Racism and Media

The article investigates afresh the circumstances surrounding the "anti-Chinese uprising" in the Australian Goldfields town of Clunes in 1873. 
Beginning with historical interpretations of events, it notes that scholars have heavily relied on one colonial newspaper report as their primary source (some scholars use two other sources, but many use only this single document).
The article then points that there are several primary sources which have never been cited or used by historians; and identifies 5 key overlapping documents.  Some of these colonial sources include recorded interviews by participants taken the following day after the troubles.  It then plots out the course of events as shown by all corroborating sources - and it is surprising to find there was no wild mass uprising, the troubles seeming to comprise of a rowdy 20 minute confrontation halted by police.
The article then surveys contemporaneous newspaper reports of the day at Clunes, showing the different viewpoints and perspectives taken by colonial publications according to political disposition.  It also plots how accounts were changed, dramatised and embellished as news travelled from country to city, and from newspaper to newspaper across the colonies. 
The article finishes by posing serious questions on how accounts in historical newspapers need to be more carefully cross-checked and contextualised to verify reported "news".
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By employing a mixed methodology, in-depth interviews with different professionals involved in the development and implementation of advertising projects and a quantitative study (n = 500) of casting requests, in this article the expressions of colourist racism in commercial and governmental advertising in Mexico are analysed. The present study is based on two main axes of analysis: (1) the frequency with which people with certain physiognomic traits are requested for advertising campaigns in Mexico; (2) the underlying logic that is implied in the selection of actors and models, depending on the nature and the contents of the campaigns. It is concluded that this selection process is based on explicit colourist discrimination, one of the expressions of racism that is socio-historically linked to the construction of Mexican society and the nation. In this selection there exists a steady tendency to exclude people with 'indigenous' traits from commercial advertising, as well as people with dark skin tones, who are usually requested for governmental ads. However, the same trend also exists in commercial publicity in respect to people with stereotypical 'European' or 'Caucasian' traits, leaving 'inter-national Latino' as the most requested profile and an ambiguous category that is far away from representing the bio-cultural diversity of the Mexican population. These observed tendencies raise many ethical issues about symbolic and structural (re)production of colourism within Mexican society. Therefore, the social and ethical responsibility of advertising is also discussed with publicists and casting directors.

Aiming to interpret the electoral success of Golden Dawn (2012) and the racist violence that followed on the streets of Athens, this study searches for sources of racism in the Greek ethnic identity (Greekness) and investigates its effects on immigrants. To address the first question this research analyses discourses that dominate Greeks’ understandings of (ethnic) self and others, along their daily and life-paths. To examine how those understandings shape immigrants’ realities, I conducted unstructured interviews and participatory observation with first and second-generation immigrants. The research found that racism is the outcome of Greeks’ participation in practices organized by state institutions and social systems (Education system, Religion, Media and Clientelism, Urban space) informed by Greekness. In short, racism is the result of Greeks “acting Greek”, that is, in accordance with Greekness’ principles. The strategies immigrants employ, to avoid the consequences of racism, constitute a response and add the knowledge of how to “act differently”. This thesis concludes that addressing the problem of racism in Greece in accordance to immigrants’ knowledge of how to do difference could lead to radical social changes, up to redefinition of country’s main structural principle - Greekness itself.

En este trabajo, tomando como ejemplo la forma en que se construye el tema de la inmigración en Italia dentro del discurso público, trataremos de razonar sobre el papel de los medios de comunicación en los procesos de criminalización de los inmigrantes. En primer lugar ofreceremos una síntesis de las características de este discurso, mostrando cómo identifica una clase peligrosa «por naturaleza». En segundo lugar discutiremos brevemente las lógicas que lo hacen posible y los efectos que produce, considerando la interacción provista de sentido entre los principales representantes del discurso público. Por último nos detendremos en las prácticas de control de la inmigración, evidenciando cómo la «Europa fortaleza» genera sentido y produce objetivaciones que «hablan» inmigración y nos indican cómo «hablarla».

In a wide variety of studies over the past two decades, the media has consistently been identified as a significant social institution implicated in normalizing and disseminating anti-Muslim prejudice. Identifying and combating Islamophobic discourses has been a challenging proposition, however, due to difficulties in systematically identifying and evaluating “Islamophobia” within texts. Islamophobia is a complex and contested phenomenon that defies easy classification within the boundaries of terminology which would normally be employed to describe hostility or prejudice based on, for example, race or religion. This article outlines some of the challenges involved in defining and categorizing Islamophobic discourses through an exploration of the process of constructing, evaluating, and applying a unique content analysis instrument, the “Islamophobia Index,” to media texts, using data sets drawn from the Australian news media. We critically reflect upon the methodological limitation...

