Speaking up and talking back: News media interventions in Sydney's 'othered'communities (2003) (original) (raw)

Transnational news and multicultural Australia project: cultural diversity and news in Australia

2017

The impact of media and public discourse, including on new media platforms, is one of the priority themes of the Victorian Social Cohesion and Community Resilience Ministerial Taskforce. The proposed project aligned with the Taskforce’s research priority on “community polarisation and marginalisation”, wherein the project examined the media’s role(both traditional news media and non-traditional/new media such as social mediaplatforms/apps) in disseminating news and information about transnational events and multicultural issues in Victoria. For example, following the November 2015 Paris attacks, the media's coverage of the news event and the Australian community's reaction to the event –irrespective of its positive or negative nature – caused unease among Australian migrants, particularly those following the Muslim faith, as they felt they were put under the spotlight by the media. The primary aim of this project was to investigate the nature, and consumption, of news, infor...

Journal of Intercultural Studies A Multicultural Nation and its (Muslim) Other? Political Leadership and Media Reporting in the Wake of the 'Sydney Siege'

This article explores public reactions to an event dubbed the 'Sydney siege', through an analysis of its media coverage. The event, where a Muslim man held 18 hostages in a Sydney café, was closely followed during its 22 hour duration and triggered an avalanche of public commentary. We analyse media articles, political leaders' media statements and transcripts of press conferences published within the week of the siege. Using NVivo software, we code the key themes arising from the data and employ in-depth textual and discourse analyses of the most prominent themes: multiculturalism, Islam/Muslims and 'community/solidarity'. Using the theoretical framework of the nation as an imagined community which needs its 'Others', we find that the 'Sydney siege' lead to emphasising hegemonic ideas of the Australian national identity and values that mark the boundaries of nationhood, community belonging and solidarity. Such ideas placed Muslims precariously at the national margin, applying a simplistic binary of the 'good ones' worthy of inclusion into the 'good nation' and the 'bad ones' to be excluded. We conclude that the public discourse following the Sydney siege affirmed Australian multiculturalism in a broad sense but also strongly implied the Otherness of Muslims.

The Construction of Muslims as “Other” in Mainstream Australia’s Print Media: An Analysis of Discourse

The Cronulla riots signalled the existence of a banal, everyday form of racism operating in Australia that works to construct Muslims as 'other' (Poynting, 2006). In this paper, racism is explored as ideology, (re) produced through, and reflected in social practices and processes, such as language and communication. Media representations are considered, a site where dominant social narratives manifest and where racism happens.

Media Representations of Racism and Spatial Mobility: Young Muslim (Un)belonging in a Post-Cronulla Riot Sutherland

Journal of Intercultural Studies

Young Australian Muslims living in Sydney have been influenced by the Cronulla riot. Online surveys (n: 76) and interviews (n: 10) reveal the impact on their engagement with the Sutherland region around Cronulla, detectable a decade after this event. The exclusionary intent of the rioters and their sympathisers was a racist form of spatial management that had both specific and general aims. The Australian news media contribute to the ethnic purification that was originally intended by the Cronulla riots. This reduces mobility among an 'ethnic other' in accessing spaces that have been portrayed as 'racist'or, in the case of young Muslims, 'Islamophobic'. Findings demonstrate the ongoing consequences of a wide-scale racist attack, like the Cronulla riot, on urban citizenship. Representations of the Cronulla riot are a repertoire of learning for young Sydney Muslims that rehearse what has been conceptualised as pedagogies of (un)belonging by Noble and Poynting [(2010). White Lines: The Intercultural Politics of Everyday Movement in Social Spaces. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 31, 489-505]. We have extended the application of this concept to a specific space and point to the means by which constructions of unbelonging are reinforced and made material. Processes of repetition and accumulations identified by Butler and Essed highlight how this enduring pedagogy of spatial unbelonging is maintained by media representations of places as Islamophobic.

