A tsunami of Aussie Aussie Aussie media
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Natural disasters have beset Australia’s neighbours in the last two days, with the Samoan earthquake and tsunami quickly followed by an earthquake in Indonesia. Considering how close these countries are to Australia and the scope of the disasters, it makes sense that they are front page news. Hundreds are dead. Thousands have been left injured and homeless. But of course, there is always the desperate search for a local angle in Australian newsrooms. “Are any Aussies dead?”. The result: if you’re just a headline skimmer, sometimes the only thing you’ll know is the Aussie death toll. We’re not saying we’re surprised, but there seems to be even more blanket Aussie coverage than usual. Post Samoan tsunami:
The Cairns Post takes the local angle to the extreme.
The Geelong Advertiser even more so, using the line: “A former Geelong woman…”
The Gold Coast Bulletin was particularly tacky, with their bad photoshopping job on the front cover and Aussie “Mum” headline.
And then the Indonesia earthquake hit:
But in the Northern Territory, there were issues far more pressing than natural disasters, death and mayhem:
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10 Comments
It’s nice to see the media act with sensitivity in times like this. Just look at the DEAD in red capitals on the Hun’s front page. And the GC’s photoshop is just terrible - why not plant the family in front of a picture of a tidal wave and go the whole hog? Disgraceful.
Nothing new about the news. Australia isn’t alone in chauvinistic reporting.
In June this year, 84 (several hundred according to other reports) Amazonian indians were massacred by the Peruvian authorities. Not a single Australian amongst the victims.
At least 246 people died in the Philippines during the recent typhoon and another typhoon is on its way. Not to mention Vietnam. So far no Australians that I’m aware of. Can’t be many Australians in Sumatra either, where it is too early to tell how devastating and lethal their two earthquakes were.
In Guinea, troops killed 157 demonstrators. No Australians were shot.
This sort of jingoistic reporting has been going on (all around the world) for a long time. What is different now is the immediacy and overwhelming mass of information available on the internet.
Next week the Samoan tsunami will have been overtaken by some other “grab” (an Australian kidnapped in Colombia perhaps, or fallen out of the tower of Pisa).
Insensitive and offensive reporting is another issue but not confined to overseas reports.
I think the latter is worse.
Amber Jamieson is obviously unfamiliar with the Northern Territory News, anything less than the outbreak of World War 3 is relegated to the inside pages; local news only on the front page, although the sort of beat-up on today’s front page gets a look in now and then. And of course there is usually the obligatory crocodile story, preferably with pictures.
jeeze guys, it’s a big story and Australians were killed, it’s on the front page of the paper as Amber grudgingly admits, why wouldn’t the story also be about Australlians killed?….I think you’re doing the usual beat up on Australian newspapers for reporting news, something you don’t reckon they do half the time…
I don’t think it’s criticism of the fact that the deaths of Australians were covered, simply that this coverage is out of all proportion to the deaths of non-Australians - or, more to the point, people we don’t perceive as being ‘like us’: in this instance, non-Western and non-white.
However, it’s not as simple as the charge that ‘all journalists/media outlets are stinky racists’ - the vast majority of individual reporters would rightly refute this charge - it seems to be about a more complex combination of institutional (what is our news ‘like’/what do we usually cover, and how?), financial (i.e. ratings) and technical (can we get the footage?) factors.
There’s a significant literature on the media coverage of non-domestic events such as this, much of which shows that the major factors affecting reportage are:
- cultural proximity (how many tourists from this country go there/how many people in this country are from there?)
- the scale of the disaster, as estimated at the time it occurred (how serious did the event seem to be, such that it became something a self-respecting media outlet perceived it ‘should’ cover?) and
- geographical proximity.
That said, I agree with Amber that it’s intuitively ‘wrong’ that deaths of people who don’t look like us or speak our language aren’t covered as extensively and carefully as are those of Australians, Americans or Europeans. Sadly, First Dog’s cartoon yesterday remains entirely accurate… and has gone up on the fridge.
Nothing wrong with localising a story to make it more relevant to your listeners, viewers or readers. What should they do? Ignore the local angle? All the stories quoted seemed to make the extent of the disaster quite clear.
Disasters never really happen until an Aussie falls over. - preferably an Aussie with lots of happy snaps on their Facebook page.
Pot calling kettle black. As I commented yesterday (in the context of the FirstDog cartoon) “Even in today’s Crikey I read: ‘The Samoa tsunami killed at least 100 people early this morning … At least seven Australians have been reported as being treated for injuries, none of which are understood to have been life-threatening.’ “
Amber’s comments are interesting if not so revelatory. I don’t think comparing this to what the press and media in other countries do is helpful - it ends up in a debate over who comes out looking better than the other person rather than focusing on how some people in the world remain nameless and generalised and others do not. How many names are remembered of Pakistani and Iraqi dead? Yet who forget’s NY Times journalist Daniel Pearl or the film A Mighty Heart with Angelina Jolie, an adaptation of a memoir written by his wife. And other examples of course can be listed.
If one focuses on Australia though the issue of this type of reporting are an issue that needs to be discussed. And it is not just about what happens to Australians overseas in these expereinces but how Australia acts as a nation among other nations and with respect to how Australia treats its own citizens, and the reporting that is done on issues and involving parts of the Australian population. This can be seen with respect to some of the criticism that has been put out recently about the response of Australia (and NZ) to the military dictatorship in Fiji. The Australian criticism having less to do with a concern about Fiji and Fijians than it does about Australia’s influence and control over Fiji and more generally in the Pacific. And some of this it has been pointed out has to do with Australia not ‘looking in its own backyard.’ The issue frequently pointed to of course being the Australian government’s policies towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Something which the government isn’t the only thing that can be seen as not doing a good job with but also the media’s treatment and understanding (frequently misunderstanding) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues. I remember a few years back when Anthony Mundine fought Danny Green in Sydney and the next day an article in the SMH said Anthony Mundine came into the ring draped in an Aboriginal Flag and A Muslim Flag - the Muslim Flag was actually the Torres Strait Islander Flag. That is a SMH journalist reporting on domestic issues. And even my own experience of living and working with Aboriginal people in Redfern, if that is a ‘no-go zone’ or a ‘ghetto’ I would offer to all Australian journalists the suggestion of reading Loic Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. This way the use of the term ‘ghetto’ could at least be applied in appropriate ways and not as hyperbole
Maybe it is more a question of what type of education and training are Australian students receiving at university in order to become qualified journalists. I can’t help but see a slide in some reporting that has an uncanny feel of being more in line with the American newspaper US Today which would be sad to see as that paper offers little to any in-depth reporting on much of anything.
What distresses me most is the overall inane news that is presented to us. I read the news on my computer and inevidably there is a story about some tv/movie stars child or spouse or bad behaviour, some sporting irrelevance, whether hey hey its saturday should be back on air permanently, reports of overseas Aussies doing whatever and the clincher ‘Is vegemite I-snack a hoax’.
Anything of importance is almost a byline and to find out about world news, which is also tainted with the Australian Reporters’ abilities, is never accurate.
I agree with the comments above, except the ones that think reporters are doing a good job. I suppose that we really need to look at who owns those papers and what pressure is put on reporters and editors to report the ‘truth’.
I don’t think that people being hurt by natural disaster should be glossed over, but please stop insulting our intelligence and ability to handle the truth.
Our newspapers are just like american newspapers - only interested in us and ours.
We are becoming divorced from the rest of the world to our sorrowful shame.