Racism and the Press

Teun A. van Dijk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317403845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1991. This book presents the results of an interdisciplinary study of the press coverage of ethnic affairs. Examples are drawn mainly from British and Dutch newspapers, but data from other countries are also reviewed. Besides providing the reader with a thorough content analysis of the material, the book is the first to introduce a detailed discourse analytical approach to the study of the ways in which ethnic minorities are portrayed in the press. The approach focuses on the topics, overall news report schemata, local meanings, style and rhetoric of news reports. Highly original, accomplished and penetrating, the book is the fruit of a decade of research into the question of racism and the press, important for ethnic studies, mass communication and media studies, sociology and linguistics.

1 The study of racism and the Press

What doubt can there be that the most subtle and implacable foe of our coloured people here is the Press.

(From a letter to the Editor of The Times, 21 October 1985)

ETHNIC EVENTS

Ethnic event 1: the immigration of refugees

During the first few months of 1985, large groups of Tamil refugees appeared at the borders of several countries in western Europe, soon followed by other Third World refugees. The governments of these countries reacted in a remarkably homogeneous way to this arrival of people whom they often subtly defined as ‘economic’ refugees: they either sent them back or grudgingly admitted them to await decisions by the bureaucracies and the courts about their requests for political asylum. It soon appeared that these decisions were largely unfavourable for most of the newcomers: many were sent back to where they came from, and sometimes risked harassment, if not imprisonment or death upon their return.

To prevent future predicaments of the same sort, several European governments, in view of the planned abolition of their internal borders in 1992, got together (‘conspired’ would probably be a better term) to establish a common policy for dealing with non-European (that is, non-white) refugees. The context of this policy is revealing: it was part of a larger framework that dealt with international crime and terrorism. While at first discredited as ‘economic’ refugees, those who sought asylum were now redefined as the perpetrators of another variant of transborder crime: immigration.

Of course, these events also hit the headlines of the media. In the Netherlands alone, hundreds of news reports, background articles and television items were dedicated to what one conservative newspaper called the ‘invasion’ of some 3,000 Tamils. As a consequence, what was initially a group of people practically unknown to the majority of the population, soon became a prominent object of public attention and discussion. The official panic of the political elites about what they saw as a deluge of poor Third World peoples arriving at their doorsteps soon led to a corresponding media panic. Before long, this barrage of negative media coverage, especially in the conservative Press, also affected large parts of the public, which expectedly was easily persuaded to resent the ‘threatening’ presence of another non-white, foreign group that would undoubtedly aggravate already serious unemployment and housing shortage and take a share of ‘their own’ welfare. These reactions were later used as a legitimation by the conservative Press and the authorities to continue their anti-immigration policies. In the years that followed, the Press in the Netherlands, but also in other west European countries, continued to pay special attention to the issue of refugees. What once was primarily a humanitarian issue, now had become an ethnic and political ‘problem’.

Ethnic event 2: the ‘riots’ in Great Britain

In the United Kingdom, in the early autumn of 1985, several British cities experienced serious social disturbances in their poor, predominantly West Indian or Asian, neigbourhoods. As was the case a few years earlier, Handsworth, Brixton and Tottenham witnessed widespread violence and fights between mostly West-Indian youths and the police, which left several people dead and many wounded, and which resulted in millions of pounds’ worth of damage.

As may be expected, television, the ‘quality’ Press and the tabloids all paid considerable attention to these events. Again, the definitions of these events by the political elites were prominently displayed, if not endorsed, by most of the media and especially the conservative Press: the ‘riots’ were the criminal acts of black inner-city youths, and a fundamental attack on the civil order. They should not be seen as caused by ethnic inequality, oppression, or discrimination nor as the expression of socio-economic frustration and rage. The appropriate response to such criminal acts of violence, therefore, should be to strengthen and support the police in their containment of these forms of urban unrest. The prejudice about blacks as a ‘problem’, if not as ‘violent’ or even ‘criminal’ people, thus became further strengthened.

Ethnic event 3: the Rushdie affair

In the spring of 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa (a ‘licence to kill’) against the British writer Salman Rushdie, who according to Khomeini had betrayed Islam in his book The Satanic Verses by his scandalous fictional account of the life of Muhammad. In the UK itself, but also in many other countries, this death threat of the Iranian leader, as well as earlier and later protests against the book by fundamentalist Muslims in Bradford and other cities, became one of the most prominent Press stories of the year. The western governments and virtually the whole Press were shocked and enraged about what they saw as international terrorism and fundamentalist intolerance. The western population at large, this time including most intellectuals, also participated in a contemporary variant of the old schism between Islam and Christianity, in which mutual accusations of intolerance and lack of respect for religious and cultural values were exchanged during a bitter ‘ethnic’ conflict. What hitherto had remained the slogan of right-wing groups or racist parties suddenly became a widely shared opinion also among liberals: ‘They have to adapt themselves to “our” norms and values’. In this way, the Press not only contributed to the legitimation of prevalent prejudices against the Muslim minorities in the western countries, and against Islam and Arabs in general, but also emphasized the socio-cultural superiority of white, western or European values and cultures. A few months later, in France, an even more complex conflict arose between Muslim traditionalism, French educational policies and anti-sexist values, on the occasion of the ‘scarves’ that some Muslim girls were wearing at school. One of the indirect results of this conflict was that the Front National won local elections and thus again obtained a seat in Parliament.

