- Title
- Pardon the pun: it's about religion, after all.
- Creator
- Koutsoukos, Christina
- Relation
- 2011 conference of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association. Refereed proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference: Communication on the edge 2011 (Hamilton, New Zealand 6-8 July, 2011)
- Relation
- http://www.anzca.net/conferences/past-conferences/2011-conf/2011-conf-p2.html
- Publisher
- Australian & New Zealand Communication Association Inc.
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- According to veteran journalist and Editor-at-Large of The Australian newspaper, World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney was an event that “enshrines the role of religion in the public square” (Kelly, 2008). Indeed, it was the largest gathering of a religious nature in Australia since the 1995 Papal visit of Pope John Paul II. It packed political and commercial punch; impacted on the brash soul of Sydney and closed the city streets to traffic with music and song. Roman Catholic Church ritual was broadcast to billions using slick television production. This was a highly visible example of the “intersection of media, religion and culture” (Hoover, 1998). ‘Religion’- a globalised Catholic Christianity- was brought to the marketplace with Pope Benedict XVI as its core “branding” (Hepp & Krönert, 2008). It had both pictorial and televisual appeal and there was no doubt this “hybrid religious media event” (Hepp & Krönert, 2008) was newsworthy. Sydney journalists embraced the young Catholic pilgrims and the Papal visitor equally in what could be described a post 9/11 ‘good news’ story. By doing so they confirmed journalism as a cultural practice “manipulating symbols and presenting narrative in such a way so they are relevant to the cultural context within which journalism functions” (Hoover, 1998). It also raised questions about how religion is reported. Textual analysis undertaken of the print and television coverage of WYD so far suggests a news journalist cohort unprepared and uncomfortable in its reporting of the religious sphere. The ‘soft news’ approach of the Australian media in all but a handful of stories and the extent of the coverage demonstrated a choice about what it considered to be the ‘acceptable’ face of religion but the language it used wasn’t always so convincing.
- Subject
- religion; Australia; media; World Youth Day
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1058763
- Identifier
- uon:16468
- Identifier
- ISSN:1448-4331
- Language
- eng
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