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Tracks to Advocacy Journalism Studies, Animal Rights and Australian Media Law

Asia Pacific Media Educator 24(2) 257–268 © 2014 University of Wollongong, Australia SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/1326365X14555287 http://ame.sagepub.com

Janine Little Abstract This article considers the role of animal rights-based journalism and its connection to teaching media law and ethics to undergraduate students in an Australian university arts faculty. An anecdotal discussion of a reflective practice informing the teaching of an undergraduate course in a journalism major relates questions of ethics and law to broader considerations of the role of advocacy in and around journalism, and media practice. It is argued that animal rights-related stories have a role in training media professionals, and also in inspiring journalists to envision their own work as part of the democratic mechanisms of social and legal reform in Australia. Keywords Animal rights, public interest, advocacy journalism, journalism studies, media law, participant observation

Introduction Australia’s news and current affairs media have taken a keener interest in recent years in stories exposing animal cruelty. This increased interest can be attributed, at least in part, to the sustained popularity of true crime and criminal justice genres in Australian popular culture. Furthermore, the grittiness of such ‘darker’ narratives tends to contradict dominant ideological constructions of the ‘brightsidedness’ of life in affluent Australia and its Anglo-American parallel nations (cf. Ehrenreich 2009).1 In this context, the capacity of digital technology to make participant observation of violence simultaneously distant and graphic blurs factual news with the deliberately stylized worlds of CSI or Criminal Minds (Dowler et al. 2006). From both higher educational and cultural perspectives, this ‘boundary blurring’ offers some insight into the ways in which media representation of the violent and/or graphic can build public (mis)perceptions of how actual

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instances and cases are dealt with at the executive and judicial levels (Littlefield 2011, p. 135). It is that process of telling stories about real cases, actual victims, and perhaps unlikely heroes and villains, that appeals to the Australian undergraduate imagination in new media times, just as much as it has historically and internationally. Journalism could be just the right arena in which cognate questions about society, how it functions, what leads to dysfunction and to positive reform, are asked and perhaps answered. Some of the bid to deploy combined forms of storytelling to explain these complex relations extends to violence or violent acts, although there is some evidence to suggest that routinely depicted violence across media genres contributes to a ‘blunted response’ (Scharrer 2008, pp. 291–292) to violence in news. This seemingly contradictory search for explanation of, and familiarity with, violence and violent acts can be considered usefully as also one of many factors relating to a general public shift away from the ‘legacy’ news media format towards the ‘layperson’ copy-tasted news on crowd-sourcing sites. The popularity of crowd-sourcing news sites such as Reddit correlates with patterns of media engagement of not only contemporary youth culture but across all Australian age groups (Spurgeon et al. 2012). According to Spurgeon et al. (2012), it is iY Generation2 who mostly do not read mainstream newspapers, or at least not in the same ways as did their parents and grandparents; a phenomenon with which Australian journalism education is currently engaging as media companies have also radically altered their business models accordingly. Even so, journalism’s central concern with the public interest continues to be a unifying factor across platforms and generations. This article’s anecdotal approach enables a reflective consideration of this unifying capacity of the public interest through a discussion of animal rights-based journalism which affected or informed Australian law and, at least temporarily, a federal government policy on the practice of exporting live animals as part of the meat and livestock industry. The purpose of adopting an anecdotal approach is to add a multidisciplinary tone to explaining the tenacity of the public interest not only in journalism but also in media law and ethics education. Such a tone might be heard in the acknowledgement of social convention and its influences on narrative, and the ephemeral attention afforded to media content as journalism itself vies for its audience share. The Australian law’s observation of public interest in rulings involving journalists breaking the law to research stories has been noticeably consistent, which is one of the reasons why it assists in illustrating the interdependent relationship of ethics and law for journalism students. This article’s discussion of animal rights-based investigative journalism and legal decision making illuminates some of the directions that the exploration of this relationship took across several years of discursively based seminars in media ethics and law in an undergraduate journalism programme—and by way of extension from my work elsewhere on related material (Little 2013, pp. 165–181). It considers how a tendency towards advocacy in the history of journalism about animal cruelty and animal rights can inform the development of journalistic understanding of both public interest and Asia Pacific Media Educator, 24, 2 (2014): 257–268

