CRONEM 2009 The journalism of difference in Australia"s television news and current affairs programs

The journalism of difference is played out nightly in Australia‟s news and current affairs programs. They show a world that is markedly different from that encountered by most Australians in their daily lives. Instead of the range of peoples and cultures reflective of a modern multicultural society we see mainly Anglo faces, projecting an archetypal image of a „white Australia‟ that is more applicable to the 1950s than it is to today. More disturbingly, when we do encounter people from manifestly different racial, cultural or religious backgrounds they tend to be featured as victims, or as social deviants, or as in some way „unAustralian‟. This paper reports on the results of a longitudinal content analysis of news and current affairs content from 2001 to 2008 focusing in particular on the representation of people from non-Anglo backgrounds. The results confirm that Australia replicates trends evident from similar studies done in the US and the UK: the editorial processes, newsgathering routines and story formats of television news are susceptible to storytelling techniques that stereotype and isolate certain sectors of the community, presenting them as different from and even threatening to an implied „mainstream‟.