Lecture #6-Commercial Media

We covered a huge amount of content in this lecture, but that makes a lot of sense because there are a lot of forms of commercial media.
We  covered everything from why commercial media exists to what its future is.
We were given a run down of all the commercial media corporations in Australia, and the public ones. I have to say, the public media is so much more intelligent!
I feel like I could rant for ages on how different the styles of TV are between public and commercial media. Public media so much more intelligent, particularly in television. It respects the viewer, and the shows are interesting and well directed and produced and yet, I'm pretty sure, public media doesn't get as many viewers as commercial media. Is this because people are less intelligent than I thought? I don't know. I shall continue to watch ABC1 and SBS for as long as I can, though.
Something commercial media does do more intelligently is newspapers. Besides the fact that there aren't any national or even state funded newspapers, broadsheets like The Australian and The Age are pretty terrific. So, I think they're doing some service to the community. But still, the broadsheets are becoming less popular every year, they do worse than the tabloids and it just reinforces the idea that people are less intelligent than I thought.

The fact that commercial media is really all about the advertisers came as no real surprise, but it ties in really nicely to the question of its future. The less that people use a certain type of media, the less interested advertisers will be in supporting that media. With fewer advertisers, less money will come in, jobs will be cut, companies will go out of business, quality will suffer and less people will use that media. It's a vicious cycle, and could potentially lead to the loss of that media almost all together.

The Hutchins Commission was my favourite part of the lecture. They are a great thing to come back to when questioning the media, its truthfulness, its agenda and its purpose in society.
The two big ones are, I think, the first, fourth and fifth statements:

A truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day's events in a context that gives them meaning;

The presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society;

Full access to the day's intelligence.

The question is, are they doing that? Can we really call commercial media "truthful, comprehensive and intelligent"?
Dare we acknowledge that the goals and values of today's society are presented by commercial media? If what commercial media sells us are our goals and values, we're a pretty shallow bunch.