Broadcasting – Page 28

Breaking News from Onion News Network: They know it all!

Some journalists and media organisations never allow the truth to get in the way of a good story.

Now, as broadcast television trades more substance for style, on-screen graphics is everything. Unless a news story is supported with gimmicky, flashy graphics, the networks seem to think, it won’t be news anymore.

This ONION TV News Parody shows how getting the graphics right is more important to TV networks than getting the meaning right. The story keeps shifting but the anchor remains authoritative — without knowing what the news is all about.

Breaking News: Something Happening In Haiti

According to their self introduction: The Onion News Network (ONN) has set the standard for globe-encompassing 24-hour television news since it was founded in December, 1892. The network boasts channels in 171 languages and can be viewed in 4.2 billion households in 811 countries. Now get the only news you need on the web and from our esteemed media partners.

Onion News Network Promo

Earlier post: Jib-Jab Video: What we call the news

Patrick Moore: 50 years of Sky at Night on the air

The first ever book on astronomy I owned, a pocket guide to the night sky, was written by an Englishman called Patrick Moore.

Armed with the tattered book, I joined night sky observation sessions of the Young Astronomers’ Association. That was more than 20 years ago.

Hormones-on-legs that we all were at the time, we were interested in heavenly bodies at both ends of a telescope. But we couldn’t have had a better guide to the celestial wonders than Patrick Moore.

The same Patrick Moore reached a milestone in the history of broadcasting this month: he has hosted the same show on television for 50 long years, more than anyone else on any subject anywhere on this planet.

The show is The Sky at Night, which started on BBC Television in April 1957.

Sir Patrick Moore Patrick Moore presenting an early Sky at Night programme

The Space Age had not even begun, and television broadcasting was still in its formative days, when a much younger Patrick Moore presented the first Sky at Night in April 1957. But as if on cue, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik One just six months later, triggering the Space Race. Thus Patrick Moore has been our able, dependable and colourful guide to the most fascinating journey in the history of humankind – our species finally venturing beyond its ‘cradle’, the Earth.

But as another populariser of space and astronomy, Sir Arthur Clarke, notes: “Sky at Night has not been just a gee-whiz show of rockets, satellites and other expensive toys deployed by rich nations trying to outsmart each other. At its most basic, it’s a show about exploring that great laboratory within easy access to anyone, anywhere on the planet: the night sky.”

Sir Arthur adds in a special tribute to his long-standing friend:
“By the time the Space Age dawned, Patrick was well on his way to becoming the best known public astronomer in the world. The Sky at Night only consolidated a reputation that was well earned through endless nights of star-gazing, and many hours of relentlessly typing an astonishing volume of books, papers and popular science articles.”

In the 50th anniversary programme, broadcast this month, Patrick Moore traveled back in time to see the first recording of The Sky at Night . He talked to his earlier self about astronomy back in 1957, and discussed how things have changed in half a century. He then time traveled to 2057 where the ‘virtual’ Patrick, saved in the BBC computer, is celebrating 100 years of making The Sky at Night and talks to Dr Brian May about the discovery of life on Mars.

Sir Patrick Moore

Thank you, Sir Patrick, for being our affable guide to the night sky and space travel for half a century. We hope you don’t consider retirement anytime soon.

Read Patrick Moore’s brief history of The Sky at Night

BBC’s 45th anniversary multimedia tribute

BBC Online interview with Sir Patrick Moore

Sir Arthur Clarke’s tribute to The Sky at Night at 50

Eye balls and leather balls: World Cup cricket final is here!

It’s finally here: Cricket’s Big Day (or Big Night, depending on where we are on the planet).

In the Cricket World Cup final today, defending champions Australia will meet 1996 World Champions Sri Lanka. The final game is to be played at the Kensington Oval in Barbados, in the cricket playing nations of the West Indies.

As I wrote in a post when the current series started, Sir Arthur Clarke will have to look very hard today for any signs of life across Sri Lanka.

The whole nation of 20 million people will have their eyes glued to whatever television screen they can find.

They will be joined by at least a couple of billion other eye balls in the rest of South Asia, where cricket-playing nations of Banglades, India and Pakistan saw their respective teams being eliminated in the World Cup’s seven weeks of build up in the Caribbean.

Talk about moving images moving people.