Tracks to Advocacy 259 objectivity. One of my working assumptions in this article (and in my work with students) is that there is a general social acceptance of animal welfare as desirable and a corresponding abhorrence of cruelty towards animals. Another working assumption is that it is not possible to conflate meat consumption with either cruelty or welfare, and indeed media representations of animal cruelty are seldom connected to meat consumption in Australia.

The Main Story Track: A Bloody Business When an investigative reporting team from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Four Corners programme won the highest journalism accolade in the country in 2011, animal rights advocacy was already positioned at the nation’s media centre stage. The Gold Walkley Award-winning investigation into the treatment of cattle in the live animal export trade to Indonesia and the Middle East had set the social media world alight with outrage when it first screened in May that year. More recently, ‘A Bloody Business’ has served as the benchmark for other cattle export industry cruelty investigations by Animals Australia and other animal rights groups, which paired activists with reporting and news or current affairs production teams based within the mainstream Australian media. While ‘A Bloody Business’ is an obvious choice for a journalism ethics case study of what journalists can do and how single stories can affect change, it was not the first instance that the news media had made prominent the fact that animal suffering is a pressing topic for investigative journalism. Furthermore, it was not the first time that the legal lines were blurred, and even crossed, for the sake of getting the story told more fully, not just to gain public attention but also to advocate for a change in public policy.

The Case Law Context: ABC versus Lenah Game Meats One of the central learning objectives for journalism students is the development of practical awareness of the intersections between the law and ethics of their profession. Traditionally, the motivations of each field are similar: applying the practices and standards of the field for social benefit; upholding human and civil rights; protecting the vulnerable; and bringing the culpable to account. While this might seem obvious to a legal mind (the conceptualizing of journalism as the ‘fourth estate’ [Schultz 1998] in relation to the judicial system in a constitutional democracy as the ‘second estate’ [Kirby 2011; Ratnapala & Crowe 2012]), it is not always so for journalism students or even for practising journalists. Some students are not fully conversant with their own civil rights, let alone the ways that knowledge of the laws that frame their media practice can support the development of that practice as one of integrity and courage. This is why the media law and Asia Pacific Media Educator, 24, 2 (2014): 257–268

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ethics class is devised in a way that sequences ethical dilemmas based on current affairs reporting with ‘milestone’ case studies that mark the various crossings into media law that emerge out of self-regulatory ethical frameworks such as that in Australia. For that teaching approach, the issue of privacy remains the most clearly comprehensible area in which general public outrage at media intrusion moves fairly swiftly into Australian legal considerations of privacy and its international status as a fundamental human right (Australian Human Rights Commission), with contrasting situational realities.

A Privacy Track The undergraduate class in media law engages with notorious privacy invasion cases; the case studies illustrating, most clearly, the types of excessive reporting practices that were considered by Lord Justice Leveson during Britain’s highly publicized judicial inquiry into press standards and press behaviour.3 In Australia, the Lenah Game Meats case, first brought against the ABC and culminating in the ABC’s appeal to the High Court in 2001, is correlated with those case studies from Britain (and elsewhere) as part of a consideration of potential risks and benefits of tighter laws around privacy and media practice in the local setting. The dilemma of protecting individual rights to privacy even when that protection risks harming others leads to the central concern with public interest that Australian law and media ethics have, historically, held in common. ABC vs Lenah Game Meats was the High Court appeal against an interlocutory injunction ordered by a Tasmanian court to prevent the ABC’s 7.30 programme from airing footage filmed covertly by Animal Liberation activists at the Tasmanian game farm. In the Lenah case,4 the ABC argued that its part in the trespass and secret filming of brush-tailed possums at a Tasmanian farm was its ethical duty, and that there was a strong public interest in broadcasting the footage as part of its investigation. The ABC reporter and the crew did not actually trespass on private property but they did encourage animal liberationists to go in, obtain the footage and deliver it to them to for their planned story. Lawyers and legal scholars situate this case in terms of its direction on the potential development of a privacy tort in Australia. The High Court was deciding whether or not Australian corporations have a right to privacy that is recognized just as it would be for an individual. Their Honours ruled that the corporation’s right to privacy could not be enforced as a way of upholding the injunctory relief Lenah Game Meats had obtained from the lower Tasmanian court, but they did not preclude the development of a tort of privacy. The injunction prohibiting the ABC’s 7.30 from using the secret video was overturned. Journalists view the case as more of an instance in which the story they decided to pursue was sufficiently newsworthy as to warrant the current affairs programme’s acceptance of the illegally obtained video footage shot by Animal Asia Pacific Media Educator, 24, 2 (2014): 257–268

