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

[杉森 典子]

Hi everyone,

Thank you Linnea for starting the discussion on Teo's
paper. I wrote the following response before receiving
Linnea's thoughs on this paper. So I will write it anyway,
and I will respond to her soon.

Teo’s article was informative, but two questions also
came to my mind. Reading his article has given me a good
opportunity to think about how we can write stronger
papers.

The main topic in Teo’s paper is about the 5T, a gang of
young Vietnamese drug dealers in Australia. Teo compared
the texts of two newspaper articles regarding conflicts
between this gang and the police (one article from The
Sydney Morning Herald and one from The Daily Telegraph).
He found that one article described the police more
assertively than the other, and he analyzed in detail why
such differences exist. I think that he would have made a
stronger argument if he had compared articles published on
the same date or dates that were closer together. He
compared articles that were published almost three months
apart. Therefore, it is possible that the relationship
between the police and the 5T was really different, rather
than the way the newspapers described their conflict being
different. According to the list of articles on this topic
(Table 1), these two newspapers published articles on this
topic on the same day: August 8, 1995. I wish I could read
Teo
’s analyses on these articles.

Teo argues that racism is operative in reporting
Vietnamese immigrants in Australian newspapers in general.
I also think that is plausible. He argues that the
emphasis on the  young ages of the 5T gang reflects
racism. I wonder if, regardless of race, drug dealings by
young teens would make the news. I also wonder if there
are teenaged drug dealers of other races in Australia. Teo
could make his argument stronger if he compared news
reports of such different populations.

Teo admits limitations of his paper, and researchers
encounter always limitations. Reading this article was a
good learning experience. Members, I look forward to
hearing your response to this paper.

Regards,

Noriko


--- Linnea Micciulla <polyglot at BU.EDU> からのメッセージ
：
> 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

Noriko Sugimori
20 Chestnut Street #204, Cambridge, MA 02139
tel & fax 617-494-6497
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