Not being an ardent cricket fan, I’ve not followed the series with the religious zeal of my many friends and colleagues. But just after filing this blog post, I’m off to see the finals on a giant, open air screen.

As Reuters reported recently, cricket fever has united — at least for now — the otherwise utterly and bitterly divided Sri Lankans. I just want to be part of that moment of unity, and yes, watch some good cricket too.

Tonight’s game will use probably a handful of professional leather balls used in cricket. As cricket fans tune in to live broadcasts worldwide, it’s fair to say that never before have so many eye balls followed the movement of so few leather balls.

May the best handlers of leather balls win.

And no matter who wins, TV broadcasters will be laughing all the way to the bank…

Bill Moyers: How the American media followed Pied Pipers of Pentagon

Bill Moyers has done it again.

The heavyweight of public interest broadcasting in America has turned the spotlight right at his own industry, asking how so many members of his profession could be so easily tamed and led astray by the Pied Pipers of Pentagon.

In Buying the War, a 90-minute documentary that aired on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) on 25 April 2007, Moyers explores the role of the press in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Buying the War includes interviews with Dan Rather, formerly of CBS; Tim Russert of MEET THE PRESS; Bob Simon of 60 MINUTES; Walter Isaacson, former president of CNN; and John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers, which was acquired by The McClatchy Company in 2006.

Image courtesy PBS Bill Moyers

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported?

“What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President — no questions asked. How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored,” says Moyers.

“How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?”

The programme opened with the following words of Moyers:

Four years ago this spring the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster. The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn’t have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on.

Since then thousands of people have died, and many are dying to this day. Yet the story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television. As the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at those months leading up to the invasion, when our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.

The show has already drawn rave reviews. David Sirota says at WorkingforChange:

“I went to journalism school because I thought journalism was about sifting through the B.S. in order to challenge power and hold the Establishment accountable. Bill Moyers and the folks I’ve gotten to know at McClatchy Newspapers who Moyers highlights show that that long tradition still exists. But the fact that they are such rare exceptions to the rule also show that the incentive system in journalism today is to reward not the people who challenge power, but the people who worship it. And though Tim Russert and Peter Beinart and Bill Kristol and Tom Friedman can kick back in Washington with their six figure salaries and tell themselves that they are really Important People, what we have seen is that they are part of a new journalistic culture that is threatening to destroy what once was a truly noble profession and undermine our democracy.”

Read the full transcript of Buying the War online

Watch Buying the War online at PBS website

Read the full review at David Sirota’s blog: When journalism became transcription and reporting disappeared

Mediasaurus — and the rise of bloggers

Earlier this month, I referred to science fiction writer Michael Crichton’s 1993 Wired article titled ‘Mediasaurus’ — in which he talked about how television as we know it (or knew it, at the time) was doomed.

I’ve just come across this cartoon, which I can’t resist sharing.

Cartoonists are the social philosophers of our time. And no one else achieves a better economy of words.

Source: http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/ariaillg2.jpg

Tabloid journalism – and MTV’s Environment News

What can be done to lure more young audiences to care for and discuss about issues of science and technoloy?

This question was put to a panel on ‘Science and television’ that I was on last week at the Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne, Australia.

Each panelist offered suggestions. Mine was just three words: think more tabloid.

Those who try to communicate science to the non-technical public are mostly trapped in the mindset of the classical documentary, or its print equivalent: broadsheet newspapers. That engages a certain kind of audience, but the masses — including many young people (15 to 25 years) — are not widely represented there. To engage the latter, we have to consider more tabloid formats.

Is that dumbing down the weighty issues we’re peddling? Not necessarily, I argued. We can make things in different formats, without over-intellectualising and not over-simplifying either.

A recent example of this comes from Music Television, MTV, and is discussed in an interesting piece appearing in the Columbia Journalism Review website, CJR Daily.

MTV Break the Addiction campaign

Here are some excerpts from the article written by Curtis Brainard, titled ‘Surprise: MTV’s Environmental News Rocks’

Just over a year ago, on Earth Day 2006, the station announced its “Break the Addiction” campaign, encouraging people to kick (or cut back on) habits that depend on fossil fuel. The campaign is a suite of on-air programming, MTV News stories, public service announcements, contests, online resources, and grassroots mobilization efforts. No, MTV is not the type of news outlet that one would reference in a scholarly paper, and it never will be. And although MTV has produced environmental stories intermittently for over twenty years, the “Break the Addiction” campaign was its first ambitious commitment.