Ethnic events and the media

These are only three of many other ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ stories that appear in the media, which extensively report issues of immigration, racially based social disturbances and socio-cultural conflicts between the dominant majority and immigrant or other minority groups. In the USA, this was also the case during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and, in the following decades, during the increasing immigration of Asian refugees, Mexican workers and of people who fled from civil war in Central America.

This special media attention implies that such events are newsworthy. We also saw that these reports may voice official definitions of such events, for instance by the dominant political groups, the bureaucracies, or other elites. These definitions may again be conveyed to, and accepted by large segments of the public. Thus, in our three examples, a panic among the political and cultural elites soon led to a media panic, which in turn inspired large scale popular resentment. This reaction of the white public to the elite definitions of the ethnic situation was largely fed by existing prejudices and stereotypes about ethnic minorities or (other) Third World peoples, beliefs which again largely developed because of earlier reports about similar or other ‘ethnic events’.

This book examines in detail the ways the white media, and in particular the Press, cover such ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ events. We want to know which of these events are reported in the Press, and which events tend to be ignored, and why. In particular, we examine how such events are reported and what the consequences are of such reporting for the formation or change of the ethnic beliefs of the readers. In other words, this book deals with the Press’s ‘portrayal’ of ethnic minority groups, ethnic relations, and the special role of political or other elites in this communication process. This analysis should give us insight into the role of the media in the maintenance and legitimation of ethnic power relations and, more specifically, in the reproduction of racism in western (or westernized) societies.

A MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

The study of the representation of ethnic minorities in the Press requires a multidisciplinary approach: (1) The enquiry into the role of the Press in the reproduction of racism requires a socio-political analysis. (2) The analysis of news reports needs to be based on recent work on the structures and functions of news discourse. (3) The ways readers understand and memorize such news discourse is a topic that presupposes a cognitive psychological account. (4) The formation and change of ethnic beliefs, attitudes, or ideologies should be studied in the framework of new developments in the study of communication and social cognition. (5) And finally, these various lines of enquiry are to be in turn embedded within the broader framework of the study of racism in the social sciences.

The internal coherence of this multidisciplinary study is provided by a broadly conceived discourse analysis, as outlined below. Such an approach pays attention to the structures of media discourse, to the cognitive, social, and political structures or processes that define their ‘context’, and especially to the multiple relations between text and context. However, owing to space limitations this study focuses on the analysis of the structures and contents of news reports themselves, and only occasionally relates these with their cognitive, societal, political, or cultural contexts. Although we shall also provide some quantitative data of the coverage of ethnic affairs, our discourse analysis goes beyond traditional content analyses by its systematic account of various structures of news reports in the Press.

Many studies of racism focus on general, macro-level, societal or political aspects of racism and neglect the various micro-levels of the actual expressions, manifestations and mechanisms of the reproduction of racism, including the discursive, cognitive and interactional dimensions of ethnic group dominance. As outlined in the theoretical framework sketched in Chapter two, our discourse analysis approach does not aim to replace such macro-approaches, but is meant as a necessary complement to them.

A CRITICAL, ANTI-RACIST PERSPECTIVE

No research is free of norms and values or their implications. This is particularly true in the humanities and the social sciences, where norms and values are themselves objects of analysis. The study of the role of the media in the reproduction of racism is a prominent illustration of such an assertion. At every level of our analysis, we encounter ideologically based beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. This is true both for news reports as well as for our own approach to their analysis and evaluation.

Therefore a thorough scholarly study of the role of the Press in the reproduction of racism can and should also have an important critical dimension. If our data and analyses support the conclusion, already established by much previous research (see below), that at least some Press reports or newspapers, or even the white Press or media in general, contribute to the reproduction of prejudice and racism and the maintenance of ethnic dominance and inequality in society, we shall not hesitate critically to evaluate such a role.

Centuries of experiences of ethnic minority groups, massive legal evidence, as well as a wealth of research have shown that our ‘north-western’ societies still show many forms of institutional and everyday discrimination and racism (see Chapter two for references). However, this book does not intend to prove again what has already been established without any doubt. Rather, it wants to study and explain in detail how racism comes about and how it is perpetuated by the Press, and examine whether there are historical changes, geographical variations, or differences between newspapers in this respect.

Since we also maintain that all forms of racism against Third World peoples in western society are inconsistent with the basic norms and values of our purportedly democratic and pluralistic social order, and a serious threat to the principle of equal rights and justice for all, the anti-racist point of view and aims of this book need no further justification.

