Journal Articles
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915
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Item ‘Listening closely’ to mediated intimacies and podcast intimacies in Song Exploder(1/08/2023) Clarke K; Bjork CIntimacy is an important and growing concept in both media studies and podcast studies. But research regarding intimacies in both disciplines has yet to fully account for the connection between sound and normativity, which is essential to podcasting and important to mediated intimacies more broadly. In this article, we mobilise scholarship from these two fields to analyse the award-winning music podcast Song Exploder. Our study highlights that attending to intimacies in podcasting involves both analysing how the story structure aligns with social norms and listening critically to the ways the sound design and audio editing complements and complicates these intimate stories. We contend that identifying the intersection of sound and normativity in this podcast contributes to understanding the cultural work of podcasting and underscores the key role of sound in mediated intimacies.Item 'Just doing their job?' Journalism, online critique and the political resignation of Metiria Turei(SAGE Publications, 18/03/2019) Phelan S; Salter LAAbstract When Metiria Turei resigned as co-leader of the Green party of Aotearoa New Zealand in August 2017, there was clear disagreement about the role played by journalism in her resignation. The controversy began after Turei confessed to not disclosing full information to the authorities about her personal situation as a welfare recipient in the 1990s. Journalists insisted they were simply ‘doing their job’ by interrogating Turei’s story, while online supporters accused the media of hounding her. This article examines the media politics of the controversy by putting Carlson’s concept of metajournalistic discourse into theoretical conversation with Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, especially their concept of antagonism. We explore what the case says about traditional journalistic authority in a media system where journalism is increasingly vulnerable to online critique from non-journalists.Item Journalism ‘fixers’, hyper-precarity and the violence of the entrepreneurial self(1/07/2023) Ashraf SI; Phelan SThe figure of the so-called journalism ‘fixer’ has received overdue academic attention in recent years. Scholars have highlighted the role played by fixers in international news reporting, a role historically obscured in the mythos of the Western foreign correspondent. Recent research has produced useful insights about the work done by fixers in ‘the shadows’ of the international news economy. However, it has also tended towards a domestication of the role, where the local ‘fixer’ finds their place in a collaborative relationship with those officially consecrated as ‘journalists’ from elsewhere. This article presents a critical theoretical analysis of this functional role, building on the image of the fixer as a kind of ‘entrepreneur’. Rather than interpreting the latter designation as a source of empowerment or agency, we approach it as a euphemism for the hyper-precarious and exploitative underpinnings of fixer-labour. Our argument draws on different theoretical sources, including Foucault-inspired work on the entrepreneurial rationality of the neoliberal self, Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, and Rancière’s concept of politics. The theoretical argument is supported by the first author’s reflections of working as a Pakistani-based ‘fixer’ during the U.S-led war on terror.Item Multiplicities and the subject: Rethinking a mix-of-attributes approach in the digital world(University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, 1/01/2015) Pearson EE; Elliot GIt has been 30 years since Clark made his call to focus on fundamental structures of media rather than media formats (such as radio or television) and more than 10 years since Eveland proposed a mix-of-attributes approach to media effects. This article suggests that it is time for a reevaluation of the mix-of-attributes approach, noting that there is a continued focus on format when studying media content. We argue for rethinking the assumptions that preempt a mix-of-attributes approach. As a way of accounting for the complexities of how messages move in the digital media ecology, beyond the constraints of singular media formats, we first invoke the concept of multiplicities (concurrent engagement with multiple information sources) and then propose that the role of the subject be foregrounded within a revised mix-of-attributes approach to studying media effects in the digital age.Item Neoliberalism and authoritarian media cultures: a Vietnamese perspective(1/03/2022) Yến-Khanh N; Phelan S; Gray EThis study asks how the concept of neoliberalism can be adapted to a critical analysis of authoritarian political and media cultures that cannot be adequately understood through the Western-centric narratives that dominate the literature on neoliberalism. We examine the case of Vietnam, a country where the relationship between the media system and the political system is defined primarily by the power of the party-state autocracy. We explore the extent to which neoliberalism is a useful theoretical category for grasping the relationship between state, market, and civil society actors in Vietnam, especially as it relates to the media system. Supported by an analysis of how Vietnamese news media cover healthcare and education for people with autism, we conclude by extrapolating three theoretical-methodological guidelines that will be useful to researchers examining the relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarian political and media cultures in different countries.Item Decolonising public service television in Aotearoa New Zealand: telling better stories about Indigenous rurality(SAGE Publications, 25/10/2022) Fountaine S; Bulmer S; Palmer F; Chase LIn settler-colonial countries like Aotearoa New Zealand, television programmes about rurality are fundamentally entwined with the nation’s