Tracks to Advocacy 261 Liberation. It was always a case where journalists acted because Animal Liberation activists were prepared to take risks to inform the public about the actual standards of animal care it condoned, albeit vicariously and through the extended arm of the regulations governing the industry at the time. The general public had the right to know what raising native wildlife for exportable game meat involved, even though, as Pearson and Polden (2011, pp. 390–302) note, Lenah Game Meats had not broken any law and was compliant with the best practice industry and government regulatory standards for doing so. It took the company two applications to secure the injunction to stop 7.30 from using the Animal Liberation footage of the possums, but the High Court ended up overturning the injunction in a majority ruling that dealt mostly with the parameters of a privacy tort, and of the defence of public interest (Pearson & Polden 2011). The High Court’s judicial deliberations, as it so happens, were instructive for journalism scholars whose awareness and understanding of the ethical and legal complexities of pursuing a story on moral grounds was essential, and not incidental. What appears to intrigue journalism students most about the decision in ABC vs Lenah Game Meats is that the use of illegally obtained footage in stories where the public interest overrode other areas of law (that is, trespass, privacy) was not ruled out. It is not the trespass at the farm, the support of the animal rights lobby or even the legal points expressed in the case’s refinement of privacy laws that impresses students so much as the fact that animal protection was for many, and in such diverse arenas, the issue that invoked concerted online and street protest (ABC 2013; The Sydney Morning Herald 2012) activity and compelled government policymakers and agricultural stakeholders to articulate more clearly the live animal export trade practices overseen by Australian companies.

The Journalism Ethics Track Animal welfare and animal cruelty-related incidents have been a consistent focus of Australian investigative journalism.5 As outlined earlier in relation to the Lenah case, animal farming that is not considered exploitation has also interested journalists (and lawyers advising journalists) because it has led to civil actions in the tort of trespass. It has also involved common law deliberations over invasion of privacy that have formed watershed High Court decisions (Cao 2010; Serres 2009). However, ethical principles for journalists in Australia provide for the fact that obtaining evidence for stories with compelling public interest involves simultaneous acts of keeping confidences and breaking some laws. The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s (MEAA) Code of Ethics, for example, makes particular mention of the compelling nature of the public interest in its guidance clause. Furthermore, the MEAA’s Walkley Foundation quite clearly indicated the merits of this approach when it awarded Sarah Ferguson and her Four Corners crew the 2011 Gold Walkley for ‘A Bloody Business’; a story that relied on a video shot secretly inside an Indonesian abattoir. In her acceptance speech for the Asia Pacific Media Educator, 24, 2 (2014): 257–268

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award, Ferguson said that ‘A Bloody Business’ demonstrated that good stories would continue to matter even in a world of ‘shiny new things’, an oblique reference to the lure of digital technology in a news production culture based on the 24-hour deadline.