RESEARCH FRAMEWORK

This study is part of a larger project, carried out at the University of Amsterdam since the early 1980s, that deals with the relations between discourse and racism. The main assumption guiding this research is that ethnic prejudices or ideologies are predominantly acquired and confirmed through various types of discourse or communication, such as socializing talk in the family, everyday conversations, laws, textbooks, government publications, scholarly discourse, advertising, movies and news reports. Since many of these types of text and talk are formulated by members of various elite groups, and since the elites control the public means of symbolic reproduction, it is further assumed that the reproduction of ethnic ideologies is, at least initially, largely due to their ‘preformulation’ by these elites, which therefore may be seen as the major inspirators and guardians of white group dominance. Our earlier research strongly supports the seemingly bold thesis that a country or society is as racist as its dominant elites are. It is one major aim of this study to provide further support for this thesis.

The interdisciplinary strategy of this earlier research is similar to the one taken in this study of the media. For a specific discourse type, it is first established what is being said or written about ethnic minority groups or about ethnic relations in general. This analysis yields an account of the contents of discourse, namely, in terms of global topics and more local meanings. However, textual analysis pays special attention to how such contents are formulated, that is to style, rhetoric, argumentative or narrative structures or conversational strategies. In conjunction with results of other research about socially shared ethnic prejudices, hypotheses are being formulated about the detailed contents and structures of these prejudices, and how these relate to structures of text and talk. On the basis of these theoretical and empirical analyses, it is finally proposed how white in-group members tend to express and communicate their ethnic attitudes to other members of the group and how such attitudes are spread and shared in society.

Most of this earlier work has been done on high school textbooks and especially on everyday conversation (van Dijk, 1984, 1987a, 1987b). In the study of talk among white group members about ethnic minority groups, it appeared that the media play a vital role in the acquisition and uses of opinions about minority groups. This earlier research also shows that the media convey public knowledge, as well as expressed or implicit opinions, about social groups and events most majority group members have little direct knowledge about. More important, the mass media provide an ideological framework for the interpretation of ethnic events. This framework may also act as a legitimation for prejudices and discrimination against minority groups. Thus, the strategic sentence ‘You read it in the paper every day’ is a well-known move in the argumentative defence of prejudices expressed in conversation.

Another major result of this earlier work on everyday talk among white people is the apparent ambivalence of expressed ethnic opinions. Prejudiced speakers tend to focus on topics or stories that may be interpreted as expressions of negative opinions about minorities. At the same time, however, they are aware of general social norms or laws that prohibit racial discrimination. In general terms, they may even share such liberal principles. At least implicitly, they know that negative talk about minorities may be heard as racist. Therefore, such talk will often be accompanied by disclaimers, that is, by strategic moves of positive self-presentation, as is the case in such well-known formulas as ‘I have nothing against blacks (Turks, etc.), but …’.

It may well be the case that this ambivalence is partly due to the media coverage of ethnic affairs. People on the one hand may read about, and selectively remember, events that they interpret as ‘proving’ the negative characteristics of minority groups. On the other hand, the more liberal media at least also report about cases of discrimination and prejudice. That is, general social norms are not only acquired during socialization or formal education. They are continually reformulated and specified for new social situations, and this happens especially in public discourse, such as news reports, opinion articles, editorials, television programmes, novels or movies.

Thus, if white readers show this kind of ambivalence, it is likely that the same is true for white journalists. Therefore, we should also analyse news reports with the aim of reconstructing the dominant interpretation frameworks for ethnic events among reporters and editors. Such frameworks, if confirmed through other kinds of research into the opinions of news-workers, may in turn explain why media discourse is ambivalent about ethnic affairs, and why an item about ethnic crime may appear side by side with an item about discrimination. Or why during the urban disorders in Great Britain in 1985, editorials in the popular Press may, just like the speakers in conversations recorded in our previous research, say that ‘they have nothing against the black community, but …’. Note, though, that the continued existence of discrimination and racism in western societies shows that the ambivalence may be largely attitudinal and ideological: as soon as real or imaginary competition, interests or conflicts are at stake, the actions of the dominant group may no longer be ambivalent at all.

Within the larger framework of my earlier research on discourse and racism, then, the present study deals with the contents and structures of news discourse, while at the same time analysing their relations with the ethnic attitudes or ideologies of news-makers and the public. Whereas the next chapters focus on the discourse structures of ethnic reporting, the final chapter specifically focuses on the ways readers have ‘processed’ the information and beliefs about a number of ethnic topics reported in the Press. To establish further coherence with the overall research framework, we also pay attention to the general discursive context of the reproduction of racism. That is, we shall occasionally see how other types of discourse, for example, those of the political elites as well as that of the general public, are related to media discourse.

MATERIALS AND RESEARCH PROCEDURES

The materials used for our empirical investigation consist of all types of news discourse that appeared in the British Press during the second part of 1985. Selected were all news reports, background and feature articles, colu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The study of racism and the Press
• 2 Theoretical framework
• 3 Headlines
• 4 Subjects and topics
• 5 News schemata, argumentation and editorials
• 6 Quotations and sources
• 7 Meanings and ideologies
• 8 Style and rhetoric
• 9 The reproduction of news about ethnic affairs
• 10 General conclusions
• Appendix Guidelines on race reporting
• References
• Author index
• Subject index