Gail Phillips, Murdoch University;
Suellen Tapsall, Murdoch University
Method and Design
The original model analysed content according to a number of quantitative
and qualitative variables. The purpose of the present study was to capture
not just news content, but specifically news content with potential multicultural
impact. This would include not just stories relating to culturally and
linguistically diverse communities of Australia, but also stories that
might be likely to influence public perceptions of those communities,
and community harmony in general. Adapted for the purposes of the harmony
project the database captured:
quantitative data:
- total bulletin times, and duration and percentages of stories from
different categories (these would be compared with the 2001 study where
possibly significant changes are noted)
- duration and percentages of stories with a potential multicultural
impact (compared with the 2001 study where possibly significant changes
are noted)
qualitative data:
- What sort of stories featured a multicultural angle, diversity of
Australian peoples and/or were likely to impact on community harmony?
(e.g. emergencies & disasters; crime; courts & justice; politics;
health & medicine, etc.)
- What types of issues were these stories associated with? (e.g ‘blood
& guts’, power & policy, money & work, social issue,
etc.)
- How were people of culturally diverse backgrounds portrayed?
- What types of talent were used?
- What tone was adopted in the presentation?
- How did pictures and graphics impact on the overall impact of the
story?
The Survey Period
The period surveyed was two weeks (14 sequential days) from November
7-20 2005. The selection of the time period was arbitrary, but in fact
coincided with the introduction of the new counter-terrorism laws by the
Howard government and the counter-terrorism raids in Sydney and Melbourne.
While this could potentially have skewed the results in terms of amount
of stories which might impact on community harmony, it also provided the
perfect context in which to test reporting of stories reflecting Australia’s
diverse cultural mix. Subsequent events have shown that the news skew
during this fortnight has in fact become an ongoing feature of the nightly
television news. Technical problems led to some gaps in recording –
for example it was not possible to retrieve the bulletins for Sydney for
7 and 8 November. In the discussion below comparisons between stations
are drawn from days when recordings exist for all.
The Networks
The survey looked at the flagship prime-time nightly news bulletin of
the 3 commercial networks (Seven, Nine and Ten) and the two public broadcasting
services (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting
Service).
The Locations
The aim was to have a sample that covered large metropolitan, small metropolitan
and regional Australia. Sydney was selected as an Eastern States metropolitan
centre; Perth was selected because it was a small metropolitan centre
and also because the data from the 2001 Perth survey would provide a useful
baseline. The Victorian regional town of Shepparton was selected as the
third sample to provide an insight into regional television news and also
to test whether a diverse population impacted in any way on story selection
and treatment (According to the 2001 census 10.8% of its population was
born overseas, and in 2005 it welcomed ten African refugee families as
the inaugural site for the Federal Government’s Regional Humanitarian
Settlement Pilot project).
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