Gail Phillips, Murdoch University;
Suellen Tapsall, Murdoch University
Conclusion
Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral
panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become
defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is
presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media;
the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and
other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their
diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or...resorted to;
the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes
more visible. ...Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except
in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious
and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those
in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives
itself. (Cohen 1987: 9)
Australia is not alone in the demonstrating an increased focus on terrorism
in its television news. The impact of the war on terror has skewed news
agendas around the globe (as an example the Centre for Media and Public
Affairs’ Media Monitor shows how the trend has been manifested in
the US). However the way the stories are told means we are seeing multicultural
communities through a particular lens – a textbook example of what
van Dijk calls the ‘new racism’ (2000:39) communicated through
the subtle use of language and signs. As Iyengar et al note, ‘Television
news may be objective, but it is far from neutral. The production of news
takes place within boundaries established by official sources and dominant
values’ (1987:133) and as this survey demonstrates the dominant
values are resulting in an increased alienation of those perceived to
be either un-Australian or less Australian than the rest of us.
While this survey has shown that non-Anglo Australians are almost inevitably
represented as ‘bad’, ‘sad’, or ‘other’,
in the current political climate the focus of the fear has overwhelmingly
been Muslim terrorism which has in turn led to a suspicion of all things
Muslim. The very nature of television news has helped to entrench the
idea of alienation from the purported ‘mainstream’ with its
cameras continually juxtaposing images of authority and rectitude against
images representing ‘otherness’ in terms of dress, environment
and behaviour. As Akbarzadeh & Smith note in their analysis of Melbourne’s
print media, journalists cannot be blamed for negative news (2005:14),
and much of the negative taint is caused by the nature of the stories
themselves in this particularly violent age. However the framing of television
news stories in ways that foreground anger and conflict, drama and threat
(what Green has termed the ‘emotion bite’ rather than the
‘sound bite’ 2002:8) has served to heighten the negative associations
and increase the fearfulness of the viewing public. This domestic climate
of fear and distrust is further reinforced by the international acts of
violence and terror that appear on our screens each night (Akbarzadeh
& Smith:12). While for the Christian-Anglo communities in Australia
the fear is directed at the ‘enemy within’, for the non-Anglo
communities in general and the Muslim communities in particular the fear
is focused on the broader community itself with the ever-present threat
of a backlash that will make them targets in their turn.
It is fair to argue that Stanley Cohen’s description of a ‘moral
panic’ quoted above exactly fits the state of the world and the
nation in the post 9/11 years (see also Killingbeck 2001 on how the television
news media can contribute to the creation of a moral panic). The spectre
of terrorism looms over our lives and Australia’s active participation
in the War on Terror has made us particularly fearful of the prospect
of a terror attack on our soil. But it is fair to ask as Suzanne Davies
does
When political leaders of Western nations call upon “us”
to join in the “war against terrorism”, whom do they speak
for and to? When they implore us to not merely consent to but embrace
ever more intrusive and aggressive policies and tactics within their
own constituencies and beyond, do they reflect a common will or their
own selective imaginings of who “we” are?’ p. 44
The fight against an unseen and unpredictable enemy has brought to the
surface the innate distrust that has characterized Australian’s
view of foreigners since the days of the White Australia policy (see Smith
and Phillips 2001) and this distrust permeates our television news.
The data shows some variation in the way different services treat their
news. Channel Seven tends towards the most dramatic representation in
presentation, tone and language. The public broadcasters SBS and ABC are
the most restrained, tending to play down the drama and adopting a more
emotionally neutral style. However it is the Shepparton regional news
service via WIN News which most focuses on the human interest personalised
stories that allow us to see the Muslim community as normal participants
in the community’s daily life. Given Galtung and Ruge’s dictum
that ‘the less personal the news, the more negative it will be’(1965:83)
perhaps the Shepparton example shows us the way ahead. If the television
news services can use their storytelling powers to tell more of the whole
story they will be doing their bit to ensure the portrait of the nation
that we see on our screens each night is a more accurate representation
of the real Australia. As Cottle (2000:2) notes, the media’s ‘crucial
role in the public representation of unequal social relations’ has
a positive as well as a negative side. While the media can on the one
hand divide us into ‘"us" and "them", "insider"
and "outsider", "colonizer" and "colonized",
"citizen" and "foreigner", "normal" and
"deviant", "friend" and "foe", "the
west" and "the rest"’ they can, on the other, ‘serve
to affirm social and cultural diversity and, moreover, provide crucial
spaces in and through which imposed identities or the interests of others
can be resisted, challenged and changed.'
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