Investigative Tracks: Another Secret Video It might have been the then Australian federal Labor government’s precarious position in the Upper House that sent it into damage control mode the day after ABC 1 screened ‘A Bloody Business’. The then Gillard government responded to a strong public reaction on social media sites and news media organization ‘Comments’ blogs with a temporary suspension of all live cattle exports to Indonesia, which was the theatre of the programme’s secret video recording of scenes inside the abattoir selected for Animals Australia’s campaign. The extent of public reaction to the Four Corners investigation had dominated not only social media but also the high-rating talkback radio programmes across the country through the days following the Four Corners television broadcast. While the federal government suspended the live animal export trade to the single abattoir depicted in ‘A Bloody Business’, it still took further policy advice. The fact that ‘A Bloody Business’ made the federal government act swiftly to shut down the live animal export trade in its entirety was viewed by animal rights advocates as a milestone for animal welfare, even if not much of an extension of their campaign for animal rights into the federal policy arena. Ostensibly, this story had much in common with the Lenah case a decade earlier: an Animals Australia activist took a hidden camera with her into the abattoir to prove that what the organization had heard and said about the live animal export trade was true. It was inhumane, despite Australia’s regulatory provisions that made it entirely legal. As with the Lenah case, the legality of how farmers and exporters in Australia conducted their practices was not at issue; it was the level of information about actual meat-processing practices that would rouse Australians’ outrage that was tested by the secret filming of a day in the life of an abattoir-bound beast. Animals Australia President, Lyn White, took her hidden video camera into the halal butchering of Australian livestock at considerable personal risk (Burke 2011). She then approached Four Corners with the video evidence, resulting in ‘A Bloody Business’ some several months of fact-checking, interviewing and source verification later. In this respect, the story approach differs slightly from the Lenah Game Meats exposé because the video footage already existed when Sarah Ferguson started putting her material together for the 2011 story. The ethical conundrum for journalism students, then, is whether ‘commissioning’ activists to obtain secret footage—in effect encouraging them, as in the Lenah case, to break the law by trespassing—can be defended by the public interest Asia Pacific Media Educator, 24, 2 (2014): 257–268

Tracks to Advocacy 263 benefit that the High Court was ultimately prepared to consider when it heard the ABC’s appeal. Students cannot make sense of the High Court’s decision without working through the ethical questions arising from the reporting practices around the 7.30 story’s source material for the story—by considering the connection between privacy as a human right and the public right to know the information that such privacy, extended to corporations or business interests, might conceal. Journalists who elect to negotiate such dilemmas of privacy and the public right to know, also have to negotiate an accompanying ethical imperative to act to protect the vulnerable while being mindful of their legal obligations as media professionals. This is why relatively new media interest groups like the Right to Know coalition, formed in 2007 by 12 Australian media companies concerned about what they saw as contracting freedom of information provisions for journalists, campaign for a strengthened public interest defence when the courts have shown a willingness to issue suppression orders and injunctions to control the media’s access to, and use of, information. The Four Corners story’s impact on the public, and the Gillard government’s cautious approach to any restrictions placed on the live export trade to Indonesia in particular, means that journalism students could observe an historically material instance in which investigative reporting led to some temporary policy revision and legislative reform (cf. Live Animal Export Restriction and Prohibition Bill 2011 [No. 2]). However, it was difficult for students to gauge how much of the revisions and reforms were reflexive political moments in the glare of the media spotlight and how much translated into a triumph of investigative reporting. In questioning contradictory public attitudes towards meat production in Australia and comparing these with the companion animal-related news values that register across media audiences, journalism students (as well as the general public) find a common thread of conflict with which to comprehend decision making by journalists. For this reason, investigative reports, including ‘A Bloody Business’, often cite much of the supporting documentation and primary research transcripts online, external to the story itself but contained within the parameters of the programme. This could be why live animal export industry stakeholders were able to accuse the Four Corners producers of bias and, worse, of contriving some of the scenes of animal suffering filmed by Animals Australia (and verified by Ferguson and her researchers) by paying Indonesian abattoir workers in exchange for access to slaughter floors. The public could be forgiven for finding this a plausible allegation given that chequebook journalism has brought them so much sensationalized infotainment based on violence and cruelty in the past. However, journalism students are encouraged to apply the same verification strategies to the industry stakeholder-based rejoinders as they do to ‘A Bloody Business’ itself. To do so with some methodological integrity involves comparison and contrast of a long-form print format story on the same topic, but in a participant observation format also situated chronologically and apparently as a follow-up to ‘A Bloody Business’.