“Historically, the environment never rated highly,” said Ian Rowe, MTV’s vice president of public affairs and strategic partnerships. “But we were starting to see signs that global warming was becoming a bigger story, even if our audiences weren’t clamoring for such news, so we made a proactive decision that we would connect the dots for our audience.”

On Earth Day (22 April 2007), MTV ran a special edition of “Pimp My Ride,” the popular automobile makeover show. Governor Schwarzenegger is a friend of the team at Galpin Auto Sports in California, where the program is filmed. He and the crew (mostly the crew) retrofit a 1965 Chevy Impala with an 800-horsepower, biodiesel engine. “We try to publicize celebrity involvement in these issues to show people it’s cool, and bring the unconverted into the fold,” said Pete Griffin, a public affairs officer who worked on the “Break the Addiction” campaign. It’s no Pulitzer-caliber exposé on the socioeconomics of biofuels, but, Griffin says, “Stand-alone half-hour shows on these issues can be less effective than integrating them into shows that people are already watching.”

With short public service announcements airing around the clock between scheduled programming, says Ian Rowe, “There is no way you can watch the channel without realizing that global warming is one of our central issues.”

Read the full article here

The return of the ‘Donnish young man’

Some of my friends who read this blog think I’m fond of name dropping. It’s just that I keep meeting some really interesting and accomplished people as I travel around the world in the course of my work.

Each such encounter enriches me. I write about some of these here to share that joy and inspiration.

Remember I wrote about Robyn Williams , the doyen of science broadcasting in Australia, and his analogy of science journalists and whales?

Well, Robyn and I are among the few participants at the Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists here in Melbourne who were also at the first such conference, some 15 years ago. That was held in Tokyo, Japan, in the Fall of 1992.
Jim Cornell, president of the International Science Writers Association (IWSA) is another.

In Tokyo, Jim Cornell invited me to join a panel discussion on science journalism in the developing countries. I was 26 at the time, and was on my first visit to Japan. All these years later, I can’t recall everything I said. But I remember how I quoted Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, to the effect that in many poor countries where survival was a daily struggle, ‘Development is the best contraceptive’.

Robyn Williams picked this up in an account of the conference he wrote up in UNESCO Sources, the monthly magazine published by the UN’s science agency. He described me as ‘a donnish young man from Sri Lanka’!

I’ve been trying to live this down ever since.

Banned in the USA, Al Jazeera now online at YouTube

“The world’s first English language news channel to have its headquarters in the Middle East; covering the world, bridging cultures and setting the news agenda.”

That’s the marketing line of Al Jazeera International (AJI), launched on 15 November 2006.

It’s been slowly building up an audience, which it now claims to be around 90 million households.

But not in the United States of America: it was shut out of most American homes because cable companies have refused to carry their signal.

Elsewhere, commerce – not politics – was at play: some cable operators and hotels, already locked into various deals with the established global news channels of BBC World and CNN International, weren’t easily carrying AJI either.

Undeterred, AJI started this week to post some of their content on YouTube.

Well, things are getting more interesting now!

When AJI started less than six months ago, I wrote an op ed published on Both Media Helping Media (UK) and MediaChannel.org (USA). I argued that to make a real difference, AJI needs to not only analyse and present the news differently, but also gather news more ethically in the developing countries of the global South.

BBC World and CNN International have an appalling track record of doing this. “They epitomise a disturbing belief in international news and current affairs journalism: the end justifies the means.”

I added: “If products of child labour and blood diamonds are no longer internationally acceptable, neither should the world tolerate moving images whose origins are ethically suspect.”

I ended my essay: “We will be watching. And not just what’s shown on AJI, but how those pictures get there.”>

Well, it’s now become easier to follow AJI. I still keep an open mind about their English channel, even if it shows every sign of aping the BBC and CNN. Already we need to look hard to find a real difference.

Let’s give them one year to prove if they mean what they say — or not.

Read my full essay on Media Helping Media, with some reader comments

Read the version that appeared on MediaChannel.org

50? In South African terms, you’re probably dead!

“How many of you are over 50?” asked Christina Scott, South African journalist and broadcaster.

