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Media
essays
The Government and the media: How did
the media respond to the Tampa and the children overboard incidents?
By Kristine Rodstol
(2002)
Introduction
In this essay, I want to look into the relationship between the government
and the media and highlight the different mechanisms at work as information
is made available to the media and the public. The media get its impulses
and influences from a multitude of different sources, among which the
government must be said to be among the most significant.
In relation to this, there are a number of questions that needs to be
asked. First of all, what makes news newsworthy, and what does this indicate
about the government's influence over the media? I will discuss this question
mainly in relation to the media theory presented by Edward Herman and
Noam Chomsky in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent.
If we find that there are government pressures on the media industries,
what can we distinguish about this influence, both in general and in relation
to specific cases? As a case study I will take a closer look at the Howard
Government's handling of the refugee crisis, which has been accentuated
over the past 12 months. Can we distinguish a consistent strategy in the
Government's approach to the media in relation to the Tampa and the 'children
overboard' incidents? I also find it relevant to briefly discuss the impact
the 11 September terror attacks may have had on the media.
Another important question is whether the media are as unbiased, objective
and critical as they, according to the journalism code of ethics should
be in their reporting. There may be personal convictions as well as normative
structural and institutional influences affecting journalists in their
work, and thereby also affecting the public opinion. Closely related to
this is the question of self-censorship are media workers influenced
by the dominant views in society and politics, to the extent that they
censor themselves in order not to upset the political leadership and disrupt
the status quo?
I have chosen to focus on the government's ability to affect the media
in this assignment. Yet, influence runs both ways; the media must also
be said to have a significant impact on the government, in their ability
to question and change the political agenda. Also, the media partly acts
from self interest; whatever sells is good news.
In my discussion of the relationship between the government and the media,
I find it relevant to present and clarify some ideas dealing specifically
with this relationship, mainly Herman and Chomsky's 'propaganda model'.
Herman and Chomsky's model is based on the media and political system
in the United States, but should be applicable to any similar system where
wealth and power exercise control over the access to a privately owned
media, making it possible for government and business interests to penetrate
the media through either direct control or indirect influence.
The propaganda model a theoretical
framework
There are a number of theories
dealing with the nature and character of the media as well as the extent
to which the media functions as an independent voice or as an outlet for
the views and values of other important power interests in society.
Michael Schudson identifies three main approaches to the sociology of
news production. The political economy approach links media output to
the economic structure of the mews organization and relates it to the
views of the dominant groups in society. The sociological approach uses
classic sociology to understand how media workers, who profess their autonomy
and independence, are influenced by organisational and occupational routines.
Finally, the anthropological approach puts emphasis on the "constraining
force of broad cultural symbol systems" placed upon the media "regardless
of the details of organizational and occupational routine" .
Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model falls under the category of the
political economy approach, as it stresses the media's role as part of
the national power structure. Even though this model has been criticised
for being too rigid and "a rather blunt instrument for examining
a subtle system () with more heterogeneity and more capacity for change
(however limited that capacity) than they give it credit for" , it
must still be recognised as an important text on the relationship between
the government and the media, and the subsequent effects on modern democracy.
Herman and Chomsky's proposition is that in a society with concentrated
wealth and power, the unequal distribution of resources will greatly affect
the access to and the mature of a private media system. Money and power
structures will have a strong influence on the media, either through direct
control or indirect influence, and news considered to be unsuitable for
the public will be filtered out.
According to Chomsky, the relationship between the government and the
media in a democracy is different from that same relationship in a totalitarian
regime in the sense that democracies allow people to speak out. Since
democratic regimes can't control behaviour with force, they have to control
the way people think; following the ideas of the American journalist Walter
Lippman, democracies require the "manufacture of consent" .
The propaganda model presents five political-economic filters, interaction
with and reinforcing one another, through which information have to pass
in order to become accepted for presentation in the mainstream media.
Effectively, these filters are considered decisive for what information
becomes available to the public, and more importantly, what does not.
The first filter is the size, ownership, wealth and profit orientation
of the major media actors. Since the 1980s there has been a major shift
in the media landscape, due to the widespread decline of public broadcasting
and the growing concentration of ownership in the press and broadcasting
industries. This has been the dominant pattern both on the national level
and globally, as transnational multi-media corporations have gradually
gained global dominance .
Reliance on market forces has made it necessary for the media to focus
more on profitability in order to survive in a competitive environment,
while autonomy has been conceded to bankers and institutional and individual
investors. The result is that ownership and market forces have gained
a powerful influence over news choices.
The second filter is the advertising licence to do business. As the media
industries increasingly privatise, they become reliant on advertisement
as their major source of income. In the US, newspapers rely on their advertisers
for 75 per cent of their revenue, general-circulation magazines about
50 per cent, and radio and television broadcasters close to 100 per cent.
