Letter From Australia: Learning to talk and live as one - K.C.Boey - New Straits Times

This article highlights a number of studies on race and the media that may be worth investigating further if you are interested in this topic. As always, cross cultural training is encouraged - in this case, with people in the media, so that the 'elites' of society don't enforce their own views on the public...
Sue Ellson, Founder, Newcomers Network

http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/nst/Sunday/Columns/20061015074811/Article/index_html

Letter From Australia: Learning to talk and live as one
15 Oct 2006
K.C. Boey

Academics are critical of the shallowness of the media with regards to its treatment of migrants and race relations.

A COUNTRY with a racist history, trying not to have a racist future, is how sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz describes the country of his parents’ adoption.

Against this backdrop, institutions are put in place to curb discrimination. Laws abound at state and national levels. Statutory bodies safeguard opportunity for all — against all manner of discrimination.

By most measures, Australia has been exemplary in facilitating one of the most successful migration processes in modern history. Yet race so often gets drawn in on every form of social conflict.

Anger over the violence on the surf beach in Cronulla, outside Sydney, last December simmers 10 months on.

Over the week, a proposal to have a "MEA" (Middle Eastern appearance) youth march on Anzac Day carrying the Australian flag met with such outrage, it was withdrawn the following day.

The scars are deep from Cronulla. Whether the ugliness is as cut and dry as raw racism, Jakubowicz is not so sure.

The professor of sociology at the University of Technology, Sydney, suggests the clash of white Anglo and Middle Eastern youth may have as much to do with "male tribalisms".

Yet race, in an atmosphere of inter-group tensions and stereotyping, adds a volatile dimension to the competition for public space. Cronulla has come to be analysed as a case study on race relations, and what government and community organisations can learn from it.

Central to the analysis has been the media and its performance in a multicultural setting.

Academics are critical of the shallowness of the media.

"The role of the media in communicating and reinforcing ideas about folk devils, through the creation of moral panics, is well documented," Jakubowicz said at a Sydney conference on ‘Everyday Multiculturalism’, examining Cronulla.

"Amplification of apprehension on all sides, polarisation of views, and mobilisation of action required active media involvement."

At a community forum in Melbourne, journalism educator Lynette Sheridan-Burns wondered if she should reverse the title of her presentation on ‘The Mob, the Media & Multiculturalism’.

A case might be made to put the media before the mob in Cronulla, the way sections of the fourth estate became makers of the news, she suggested.

In the broader scheme, participants at an academic workshop in Melbourne explored the possibilities of academics and the media collaborating to enhance understanding in a multicultural Australia. The workshop sought to bring together concepts of Islamic culture(s), nation-building and the media.

Contrasting understanding of the role of the media is well documented in a book from a 1996 conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia,‘Communicating with/in Asia’. Papers from that conference have been compiled into a book, Foreign devils and other journalists.

The conclusion is of a gulf in understanding between media practice in Western perspectives, and the "development journalism" in developing countries.

As the editors of Foreign devils note, the traditionally accepted role of the Western media is that they act as a watchdog over public affairs — to scrutinise governments and official institutions, and to offer a voice to the public.

A more critical view is that of media in a free market that essentially reflects the views of controlling elites.

The development view is that of the media having a role in the enhancement of the lives of people.

Stances in the first two are adversarial, and the third consensual. Can the opposing stances find accommodation in a changing Australia? Is there a need for adjustments to be made?

A report being finalised for a ’Living in Harmony’ project funded by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs suggests a media needing encouragement in the reporting of multicultural affairs, and in the training of journalism students.

A more controversial study has been Race for the headlines: Racism and media discourse, which the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Board undertook in 2003, in the wake of Sept 11 (2001).

Respected journalist Peter Manning, now professor of media studies at the University of Technology in Sydney, is critical of how the media demonises Arabs and Muslims in his book Us And Them, released last month.

The newsworthiness of ethnic minorities was no different from how other news events were evaluated, journalism lecturer Eric Loo tells the New Sunday Times of his PhD study in the mid-1990s.

"Ethnic minorities have to compete with other news events for equal space in the daily news operations. The consciousness that journalists have a moral obligation to help improve race relations at the community level, or ‘nation building’ is somewhat ambiguous, if not completely dismissed.

"Nation building is a term alien to Australian journalists, unlike ... in Malaysia," says Loo, co-editor of Foreign devils, now senior lecturer in the School of Journalism and Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. Loo has worked as a journalist in Malaysia.

Media coverage of cultural diversity has improved in the 20 years Loo has been in Australia. But he would like his students more sensitised to the cross-cultural dimensions of issues, to give them the confidence and ability to live and work with people of other countries and other cultures.