Teo: Racism in the news, Discourse & Society 11(1)

[Linnea Micciulla]

Hello everyone,

I ended up not contacting Peter Teo, but here are my thoughts on the article:

In general, I thought it was thought-provoking and fairly thorough.  There
were some analyses, however, that were not convincing for me.  For example,
"Even a casual glance at the headlines summarized in Table 2 points to a
motif of violence suggested by the lexical choices used in the
headlines...The lexical choices betray an explicit association of the 5T
with serious crimes like 'murder' and 'drug deals'." (p. 15).  The author
seems to be implying that there should *not* be an explicit connection
between the gang and these crimes, but as far as I can tell from the article
this gang did/does deal drugs and commit murder.  Is his argument that only
some of the gang member sell drugs, and that the association between the
gang and drugs should not be generalized to the entire gang?  If so, it
would make his argument clearer if he said so directly.  It would also be
helpful to suggest other lexical choices - such as changing "Street gang's
culture of murder" to something like "5T leader is victim of fatal shooting"
.  I see the racism inherent in associating "Vietnamese" with "drugs" but
it's harder for me to make that connection when talking about associating a
street gang with drugs.

There were some assumptions that didn't have enough support. Teo states, "In
sum, we see how the active choices made in the way newspaper headlines,
leads and captions are couched can have a very powerful ideological effect
on readers' perception and interpretation of people and events."  (p. 16).
This is a rather bold claim, since he doesn't report any actual perceptions
of any actual readers - it's simply what he imagines their perception might
be, based on the syntax and lexical choices of the article.  (It would
certainly be a fascinating study to investigate the ideological effect on
readers.)  Likewise, there are several references to the intents of the
journalists, ie. "it is fairly obvious that the intention behind these
explicit references to age is not only to provide factual information but to
orient the readers' perception..." (p. 21) that require more explanation -
how does he know what the writer intended?  I also don't see the support for
the claim "...the prevalent attitude towards the 'ethnics' as expressed by
newspapers seems to be: if they want to live here, they must adapt to *our*
culture..." (p. 41).  I think he is likely to be correct in these
assumptions, but they need to be supported in order to be convincing.

I thought the distinction between objective reporting of events (OE) and
evaluative reporting of events (EE) was intriguing, and potentially very
useful.  I think this distinction is still pretty subjective, though; I did
not initially agree with his coding of paragraphs [32], [33] and [34] as EE.
 Perhaps these could be used more fruitfully if more than one person codes
the text, or with clearer guidelines for each category.  I also liked the
analysis of the headlines showing intertextuality, and the generalization,
quotation and over-lexicalization sections were quite good.

Linnea