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Frontline


Frontline helps the audience challenge the representation of truth by the media with its clever reconstruction of a current affairs program. In "Add sex and stir" the truth of the story bends towards what rates well. A story about a woman dropped from her netball team because of poor form' is warped by Brooke as she reconstructs the story into a 'sex scandal' knowing the addition of sex will make it rate well. She takes up the story on the basis of one woman's allegations. This follows Marty's advice who claims that his grandmother once said: 'take any story and add sex and stir'. This is a perfect example of how truth has been sacrificed for the sake of ratings.
             It demonstrates how the medium of TV allows certain constructions of the truth to be manufactured through editing and selective representation. These tactics are common in journalism as represented by the filming of "noddies" and in this situation Brooke changes an innocuous question from "How many girls on the team had it in for you?" to a damaging lie "So how many of the team are gay?" This is followed by a seedy re-enactment of towels being suggestively dropped by actresses as the story goes on air. This forces us to acknowledge that the story we were presented with is falsified and prompts us to consider other stories we have seen may have been falsified in this manner. Furthermore, Brian is perfectly comfortable with releasing of a "lesos" story but he immediately rejects the possibility of running a story on a gay cricketer. This episode highlights the compromise of truth and the gender bias and the prejudice when recreating the truth.
             The concept of gender bias is also apparent in "we ain't got dames". Due to a survey, Frontline was apparently unappealing to female audiences. To regain that part of the audience, the team targets the specific demographics, that is the female population. This episode raises concerns about the nature of ratings and the cynical attempts to capture more of the ratings market.


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