same mistakes in their new Australian colony, and their rigorous control of the press and public speech was with this goal in mind. The Australian society of these early years, full of government clergymen and military personnel who had never smelt the air of freedom (Pullan, 1984: 68), were not of the disposition to complain.

Thus it can be seen that although the control of the press and free speech did not originate in Australia, it was certainly magnified by the two great themes of our history - convictism and colonialism - which reinforced the idea in which censorship has been rooted throughout recorded history: mistrust of the people. So free speech, one of the most powerful ideas in world history in the last two centuries, had no foothold at all in the laws and institutions the British brought to Australia (Pullan, 1984: 12, 39).

The outbreak of war in 1914 saw a whole new level of concern about the dangers of communication, which led to the introduction of military censorship in the form of the War Precautions Act, entitling the government to make regulations "for securing the public safety and the defense of the Commonwealth". This included extending their control over all communications - including films, war news, soldier's correspondence and public speeches - with the aim to further the war effort while at the same time retaining social cohesion and boosting moral. The result was the establishment of a more stringent system of censorship that saw the mutual cooperation of the Commonwealth military censors and the various state civilian censors (Bertrand, 1978: 40; Osborne & Lewis, 1995: 32, 164). The presumed persuasive power of the media was evident in the care the government took with wartime communications policies, which in turn led to numerous conflicts over the censorship of the press and broadcasting as newspapers and radio became a vital source of wartime news (Osborne & Lewis, 1995: 6).

These First World War regulations produced a new acceptance of the principle of censorship. After all, under conditions of such national emergency, only the most rabid democrat could complain about invasion of privacy or interference with liberty of a citizen (Bertrand, 1978: 42). As a result of the many discussions of the uses of public communication for the purposes of societal control (Dandeker in Osborne & Lewis, 1995: 6), both governments and community groups sought to use the growing range of communication devices for propaganda purposes (Osborne & Lewis, 1995: 164). The combined weight of press editorials, censorship policies, and film and print propaganda converged to mould public opinion toward a wholeheartedly pro-war stance (Jowett & O'Donnell, 1986: 123).

The legacy of wartime press censorship would flow on into the interwar years with the continuation of censorship on both political and moral grounds at a higher level than many would have liked. This, together with the growing monopoly of media control - an issue we will examine in greater detail later - significantly limited the right of Australians to freely communicate their ideas in public (Osborne & Lewis, 1995: 34, 164).

During the Second World War the government returned to more aggressive censorship policies, as the rise of totalitarian regimes and the use of propaganda techniques intensified anxiety concerning the anti-democratic potential of modern communication. The use of communications for political control by communism in Russia and by fascism in Germany and Italy alarmed many about how the media could be used for propaganda, and though these censorship policies declined somewhat after the war, in many areas they lingered for a generation or more at an uncomfortably intrusive level. Censorship and propaganda together provoked discussions which emphasized the persistent underlying view of communication as a powerful force which could be used to achieve societal objectives and which therefore needed to be the subject of public scrutiny (Osborne & Lewis, 1995: 37, 65, 164).

Censorship, however, was not only the result of government paternalism or authoritarianism. Church and citizen's groups had always campaigned vigorously for tighter censorship, and it was a small step from the rational control of communications in the interests of strengthening moral to one in the interests of protecting moral standards (Bertrand, 1978: 42; Osborne & Lewis, 1995: 69).

In practice moral censorship was concerned essentially with sex, the basic assumption behind obscenity censorship being that the act of reading or watching might lead to indecent behaviour (Osborne & Lewis, 1995: 69). This impulse to censor is deeply rooted in human sexuality and in the instinct of self-preservation. Running through our history of sexual censorship is the theme of the protective parent, the government, suppressing words and pictures that we, the children, are not mature enough to read and see. The universal anxiety parents experience about their children's sexuality is anxiety about loss of control. Our censorship of obscenity, our laws and regulations against swear words, our classification of films and our statutory regulation of television and radio are a product of this anxiety. Because of its deep psychological roots and its reinforcement by the cultural imperatives we inherited from Britain, puritanism has been tremendously powerful through our history (Pullan, 1984: 13, 140), and has contributed significantly to our desire to control the information that reaches the public.

