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Same but different: Bali Nine and children in detention : Comments
By Virginia Small, published 2/3/2015Mr Abbott said the Human Rights Commission should be ashamed of itself for releasing the report because it was an attack on his government.
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Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus, argued that meaning is inextricably linked to the form of the words, or in other words, that what you see is what you get. After another 20 years of thinking about the subject he completely reversed himself in his Philosophical Investigations, arguing that meaning is constructed within the context of the reader/listener (social, emotional, cultural, etc) and the words themselves are not the context-free information carriers that Bertrand Russell had tried to treat them as.
Umberto Maturana went on to develop the idea, developing the idea of "languaging", which is the process of developing a shared understanding between sender and receiver and is at the heart of the idea of "branding".
The media, as you would already know from your experience as a journalist, is expert at such languaging, as are our politically-employed journalists and the political apparatchiks that they work with.
Unfortunately, the media is not driven by ethical principles, as an experience I have had with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (the journalists Union) showed me. In fact, despite trumpeting such principles loudly, they are often honoured more in the breach. As a result, the expedience of the moment (who's paying the bill for the story) is often the only guide that media organisations follow and they can be enormously destructive as a result.
The idea of the press as the guardians of liberty in a democracy is sadly, long gone.