Advertisers carefully choose which media to be associated with, avoiding
media they find damaging to their interests. The result is that while
media industries come under increasing pressure to behave as profit makers,
there are strong incentives for them to avoid programming that has significant
public affairs content.
Sourcing mass media news is Herman and Chomsky's third filter. The media
keep close relations with the local and national power structure, as well
as business corporations and trade groups. This is where a great number
of significant news, leaks and rumours originate, supplementing regular
press conferences. These sources are associated with credibility and trust,
and the media can thus reduce investigative expenses, along with the risk
of libel suits and criticisms of bias. The Prime Minister's media office,
for example, must thus be considered to be a highly reliable source of
information. In Mark Fishman's words:
Newsworkers and predisposed to treat bureaucratic
accounts as factual because news personnel participate in upholding a
normative order of authorized knowers in the society. Reporters operate
with the attitude that officials ought to know what it is their job to
know In particular, a newsworker will recognize an official's claim to
knowledge not merely as a claim, but as a credible, competent piece of
knowledge. This amounts to a moral division of labor: officials have and
give the facts; reporters merely get them. [63]
Herman and Chomsky's fourth filter is 'flak'.
This is a term that refers to negative responses to media output, and
may take the form of a great number of modes of complaint such as letters
to the media, phone calls, law suits, petitions, speeches, bills, threats
and punitive actions. Mobilised on a large scale, flak can become very
uncomfortable as well as costly to the media, as they will be forced to
defend their stance both inside and outside of the media organization,
and possibly also in the courts. The media is particularly sensitive to
punitive actions from advertisement clients. The ability to produce effective
flak is closely related to power, and may be exercised directly or indirectly.
The fifth filter presented in the propaganda theory is 'anticommunism'.
Herman and Chomsky characterise anticommunism in America as a "dominant
unifying religion", where opposition against communism is to some
extent a criteria for social acceptance, causing "liberals to behave
very much like conservatives" . Anticommunism originated from profound
conflicts between the USA and the communist states and ideology, and tends
to dichotomise issues in a zero-sum reality, as either communist or anticommunist.
This has had considerable effect on the mass media, and has served as
an effective buffer against radical opposition movements.
As these filters strongly set the limits for the range of news that can
pass through the gates, they also decide which news have the potential
to become "big news", sustained and fuelled by large news campaigns,
and which are dismissed as "little news" occasional dissident
reports .
Herman and Chomsky claim, "[by] definition, news from primacy establishment
sources meets one major filter requirement and is readily accommodated
by the mass media" . In my following discussion of the Howard Government
and the refugee crisis, I will try to identify the Tampa and the children
overboard incidents and "big news" government propaganda
fed to the media and discuss to what degree these incidents support
the notion of an Australian media subject to a 'propaganda model' of government
media manipulation.
Tampa a PR stunt
Over the past 12 months, the emphasis
on the refugee crisis and subsequent political controversies has seen
the Coalition move from an uncertain position in an election year to electoral
victory, and back to rather tame results on the opinion polls.
Illegal immigration and border protection had for some time been a major
concern to the Government, and in an election year it was important to
send a strong message to the electorate. 'Operation Relex' the new
border protection policy had been initiated only weeks before the
Tampa incident, and part of this policy involved an unprecedented push
for media control, as the Defence Minister at the time, Peter Reith, ordered
that "all propaganda, even the most mundane press release, must be
cleared by his office or his junior minister, Bruce Scott ."
If the Australian media didn't make a big deal out of it when the border
protection media restrictions were first imposed, they soon came to understand
the full meaning of the new policy; the Government's attempts to control
the media would become a central characteristic of the 2001 election campaign.
When the Norwegian MV Tampa approached Christmas Island with 438 boat
refugees on board in late August last year, the Coalition clearly recognised
the opportunity to set an example and take a clear stance on the refugee
issue.
As the story broke in the news, the Government gave the conflict an 'operational'
status of national security, enforcing the new policy and banning the
media from the area. When the ship eventually entered Australian waters
after sending distress signals to the navy, SAS troops were flown in to
take control of the situation as John Howard pledged that the Tampa refugees
would not set foot on Australian soil. Journalists were not allowed to
take photos of the ship, and those who tried to approach the ship were
threatened with arrest. When Mike Bowers from Fairfax managed to take
photos of the ship from an airplane chartered from Jakarta, the Government
answered by imposing a no-fly zone over the ship. Still, troubling images
from the Tampa did eventually reach the press, as one of the ship's crew
e-mailed photos taken with a digital camera to the outside world. Shortly
afterwards, the communication lines were cut off .
When the Tampa stalemate had finally been resolved and the so-called Pacific
Solution had temporarily relieved the refugee-problem, it became clear
that the Howard Government's influence over Australian media reached far
beyond Australian borders. Even in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, Australian
journalists were prevented from contacting the Tampa refugees.
