ISSN: 1329-878X

The new 'others': Media and Society post-September 11 No 109, November 2003 Order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

Lelia Green: The new 'others': Media and society post-September 11

This issue of Media International Australia incorporating Culture & Policy is The New Others: media and society post-September 11, a date that now clearly has has enormous significance in all fields of social inquiry. In the Australian context it was part of an extraordinary sequence of events relating acts of terror to the creation of widespread fear of the new 'others', people of Muslim and Middle Eastern background. Media and Cultural Studies scholars explore some of the issues that confront us in this new political landscape.

John Frow: The uses of terror and the limits of cultural studies

The plot of the event of September 11 - the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by terrorists - might have been written by Hollywood, or by Baudrillard. So fantasmatic, so familiar was the scenario that it fitted seamlessly into the manichaean agenda of the Pentagon hawks planning the next American war, and the next. Indeed, a perfectly plausible paranoid response reads this plot as a plot on the part of those who have most thoroughly benefited from it. How do we take fantasms seriously when they come true?

Tim Groves and William D. Routt: The terrorist and the collaborator

In a culture saturated with media images of terrorism, it is all too easy to conflate identities with representation. This article explores some of the sense made by terrorist figures such as master criminals, serial killers, bushrangers and the shuhada. It suggests the complexity of such cultural tropes by indicating some of the ways in which they are deployed and thought within the specific experiences of the authors. The piece takes the form of a free-flowing dialogue that disrupts the identities of the speakers.There is a sense in which terror is evoked directly in images: skyscrapers falling, the rubble of what was once a nightclub, explosions, bodies, the faces of grief - or, if these are not simple images of terror, they only require simple stories to become them. This piece takes the form of a free-flowing 'dialogue' in which the speakers - the terrorist and the collaborator - are not idenified.

Andrew Padgett and Beatrice Allen: Fear's slave: The mass media and Islam after September 11

This paper will investigate the purpose of society's construction of 'others' through the gaze of the mass media. During times of crisis, the paper will argue, Western mass media are faced with an irreconcilable paradox: the simultaneous demand for, and denial of, a fear-inspiring other (the Soviet Union, Al Qaeda, etc.) This paradigm of otherness was overcome in the period post-Cold War and pre-9/11 as the US media was able to demonise 'others' at home - the war on drugs, for example. The question this paper will address, then, is: what are the motives driving the US mass media towards an other constructed along lines similar to the Soviet-era other? Who is to 'blame' for this phenomenon - the media, or the society in which these media operate?

Scott Poynting and Greg Noble: 'Dog-whistle journalism and Muslim Australians since 2001'

'Dog-whistle politics' was much discussed around the 2001 federal election campaign in which the Howard government used the 'Tampa crisis' and September 11 to appeal successfully to popular xenophobia and insecurities. The notion involves sending a sharp message which, like a dog whistle inaudible to humans, calls clearly to those intended, and goes unheard by others. This article argues that this sort of ideological manoeuvre has been abetted by an analogous process in the tabloid press, in which ostensibly liberal, reasonable stories speak at the 'inaudible' level to those whose insecurity and ignorance leaves them susceptible to populist claims that their relaxed and comfortable past has been stolen away by cosmopolitan, 'politically correct' elites and the 'multicultural industry'. Three examples are analysed: the stories of the women's gym and the halal hamburgers in Western Sydney, and that of the Muslim man threatened with the sack from his Sydney North Shore professional job for praying in his lunch hour. Each was originally run as a 'good news story' or as sympathetic to Muslim protagonists, but provoked a backlash which generated extended 'news' and comment - much of it racist - and irresponsibly exacerbating community tensions.

Peter Manning: Arabic and Muslim people in Sydney's daily newspapers, before and after September 11

This paper examines two years of articles/texts located around the concepts of 'Arab' and 'Muslim' within Sydney's two major daily newspapers. It finds peak issues which concentrate reporting of these concepts and it focuses on language used by journalists and the meanings they carry within the texts chosen around those peak issues. It argues that a consistency of view can be found in three peak issues - the Palestine/Israel conflict, Lebanese rape trials and the arrival of asylum seekers - and that this view is an antipodean development of a Western way of seeing the Orient defined by Edward Said as 'orientalism'.

