I’ll be honest; I don’t watch much Australian free-to-air television. With the easy accessibility of advert-free British and American programs online and the presence of services such as Netflix, I rarely find myself waiting for a program I want to watch on television, or planning my evenings around the scheduled hours of my favourite programs. After all, why wait until 10.30pm to watch Mystery Diners when I can stream it on the Food Network whenever I want? The only time I watch live television is when it is playing in the background of family dinners each night. Sitting with my mother, father and two brothers has given me a unique understanding of how television is constructed to appeal to its target audience. For example, the flashy attention-grabbing headlines of A Current Affair always catch my mother’s attention, while my younger brother can’t stand the show as he knows that what it reports is not actually news and that the headlines are deliberately misleading. My mother is always gaping in awe when watching reality programs such as Married At First Sight, The Bachelor and My Kitchen Rules, while I sit there enjoying her reactions while fully aware that although it is billed as “reality”, there are producers manipulating the talent to get them to say interesting things, and editors to take that footage out of context and hyper-dramatise it. A Current Affair and Today Tonight are perhaps the biggest culprits of manipulating editing techniques to visually paint their story. I often remember a segment of The Chaser’s War on Everything that comedically demonstrated how editing can turn footage of anyone, including the Prime Minister of Australia, into a villain. That’s all my media musings for now,
xoxo Gossip Girl