The beginning of the twentieth century brought forth a new era of mass communications, with technological innovations that made possible the mass circulation of newspapers. These changes led to many small printers going out of business as only the large business enterprises could assemble the capital necessary to produce a mass circulation newspaper, the result of which was a steady decline in the number of actual newspaper titles and a concentration of ownership of the press (Edgar, 1979: 15-16). This monopolistic control of the media had obvious economic advantages for the individual companies in their sharing of resources and news across their numerous publications and media outlets, but it was a cause of great concern to many in Australia and continues to be so. Ownership concentration may prevent a society's access to a plurality of views and lead to homogenous content, and even to the possibility that owners may bias reporting or suppress views that could conflict with their wider commercial interests (Ibid, 1979: 17,19; Lee, 1992: xxvii; Windschuttle, 1981: 2). This pattern of ownership was to continue through to the advent of television, when even as the opportunity was presented to loosen the grip of the press publishers in the communications field in Australia, the Australian government allocated almost all the early licenses to newspaper proprietors. As a result powerful commercial groups have been in a position to control what the average Australian reads, listens to and watches (Western, 1975: 9,10,11) for the past century.

To make sense of Australia's media monopolies, it is essential to get the relationship between the media and advertising the right way round. The commercial mass media are not news and features backed up by advertising; on the contrary, the commercial mass media are advertisements that carry news, features and entertainment in order to capture audiences for the advertisers. It has been like this since mass media started, with the costs of production bourne by advertisers and not by audiences - at least not directly. This dependence of privately owned media on advertising revenue has long been criticised because it has led the media to tone down or even suppress news reports which might upset companies with large advertising budgets (McQueen, 1977: 9,10,12).

And now as we move into the late twentieth and early twenty first century once again technological issues concern the government. The astonishing growth of new communication technologies such as television satellites and digital networks has created an instantaneous worldwide audience for what were previously national or small-scale international activities. Increasingly world leaders are becoming astutely aware that their every action is being critically examined within this new electronic arena (Jowett & O'Donnell, 1986: 145), and in a region of damaged democracies, military governments and communist regimes, Australian governments have been quick to back away from free speech which might offend its neighbours (Kingsbury, 1997: 31; Pullan, 1984: 203).

The concept of communication is very simple: it is one of the fundamental requirements of any social system, generally answering the same need in all societies - the need to survey the environment, the need to reach consensus on important issues, and the need to socialise new members (Western, 1975: 2). These are all issues that remain extremely relevant in contemporary Australia, probably even more so with the recent global events and conflicts that have come to impact on our society in such a personal and powerful way. In the complex world that we live in today it is more important than ever before that we, as a society, have access to objective information that allows us to fully comprehend and make decisions on a wide range of issues that effect us today and into the future. Support for free speech in Australia has usually been support for a particular instance of free speech, rather than a universal principle (Pullan, 1984: 14). Unlike the American constitution, there is nothing in our constitutional law that protects our right to free speech. Perhaps it is time that we, as a society, address this matter, and seek to create an environment of truly open, objective communication and information that allows us to make knowledgeable, intelligent decisions for the future of our nation, rather than leaving all these decisions in the hands of those who weld the power.


References

Bertrand, Ina (1978), Film Censorship in Australia, University of Queensland Press: St Lucia

Edgar, Patricia (1979), The Politics of the Press, Sun Books: Melbourne

Jowett, Garth & O'Donnell, Victoria (1986), Propaganda and Persuasion, Sage: Los Angeles

Kingsbury, Damien (1997), Culture and Politics: Issues in Australian journalism on Indonesia 1975-93, Uniprint: Griffith, Qld

Lee, Michael (1992), News and Fair Facts, Australian Government Publishing Service: Canberra

McQueen, Humphrey (1977), Australia's Media Monopolies, Widescope: Camberwell, Vic

Osborne, G. & Lewis, G. (1995), Communication Traditions in 20th Century Australia, Oxford University Press: Melbourne

Pullan, Robert (1984), Guilty Secrets: Free speech in Australia, Methuen: Sydney

Western, John S. (1975), Australian Mass Media: controllers, consumers, producers, Southwood Press: Canberra

Windschuttle, Keith & Windschuttle, Elizabeth (eds.) (1981), Fixing the News: Critical perspectives on the Australian media, Cassell: Sydney

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Why Do They Hate Us?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I lost a friend. Mark Bingham was one of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. He was one of the passengers believed to have thwarted the hijackers attempts to crash the plane into a Washington government building, possibly the White House. My loss is one shared by many others that lost friends, family and colleagues on that day, and my sense of shear shock and horror at the extent of the devastation caused is one felt by many millions of others. But beneath this shock, this horror, this loss, one emotion I did not experience was surprise at the events that had happened.

From the American public, however, the sense of surprise has been widespread, the continuing question of "Why?" and later "Why do they hate us?" has resonated through much of the media and public debate. President Bush even addressed this in his speech to Congress on September 20: "Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?'" he said. "They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other" (New York Times, September 21, 2001). Unfortunately this kind of simplification and trivialisation, the enemies of understanding (Shane, 2001: 70), is widespread throughout most American mass media and, specifically, American television coverage, and is the primary source of the American public's surprise at the events of September 11. Many institutions contribute to the development and maintenance of a society, but, of these, the mass media systems are probably (along with the schools) the critical ones, the key institutions in the operation of cultural hegemony (Hall, 1975: 142).