In December 1873 the Victorian goldmining town of Clunes, about thirty kilometres north of Ballarat, was the scene for what is remembered as a major uprising against Chinese miners. This event is cited in assorted histories of Australian society in the nineteenth century, often being placed in terms of size and violence close behind the riots at Lambing Flat in 1861 and Buckland River in 1857.

This essay examines how the films of Spike Lee dismantle certain stereotypes related to black people, demonstrating that an alternative thought and identity may represent an enrichment for the majority, and not just a source of fear or derision. I will consider Lee's Girl 6 (1996), Bamboozled (2000) and BlaKkKlansman (2018). The aforementioned movies have been particularly effective in overturning the rhetorical mechanisms linked to the Savage, Coon and Victim models in American entertainment.

Mission Invisible: Race, Religion, and News at the Dawn of the 9/11 Era Ross Perigoe & Mahmoud Eid © 2014 by IGI Global 332 pp. $99.00 ISBN: 978-0774826471 Mission Invisible was written by the late Ross Perigoe and Mahmoud Eid. The authors examine the devastating events of 9/11 as reported by The Montreal Gazette (or simply The Gazette), the only English-language daily newspaper published in Montreal, Quebec. In particular, they focus on biased, systemic racist reporting by The Gazette, analyzing a twenty-day pe-riod and criticizing how events were reported. Their findings are discouraging in terms of the journalists' unethical behaviour as a result of a lack of cultural sensitivity and professionalism. Although the authors analyze just one newspa-per in Montreal, their findings raise the question of how other Western news media reported on the crisis: how did post-9/11 reports influence Canadians and the government? Mission Invisible describes key negative attitudes that some C...

This paper deals with prejudiced discourse in mainstream newspapers. It traces the use of loaded questions that reveal unquestioned stereotypes and biased assumptions on the part of the media in matters involving the representation of victims and perpetrators of criminal offences committed by minority groups. The analysis is based on a qualitative critical analysis of two cases that show how the media prejudicially handle the minorities. The first case deals with how the media uselessly probe into family matters in order to evoke the majority group's ethnic stereotypes, thereby putting the minority group on the defensive. The second case shows how proper names and category labels can be used to cancel out negative stereotypes arising from foreign origin, as long as another out-group could be targeted through negative stereotyping. Through the use of specific micro-level discursive strategies, the media contribute to the ethnic profiling of minority groups and contribute to the polarization of the society in terms of "us" vs. "them".

While the violence that has erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, over the past few weeks appears to be subsiding, the discussion over the problems faced by those protesting in the area has not. For a historian of the 1960s, it is surprising and even alarming to see how much of this conversation has taken place before.

Can a shared feeling of distress caused by racism and colonialism among different ethnic groups turn into group agenda? Interactions between Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders and other racially marked group of peoples from overseas living in Australia do not receive much interest. However this case study shows that these engagements occur on a daily basis. Koori Radio, an Aboriginal radio station based in Redfern (Sydney) has as its main objective to promote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music and to contest the scarce and stereotyped representations of ATSI music and peoples on the mainstream media. Simultaneously the radio plays music and provides room for other peoples who are racially marked since its foundation. In doing so, it voices their concerns and expresses common complaints and assertions. Based on ethnographic research this paper explains how a shared feeling of historical racist injustice have led to the radio station to open their space and provide airtime for other groups of peoples such as Maoris, Africans or Fijians. Further, it analyses the reasons why these peoples who are based in Sydney chose Koori Radio as a ‘shelter’.

Media research has generally focused more attention on analysing the ‘problems’ of media racism than on exploring possibilities for ‘solutions’ or change. In this article I introduce community media interventions as an underdeveloped and highly productive field of research into both the possibilities
and the limitations of working for media change in the context of the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘globalisation of the Muslim Other’ (Hage, 2007). The opening sections discuss the concept of ‘community media interventions’ and provide an overview of media intervention strategies among racialized communities in Sydney, Australia since 11 September 2001. The concluding
sections sketch the many limitations of and dilemmas for media interventions as strategies for responding to racialized media. I argue that, in order to adequately understand and contribute to struggles for media change, media research needs to attend to the politics of ‘listening’ in addition to the dynamics of ‘speaking up’. Crucially, attention to listening shifts the focus and responsibility for change from marginalized voices and on to the conventions, institutions and privileges which shape who and what can be heard in media.