Among The Herald's readers Greg Ray is a well known dude. He has carved out an identity as a strong historical and investigative writer, winning a multitude of regional awards for many of his articles. Greg is noted for his contribution to the public's knowledge on a range of important issues and is said to have produced articles of national importance (Forum contributors, n.d. accessed May 5, 2010, from http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Ray_Greg_976810119.aspx).
Presumably, with The Herald's self-proclaimed reputation as a balanced and reliable source, and Greg's position as senior journalist, the media release Newcastle Beach Front in Decay (July 2009) is just trying to put forward a generally accepted community view: the view that the legal graffiti wall is a stain on the landscape, the council needs to shape up their act and the Mirvac development is simply awesome. In fact if we have a look through the back catalogue of Greg Ray's journalism on the South Newcastle area, such 'balanced' and 'well researched' representations are a recurrent theme. Lets have a look...
On the 11th of August, 2008, almost a year before the release of the Newcastle Beach Front in Decay video, The Herald published Greg's article Plan to Beautify Newcastle Beach (accessible via this link). The article featured this image, with the caption 'MESS: The skate park at South Newcastle Beach."
The opening line, "NEWCASTLE'S blighted city beachfront may get a much-needed overhaul, thanks to the Mirvac redevelopment of the former Royal Newcastle Hospital site", along with the following words in the short article effectively painted the picture of a dirty and misused location, that fortunately, might rediscover its potential through the influence of a nearby apartment building development.Greg Ray interviewed Mirvac director Gavin Tonnet to contribute his perspective on the state of and future hopes for the beachfront area.
The following day's paper contained another of Greg's short articles (link), this time head-lined City lost $1m on hospital site deal: council - an unusual arrangement of words for an experienced writer, but with the overall effect that an inept council lost one million dollars on a site deal. The article also featured this image with the caption "GOLDEN: Design for Mirvac's development. Artwork by Mirvac."
Greg Ray's unusually worded headline combined with the image and its included caption effectively portrayed the developer Mirvac in a, shall we say, golden radiantly positive light, and the council in a rather negative light, making somewhat of an economic blunder. This is perhaps confusing when we read through the actual article to find that Mirvac by way of technicality were able to avoid paying the city council an originally negotiated community contribution of $2.835 million, now paying just $1.89 million. Essentially what happened was that Mirvac was able to redirect the $1m loss into the surrounds of their own development and away from the wider community. Looks like Greg tried particularly hard to dilute that truth.
The above examples reveal a standard tabloid approach characteristic in Ray's journalism. It seems that at least in the instance of his journalistic representation of the Newcastle South beachfront in recent years, his intentions aren't exactly parallel with those that he and The Herald are known for (supposedly and via self-proclamation). We can see that Ray doesn't create the message to represent an accurate and balanced depiction of local events and issues, but rather distorts local events and issues, to stay onside with the business community and thus foster the relationship between advertisers and advertising space. He does so at the sacrifice of his own journalistic integrity.
In such examples, media produced by The Herald fails to project a balanced community view. In its alignment with the business community The Herald projects a view which is only sectorial within our local society (Sutton cited in ABC 1998). Furthermore, they do so under the false guise of community oriented news - providing corporations like Mirvac with a subversive political tool through which to promote their aims. Now that we know who has created the message and perhaps why, let's have a closer look at exactly how representations are constructed in the media release video Newcastle Beachfront in decay (July, 2009).
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