Summing it up.

The political persecution of Australia's Prime Minister, what does this mean for women in politics?

One of the best and shocking speeches I have ever read. Anne Summers gave her key note speech at the 2012 Human Rights and Social Justice Lecture at the University of Newcastle on the topic of Her Rights at Work. This speech focused on the political persecution of Australia’s first female prime minister. Like many other Australians, Anne Summers was disturbed by the double standards that are seemingly applied to Julia Gillard by the Opposition, by the media and by many ordinary people.

However in the course of researching this topic Summers discovered that Gillard is subjected to far worse than mere double-standards. There is an entire industry of vilification, much of it sexually crude, all of it offensive and designed to undermine her authority and thus her legitimacy in the role as Australia’s first female prime minister. Anne Summers felt that she could not argue this case without displaying at least some of the material that she was referring to. This material is very confronting and she warned that not everyone will want to look at it.

The link to the full article which reveals some shocking truths about the misogyny that exists within Australian Parliament is; http://annesummers.com.au/speeches/her-rights-at-work-r-rated/
Even if you don't agree with Gillard's politics, this speech is worth having a look at.

Making Poverty History.

“Poverty of course is a crime. Poverty is a discrimination. Poverty is worse than racism. Poverty is a social injustice. Poverty is a prison. Poverty is a destruction of human dignity. Poverty is a condemnation to death. I dream of that time when poverty is ended and I know it will be during my lifetime!” - Alphonse Toussaint 

In 2010 I was an ambassador on the Make Poverty History Roadtrip. This Roadtrip consisted of over 1000 Australian youths travelling to Canberra to advocate that Australia raise its foreign aid commitment to 0.7 per cent of GDP.

Make Poverty History is a coalition of more than 70 aid and development organisations, community and faith-based groups. In Australia, Make Poverty History works in partnership with Micah Challenge and the Global Call For Action Against Poverty (GCAP) to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and halve global poverty by 2015.

In 2013 I will be once again venturing down to Canberra on the Make Poverty History Roadtrip, this time as a group leader, in an effort to raise awareness of the commitment made by the Australian government to raise our nations commitment to the MDG's. 

A good read.. on Liberalism.

Ironic how I am in the process of writing an assignment on Liberalism and my mother emails me this article, either way it's a good read and interesting ideas presented.

Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law

By Richard A. Epstein

(Harvard University Press, 233 pp., $29.95)

Richard Epstein is the same as he ever was. Part erudite scholar of Roman law and the common law, part provocative intellectual who promotes a view that he calls “classical liberalism,” Epstein is relentlessly true to himself, and this gives his works a unity of tone and content that both pleases and distresses. After shifting early in his career from a natural-rights justification for classical liberalism to a utilitarian justification, the Epstein program has shown no signs of internal struggle or evolution.

And it is not as though there is nothing with which to struggle. Many scholars have offered withering critiques of the Epstein program, but there is little sign that the arguments of the critics have been heard and considered. Epstein’s latest book targets the administrative state as the enemy of classical liberalism, and argues that the administrative state is inconsistent with the rule of law, but Epstein fails to come to grips with objections that have been made many times to arguments of this sort. Indeed, James Landis, a New Dealer and dean of the Harvard Law School, addressed similar arguments in 1938 and offered root-and-branch objections about which Epstein says barely a word. Is there a word to describe a thesis that was refuted before it was written? Prefuted, perhaps? If there is such a thing, Epstein’s book has been prefuted.

In Epstein’s worldview, classical liberals have to fight a two-front war against both libertarians and progressives. On the right flank are strict libertarians who insist that natural rights bar the state from undertaking any program of coercive taxation. On the left flank are progressives who favor expansive schemes of taxation, redistribution, and regulation. (These are Epstein’s conceptions, not necessarily those of the libertarians and progressives he sees himself as battling.)

As against the libertarians, Epstein argues that coercive taxation and regulation are permissible for mutual advantage—that is, to overcome problems of collective action that prevent individuals and markets from supplying public goods at desirable levels. Property holders may be forced to accept compensation “in kind,” or in other implicit goods, for the forced surrender of their rights, but only if they are left at least as well off by the transaction as they would be in its absence. Thus state schemes of anti-monopoly regulation, mutual insurance, and defense are generally permissible, subject to the mutual-advantage constraint.


