The Stories We're Sold

The Stories We're Sold

Any news outlet will promulgate a particular set of stories and demote others. Whether it is small scale and harmless, or targets whole groups, religions or communities of people, over time the outcome can be devastating.

Media is the plural of medium: “one of the means or channels of general communication, information, or entertainment in society, such as newspapers, radio, or television, that influence people widely.” Some subjectivity is inherent in any medium. In print media, the editor selects which articles go to print and then arranges them in the manner they see fit. Indeed, as the circulation of print media becomes more and more obsolete in our daily habits, the decisions made by the editor and their assistants may well become more wide-ranging, honing the content to suit their target audience.

The Student Identity
When a small number of students burn couches, the newspapers view students as a homogenous group, with headlines that proclaim “Students At It Again” collectivising us into 19,000 arsonists. The reason behind this is simple yet effective. It is to vilify a minority in order to gain readership and circulation of the publication among the majority, in this case locals. The infamous stories of student behaviour, especially in relation to Orientation and Hyde Street, perpetuate the campaign against the group and prompt emotive responses from locals, in turn spurring newspaper sales.

Earlier this year, Jessica Richards, a second-year law and politics student at Otago University, was photographed by the Otago Daily Times “passed-out” in the streets of Dunedin — except she had not passed out at all. Speaking last week, Jessica said she had only had a “few drinks at the flat then decided to go to town. On the way to town, along Frederick Street … I tripped over. I was having fun and mucking about! It was completely harmless and I remember it all!” After becoming the picture-girl of university debauchery, Jessica felt “embarrassed and awful, like I had done something wrong, like I was a bad student...when really all that happened was I fell over.”

Jessica discovered the picture after it was posted online. Thankfully she was able to convince the paper to remove the photo, but she recognised that “if they hadn’t taken it down, it may have been a problem for [my] future employment opportunities.” One would hope the photographer would have checked on Jessica’s state in order to verify how intoxicated she was, both to validate the story and to check she was okay.
In a recent interview with The Wireless, Vice-Chancellor Professor Harlene Hayne said she does “find some media are on the hunt for stories about bad student behaviour.” During her tenure, she has continued measures implemented by the previous Vice-Chancellor, David Skegg, to counter-act the perception of students as drunken, hedonistic and debauched. The media practice of not presenting the full story to readers is another problem Hayne has identified as part of why the university is seen as troublesome. She stated, “Some of the mayhem is not caused by students, but by others. Rarely do journalists confirm that the perpetrators of particular events are actually students, and often they are not.”

When asked about the ODT’s portrayal of bad student behaviour, ODT editor, Murray Kirkness, said, “certainly we want to sell as many papers as we can, and we don’t make any bones about that. The difficulty that we face is that there are so many forums by which people access their news.” He went on to say: “There is a realisation that if we don’t sell enough newspapers that has consequences.” But he also added: “If you put it into some context and publish 310 newspapers a year … how many feature students misbehaving?”

The Muslim Story
The story we get from mainstream media about Islam is likewise partial. Head of Department for Media and Communications, Associate Professor Vijay Devadas said, “Something negative is more newsworthy. Positive things have been happening for a long time, such as robust and engaging interfaith dialogues and movements to tackle stereotyping, but that is not news.” The fact this occurs through the messages being promulgated in the media acutely influences public perspectives on key issues involving the Islamic community.

Many news outlets construct subtle messages that demonise and scapegoat the religion while at the same time neglecting to cover stories that show the religion or its followers in a positive light. It is human nature to be wary of people who believe something different to you, and the media can prey on that wariness to increase their circulation figures. For example, consider the abhorrent killings of three Islamic students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on 10 February this year. An atheist, who declared his reason was to avenge Islam for the insult it had caused him, committed the act. Coverage of this event from Western news outlets was appallingly less than that given to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity in Paris, which occurred in early January. The lack of coverage led many Islamic communities to protest on the streets of their towns and cities, holding placards stating, “Muslim Lives Matter Too.”

Those who watched or read coverage of the Chapel Hill attack may have picked up on the description of the perpetrator. He was referred to as the “murderer” or the “killer”, but interestingly enough, never the “terrorist”. Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.” This definition fits almost perfectly what Craig Stephen Hicks did when he shot the three students in cold blood due to ideological differences. The word is selectively used to the point that the head of BBC Arabic no longer wants the term used. The BBC’s editorial guidelines say: “The word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.”

Who Makes The News>
When stories that aid certain agendas are printed in favour of more balanced, truthful and unprejudiced news stories, the public is betrayed by the industry. Associate Professor Vijay Devadas said, “[I] think it is brutally ideological, that the people who run the media are actually committed to a practice of discrimination and demonisation.” While news outlets need to make money in order to survive, and may be justified in appealing to the audiences’ needs and wants to do so, the plugging of agendas is completely unjustified. Malcolm X once stated: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

A key individual to pinpoint in relation to this subject is Rupert Murdoch, who owns NewsCorp. According to The Conversation, NewsCorp “account[s] for 59 per cent of the sales of all [Australia’s] daily newspapers, with sales of 17.3 million papers a week, making it Australia’s most influential newspaper publisher by a considerable margin.” Moreover, his company gives him a huge amount of influence, and this does not just extend to the shores of our Australasian neighbours. NewsCorp is a media giant with an asset list of hundreds of newspapers, including some of the world’s largest circulated newspapers, such as the Sun, The Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

Devadas believes that the domination of media by one man is concerning: “Any monopoly of the media is terrible because … if the media is seen as a stage for democratic rights to be expressed, and debates to take place, then Rupert Murdoch has no business owning so many per cent of the media in Australia.” Indeed, the power that comes from owning large swathes of the print media in a country is clear. For example, Murdoch was able to exert significant influence in the election of Tony Blair to prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1997, as well as throughout Blair’s ten-year tenure.

Communications took place between Blair and Murdoch three times in the ten days leading up to the controversial invasion of Iraq — this was disclosed when Gordon Brown took over as prime minister. A Freedom of Information request by a Liberal Democrat peer, Lord Avebury, was the catalyst for their disclosure and, according to the Guardian, he said: “Rupert Murdoch has exerted his influence behind the scenes on a range of policies on which he is known to have strong views, including the regulation of broadcasting and the Iraq war. The public can now scrutinise the timing of his contacts with the former prime minister, to see whether they can be linked to events in the outside world.”

Clandestine communication between a media mogul and the prime minister must surely raise the eyebrows of even the most fervent supporters of the government. Two people who hold a considerable amount of power discussing events in such proximity to the illegal invasion of a country must be looked back on and criticised publicly.

Finding Our Voices
So what can be done to counter this rotten machine that plays such a prominent role in our daily lives? We can do one of two things: firstly, we can go along with it, with our silence implying approval of both the message and the manner in which the message is communicated. On the other hand, we can attempt to use the technology at our fingertips to flood the world with more articulate, balanced and sensible prose, prose that does not unjustifiably target a minority in order to boost sales. As young people, we have a duty to attempt to stamp out these practices both among our peers and also among the industry that promulgates such agendas. Write knowledgeable blogs, call out the media for getting it wrong, express informed views on Twitter, post educated messages on Facebook, and use all of the resources available to help change the status-quo. These platforms provide ample opportunity to change the face of media and journalism.

The power of the media is such that they play a huge role in what people think about a certain subject and can influence the position of local and international decisions. The propensity for this influence to be abused is worrying, as much of the time it is subtle. This needs to be challenged not only by the young journalists of the future but by everyone.
This article first appeared in Issue 5, 2015.
Posted 5:43pm Sunday 22nd March 2015 by Joseph Higham.