Media coverage of refugees and asylum seekers in regional Australia: a critical discourse analysis

Despite significant research into media and political coverage of refugees and asylum seekers, and ongoing Commonwealth policies to resettle refugees to regional areas, analysis of the regional press is lacking. We reviewed articles from four regional newspapers using quantitative content analysis and qualitative content analysis to examine some initial trends in how regional newspapers represent refugees and asylum seekers. Despite the dominant negative framing of refugee issues at the national level, the regional media used positive, humanising frames and a broader range of sources in articles on local topics such as refugees' personal stories. This reflects the community-building role of local journalism and challenges the familiar boundaries of the debate. However, there was a compelling distinction between articles on local and national topics, with the negative national discourse and dominance of government sources reflected in articles on national topics such as legislation and events.

Globalization and the public sphere: the space of community media in Sydney (2007)

Couldry, N. & Dreher, T. 2007, 'Globalization and the public sphere: the space of community media in Sydney', Global Media and Communication, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 79-100. - - - Recent accounts of Habermas's conception of the public sphere concern the interlocking of multiple networks and spaces. In a global context new interfaces between existing (counter-) public spheres can lead to multiple counter-publics. This article explores this phenomenon through the examination of the communicative spaces that offer alternatives to Australia's mainstream public sphere from three different strands of Sydney's community media: diasporic media (Assyrian Radio SBS), Indigenous media (Koori Radio) and discursive sites that operate in between ethnic and mainstream media (Forum for Australia's Islamic Relations).

Dismantling the Deadlock: Australian Muslim Women’s Fightback against the Rise of Right-Wing Media

Social Sciences

In Australia, as in other multicultural countries, the global Islamophobic discourse linking Muslims to terrorists to refugees results in the belief of an “enemy within”, which fractures the public sphere. Muslim minorities learn to distrust mainstream media as the global discourse manifests in localised right-wing discussion. This fracturing was further compounded in 2020 with increased media concentration and polarisation. In response, 12 young Australian Muslim women opened themselves up to four journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). They engaged in critical journalism research called Frame Reflection Interviews (FRIs). The process gave journalists important knowledge around the power dynamics of Islamophobia and empowered participants to help shape new media discourses tackling Islamophobia. This paper proposes that the FRIs are one method to rebuild trust in journalism while redistributing risk towards the journalists. These steps are necessary t...

“Representations of the Young Muslim Man in Australian Public Discourse” Transforming Cultures e-journal, Vol. 2(1)

Transforming Cultures eJournal, 2007

Through an analysis of two highly mediatised recent events in Australia this article seeks to interrogate the intersections of gender, ethnicity and culture in the construction of Australian national identity. A series of gang rapes in the early 2000s attracted widespread public outrage and the harshest ever condemnation of acts of sexual violence in Australian history. Linked to these events, in December 2005 a series of riots at the Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla led to further questioning of ethnic relations and the state of Australian multiculturalism within media and political discourses. While many of the responses to the gang rapes and the Cronulla riots have drawn on the language of 'women's rights', a closer look at the discourses suggests a different story. Responses to the gang rapes have often characterised the attacks as being against the Australian community, rather than against individual women. It is also interesting to contrast the outrage surrounding the gang rapes with the general silence regarding the increased racist violence committed against Muslim women in recent times. Furthermore, the linking of the gang rapes with a particular religious/ethnic community can be contrasted with the discourses on the alleged gang rapes involving Australian sporting teams, such as the Bulldogs and more recently the Wests Tigers. Finally the manner in which the events of Cronulla have been recast and linked back to the 'threat' posed by young Muslim/Lebanese/Middle Eastern men to Australian women suggests that ethnicity and gender both play an important and mutually reinforcing role in the construction of Australian national identity.

Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Australian Media, 2001–2005

Muslim Australians believe that prevailing media attitudes towards them and their religion, Islam, disadvantages them both economically and socially. The Western media is alleged to have aggravated anti-Muslim sentiment since the 1990–1991 Gulf Crises, and after September 11, 2001 and the Bali tragedy in 2002, effectively divided the world into the Muslim terrorists (“evil”) and the civilised Christians (“good”). Within the framework of national interest and security, this paper examines whether Muslims' allegation of media bias is valid. If so, then, it will address the question, why is the media demonising this group of people, and who is to blame for this phenomenon—the media, its audience or the militant Islamic groups? This paper is based on primary and secondary sources including oral testimonies.