THUS FAR, EPSTEIN'S arguments amount to a conventional welfare-economic view that emphasizes the role of the state in supplying public goods. More dramatic is the fight on Epstein’s left flank, where he wants to indict the administrative state. The administrative state is the enormous apparatus of modern government, both in the United States and in the other democracies, that is constituted by a menagerie of administrative agencies, boards, and commissions. In the United States, everyone has heard of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and a few others, but there are in fact hundreds of such agencies that act under the authority of statutory delegations from Congress, taking a staggering variety of forms and pursuing a staggering array of regulatory, redistributive, and managerial aims. In many cases, the delegating statutes combine legislative, executive, and judicial functions within agencies; they give agencies the power to make rules, enforce the rules, and judge whether the rules have been violated. This combination of functions makes a certain brand of political liberal, one who has taken very seriously some famous passages from Montesquieu and the Federalist about the separation of powers, recoil in horror.

Epstein makes the usual liberal noises about the separation of powers, but the main thread of his indictment derives from Friedrich Hayek, his intellectual lodestar. Following The Road to Serfdom, Hayek’s cri de coeur, Epstein worries that the administrative state is inconsistent with the rule of law. The claim is puzzling at first glance, because the agencies derive their powers from enacted law, rather than tyrannical fiat. To understand the Hayekian concern, we need to invoke a jurisprudential distinction between “thin” versions and “thick” versions of the rule of law.

The thin rule of law is simply the requirement that coercive governmental power be exercised in accordance with duly enacted legal instruments, and the agencies are fine on that score, because they trace their authority to delegating statutes. But the thick rule of law is more ambitious, and requires that governmental authority be exercised in accordance with a set of criteria elaborated by the legal theorist Lon L. Fuller—criteria of generality, prospectivity, clarity, and neutrality. Hayekians such as Epstein emphasize that the thick rule of law promotes the predictability of official action, and this in turn helps private actors to plan their affairs.

Epstein thus sees the administrative state as a repository of vast official discretion, antithetical to generality and predictability. The resulting political risks include official favoritism and dirigisme, “rent-seeking” or lobbying by firms seeking benefits funded by taxpayers or seeking to impose regulations that will disadvantage competitors, and ham-handed regulatory intervention that needlessly blocks improvements that private parties could otherwise have made through contractual arrangements. The common problem in all this is that the agencies exercise excessive discretion under vague delegating statutes that permit them to issue ad hoc commands rather than general rules of law.

Epstein’s main prescription is to restore key “procedural and structural” features of the classical liberal regime, of which the most important are “unbiased decisionmaking” and “judicial review of administrative actions on matters of fact and law.” The phrases are loaded. What Epstein means is that the law should not permit the combination of rule-making, enforcement, and judging functions within administrative agencies, and should reject the so-called “Chevron doctrine,” under which courts defer to agencies’ interpretations of the laws they administer so long as those interpretations are reasonable. Epstein also wants a revival of constitutional restrictions on the delegation of power to administrative agencies, an idea that the Supreme Court abandoned in the 1930s. As applied to current controversies, Epstein seemingly wants the courts to narrow or perhaps to invalidate—he is not clear about this—both the Obamacare statute and the Dodd-Frank law that attempts to strengthen financial regulation. Whatever the details, and whatever the context, more review of agencies by judges is the watchword.

NONE OF THESE diagnoses or prescriptions is exactly novel. Critics of the administrative state have been complaining about excessive delegation and arguing for more vigorous judicial review at least since Albert Venn Dicey wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Works with titles such as The New Despotism argued relentlessly that the burgeoning administrative state, observable both in Britain and the United States, would eventually undo the rule of law altogether; the critics hoped that judges would constrain administrative discretion while enforcing the general and neutral legal rules of the pre-existing common law. Against this backdrop, Hayek himself was a latecomer to the party, and Epstein’s latter-day Hayekianism is old hat by now.

Since the debate is so old, it should not be surprising that the rule-of-law critique of the administrative state is subject to well-known rejoinders. It is not as though judges lack discretion of their own: a vast body of literature in political science demonstrates conclusively that in the hard cases that reach appellate courts, judges often rule on predictably ideological and partisan grounds rather than strictly legal ones. (The literature is mostly about American judges, but recent work in the British context has begun to explore whether the same finding holds true there.) The Epsteinian and Hayekian worry that agency policy-making will be “captured” by rent-seeking firms—special interests with lobbyists—is fatally non-comparative as well, because such firms can also seek rents through the litigation process, hiring expensive lawyers, and bringing wave after wave of suits in the hopes of establishing favorable precedents. Epstein falls into the nirvana fallacy—the tendency to juxtapose a jaundiced picture of agency policymaking to an idealized vision of commonlaw courts announcing and enforcing general and neutral rules. Real courts may be captured by the forces that resist regulation or else use their discretion to indulge their ideological proclivities.