Half a dozen hands went up.

“Come on, now – be honest,” Christina urged. One more hand joined.

“In South African terms, chances are that you’re already dead,” she declared.

Christina was talking about stark realities of living and dying in today’s South Africa, which is one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world.

We were at a session on ‘Life and Death in 2020: How will science respond?’ during the Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists, currently underway in Melbourne.

Christina Scott - image courtesy IPS

Christina then asked how many in her audience were aged between 30 and 35. This time, four hands shot up.

“If you were in South Africa, you’re probably infected with HIV, and don’t know it yet — and go around giving it to others,” she told them.

After getting her audience shocked and hooked, Christina talked about how HIV is cutting across social hierarchies and colour barriers in her country.

Many intervention strategies to contain HIV have been based on the premise that when people know more, they are more likely to change risky behaviour. “We now see that greater wealth or higher levels of access to information alone do not change people’s behaviour. In fact, the middle classes lull themselves into thinking that HIV is a poor people’s disease, when it’s not,” she said.

In other words, it’s not a linear process and is much nuanced.

Christina was doubtful if Internet, PCs and online communications could make much headway in reaching out a majority of South Africans. It’s not just a lack of connectivity and computers, but a more basic absence of electricity in many areas.

To her, old fashioned radio was still the most cost-effective way to reach more people quickly.

One new ICT that has taken sub-Saharan African by storm is mobile phones. “They are everywhere, and people are using them for all sorts of things — including sexual transactions.”

She was cautiously optimistic about prospects for combating HIV. “AIDS is like a war: it’s very nasty, and causes a lot of damage. But as in war, it also spurs innovation and responses,” she said.

An AIDS vaccine is not the answer, as the virus keeps mutating and in any case distributing the vaccine to all those who need it will be a huge challenge.

Her personal wish: her daughter of 15 to get through college without contracting HIV.

Note: Christina works as Africa consultant for the Science and Development Network.

Science journalists and whales: much in common?

Science journalists have been called many names, some more memorable than others.

Speaking at the inauguration of the 5th World Conference of Science Journalists, Robyn Williams — the doyen of science broadcasting in Australia — suggested a new analogy: they are like whales in many ways.

To paraphrase his witty opening remarks, whales and science journalists have some things in common (my comments in brackets):

They both respond to lots of free drinks and eats.

In fact, they like to drink vast amounts (though not necessarily the same liquids!).

There is evidence to suggest they are both intelligent species.

They are both endangered too – there are some nasty people out to get them.

Both are free spirits – don’t like being trapped or hounded.

And they are known for occasional mass strandings – in the case of science journalists, it first happened in Tokyo (which choice whales might not approve!), followed by Budapest, Sao Paulo, Montreal and now – Melbourne.

These are the cities that have hosted World Conferences of Science Journalists, beginning in 1992.

It’s an event that happens approxiatemly every three years — or as soon as the next host can line up the massive logistics involved in receiving, feeding and keeping the several hundreds whales – sorry, science journalists – happy.

Robyn Williams, image courtesy ABC

Robyn is not just a very entertaining broadcaster, but has has written more than 10 books — one of them a novel, 2007: A True Story Waiting to Happen.

By coincidence, the story involves whales – one of his favourite species – and its action starts in April 2007!

Here’s the blurb promoting the book, first published in 2001:

It is the year 2007. The weather is now wreaking turmoil on the planet. Hurricanes, cyclones, tsunamis, floods, fires, droughts and diseases are sweeping the world with increasing frequency and severity. The poor countries are worst hit, but even the rich ones are no longer immune from major disruption. Big business is worried.

In April 2007, the animals take matters into their own hands. An enormous pod of whales sinks a whale-killing submarine. Massive flocks of pelicans close airports around the world. Huge herds of cattle bring freeways everywhere to a halt, burying cars under mountains of steaming dung.

Desperate to find a solution to the global chaos, the President of the United States calls on the world’s top scientists to explain what it happening and how to stop it. One man, his daughter and her dog hold the key, but before things can get better, they have to get a great deal worse.

Hmmm. Robyn is known and admired for many talents, but perhaps the world hasn’t yet appreciated his powers of prescience.

Having blazed new trails in taking science to the public, Robyn now presents The Science Show on ABC radio.