The cover of the ‘Weekly Standard’, February 2016.
Two recent controversial cartoons depicting people as apes have raised an important question: what are the legal and philosophical distinctions between harm and offence?
Involving the media seems to send the message of how unpleasant the AFP can make life for people who challenge the government.
AAP/Lukas Coch
None of the politicians are talking about it, but threats to freedom of speech have emerged in three different guises in the first three weeks of the election campaign. First there was the assailing of…
The 60 Minutes employees Tara Brown and Stephen Rice arriving home from a Beirut prison.
Dean Lewins/AAP
When Channel Nine was implicated in an illegal ‘child recovery’ operation, many would have assumed the media regulator would investigate. Yet Australian broadcasting standards are so limited there will probably be no independent inquiry at all.
Fairfax’s print newspapers take different approaches to locking up content.
Joel Carrett/AAP
The AFR has one of the hardest paywalls in the business, but the evidence shows this strategy could prove difficult to maintain.
Deals between metro and regional television networks are paving the way for future mergers if the media reach rules are changed.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
A new affiliation between Network Ten and WIN may have been forced, but it opens the way for possible future mergers.
Printer George Howe shows the first edition of the Sydney Gazette to Governor Philip Gidley King, in a feature window at the Mitchell Library.
Reproduced with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Digital Order Number: a6509002
What science issues did Australia’s first newspaper - edited by a convict - discuss in its letter pages? The same ones we talk about today: the environment, education and health.
Quarterly circulation figures have not been good news for publishers, but Fairfax in particular has suffered.
AAP/Dan Himbrechts
Fairfax’s circulation figures fall as staff are made redundant.
There’s a lot of incentive to hype scientific findings but in the end nobody wins. Overselling findings can undermine the authority of scientists as well as the credibility of the sources and ultimately deceive or even endanger the public.
Shutterstock
Sometimes scientists, the media and the general public inadvertently conspire to oversell science, and that is bad for us all.
Proposed developments in Brisbane illustrate the scale of urban consolidation.
flickr/Brisbane City Council
In the media, urban consolidation is often depicted as a threat to Australian suburban life. In reality, it’s a result of managed planning processes to ensure growing cities remain liveable.
People with dementia deserve higher standards of communication.
Ocskay Bence/Shutterstock
Dementia headlines are often misleading, but it’s not only journalists who are to blame.
Workers arrange copies of the ‘Business Daily’, produced by Kenya’s Nation Media Group, the biggest newspaper publisher in East Africa.
Reuters/Thomas Mukoya
Namibia’s rise in the World Press Freedom rankings is stunning. The media environment in Africa, too, has improved. But media closures and the harassment of journalists are not yet things of the past.
Mark Scott has altered the ABC in profound ways.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Mark Scott will hand to Michelle Guthrie a much-transformed ABC – one that does the same things in very new ways.
Closed shop.
Stuart Chalmers
Local reporting matters – but it’s falling through the cracks.
Is it game? Is it a film? The lines are blurring.
Square Enix
With the boundaries between film and game eroding, why are more people not exploiting the potential for cross-media creations?
Social media provides a way of answering back, and an alternative source of material, ideas and priorities.
shutterstock
While many accuse social media of being overrun with vile abuse, there are many ways in which it makes a positive contribution to public debate.
PA/Jonathan Brady
You wouldn’t know elections are happening all over the country, looking at the national press.
Media predictions aren’t usually great, but those from 2015 were historically bad.
Ray Stubblebine/Reuters
As the talking heads line up to predict this season’s division winners, many are hoping fans will forget their abysmal forecasts for the 2015 season.
The ABC could be used to support struggling sectors of the media environment.
AAP Image/Dan Peled
The ABC isn’t to blame for the crisis in commercial media, but they could be part of the solution.
Many viewers can’t look past the fact RT America is being funded by a country that severely limits press freedom on its own soil.
Reuters
With the collapse of Al Jazeera America, there may be a case for RT America as a purveyor of progressive, alternative journalism.
PA.
Yui Mok / PA Wire/Press Association Images
Always an underdog, the newspaper showed what imagination and rigour could bring to journalism.