Media Analysis

During the four years that the JMA/RD project has been running a series of analyses have been done across a range of media to examine how Australia’s ethnic minorities are represented in print, radio and television news services.

Print News

The Print News studies look at a series of key stories involving multicultural communities in contentious situations in order to track how they were handled in the print media. This project was overseen by the University of South Australia’s Kathryn Bowd, Kerry Green and Ian Richards, with research assistance from Danni Nicholas-Sexton, Dr Simone Bignall and Fayrouz Ajaka.

• Reporting on Immigrant Communities: the representation of  the Sudanese community in the local print media in two regional centres (Toowoomba, Queensland and Newcastle, NSW)
   
• Reporting Terrorism: how four major newspapers ( The Australian, The Canberra Times, and Melbourne’s Herald Sun and The Age) covered the counter-terror raids and their aftermath in November 2005
   
• The Development of a Story: The Cronulla Riots.  This study tracks how the story of the community violence on Sydney’s beaches in December 2005 was reported in three newspapers: The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.
   
• The Cronulla Riots: Key Themes.  This study goes beyond the way in which the story of the Cronulla riots developed chronologically to analyse the key themes that emerged in terms of how the story was framed.
   
• International Students in Australia.  This case study looked at all stories featuring international students in The Australian newspaper over the course of a year (November 1, 2004 – October 31, 2005) to see what themes emerged.
   
• The 2005 terrorism raids in Australia’s Arabic‐language press. This case study reports the results of content analysis of reportage of the ASIO raids, and of the period preceding them when proposed anti‐terrorism laws were the subject of much public debate, in Australia’s three main Arabic newspapers.
   
• Mediating the ‘uneasy conversation’: Reporting and engaging with Indigenous and multicultural issues in Australia. This research case study aims to explore, in some detail, one particularly problematic aspect for journalists reporting diversity in an Australian context – the reporting and representation of both Indigenous and minority ethnic communities.