One might say that the Tampa incident occurred at the perfect time for
the Howard Government. Mungo McCallum claims that "[if] the Tampa
had not existed, John Howard would probably have invented it; and to a
large extent, that is what happened anyway" . The Coalition didn't
really have a clear lead in the opinion polls, and early in the election
year political commentators like Robert Manne considered it to be "more
likely than not that the left-wing party of Australia, the ALP, [would]
be governing in Canberra and in every state" . What distinguished
this boatload of refugees from any other, according to McCallum, was that
it became the subject of an Australian led rescue operation, where the
Norwegian ship was asked to participate. As the refugees refused to be
taken back to Indonesia, the Australian Government chose to set an example
by treating the Tampa as a regular people smuggling vessel, denying it
entry into Australian waters. During the events that followed, the Tampa
became in many ways a media hype, exploited and manipulated by the Government
through its hard press policy and total control of information. According
to the polls and the talkback radio programs, the propaganda worked; the
Howard Government did indeed emerge strengthened from the incident
11 September
the Government's focus on the
refugee crisis were to gain even stronger momentum in the aftermath of
the 11 September terrorist attack in New York and the following launch
of the 'war on terrorism'. The attacks were generally interpreted as an
assault on the Western world as an entity, epitomised by the USA, and
the widespread uncertainty and sentiment of vulnerability that followed
worked only to justify the Government's border protection policy. Shortly
after 11 September, the Defence Minister at the time, Peter Reith, indicated
in an interview with Radio National that the boat people could be a "pipeline
for terrorists" . This was later suggested also by John Howard .
Herman and Chomsky's fifth filter, anticommunism, have certainly lost
some of its impetus after the end of the Cold War. Yet, this filter might
be applicable to other political and ideological dichotomies. If we look
at some of the basic characteristics of this filter prejudice and
more or less endorsed xenophobia one might be able to identify them
in Western mass media's united stance against terrorism. Herman and Chomsky
claim that "[in] normal times as well as in periods of Red scares,
issues tend to be framed in terms of a dichotomised world of Communist
and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses allocated to contesting
sides, and rooting for "our side" considered an entirely legitimate
news practice" . To some extent, the bipolarised world society of
the Cold War has been replaced by an economical, cultural, religious,
and ideological standoff between the West and Islam . Along with a general
growth of xenophobic sentiments in Western societies, the recent vilifying
of refugees, both related to the Tampa and the children overboard incidents,
and to suggestions that refugees might have terrorist links, could be
interpreted in support of this view.
Children overboard bureaucratic
blunder, misguided loyalty or deliberate lies?
The clearest case of media manipulation
during the refugee crisis so far, has obviously been the children overboard
incident, where the press was presented with photographic "evidence"
of refugees throwing their children overboard in an attempt to force Australia
to give them asylum on 7 October . Not only were the claims put forward
by then Defence Minister Reith not true; the photos presented as evidence
of the event turned out to be of children being rescued as the refugee
ship sank on 8 October; no children had actually been thrown overboard.
On the evening of 9 October, 2 photos were e-mailed from the HMAS Adelaide,
along with a letter explaining that the photos depicted the rescue operation
on 8 October. When the photos were shown as evidence of the alleged 7
October incident on ABC's 7.30 Report, on 10 October, navy personnel
who had been in charge of the operation attempted to set the record straight.
Yet, their warnings about the doubtful nature of the photos were not acted
upon, even though central public servants and ministerial advisers had
been informed about the uncertainties surrounding the photos on the day
of their release. It is now evident that by the morning of 11 October,
this information had reached the former Defence Minister Mr. Reith . Still,
the information was not passé on to the Prime Minister, who says,
he had no indication of the controversy surrounding the photos until 7
November, three days before the federal election. Defence personnel had
been gagged by punitive legislation since the implementation of the Government's
new border policy, but this didn't prevent anonymous leaks to the media.
The news did not break in the media until two days before the election,
though, when The Australian ran the story on the front page, using
anonymous sources . There were never any official indications about any
doubts surrounding the photos before The Australian broke the story;
members of the Government seemed all too eager to believe the photographic
'evidence' to investigate the possibility that the photos were misleading.
According to Paul Syvret, a senior media adviser to former Queensland
Treasurer David Hamill, government information released to the media is
largely based on the priories of the media advisers. "You're basically
a gatekeeper", he says, "[y]ou are there to tell the truth,
or at least those elements of the truth, or a slant of the truth that
will put our Minister and the government which you work for, in the best
light. You're basically protecting, defending and promoting" . Yet,
in the children overboard incident, it might seem as if some officials
have taken this praxis a bit too far, as claims are made that the photos
were in fact carefully chosen from a number of photos, and edited before
being released to the media.