Moreover, Hayek’s intuition that only general rules make decisions predictable was simplistic. Ad hoc administrative decision-making can promote legal certainty and predictability as much or more than general rules enforced by courts. As long ago as 1924, Roscoe Pound observed that general rules are inevitably open-textured, and are thus dependent on the uncertain interpretation of judges in future litigation. As Pound put it:

Especially in the complicated economic organization of today the law cannot say to the business man, well, you guess; you employ a lawyer by the year to give you the best guess that he can, and then as the result of litigation we will tell you five years afterwards whether your guess as to the conduct of your business was the correct one or not.... Our administrative commissions are nothing but traffic officers, as it were, with signals to tell us when to cross and when not to cross, and where to cross.

The largest point, however, stems from James Landis’s work in 1938. Landis’s great theme was substitute safeguards: even if the administrative state has slipped off the traditional constraints of the separation of powers, there are new political and sociological constraints against official abuses. Landis defended the combination of functions in agencies by observing, “The fact that there is this fusion of prosecution and adjudication in a single administrative agency does not imply the absence of all checks. It implies simply the absence of the traditional check.” Prominent among the substitute safeguards identified by Landis were professionalism and expertise. Agency administrators, even if politically appointed, would tend to possess or develop a mission orientation that would insulate them to at least some degree from the more sordid forms of political temptation and influence. Many have debated whether that claim is correct, but from Epstein’s book one would be hard-pressed to discern that it had ever been made.

That is the sense in which Landis prefuted Epstein. One may believe, as I do, that the rule-of-law critique of the administrative state falls flat, or one may believe the opposite. Yet Epstein never really comes to grips with the standard rejoinders, not in this book anyway. Instead he primarily reiterates the first-level Hayekian arguments in setting after setting. The result is a book that will please the faithful but not persuade the doubtful, or break any new ground. The debate stands where it was.

Adrian Vermeule is a John H. Watson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. This article appeared in the March 15, 2012 edition of the magazine.

Annotated Bibliography

The role of journalists is not black and white. Reporting is not only confined to the facts, but often it is extended into areas that remain morally and ethically grey.  This is especially the case where journalists are posted in dangerous areas, where the safety of the journalist is often put into peril in favour of getting ‘the scoop’. This annotated bibliography will firstly analyse an academic article about the contemporary role of journalism today.  It will then analyse three sources, each of different mediums, written by journalists in the midst of the conflict in Syria. Through the analysis of each author and their work, this bibliography with highlight the role of journalists as first-hand eyewitnesses and the way in which they communicate back to the public at large. Each source will be analysed based on their credibility and the transparency of the arguments as well as the importance of their role as journalist to communicate the news and their opinions to the people at home. 

(Journal Article)Deuze, Mark. (2006). Liquid Journalism. International Communication Association & American Political Science Association; Political Communication Report. 16 (1), 1-4. 

Deuze, associate professor at the Indiana University in Bloomington, has done extensive research in the field of mass communication and journalism and has published several works surrounding these issues (Deuze, 2011). In his article ‘Liquid Journalism’ Deuze focuses on the evolution of mass communications and the changing views of journalism. He argues that the role the media plays in society is either considered to be a ‘mere mirror of the changes taking place in world society’ or otherwise seen as taking on a more independent role with the media having the ability to impact on cultural, economic and political trends within society. In support of his argument Deuze cites recognised social philosophers and provides factual evidence. However although Deuze focuses on the changing role of journalism, this article fails to articulate the reason behind this change.  In focusing only on the way in which the change affects us he fails to provide context for the change and an understanding of the underlying causes. Nonetheless this article is clearly well researched and shows transparency in that it is well referenced and the arguments presented are thoroughly supported. Furthermore the APSA Political Communication Report is a well-established journal that is well known for its reports on politics and mass communication. In relation to Syria, this article highlights the way in which mass communications and  journalistic views can impact on the views and beliefs of society and therefore the way in which a journalist’s reporting on the situation in Syria can influence society and impact not just on the present situation but also on the future one.