The development of the information society so evident in the United States, has not only brought a 'new dawn' of instantaneous communication, but it has been accompanied by a 'darkening shadow' as individuals find themselves in a world of voyeuristic television programs, attention-getting stunts, trivialised information, and glorified crisis events (Fishman in Shane, 2001: ix). To the list of neighbourhood and region and continent and planet we must now add television as a place where Americans live, and the problem is not that it exists - the problem is that it supplants (McKibben, 1993: 53). There is no question that American television is a dominant cultural force, television is integrated into the flow of domestic life like no medium before it. Viewers now absorb it continually, in a thin, processed stream: People don't watch television shows, they watch television (Monaco, 1981: 21). American audiences cite television news as their major source of knowledge of what is going on in the world (Katz, 1975: 102), but what kind of knowledge are they deriving from their television viewing?

The beginning of the twenty-first century is a period chained to imagery, primarily the imagery of television, so if the cameras' aren't there, is the event real? There was no famine in Africa until a BBC camera crew stumbled across it (Shane, 2001: 147), and this raises the question, can the viewer be truly informed by learning about the world from television? In the mid 1980s, international news made up nine minutes of the nightly news on American television, but by the mid 1990s, the major networks spent an average of only six minutes of every evening newscast on news outside the United States (ibid: 82). Although the media have a right and a duty to reflect the viewpoints of the dominant sectors, and are closely, regularly and continuously dependant on them as sources, they also have some countervailing obligation to 'seek out' issues and 'inform the public' on issues which those in power would prefer to keep silent (Hall, 1975: 143).

News programming is not necessarily done out of a belief in a more informed society. Rather, news has become a money maker in recent years - less expensive to produce than other forms of prime-time entertainment (Diamond, 1981: 104) - and while based in reality this in no way implies that it is genuinely informative (Bergreen, 1981: 108). Planned flow is the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form, resulting in effortless transitions from shot to disparate shot and scene-to-scene, and this is best evidenced in any newscast (Monaco, 1981: 19). This endless flow of information does not often help people select among it, make sense of it, or find ways of using it (Katz, 1975: 95), and in fact there is an inherent but unfortunate bias within the media against offering complex interpretations that provide history and meaning to the reporting of news events (Fishman in Shane, 2001: ix)

Global events are shaped and reshaped by television news reporters in ways that make them comprehensible and palatable for domestic audiences. As far back as 1958, Edward R. Murrow, the most visible and credible American newsperson of the time, accused television networks' prime-time schedules of insulating audiences from the realities of the world (Shane, 2001: 20), and it is common practice now that news and documentary materials are distorted to fit dramatic formulas (Monaco, 1981: 21). Thus while the images may have a global currency, the meanings given to them may not necessarily be shared globally. This television 'filter' shapes viewer images of the world around them, creating a bias of understanding (Shane, 2001: 73).

In the 1980s, 'international news' meant social developments, political and diplomatic news, or economic trends. Today's 'world news' involves natural disasters like typhoons and volcanic eruptions, shellings and other violence, or famine - especially if there are pictures of starving children. None of these stories offers insight or understanding as they flit through public media consciousness (Shane, 2001: 82). Americans seeing the outside world on TV could be forgiven for believing that all countries fall into two categories: those that are so messed up they shouldn't waste time thinking about them, and those that are messed up in a way that threatens American security or moral sensibility, so they should invade them, withdraw quickly, and forget about them again (Fallows, 1997: 141). Most modern flare-ups appear, then disappear from the newscasts so quickly that viewers develop a confidence that either they didn't really exist, or, if they do, they'll go away just as quickly as they materialised (Shane, 2001: 82), and American viewers have allowed the cabaret of the information explosion to lull them into thinking they know what's happening around them (ibid: xiii).

As a result of the myriad choices Americans experience in their media coverage, they've made a choice: They choose not to care about the outside world. The consumer's position is, "If it doesn't relate directly to me, don't bother me with it." (Shane, 2001: 83). This also relates to the problem that for most people most of the time "the environment is their locality" (Lash and Urry, 1994: 305), and it is well known that the mobilisation of public opinion over local issues (citizen's action groups opposing road constructions, nuclear plants etc.) is vastly easier than over global issues (Yearly in Tomlinson, 1994). This is a question of the problem of "imagining the world" as anything other than an abstraction and is limited by the capacity we have to identify with "the world" as a community (Tomlinson, 1994). This is not just restricted to world events either: When Channel 3 television in Memphis interrupted a football game to announce a tornado warning for nearby Jackson, Tennessee, people called the station to complain. Eight people died in the storms (Shane, 2001: 155).