Natascha Klocker and Kevin M. Dunn: Who's driving the asylum debate?

Newspaper and government representations of asylum seekers The welfare and future of asylum seekers in Australia has been a very contentious contemporary issue. Findings based on content analysis of media releases in 2001 and 2002 reveal the unrelentingly negative way in which the federal government portrayed asylum seekers. While the government's negative tenor was constant during the study period, the specific terms of reference altered, from 'threat' through 'other', to 'illegality' and to 'burden'. The negative construction of asylum seekers was clearly mutable. Analysis of newspaper reporting during the same period indicates that the media largely adopted the negativity and specific references of the government. The media dependence upon government statements and spokespersons in part explains this relation. The findings generally support the 'propaganda model' that holds a pessimistic view of the news media's critical abilities. However, the media departed somewhat slightly from the government's unchanging stance following some key events and revelations. Clearly, there is scope for disrupting the flow of negative constructions from government to media, and ultimately to audiences.

Kate Slattery: Drowning not waving: The 'children overboard' event and Australia's fear of the 'other'

The last few years have been an awakening time for the people, communities and governments of the global village. Escalating problems in the Middle East, global economic uncertainty and an increase in asylum seekers, refugees and migration worldwide have reignited tensions involving boundaries and borders, both geographical and cognitive. One event which highlighted these tensions in Australia, and which was given much media coverage, was the 'children overboard' event in October 2001. Utilising a selection of print news coverage of the event, this paper explores how the 'children overboard' event demarcated national identities and spaces through the construction and representation of 'good' Australian citizens and 'bad' asylum seeker 'others'. Specifically referring to 'children overboard' as an 'event', I seek to highlight the constructed and representational nature of 'children overboard' as a media story and political tool, one which promoted a continuing threat of 'others' to the nation in order to gain support for government policy and legitimize national security, and in so doing creating a model of Australian citizenship and identity based upon fear.

Alison Saxton: 'I certainly don't want people like that here': The discursive construction of 'asylum seekers'

In October 2001, it was alleged that asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard in order to manipulate the Australian Navy to pick them up and take them to Australian territory. In response to this incident, Prime Minister John Howard announced on radio 3LO: 'I certainly don't want people like that here.' (Mares, 2002: 135) A discursive approach is adopted in this paper to examine how asylum seekers have been constructed to be 'people like that' in the print media. The analysis demonstrates that asylum seekers have been represented as illegal, non-genuine, and threatening in these texts. These representations were employed within nationalist discourse to legitimate the government's actions and public opinion concerning asylum seekers and to manage the delicate issue of national identity. The discursive management of the collective identity of asylum seekers by the dominant culture to construct a specific social reality is discussed and illustrated.

Tanja Dreher: Speaking up and talking back: News media interventions in Sydney's 'othered' communities

Since August 2001, Arab and Muslim communities in Sydney's western suburbs have been caught up in a spiral of signification that linked 'gang' activity in the area to the standoff over asylum seekers aboard the MV Tampa, a federal election campaign fought on the theme of 'border protection' and global news reporting of 9.11 and the 'war on terror'. Many people who live and work in the Bankstown area responded to this intense news media scrutiny by developing community-based media interventions that aimed to shift the mainstream news agenda. Through media skills training, forums, events, and cultural production, Arab and Muslim Australians in the Bankstown area positioned themselves as the subjects rather than the objects of news. This paper analyses news interventions strategies in terms of media power and the politics of representation. I argue that the activities of those working with racialised communities suggest valuable models for the wider process of improving the reporting of cultural differences in multicultural Australia.

