ISSN: 1329-878X

Drugs and Media No 108 August 2003 Order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

John Tebbutt: Drugs and media

The articles in this Drugs and Media theme section place the current media debates on the various drugs prevalent in our society - legal and illegal - in some perspective, drawing as they do on historical and contemporary events to address the relationship between media representations and social policies relating to drug use and abuse.

Melissa Sweet: Promoting healthier journalism

The media are often not rigorous in their coverage of health and medical issues, and have a tendency towards uncritical amplification of the claims of researchers, doctors and others, including commercial interests. Many journalists are not skilled at evaluating studies and research claims, and news values tend to be driven by factors other than the validity of research evidence. Media coverage of medicines tends to be overly promotional, highlighting the positives and often failing to mention the negatives. Media and public relations activities are a high priority in pharmaceutical industry marketing strategies. Tactics include: using medical opinion leaders and experts to raise awareness of diseases or treatments; generation of 'new' medical conditions to expand product markets; sponsorship of conferences; and even funding of journalism prizes. Critical reporting of health, medical and scientific issues could be promoted through appropriate education and workplace training.

Cameron Duff: Alcohol marketing and the media: What are alcohol advertisements telling us?

The marketing and promotion of alcohol have attracted considerable controversy in Australia in recent years. Many researchers argue that the active promotion of alcohol has led to increases in alcohol consumption in Australia, particularly among the young, as well as a range of alcohol-related harms and problems. Others contest this view, whilst the alcohol industry itself contends that alcohol advertising is more concerned with winning and maintaining 'market share' than with attracting new drinkers. As such debates intensify, it is timely to consider changes in the content and format of alcohol advertising in this country. This paper examines a number of recent Australian alcohol advertisements, comparing those for beer with those for spirits and 'ready to drink' products in highlighting some significant changes in the ways leisure and consumption are represented in youth cultures. I argue that many of these advertisements present alcohol as a potent means of enhancing young people's leisure experience in ways that risk endorsing excessive alcohol consumption as an appropriate or 'normal' leisure activity for young people.

Steve Stockwell: Home grown: The strange and savage times of the Australasian Weed

The 1970s newspaper Australasian Weed remains a remarkable chronicle of a very different time when a flourishing counter-culture created the space for a regular pro-drug publication at the edge of legality. Content analysis of the Weed and associated publications reveals an expected preoccupation with legalisation campaigns, instructional material and zany antics but a more surprising interest in detailed investigations of the legal process, the history and literature of drugs and health and safety issues. While influenced by the US underground press and drug writers like Hunter S. Thompson, the Weed was nevertheless in the Australian tradition of larrikin, alternative press with a crusading agenda and a confrontational approach to authority. The Weed's stormy career and eventual demise point clearly to the limits of a free press in Australia and raise questions about the efficacy of government drug education programs.

Shane Homan: The tabloid, the dance party and the Premier: The policy legacy of Anna Wood

This paper reviews one of the nation's most intense recent contemporary moral panics, the media and public concern about ecstasy use at dance parties that raged immediately after the death of Sydney schoolgirl Anna Wood in 1995. The reportage of one Sydney tabloid, The Daily Telegraph Mirror, is assessed for the roles it played in producing this panic: first, its visible and self-proclaimed task in setting the key terms of debate about ecstasy consumption and dance parties; and second, in influencing the policy responses of the state government at the time. The ongoing legacy of the moral panic engendered by Anna Wood's death is evident in the ways that media and government articulate discourses of 'risk' in relation to young people's ecstasy consumption when compared with the contexts and uses of alcohol. Further, the paper reveals how these different discourses have produced clearly iniquitous policing strategies in relation to Sydney dance clubs and hotels.

Judith Bessant: Stories of disenchantment: Supervised chroming, the press and policy-making

This article examines how we can best understand the role of media activity in the policy-making process. The idea of policy-making as a rational, logical and objectively informed procedure is challenged, and attention is given to the mythic-narrative techniques used in the media to constitute social problems. This is done by way of a case study of Melbourne press reports on the 'supervised chroming of children' in early 2002. Based on the assumption that journalism functions first and foremost as a form of storytelling, I focus on two specific rhetorical techniques employed by media workers. I first draw on Cerulo's (1998) classifications of victim/perpetrator sequences before turning to the mythic elements of storytelling.

Rob Watts: 'Headlining heroin': Policy change and reporting the heroin problem

This article explores the role of daily print media in the formation of policies on illicit drug use. It asks how we might think about the role of the media in making drug policy and how the print media represent the use of heroin. In answering these questions through an examination of the complex process of problem making, the article suggests it may help us to better understand how issues which policy-makers identify as 'problems' come to achieve such a status, and how solutions that come to be regarded as 'realistic' — or not — reach this point.

R. Warwick Blood, Jordan Williams and Kerry McCallum: Representations of public risk: illegal drugs in the Australian press

The paper draws upon recent research investigating news frames, and risk theory to analyse Australian national news coverage of illegal drugs. Recent research has elaborated how risks are socially defined and acted upon, especially given changing media representations of risks. Public understandings of the risks associated with illegal drug use, policing and policies develop through the continuing and often changing representations of these risks in the media, as well as through other social practices. This paper questions the role of some prominent newspapers in setting alarmist and sensational frames to define risk in this context, and demonstrates how journalism can heighten community fear.