The media will always be an important part of the political sphere of
a democracy. On the basis of what has been revealed about the Government's
manipulation of the media during the refugee crisis, one might claim that
the new Howard Government was elected under false pretences. Yet, as several
commentators have indicated , the majority of the population still seems
to support the Government's policy, even though they resent the secrecy
and manipulation of the media throughout the electoral campaign, that
has been revealed to its full extent during the recent hearings in the
Select Committee for an inquiry into a certain maritime incident.
The alleged photo evidence of the children overboard incident certainly
was exploited to its fullest potential by the ministerial and bureaucratic
staff, and possibly also some members of the Government.
Still, it is hard to tell to what extent there was a conscious, planned
agenda behind the Government's manipulation of the photographic 'evidence'
of the children overboard affaire, especially since the ministerial staff
deeply involved will not give their statements to the Senate inquiry.
The evidence so far suggests, though, that the news that children had
been thrown in the water was little more than an honest mistake, but instead
of sorting out the misunderstanding, the truth was twisted in order to
support the Government policy and position in the lead up to an election.
The media's role
So what can we distinguish about
the media's role in all of this? What has been the nature of the Government's
influence over the media, and have the media reported the refugee issue
unbiased and critically?
In many ways it seems clear that despite the Government's desire to dupe
the media, they have not fully succeeded. At least parts of the Australian
media,, in particular the ABC and several national and regional newspapers,
have to a large extent served as a critical commentator to its policy.
Others have been more complaisant to accept the Government's policies,
in particular the talkback radio, which the Howard Government has been
known to utilise to a large degree, and which have a large audience. While
other media often chose a more cautious approach, many talkback radio
programs took a fervent stance in support of the Government, something
that ultimately proved to have been premature . The national and regional
press, like The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The
Age obviously have taken a more critical stance, both in relation
to the Government's handling of refugees and the restraining of the freedom
of press .
The media have not escaped without criticism, though. In a response to
the Canberra Press Gallery's submission to the Senate inquiry, where the
press gallery expressed deep concern with the Government's manipulation
of the media, Labor Senator John Faulkner suggested that the media had
#swallowed hook, line and sinker" in the children overboard story
. While the journalists admitted to having been too uncritical in their
reporting they still gave the Government's manipulation campaign the main
responsibility for the distortion of facts through the media.
Others, like Mungo McCallum, have also expressed disappointment with the
media's handling of the Tampa and children overboard incidents, claiming
that they were not sufficiently critical and unbiased in their reporting:
"It was not Australian journalism's finest hour. The once feared
rat pack had been reduced to a somewhat grumpy mouse pack." .
Already in late November, the Australian Press Council expressed concern
for the objectivity of the media, and choose to "alert the public
that they were being denied the full story because of excessive Government
restrictions on media access. Michael Stutchbury, the editor of The
Australian, said the Howard Government has created a "culture
of information suppression", and regards the children overboard issue
to be a "classic example" of this . Clearly, this sends a strong
message to the Government that the media will not accept this policy,
and also a warning signal to the media in general to strive for journalistic
accuracy and objectiveness.
Conclusion
Over the past 12 months, the media
has been deeply involved with a number of issues concerning the refugee
crisis. As the MV Tampa approached Australian waters last August, the
Howard Government clearly saw the potential to take a firm stance in the
Coalition's refugee policy. The Government's unyielding principles gave
the Liberals a lead in the run up for the federal election, and put 'border
protection' on top of the Government's list of priorities. Other major
events in the months to follow, like the 11 September terror attacks,
should only prove to support this policy.
Yet, the Government's hard line has led to serious casualties that
of freedom of press and truth. One might then claim that the Australian
press has been under the control of a propaganda system, to some degree
controlling the news agenda. The press has been heavily restricted and
manipulated from the implementation of the border protection policy. A
turning point came, though, with the revelation that photos 'proving'
that children had been thrown overboard from a refugee boat in order to
pressure Australia to accept the refugees was nothing but a hoax, an opportunity
seized as 'Chinese whispers' distorted the initial message on its way
up the chain of command to the political leadership.
The retaliation in the press has been severe, but undoubtedly justified.
The media had deliberately been led astray by members of the bureaucracy
and the Government. In some way, one might claim that the media eventually
exposed the Government's propaganda agenda, making it difficult for them
to try similar stunts again. On the other hand, the propaganda structure
in question is still very much in place, restricting journalists' access
to information on refugee issues and incidents that are still very much
a part of the news reality. Maybe the real propaganda is linked to other
social issues that need to be resolved, and not the intense political
focus on the refugee and border protection agenda? That is a question
that might be better dealt with in other academic disciplines, though.
Author contact: krodstol@hotmail.com
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