Global Perspectives
"We Need More Positive Stories": Western Australian Community Perspectives Concerning News Media Representations of People Seeking Asylum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ashleigh L Haw
In Australia, the issue of people seeking asylum has received widespread media attention, attracting considerable debate at both the political and community level. For people who oppose refugee resettlement in Australia, asylum seekers are routinely constructed as illegal immigrants (Every and Augoustinos, 2008; Pedersen, et al, 2006; Clyne, 2005; Klocker 2004; Pickering, 2001), queue-jumpers (Markus and Dharmalingam, 2014; Augoustinos and Every, 2007; Pedersen, et al, 2005), and economic migrants (Saxton, 2003; Pickering, 2001). While limited, there is some empirical evidence to suggest that similar discourses are pervasive in Australian news content about asylum seekers, often mirroring political discourses that serve to justify exclusionary or punitive policies for managing asylum seekers (e.g. McKay, et al, 2011; Saxton, 2003). While some Australian research has focused on media discourses about people seeking asylum, no prior studies have explored community perspectives on how asylum seekers are portrayed by the Australian news media. This paper discusses the findings of research utilising Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995) combined with Hall’s Audience Reception Theory (1993) to examine the perceptions of a sample Western Australians regarding news representations of people seeking asylum. The key discourses uncovered were concerned with negativity, sensationalism, and a lack of transparency in Australian news reports surrounding asylum seekers. These discourses are discussed with emphasis on the wider implications from both a research and policy perspective.
In a Mediated Age: Migrant and Host Culture Perceptions and Expectations
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mary Ellen Schiller
This paper, focusing on recent and current migration events, begins with the wide acknowledgement that mass media, especially news media, are the dominant sources of the material from which individuals and groups construct their social realities. This remains firm, even in the face of the expansion of social media, which largely offer users affirmation and confirmation of existent beliefs, rather than prompt the formation of new ones. For both migrants and residents of host/receiving countries and communities, perceptions of what to expect are formed well ahead of the parties having personal contact with one another, and are framed largely by mass media reports. Historic and current literature on the portrayal of migrants across the mass media spectrum, the recurrent motifs and images of the narratives, reports of the lived experiences of migrants recently settled in unfamiliar cultural contexts, reports of the lived experiences of members of host/receiving communities, and the ways in which media-influenced expectations held by both have been confirmed or nullified are all examined.
