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"Playing MediaPolitics "
by Richard C. Stanton
Australian university media and communication students at the beginning of the 21st century are overtly conservative. They actively participate in right-of-center political and religious organizations, read and engage with conservative print media and subscribe to the values and ideologies of conservative national politics. Yet they bring to their universities markedly different backgrounds and aspirations for themselves and for their political futures.
In the past eight years I have taught and engaged with media students at two very different institutions. I have observed their individual and collective behavior and attitudes, and reflected on why they bring certain values and ideals to both the classroom and to their campus political life. The surface difference in the universities, and in their names, can be described in a single word: ‘Western’. In this the word does not relate to a differentiation between cultures, such as Eastern and Western, nor to the image of the great American West. It is distinctly Australian and is usually a derogatory remark upon the urban framework of Sydney, Australia’s largest city. The eastern suburbs and north shore are where the élites live and work, while the rest of Sydney is referred to as the ‘western suburbs’. This is a misnomer. Both the popular and élite media use it to refer to all towns and urban areas located as far away as forty miles from central Sydney (the city is bounded to the east by the Pacific Ocean and to the south and north by escarpments and national parks, so it can only extend west) and to reflect a poor, working class sprawl.
There are two universities in Sydney with very similar names: The University of Sydney and the University of Western Sydney. The University of Western Sydney uses its title to leverage its competitive international position in attracting students from southeast and northern Asia. But that is where the comparison ends. The University of Western Sydney was established fewer than twenty years ago to serve as an educational institution for mainly vocational training. In this it teaches media and communication at a practical level. Its greatest virtue is that the majority of students entering the bachelor of media and communication programs are from families where they are the first to undertake university studies. They come from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds that reflect the national multicultural policy in Australia and its geographical focus on Sydney’s west. And it is within the vast outer urban and township areas that the University of Western Sydney is located, on four campuses.
The University of Sydney, on the other hand, was established in the 19th century, and is Australia’s most élite university. It has well-established medical and law schools, both of which are considered to be the most important in Australia.
The difference between the universities is best highlighted by their relative entry scores for media and communication. For the University of Western Sydney a ranking of seventy out of one hundred will provide entry for a student wanting to study public relations or journalism. For the University of Sydney, the ranking is ninety-eight out of one hundred.
In the past eight years I have taught media and communication at both institutions. I have observed and engaged with students in a number of political situations and have provided them with overtly political problems and projects which required an investigation of political and communication theories and practices.
At the University of Western Sydney, as I have mentioned, students arrived from a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds that reflected a general family political conservatism; there were many of Greek and Italian backgrounds whose parents and grandparents had established small businesses in their urban communities. The parents worked hard and placed high value on education despite their own limited access or training in the English language. These students, quite frequently, if subconsciously, brought to the project or problem a set of skills that were practically based. They tackled problems and projects using a set of skills that had been derived from observation of and involvement in their own parents’ development. There was a tendency to regard theory suspiciously, to the extent that one male student of Italian background (first generation Australian) was proud to declare to me on completion of his degree, that he had made it all the way through without reading one textbook, (except in one of my public relations courses, where he decided he needed to understand the theory in order to apply the media politics).
At the University of Sydney, students arrive in the specialist media and communication degree program principally from élite schools armed with a strong self assurance. Courses in this program are heavily weighted towards theory and to the knowledge that élite liberal media such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Fairfax Group (publishers of the élite newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review and national business magazine BRW) will find them attractive graduates.
What I have found most startling, despite the clear differences in course offerings, is that the students have very little to differentiate them politically. Aside from the occasional student who at either institution was happy to be identified as a Marxist, the predominant political thinking leaned towards conservatism. And while there was some opposition in the classroom to conservative issues such as globalization (in a media globalization class) or nuclear energy (in a political public relations class) partisanship lay not in a diffuse understanding of politics or the political process, and therefore in a genuine desire to take sides, but in a familial process that had been handed on by earlier generations. In other words, there was no sign of any radical thinking, despite their formative years being dominated by Australian conservative governments and political parties.
Of most interest to me is the obvious dichotomy. If first generation students from ethnically diverse backgrounds use practical skills to develop their political partisanship and align with the conservative right, then élite students studying theoretical concepts, with generations of support, attending the oldest, most elite university would, hypothetically, be radicalized even if only to show their contempt for their depth of generational connectivity.
That the élite students at the élite university demonstrate a similar partisanship through theoretical approaches to media politics to those students at a third tier university using practical life skills, indicates that the conservative political parties in Australia, the Liberal National Coalition government, are and have been developing enormously successful political strategies to secure generational support.
Richard C. Stanton is a faculty member in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Sydney.
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