Tiina Vares, Annie Potts, Nicola Gavey and Victoria M. Grace: Hard sell, soft sell: Men read Viagra ads

Viagra (known generically as sildenafil citrate) was released in New Zealand in 1998. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements represented Viagra as a panacea for men's sexual difficulties. The Research Medicines Industry Association of New Zealand (2000) claims that the Viagra DTC campaign removed the stigma associated with erectile dysfunction. However, in this paper we analyse participants' views that the advertisements also transform cultural anxieties in ways that proliferate 'performance' (and other) anxieties in new forms and for increasingly broad groups of people. This paper draws on material from a reception study of male viewers' readings/interpretations of popular cultural representations of Viagra in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2002. The participants frame both the advertisements and the television program My Family as 'peddling fear' about sexual performance, and thus potentially 'establishing a need' for a new drug. As one participant said: 'Pfizer wants young men to start worrying about these things, stress creates erectile dysfunction, off you go.' This indicates a need to consider how the critical responses of viewers/readers to advertising, particularly DTC drug advertising, may reflect the 'exploitation' of advertising by its audience in a way that simultaneously critiques a commodity (Viagra) and its associated cultural practices (creating erections through a pharmacological 'solution'), as suggested by recent arguments in the media/cultural studies literature.

Derek Wilding: The House, the Senate and the Media Ownership Bill: An 'unacceptable three-way control situation'?

Over the past year media ownership and control have been at the forefront of media policy debates in the United States and the United Kingdom. In Australia, the Media Ownership Bill was debated - and defeated in the Senate - in the last week of June. The Bill seeks to remove many of the regulations on ownership and control in the Australian media. It is expected to return to the Senate later this year and has been tipped as one of the handful of triggers for a double dissolution. In this article Derek Wilding provides an outline of the Bill following a number of recent amendments, as well as the key policy issues and points of contention in this long-running debate on diversity, convergence and media influence.

Tim Dwyer: Recalibrating policies for localism in Australia's commercially networked TV industry

This article considers the emergence of policies for localism within the Australian commercially networked TV industry. By historically reflecting on the construction of equalisation policies of the late 1980s, their trajectory is traced through to the ABA's regional TV news inquiry in 2001-2002. Against a background of late twentieth century international trends to deregulation, the reregulation of Australian regional TV is linked with a discussion of possible alternative rules for content distribution. The origins of localism in US commercial TV and comparable recent US developments in TV news are reviewed. It is questioned whether the intended beneficiaries of the equalisation policy - under-served rural and regional TV audience - have in fact had their promise of increased television choices compromised, with the winding back of the key genre of local news programs in some areas. It is further argued that broader contextual data - for example, information arising from economic and social policy research in rural and regional Australia - could appropriately inform the development of localism policies for the longer term.

Antonio Castillo: Breaking democracy: Venezuela's media coup

This article endeavours to describe and analyse the media's role in the 11-13 April 2002 attempt to oust Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez. The short-lived and unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government exposed the politicised and undemocratic nature of Venezuela's private commercial media. At an international news level, the events of April 2002 demonstrated that foreign news coverage tends to reproduce the version of the dominant elite and over-simplify the causes and outcomes of complex historical events. In this case, most of the foreign news not only reproduced the local private media coverage, but also amplified the strength of the coup. Essentially, this media coup revealed the centrality of the commercial, privately owned media in bringing together some of the key players behind this political operation: businesses, right-wing politicians and some sectors of the military. The key component of the current social and political crisis in Venezuela is the bitter struggle between the government and the commercial media.

Gerard Goggin: Media studies' disability

Review essay of:
Albrecht, Gary L., Seelman, Katherine D. and Bury, Michael (eds), Handbook of Disability Studies
Braithwaite, Dawn O. and Thompson, Teresa L. (eds), Handbook of Communication and People with Disabilities: Research and Application
Corker, Mairian and Shakespeare, Tom (eds), Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory

Book reviews

Ahearne, Jeremy (ed.), French Cultural Policy Debates: A Reader
Bergfelder, Tim, Carter, Erica and Göktürk, Deniz (eds), The German Cinema Book
Brosius, Christine and Butcher, Melissa (eds), Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India
Caputo, Raffaele and Burton, Geoff (eds), Third Take: Australian Filmmakers Talk
Castells, Manuel, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
Conboy, Martin, The Press and Popular Culture
Dower, Nigel and Williams, John (eds), Global Citizenship: A Critical Reader
Dwyer, Rachel and Patel, Divia, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film
Farnsworth, John and Hutchison, Ian (eds), New Zealand Television: A Reader
Gere, Charlie, Digital Culture
Hemelryk, Stephanie, Keane, Michael and Yin Hong (eds), Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis
James, David and Kim, Kyung Hyun (eds), Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema
Margulies, Ivone (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema
O'Shaughnessy, Michael and Stadler, Jane, Media and Society: An Introduction
Page, David and Crawley, William, Satellites Over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and the Public Interest
Price, Monroe E., Richter, Andrei and Yu, Peter K. (eds), Russian Media Law and Policy in the Yeltsin Decade: Essays and Documents
Roscoe, Jane and Hight, Craig, Faking It: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality
Wardrup-Fruin, Noah and Montford, Nick (eds), The New Media Reader