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A Comparative Track: Us and Them The Quarterly Essay, Us and Them, by Anna Krien (2012), is, in this case, a timely and sustainable comparison mainly because Krien wrote it largely as a consequence of ‘A Bloody Business’. Its longer length (compared with most news stories or features, for instance) allows it to extend discussions of journalism’s ethical obligations and values to the ways in which news informs the cognate forms of media practice that aim to depict human behaviour in its complexity. In the parlance of news reporting instruction, this area of discussion would focus on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the five ‘w’s’ and the ‘h’ at the centre of most introductory classes in Australia. Krien, for example, writes of the Four Corners programme: The public response seemed a clear assertion that what had happened was wrong and intolerable. But the story of the live cattle trade is more complex than it seems. And so too is our nuanced and often contradictory relationship with animals. It seems most of us have a minor clause inside us on the treatment of animals—a ‘that’s not allowed’ but ‘that’s okay.’ We have our limits and our permissions. But the categories are becoming more and more blurred. After all, how can we allow one act and not another? For example, the cattle slaughtered in Indonesia are, to all intents and purposes, objects. ‘Things’ that suddenly became subjects in the glare of a video camera. And to what end? For killing standards to be raised to Western-approved levels so that cattle can safely become objects once more?

The impact of journalism on public policy is, in this iteration, only as strong as the audience’s own capacity for self-examination or intertextual6 referencing. Krien’s essay identifies the public response to ‘A Bloody Business’ and connects it to the ongoing objectification of animals-as-food as an instance of cognitive dissonance, albeit a socially conventional one. A news report would not have, within its objective scope, the means (or need) to point this out to the reader, but the longer essay enters into a different type of implicit agreement with the reader— and, therefore, makes it a useful conduit for reflective discussions of journalism ethics with students. If there were not socially conventional attitudes to consumption of animals for food and caring for animals as pets (or workers), the social media reaction to Animals Australia’s online activism around the original Four Corners investigation and broadcast would not have triggered a federal government policy adjustment. The online activism was part of a negotiated narrative consistency achieved by the constellation of stories about live animal export, with journalistic involvement as its crucial, central element. In particular, the use of hidden video cameras and secret recordings that gathered evidence of what was happening to Australian animals raised and exported for meat could not, in itself, qualify as rigorous (or legal) investigative reporting technique. However, the role of journalists as verifiers of material, checkers of fact and balancers of interpretation could indeed be reflected back to students as the distinguishing markers of professionalism that can make some ethico-legal contradictions easier to understand. Asia Pacific Media Educator, 24, 2 (2014): 257–268

Tracks to Advocacy 265 In a broader, didactic sense, Krien’s essay also relies upon a process of the media’s public needing to first know what it has a right to know, even if her follow-up research at the same Indonesian abattoir featured on Four Corners was, by the time of her essay’s publication, covering familiar ground. For students, the longer essay fills in descriptive detail and complements the investigation in ‘A Bloody Business’. It is in the follow-up feature form in participant observation mode, but without the covert techniques. The comparison and contrast of the essay with the television documentary-style story makes it possible, therefore, for students to reflect upon the critical importance of the public interest to journalistic identity, as well as to its legitimacy in legal decision making. Evidenced by a consistent narrative of legal precedent, the role of the public interest in the historical patterns of journalism around animal welfare issues is then identifiable in the classroom as the factor that differentiates opinion-driven political impulses from lasting policy changes. These changes might occur because of sustained media attention to animal welfare and rights-based issues, but highlighting the contradictory nature of that attention is more specifically a task for journalism. Krien, for example, writes of the reaction to the secret video from the Indonesian abattoir screened in ‘A Bloody Business’: The condemnation of Indonesia’s slaughtering practices was valid—but how valid? How is it that Australians could not see their own reflections in that footage? Many selfdescribed animal lovers confided to me that they wanted to go over to Indonesia and beat the workers after they saw the footage. Sure, local butchers did report a temporary drop in beef sales in the first weeks after the Four Corners report, but after a month or so, what with the ban in place and all, sales picked up again as we managed to get our ghosts under control. For the most part, Australians empathised with the cows, not the workers—and that is truly an irony.

