Mediatized Conflict

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IDENTITY POLITICS AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE | 173 parliamentarian presuppositions concerning the public elaborations of reason and debate and the formation of public opinions and consensus – indispensable as these may be. We also need to attend to the media’s more expressive capacities; its aesthetic and emotional appeals and ritual forms of communication (see Chapters 4 and 7). Here visualized histories and her-stories, dramatized narratives, experiential accounts and emotive testimonies can also contribute to the cultural valorization of different ways of being and how different people make sense of themselves and others in the world (Smith 1979; Campbell 1987; Bird 1990; Corner 1995; Dahlgren 1995; Cottle and Rai 2006). When enacted in the mediasphere the politics of recognition is variously performed in established communicative modes of deliberation and display. Whereas the former is based on the circulation of information, reasoned accounts, rational arguments, investigation, discussion and debate, the latter communicates by the presentation of image and visualization, narratives of self and collective discovery, stories of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, and dramatized re-enactments as well as expressive and aesthetic appeals. Journalism, as we shall see, communicates by both these modes of ‘deliberation’ and ‘display’ and thereby can infuse the mediatized politics of recognition with claims and arguments as well as expressive and moral force. These communicative complexities, however, have yet to be properly acknowledged and researched. To help illustrate something of these complexities of mediatization and as a way of opening up to view the more progressive possibilities that inhere within some mainstream forms of journalism, the following demonstrates how television journalism has sometimes repositioned former Others – indigenous people, asylum seekers and refugees, terrorism suspects, victims of war and famine – as human subjects demanding wider recognition, respect and political response. For the purposes of this discussion we focus on the medium of television, though press journalism is also capable of performatively championing, as well as publicly denigrating, Others, whether incarcerated asylum seekers or impoverished and politically abused Aboriginal people (see Images 9.1 and 9.2). <strong>Mediatized</strong> recognition, symbolic rehabilitation and the Other Many governments across recent years have developed particularly harsh, some would say punitive, regimes designed to reverse the flows of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who are looking for sanctuary and new opportunities for themselves and their families. Australia’s record is particularly noteworthy given the extraordinary lengths to which the Liberal (conservative) government of John Howard has gone in incarcerating men, women and children in ‘detention centres’ in the Australian desert or remote islands before returning them, often after many years, to their countries of origin and charging them with the costs of their own incarceration. In its enthusiasm to detain and deport ‘illegal immigrants’ the Australian government has also wrongly incarcerated and deported mentally ill Australian citizens.
174 | MEDIATIZED CONFLICT Image 9.1 The Age, 16 April 2005 (© The Age 2005/Michael Gordon. Photos: Michael Gordon/The Age Photo Sales). There is little doubt that the Australian media, like many media in western countries, have tended to perform a less than independent and critical role in the mediatized politics surrounding refugees and asylum seekers or, to use the Australian government’s preferred term, ‘illegal immigrants’. There are strong grounds to suggest that John Howard’s election victory of 2001 was snatched from defeat by playing the ‘race card’, specifically by media-circulated claims – that we now know to have been untrue – that ‘boat people’ had deliberately thrown their children overboard in order to be picked up by the Australian Navy to gain entry to Australia (Marr and Wilkinson 2004). Many Boat People had drowned in the perilous journey from South East Asia and elsewhere to Australia, and those that managed to make it to Australian waters became interred in detention centres deliberately cited in remote locations including the islands of Nauru off-shore (see Image 9.1). Not all the Australian media, however, have reproduced the government’s preferred symbolic representation of ‘illegal immigrants’ as a collective Other or endorsed their discursive reification as an undesirable and indivisible threat confronting Australian culture and way of life. Some television programmes sought to get behind governmentled headlines and give image and even identity to the normally invisible Other of the news, visualizing their human plight and documenting the injustices that strict policies
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Mediatized Conflict

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