Laying your cards on the table: representations of gambling in the media

The media saturates our 21st-century societies, helping to form our identities and our understanding of the world. The media sets the agenda for the way we live our lives; it echoes and shapes our culture, and reflects carefully selected images of consumers back at us. Gambling is an activity that appears across a wide variety of media sources. This article introduces a research project that investigates how gambling is portrayed in the Australian media. Taking a survey approach (a single day in a regional Australian town), the project describes the ways in which multiple forms of media present gambling in polarised and often contradictory perspectives. By exploring these various representations of gambling and the roles they play in our lives, the study provides material that can provide the understanding of how the general population comes to view gambling behaviour.