What Krien recognizes is the conditional nature of public outrage, if not the sometimes fickle interests of the public in unpicking some of the more tangled contradictions around their reaction to the slaughter scenes from Indonesia. In part, Krien is recognizing what the ‘digital natives’, who comprise the majority of most Australian undergraduate professional communication student cohorts, already know: that media coverage of issues-driven stories virtually drives public attention, but not always to the issues themselves and never for very long. For journalism students to freeze-frame a moment when all of these factors did coalesce for animal rights and public interest in Australia, the comparative case studies were useful.

Conclusion In a fundamental way, journalism education aims to support future journalists and media users in the research and production of stories that are accurate, fair and Asia Pacific Media Educator, 24, 2 (2014): 257–268

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newsworthy. The three case study examples were considered in this article as part of its anecdotal reflection on the boundaries between ethics and law, and between objectivity and advocacy. For journalism education in particular, this reflection has added to the fundamental aim of developing skilled news gatherers and producers by informing a discussion, over several years, with students about journalism’s relationship with the public interest. As a legal defence, and an ethically cognizant motivation for decisions about media content and impact, public interest was considered here as part of Australia’s broader social conventions around, and comprehensions of, animal welfare and animal rights. It was suggested that journalism students could observe connections between their own professional decisions and the law’s reasoning around public interest in selected case law, when juxtaposed with relevant stories. One of the benefits of making such an observation was observed as a signposting of ways of approaching the collected stories about this and other public affairs issues. Another subsequent benefit was the tracking of some of the ways in which the historical and ongoing relationship between journalism and advocacy is both contested and negotiated in Australia, and at various moments of public interest. Acknowledgement The author wishes to thank the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Melbourne, for research dissemination funding in support of presentation of an early version of this work at the Journalism and Mass Communications Conference, Phuket, Thailand, on October 28, 2013. Notes 1. Ehrenreich’s book, published in Australia as (2010) Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, London, Granta, contributed an exception, for journalism of the time, to the countercultural subversion of neoliberal thought. 2. See Edwina Luck and Shane Mathews (2010, p. 137), ‘What Advertisers Need to Know About the iYGeneration: An Australian Perspective, Journal of Promotion Management, 16, p.137, for a succinct definition of iY Generation. 3. Lord Justice Leveson heard final evidence in the inquiry on 24 July 2012. See BBC News (2012). 4. Australian Broadcasting Corporation vs Lenah Game Meats Pty Ltd (2001) 208 CLR 199. Retrieved 14 May 2014. 5. Factiva purposive term search on 15 May 2014, for ‘animal cruelty’ stories in date range 2011–2014, returned 119 distinct articles under ‘animal rights’ header, which database treated synonymously. The ABC (17) and Adelaide Advertiser (12) published most of relevant stories in ‘traditional’ media. On live exports, see, for example, Ferguson and Doyle (2011). Brad Thompson (2013) reported similar issues in relation to live exports to Qatar and Israel. On 15 April 2014, The Australian reported how Animals Australia video footage depicted ongoing abuse of Australian cattle exported to Gaza (Cox 2014). 6. ‘Intertextual’ refers to the cultural studies term. See Barker’s (2007, p. 482), definition of intertextuality as: ‘The self conscious citation of one text within another as an expression of enlarged cultural self-consciousness.’


