TV news not playing fair on ethnic diversity

Comment news by Gail Phillips, Associate Professor of Journalism

Australia's television news media aren’t playing fair when it comes to the representation of ethnic minorities.

While ethnic groups have from time to time complained about how they are portrayed, they could offer no hard evidence to back up their case.

Now the most comprehensive survey to date on the way people from different ethnic backgrounds are represented in television news and current affairs provides clear evidence that journalism practice leaves a lot to be desired.

Since 2005, Murdoch University has been the lead institution in the cross-institutional Reporting Diversity research project.

Funded by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship under its Living in Harmony program, Murdoch’s Associate Professor Gail Phillips and scholars from UniSA, University of Canberra, University of Western Sydney, and Griffith University have been scrutinising the portrayal of ethnic minorities in Australian media.

Associate Professor Phillips has conducted two content analyses of nightly television news in 2005 and 2007, and has just completed a study of television current affairs.

These studies show the nightly news and current affairs programs present a world markedly different from that encountered by most Australians in their daily lives.

Instead of the diversity reflective of a modern multicultural society, we see mainly Anglo faces and ethnic minorities are rarely represented as a ‘normal’ part of Australian society.

Instead they tend to feature only when there is a specific story about them, and most of these stories show them in a negative light.

In the league table of good practice emerging from these recent studies, SBS is the clear leader, followed by the ABC, with channel Ten coming third.

Channels Seven and Nine are the worst offenders, especially in their nightly current affairs programs (Today Tonight on Seven and A Current Affair on Nine).

They appear to ignore their own Commercial Television Code of Practice which exhorts journalists to give expression to Australia’s cultural and ethnic diversity and to avoid placing gratuitous emphasis on national or ethnic origin.

Demographic studies have shown ethnic minorities in Australia are turning off television news as they don’t see it as relevant to their world.

The ‘Anglo-centrism’ of news could well be contributing to the flow of audiences away from news programs.

In this case changing journalistic practices could bring commercial dividends.