(Online Newspaper Article)
Black, Ian. (2012, 8 October). We'll arm the Syrian rebels – but only those who share our values. The Guardian. Retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/08/romney-arms-syria-rebels

Ian Black has worked for The Guardian for over twenty-five years as its European editor, diplomatic editor, foreign leader writer and current Middle East editor and correspondent. In 2010 Ian was awarded a Peace through Media Award by the International Council for Press and Broadcasting for his work (The Guardian, 2012). In his most recent article, which focuses on the American presidential debate and the issues surrounding the situation of the Syrian rebels, Black highlights the differences between the two presidential candidates of Obama and Romney and the major differences in their proposed policies in Syria. The article is peppered with quotes from the two candidates and includes references to past instances such as the 1979 peace treaty with Israel and the need to continue to maintain it. Black, throughout this article expresses his personal opinion which reflects his own political and ideological views. However his opinion and personal views carry weight due to the extent of the knowledge he possesses as a resident in the Middle East and a first-hand witness. The article is particularly focused on the views and portrayals of candidate Romney with Black questioning many of his statements. However Blacks arguments are not heavily persuasive as this article is lacking in detailed background information on the Syrian situation. By failing to provide more detail, especially given his first-hand knowledge, Black misses an opportunity to totally win the reader over to his point of view. As a result of this lack of information, it was difficult to understand the full and very complex issues in America’s involvement with Syria. The Guardian is a creditable and renowned British newspaper that has been printing newspapers for close to a century and has remained influential and holds significant political sway in the UK.

(Magazine Article)
Zakaria, Fareed. (2012, June 11). The Case Against Intervention in Syria. Time Magazine World. Retrieved: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2116135,00.html#ixzz28uAlFyCr

The Time magazine is the world’s largest circulations weekly news magazine with a readership of over 25 million. Zakaria is an editor at large at The Time magazine and has worked in foreign affairs for over two decades (Timeinc. 2007).  Zakaria’s experience within the field of reporting is evident throughout the article as he articulates his expressions and views on the brutal regime of Bashar Assad and uses history as evidence to support his opinions. This article questions the current method of the United States in dealing with Assad and, though the use of different instances, including the latest massacre of civilians in Houla, the article forces the reader to question the current strategy and the role the United States has played. This argument is further aligned with the argument of Ian Black, aforementioned, in that he criticises the Unites-States position and places emphasis on the politics of the intervention. Zakaria enforces his main arguments against the intervention in Syria through the use of stories, factual evidence and statistics.  Zakaria views are very clear and although he doesn’t provide any counter arguments he highlights several arguments as to why he believes military intervention is unlikely to work in Syria, and provides reasoning and examples for each. In presenting his argument in this format, Zakaria is able to provide a credibility and transparency that helps communicate with the reader and further helps provide an authenticity to the article.

 (Chapter from Book)
Starr, S. (2012) Damascus: Dragged towards Revolt in Revolt in Syria: Eyewitness to the uprising. London, United Kingdom. C Hurst and Co. Retrieved: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolt-Syria-Eye-Witness-Stephen-Starr/dp/1849041970

Stephen Starr, in his chapter Damascus: Dragged towards Revolt, writes about his experience as a journalist living in the midst of the violence in the Middle East and highlights several of his opinions on the uprising in Syria. This book was published by C Hurst and Co, a well-known British publishing house that specialises in Global Affairs. Starr provides a vivid account of the first few months of the uprising and his life as a journalist living amongst it. In doing so he presents his ideas on the way in which Syria differs from other Arab uprisings and the role the media played in representing the situation throughout the country. Starr goes on to criticise the propaganda under the current regime and expresses his opinions on the resolve of the Syrian people. Although this chapter, and in effect this book, is a personal account of the author’s experiences and it is clearly subjective in that it is the authors personal beliefs, the arguments are well presented and supported by factual evidence including citations from other recognised scholars. Unlike Zakaria in his article (discussed above), Starr highlights and criticises various problems in Syria including the role of the media and the position of the United-States. However despite his criticisms he does not present any possible solutions to the problems he raised. Although this meant there was a lack of balance it was clear that this book was both well-researched and well-funded which therefore afforded it the opportunity to present itself as a creditable resource.

References.

Time Inc. (2007). About Us. Retrieved from: http://www.timeinc.com/home/

Deuze, Mark. (2011). Department of Telecommunications. Indiana University Bloomington. Retrieved from:  http://www.indiana.edu/~telecom/people/faculty/deuze.shtml

The Guardian. (2012). Ian Black – Profile. Guardian News and Media Limited. Retrieved from:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/ianblack

JOUR1111 Lecture 11 - Agenda Setting.