Tracks to Advocacy 267 References Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). (2013, December 13). A protest against live animal export in Fremantle has attracted about 100 people. News Online. Retrieved 21 April 2014, from Factiva database document ABCNEW0020131213e9cd0005t, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-13/export-rally/5155924 Australian Human Rights Commission. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948, Article 12. Retrieved 14 May 2014, from http://www.humanrights.gov.au/universaldeclaration-human-rights-human-rights-your-fingertips-human-rights-your-fingertips Barker, Chris. (2007). Cultural studies: Theory and practice (3rd ed.). London: Sage. BBC News. (2012, July 24). Leveson inquiry: Hearings to conclude after eight months. Retrieved 20 February 2012, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18964165 Burke, Kelly. (2011, May 31). Shocking slaughterhouse abuse sparks investigation. The Sydney Morning Herald (online). Retrieved 20 February 2014, from http://www.smh. com.au/environment/animals/shocking-slaughterhouse-abuse-sparks-investigation20110530-1fd06.html Cao, Deborah. (2010). Animal law in Australia and New Zealand. Pyrmont, NSW: Thomson-Reuters. Cox, Lisa. (2014, April 15). Animal activists claim footage shows abuse of Australian animals in Gaza. The Australian. Retrieved 21 April 2014, from http://www.smh.com. au/federal-politics/political-news/animal-activists-claim-footage-shows-abuse-ofaustralian-animals-in-gaza-20140415-zqv1s.html Dowler, Ken, Fleming, Thomas, & Muzzatti, Stephen L. (2006). Constructing crime: Media, crime, and popular culture. Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice, 48(6), 837–850. Ehrenreich, Barbara. (2009). Bright-sided: How positive thinking is undermining America. New York: Metropolitan Books-Picador. Ferguson, Sarah, & Doyle, Michael. (2011, May 30). A bloody business. Four Corners, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 21 April 2014, from http://www.abc. net.au/4corners/special_eds/20110530/cattle/ Kirby, Michael. (2011). Protecting human rights in Australia without a charter. Commonwealth Law Bulletin, 37(2), 255–280. Krien, Anna. (2012). Us and them: On the importance of Animals. Quarterly Essay 45, Collingwood, Vic: Black Inc. Little, J. (2013). Journalism ethics and law: Stories of media practice. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Littlefield, Melissa. (2011). Historicising CSI and its effect(s): The real and the representational in American scientific detective fiction and print news media, 1902–1935. Crime, Media, Culture, (7), 133–148. Luck, Edwina, & Mathews, Shane. (2010). What Advertisers need to know about the iYGeneration: An Australian perspective. Journal of Promotion Management, (16), 134–147. Pearson, Mark, & Polden, Mark. (2011). The journalist’s guide to media law. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Ratnapala, Suri, & Crowe, Jonathan. (2012), Australian constitutional law: Foundations and theory. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.


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Scharrer, Erica. (2008). Media exposure and sensitivity to violence in news reports: Evidence of desensitisation? Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 85(2), 291–310. Schultz, Julianne. (1998). Reviving the fourth estate: Democracy, accountability and the media. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Serres, Michel. (2009). Ownership and pollution: The ‘natural’ or animal foundation of private property rights. Western Humanities Review, 63(3), 108–117. Spurgeon, Christina, Ferrier, Liz, Gunders, Lisa, & Graham, Phil. (2012). Young citizens, values and new/s media. Continuum, 26(6), 911–922. The Sydney Morning Herald. (2012, October 6). Thousands rally in Sydney against live animal exports. Retrieved 21 October 2014, from http://www.smh.com.au/environment/ animals/thousand-rally-in-sydney-against-live-animal-exports-20121006-275s2.html Thompson, Brad. (2013, December 13). Battle rages over animal cruelty. The West Australian. Retrieved 21 April 2014, from https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/ countryman/a/20294142/battle-rages-over-animal-cruelty/

Janine Little, PhD, is a senior lecturer in journalism at Deakin University, Victoria. Her book Journalism Ethics and Law: Stories of Media Practice (2013) has been published by Oxford University Press; and her latest essay ‘“Jill Meagher CCTV”: Gothic Tendencies in Narratives of Gender Justice’ has been published by Feminist Media Studies, London: Routledge (2015). E-mail: [email protected]