Peter Bishop: Lost at Woomera: Rereading mainstream and alternative media

This paper focuses on aspects of the media engagement with demonstrations at the Woomera Detention Centre during Easter 2002. A broad range of interests and affiliations were represented within the 1,000-2,000 protestors, several hundred of whom attacked the fences allowing numerous detainees to escape. In an era of on-line activism the Easter 2002 demonstration at Woomera showed the continuing significance of the embodied occupation of public space by protestors. It echoed an upsurge in public demonstration, from Seattle to more recent worldwide marches against war in Iraq. In addition to receiving extensive mainstream media coverage both in Australia and overseas, a whole series of 'alternative' forms of media were mobilised around the demonstration. Through a study of some mainstream and alternative media, this paper suggests that casting them as oppositional, one as reactionary towards asylum seekers from Islamic cultures and the other as emancipatory, is too simplistic. While mainstream media is the subject of searching critiques of its representational and agenda-setting power, similar critical evaluations are few for alternative media. It suggests that such a dichotomy has serious consequences for the understanding and operation both of emancipatory struggles and of the media. Giroux has called for a politics of educated hope (2002) and this paper suggests that critique should be accompanied by an active search for moments of contradiction and possibility.

Guy Redden: Read the whole thing: Journalism, weblogs and the re-mediation of the war in Iraq

This paper examines a particular form of online activity-weblogging, and how it has allowed for specific new forms of popular political communication in the context of the Second Gulf War. After describing the basics of weblogging, the paper discusses Western media coverage of the war and then shows how 'warbloggers' positioned themselves vis-à-vis media coverage and propaganda, creating commentaries that frequently combined media and political criticism. While bloggers of every political hue offered a range of perspectives and personal styles, some general tendencies are evident in warblogging discourse. The piece ends by questioning the significance of warblogging in terms of its potential contribution to democratic communication.

Barbara Bloch: 'David vs Goliath': Australian Jewish perceptions of media bias in reporting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

This article seeks to show how the notion of 'media bias' has functioned in much Jewish discomfort and anger with how the second, or Al Aqsa, intifada has been represented by mainstream Australian and global media. My objective is not to demonstrate that this reporting in general favours one side of this conflict over the other, nor that there is an unproblematic position of balance which could be attained. Rather, I utilise the concept of media frames to problematise responses by Jewish and other audiences regarding Palestinians being represented by the media sympathetically as the 'underdog', and accusations of media bias against Israel. I examine the work that the metaphor 'David versus Goliath' has accomplished over the longer period of the Arab-Israeli conflict and how it has framed the conflict for both media and audiences. Finally, I draw on Judith Butler's writing on 'explanation and exoneration' in relation to what could be spoken of, and heard, by Americans in the September 11 attacks, to suggest that a similar discourse exists in relation to how Israeli and Palestinian violence can be spoken of from the perspective of Israel. I argue that the accusations of media bias against Israel circulate around a sense that the Israeli and Jewish narrative has been to some extent decentred by sections of the international media and other bodies.

Book Reviews

Anti-Discrimination Board of New South Wales, Race for the Headlines: Racism and Media Discourse
Appadurai, Arjun (ed.), Globalization
Bodroghkozy, Aniko, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion
Jacobs, Jason, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama
Cottle, Simon (ed.) News, Public Relations and Power
Crane, Diana, Kawashima, Nobuko and Kawasaki, Ken'ichi (eds), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy and Globalization
Gasher, Mike, Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia
Gray, Clive, The Politics of the Arts in Britain
Griffen-Foley, Bridget, Party Games: Australian Politicians and the Media from War to Dismissal
Hjort, Mette and MacKenzie, Scott (eds), Cinema and Nation
Ivison, Duncan, Postcolonial Liberalism
Jacobs, Jason, Body Trauma: The New Hospital Dramas
Lipkin, Steven N., Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice
Mackay, Hugh, Media Mania: Why Our Fear of Modern Media is Misplaced
Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media
Meredyth, Denise and Minson, Jeffrey (eds), Citizenship and Cultural Policy
Neale, Steve (ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood
Phillips, Gail and Lindgren, Mia, The Australian Broadcast Journalism Manual
Scraton, Phil (ed.), Beyond September 11, An Anthology of Dissent
Zelizer, Barbie and Allan, Stuart (eds), Journalism after September 11