Is racism still alive and well in the UK and Australian media?

“Racism on the rise in Australia”, a Sydney Morning Herald article cites the data on higher year-on-year percentage of Australians being discriminated (19%). Meanwhile, the Independent (2014) quotes a poll findings that four out of five people in the UK think the media coverage of ethnic minorities is racist. The British and the Australian press are seen to fall under the Liberal model as classified by Hallin and Mancini (2004), with strong professionalisation and low instrumentalisation. Nonetheless, when it comes to covering issues related to race and ethnic minorities, the media seems to fail short of its social responsibility, one of the famous four normative theories of the press (Siebert, Peterson, Schramm, 1956). 

In this analysis, I will discuss the evidence of racism in the two countries’ journalistic practices with regard to framing and discourse. I will also incorporate two variables of Hallin and Mancini’s media system – professionalism and political parallelism in understanding the dynamics behind such racist coverage.

Firstly, although there have been positive changes in news reporting, e.g. fewer explicit racist messages, a new form of racism seems to have emerged (Barker, 1981) in which there is denial of such attitude.  News, through its discourse, has become the main “information centre” about ethnic minorities, for reasons such as most white people have few daily experiences with minorities and negative opinions about them are in the interest of most whites (van Dijk, 2000).

In the UK, news about ethnic minorities seem to revolve around certain topics and issues, as pointed out by Law (2002) and van Dijk (2000): crime, work, asylum seekers, immigration, political response, racial attitudes, threats etc. However, the frame in which ethnic minorities are depicted is usually the “problem frame”. These are “episodic frames” which focus on “describing single events and occurrences, which tend to involve the use of negative stereotypes” (Papacharissi & Oliveira, 2008).

Through such framing, the media has given an unfair portrayal of a group of people who might have a genuine purpose of escaping threat by making them seen as the threat (Bailey, Harindranath, 2005). Nonetheless, in three-quarters of news, the British media puts on a great “anti-racism show” (Law, 2002). A prominent example pointed out by Law (2002) is the case of Stephen Lawrence in 1997, when the Daily Mail actively contributed to raising the issue of racial injustice, the front page: “White justice failed my son”.

Concurring with other scholars, Law (2002) painted a trend in anti-racist rhetoric, where headlines were about “exposing the stupidity of racism” rather than marginalising minority groups. As such, the media shook hands with politicians, referring to their racist comments as “gaffes” instead of adopting a critical function, as described in the representative liberal or social responsibility theories (Benson, 2008).

This leads us to the spread of “us-them” binaries. As Hall (1990) and Van Dijk (2000) argued, racism has become normalised, through linguistic use of disclaimers: positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. Although the media may say they are actually performing their “social responsibility” by preserving the “Britishness”, they cannot explain the decline in the quantity of race-related items since the mid-1980s (Law, 2002).

Zooming into specific discourse, Gabrielatos and Baker (2008) analysed newspaper coverage of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants (RASIM) over a period of 9 years. They noted the majority of the UK press did not attempt to follow the social responsibility normative theory, which, as noted by Benson (2008), means upholding objectivity, diverse viewpoints and open debate. Instead, British newspapers, especially tabloids and right-wing, made known their stance using both explicit and subtle ways.

Through negative keywords and even non-sensical terms (e.g. illegal refugees), the UK press is seen to have political parallelism regarding race coverage, although broadsheets tend to adopt thematic frames and more balanced argumentation (Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008).

In Australia, the situation is not better. The Anti-Discrimination Board (ADB) in 2004 identified seeking newsworthiness as a journalistic practice that made conflict reporting a prime choice. In this country, race is used by the media as “the reference point, the cause or the catalyst for change or problems”.

The ADB pointed out the advent of “common sense racism”, somewhat as the direct result of applying episodic frames over a period of time. This is how targeting and blaming marginalised groups become normalised through the media discourse and reasoning on a daily basis. For Australia, asylum seekers have always been the most prominent example of racialised coverage. Politicians, and in turn, the media, focused on the means of arrival (boat) rather than the reasons for seeking asylum. “We only want those prepared to be like us”, a politician wrote in an opinion piece to the Australian in 2001.

Clearly, the elites have adopted the language of “othering” and went on further to restrict access by the media to stories regarding asylum seekers. The ADB (2004) pointed out criticism of the media’s failure to act as a government watchdog. The “children overboard” incident (2001) serves as a glaring example of how the media was too quick to adopt government lines. Nonetheless, the media can also find themselves attacked by the government if interrogation into asylum seeker polices is made. Apart from cases back in 2004 cited by ADB, the latest incident involves the Australian government’s accusation of the ABC on bias grounds (2014).

In a study on the marginalisation of Vietnamese immigrants into Australia by the media, Jakubowicz et al. (1994) used the “political economy” to illustrate the “systematic exclusion” of voices other than those of media owners/controllers, unless they are “bizarre” or “sensational”. As such, the degree of autonomy, a dimension or professionalisation (Hallin and Mancini, 2004) is deemed to be low. Interestingly, findings of the Worlds of Journalism Study (2011) indicate very high perceived autonomy of journalists in Australia. The study also indicates low perceived influence of the government (political) and advertisers (economy) on journalistic practices. Perhaps there is still gap between the ideals and actual practice.

Another aspect of racialised coverage is that of Indigenous Australians. McCallum, K. and Blood, R. W. (2007) noted the media represented this social group “in routine and predictable ways that reinforce their image as a threat to the existing order and a source of conflict”. This is consistent with Iyengar (1991)’s explanation of episodic framing, which attributes failures to individual rather than societal responsibilities.

In conclusion, the UK and Australian media share many similarities in their coverage of ethnic minorities, with regard to episodic framing and other discursive elements. Racialised coverage seems to be less severe in the British press thanks to the “anti-racism show”. However, this still does not indicate high professionalisation in all dimensions, as the UK media may simply be following the government’s change in tone towards racism.

Some of the evidence discussed dates back to more than a decade ago, yet the current situation only indicates slow improvement. In Australia, proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act are argued to permeate the thinking “it’s OK to be racist” (Marriner, 2014). In the UK, although the public, including white people, have started to recognise the racist nature of media coverage, the percentage of racism-fuelled reporting is overwhelmingly high (Burrell, 2014).

References
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