Humans are susceptible beings. Easily influenced by emotions, environment and different circumstances. The idea that society is a human product stems from the social constructionism of reality theory, that is; 

•  An individual’s conception of reality is socially constructed through a process of communication using shared language. 
• Reality exists, but the way we come to know it, talk about it, understand it, is mediated through social life. 
• The media play a large role in ‘constructing’ or ‘mediating’ the social world, as we understand it. 

It is without a doubt that the media can be very influential and impact on the decisions, beliefs and ideas of a person. The ability to influence ones formation of reality and the way in which the media constructs reality is known as agenda setting.

Agenda setting can be defined as; "the process of the mass media presenting certain issues frequently and prominently with the result that large segments of the public come to perceive those issues as more important than others. Simply put, the more coverage an issue receives, the more important it is to people.”(Coleman, McCombs, Shaw, Weaver, 2008)

Quite simple agenda setting can be categorised into three groups, that is;

1. Public Agenda: The set of topics that members of the public perceive as important.

2. Policy Agenda: Issues that decision makers think are salient (i.e. legislators)

3. Corporate Agenda: Issues that big businesses and corporations consider important.

The way in which reality is firstly created by the media and then portrayed to the public can alter the public’s perception of a certain matter and even reality.

This diagram illustrates this and the way in which the media warps the public perception of reality.

 

In order to accept and understand the theory of agenda setting, one must understand the two basic assumptions that come with agenda setting, that is; 
1. The mass media do not merely reflect and report reality, they filter and shape it. 
2. Media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important that other issues. 
So one might now ask did all this agenda setting come from? 
The mass communication theory of ‘Agenda setting’roots can be found in the book Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. Public Opinion was publish in 1922 and presented a new insight into the role of the media. Lippman exposed the way in which the media paints “pictures in our heads”. A good example of this is the way in which the terrorist attack of September 11 was portrayed and the media ‘painted a picture’, so to speak, of the terrorist attack in our head. 

 

Pictures of the pentagon were very rarely shown; the media instead chose to show the pictures of the plane crashing into one of the Twin Tower and therefore create a new reality. 

More than Half a century later, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw lead the major research dedicated to agenda setting. Setting The Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (McCombs, Shaw 1972) exposes a very important point about the theory of agenda setting. “Agenda setting is not the result of any diabolical plan by journalists to control the minds of the public, but an inadvertent by-product of the necessity to focus the news. Newspapers, magazines, radio and television have a limited amount of space and time, so only a fraction of the day’s news cam be included.” 

McCombs and Shaw conducted an experiment, to study the effect of agenda setting in the media. This experiment occurred over the 1968 Presidential Campaign in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Over this time 100 undecided voters were surveyed on the key issues and measured that against media content. Their hypothesis was that the mass media set the agenda by emphasising specific topics. 
The study conducted was set under two theories of the agenda setting theory. 
First Level Agenda Setting Theory – Emphasizes the major issues and “the transfer of the salience of those issues.” At this level the media suggest what the public should focus on through coverage. To speak through the voice of Walter Lippmann this theory is simply concerned with ‘what the pictures are about’, 
Second Level Agenda Setting Theory - This is essentially how the media focuses on the attributes of the issues. The media suggest how people should think about an issue and this theory is focused on how people understand the things that have captured their attention. 
The conclusion that McCombs and Shaw came to was that “In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues – that is, the media may set the ‘agenda’ of the campaign.” 

The agenda setting ‘Family’.

Through the process of agenda setting, the media can also perform a number of different tasks, including:

· Media Gatekeeping – how individuals control the flow of messages through a communication channel; the exposure of an issue.

· Media Advocacy – purposive promotion of an issue, i.e. smoking, organ donation.

· Agenda Cutting – the reality that most news isn’t represented, i.e. AIDS/HIV in Australia.

· Agenda Surfing or the ‘Bandwagon’ effect– crowds and trends i.e. Kony. The media "surfs" on the wave of topics originally mentioned in the opinion-leading media.

· The diffusion of News - the process through which an important event is communicated to the public. How, where, when news is released. Who decides?

· Portrayal of an Issue - The way an issue is portrayed will often influence how it is perceived by the public.

· Media Dependence – the more we become dependent on the media, the greater ability we grant it to set the agenda.

Bullying within Journalism.