colonial history, but how this context impacts on locally made, public service television content and production is seldom examined. Utilising data collected from interviews with programme makers and a novel bi-cultural friendship pair methodology, we examine how a high-rating mainstream programme, Country Calendar, conceptualises and delivers stories about Indigenous Māori and consider the extent to which these stories represent a decolonising of television narratives about rurality. The findings highlight the importance of incorporating Indigenous voices and values, the impact of structural limitations and staffing constraints on public service television’s decolonising aspirations, and challenges reconciling settler-colonialism with the show’s well-established ‘rosy glow’. While rural media are often overlooked by communication scholars, our study demonstrates the contributions they might make to the larger task of decolonising storytelling about national identity.Item The morality and political antagonisms of neoliberal discourse: Campbell Brown and the dorporatization of educational justice(University of Southern California, 2017) Salter LS; Phelan SPNeoliberalism is routinely criticized for its moral indifference, especially concerning the social application of moral objectives. Yet it also presupposes a particular moral code, where acting on the assumption of individual autonomy becomes the basis of a shared moral-political praxis. Using a discourse theoretical approach, this article explores different articulations of morality in neoliberal discourse. We focus on the case of Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor who reinvented herself from 2012 to 2016 as a prominent charter school advocate and antagonist of teachers unions. We examine the ideological significance of a campaigning strategy that coheres around an image of the moral superiority of corporatized schooling against an antithetical representation of the moral degeneracy of America’s public schools system. In particular, we highlight how Brown attempts to incorporate the fragments of different progressive discourses into a neoliberalized vision of educational justice.Item Friendship isn’t an emotion fucknuts: Manipulating affective materiality to shape the experience of Homestuck’s story(SAGE Publications, 20/06/2017) Veale KRHomestuck is a textual and experiential chameleon that manipulates its own structure to shape the audience’s affective experience of the story by mimicking not just the storytelling techniques of other media forms, but their modes of engagement as well. This article introduces terminology to illustrate how and why the online serial Homestuck qualifies as a distinctive form of storytelling. I introduce the term transmodal engagement to illustrate how Homestuck uses the affective, experiential affordances of different media forms to sculpt and shape the experience of the text in completely different ways to ‘transmedia’ storytelling. The second term this article introduces is metamedia storytelling, which describes how the audience’s familiarity with storytelling across multiple media forms can be used to manipulate their experience of fiction. Homestuck deploys metamedia storytelling to continually destabilise the reader’s understanding of the text and their investments in the storyworld by forcing re-evaluations of not just what is happening, but what kind of mediated relationship the readers have with the content of the story.Item The Len Brown affair: The roles of new and old media in a New Zealand political sex scandal(Auckland University of Technology, School of Communication Studies, Pacific Media Centre, 2017-01) Hannis GDThe power of online media to influence New Zealand local government politics was made clear in 2013 when a blogger revealed that Len Brown, the popular mayor of Auckland, had conducted a two-year, extramarital affair. The mainstream media picked up the story, Brown’s popularity collapsed and in late 2015 he announced he would not stand again for mayor. This media scandal was, in part, driven by the fact that Brown was a celebrity. Unlike several high-profile sex scandals involving politicians overseas, Brown’s career did not survive the controversy, perhaps because the public came to regard him as a practised liar. The media itself engaged in self-serving scandalous activity during the controversy. Today’s shock bloggers are similar to the proto-journalists of the 17th century. Members of new and old media researching the scandal treated their secret sources very differently. The existence of the internet means such scandals can now exist in perpetuity. If the Len Brown Affair was an example of the media fulfilling its watchdog role - by exposing a lying politician - it was also an example of journalists furthering their own ends - political and commercial - by appealing to their audiences’ purient interests.Item Facebooking a different campaign beat: party leaders, the press and public engagement(SAGE Publications, 2020-11) Ross K; Fountaine S; Comrie MSocial media are increasingly entrenched in politicians’ campaigning. Yet even as they become more ubiquitous, evidence suggests widely used platforms normalize rather than equalize the existing power dynamics of the political landscape. Our study of New Zealand’s 2017 general election uses a mixed-method approach including analysis of five Party Leaders’ (PLs) public Facebook wall posts, campaign coverage in four newspapers and interviews with Party workers and MPs. Our findings show PLs seldom interact with citizens and mostly use posts to promote campaign information. Citizens are more likely to ‘like’ a PL’s post than share or comment and there are important divergences between Party and media agendas. These findings demonstrate not only the importance of social media for Parties’ attempts to control messaging and disrupt journalistic interference, but also highlight that neither Parties nor citizens seem much invested in dialogue. However, understanding which posts excite citizen engagement may help all Parties more effectively promote participatory democracy globally.