Morality which we have inherited from pre-modern times - the only morality we have - is a morality of proximity, and as such is woefully inadequate in a society in which all important action is an action on distance. Moral responsibility prompts us to care that our children are fed, clad and shod: it cannot offer us much practical advice, however, when faced with numbing images of a depleted, starving and war ravaged planet which our children, and the children of our children will inherit and have to inhabit in the direct or oblique result of our collective unconcern (Bauman, 1993: 2178). It is only as global problems come to be experienced as immediate threats at a local level that responses arise (Tomlinson, 1994), no better example unfortunately than the attention given to Afghanistan since the September 11 events. Our morality has powerful but short hands, but it now needs very, very long hands (Bauman, 1993: 218): "Are we to conceive of ourselves as citizens of the world or of a nation state or of what?" (Garnham, 1992: 368).

Globalisation of our world is not something that we can reverse or halt. It is an evolutionary process that began in the earliest days of colonisation, and is seen today in the rapid development of complex interconnections between societies, institutions, cultures, collectivities and individuals worldwide. The most far-reaching political implication of this process is probably in its impact on the political integrity, authority and sheer competence of the nation state. Many recent authors have commented on the erosion of the powers of the modern nation state in the context of global modernity, and it is clear that there are problems that cannot find their solution within the political sphere of the nation state, but which demand concerted 'transnational action' (Tomlinson, 1994).

Current mass media models are woefully inadequate in offering any kind of solution to this problem. Originating as they do from very distinct nation states they are driven by the political and cultural sphere of their origins, and even those traditional media that present themselves specifically as international bear strong marks of particular national formations, and their circulation and audience is tiny by the standards of the nationally-oriented media (Sparks, 1997). Much discussion has centred around the creation of a "global public sphere", in general terms referring to an informed public opinion exercising greater political influence over matters which have become removed in modernity from democratic form into a closed technocratic realm (Beck, 1992: 119), and we can add to this the sense of importance of public communication in the formation of public opinion. The mass media are by implication of crucial - though by no means unproblematic - importance in the debate (Dahlgren and Sparks, 1991).

A global public sphere would consist of a parallel set of global media and political institutions whose functions would be to inform and, as it were, culturally empower a global public and to institute its collective will. In a context in which corporate and political actors are constantly making interventions in their own partial interests - in the interests of capital accumulation or of the narrow domestic concerns of individual nation states - the function of a global public sphere is to render these actions democratically accountable to the universal polity of the global community. While recognising that the building of these institutions would be an enormously difficult political and practical undertaking, it is a task which must be addressed, if we are to not give up entirely on the project of the democratic and rational political control of our collective human destiny (Garnham, 1992).

References

Bauman, Z (1993), Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell

Beck, U (1992), Risk society: towards a new modernity, London: Sage

Bergreen, Laurence (1981), 'News: Television's bargain basement', in Carl Lowe (ed.), Television and American Culture, New York: H.W. Wilson Company

Curren, James and Gurevitch, Michael (eds.) (1991), Mass Media and Society, London; New York: E.Arnold

Dahlgren, Peter and Sparks, Colin (eds.) (1991), Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the public sphere in the new media age, New York: Routledge

Diamond, Edwin (1981), 'All the news that isn't the news', in Carl Lowe (ed.), Television and American Culture, New York: H.W. Wilson Company

Fallows, James (1997), Breaking the News, New York: Vintage Books

Garnham, Nicholas (1992), 'The Media and the Public Sphere', in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, 359-376, London: MIT Press

Hall, Stuart (1975), 'The structured communication of events', in Getting the Message Across: an inquiry into successes and failures of cross-cultural communication in the contemporary world, Paris: Unesco Press

Katz, Elihu (1975), 'The mass communication of knowledge', in Getting the Message Across: an inquiry into successes and failures of cross-cultural communication in the contemporary world, Paris: Unesco Press

Lash, Scott and Urry, John (1994), Economies of Signs and Space, London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage

McKibben, Bill (1993), The Age of Missing Information, New York: Plume

Monaco, James (1981), 'The TV plexus', Television and American Culture, New York: H.W. Wilson Company

Shane, Ed (2001), Disconnected America: the consequences of mass media in a narcissistic world, Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe

Sparks, Colin (1997), 'Global media - creating a global public sphere', published electronically at www.csad.coventry.ac.uk/empires/spartex.htm

Tomlinson, John (1994), 'Mass communication and the idea of a global public sphere', Journal of International Communication, 1(2)

Zakaria, Fareed (2001), 'The Politics of Rage: Why do they hate us?', Newsweek, Oct. 15, 2001

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