Legislative Council
MEDIA, CRIME AND POLITICAL EXPRESSION
The Hon. IAN GILFILLAN: The matter of interest that I wish raise today can be titled `Media, Crime and Political Expression', taken from an article, `Telling Stories of Crime in South Australia' by Mark Israel, focusing on events in 1993. The article was published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology in 1998.
I draw members' attention to distortions about crime in Unley in a column written by Mr C. Hackett, an Advertiser journalist, in 1993. The aim of my comments based on the report just released around Hackett's news report is to highlight both the way in which the electronic and print media currently construct crime as news and the way in which this news feeds into local community fears about high levels of crime. What results from this media news is the creation of strong political pressures for a law and order agenda. My account begins with the way Hackett's report of crime in Unley in the Advertiser in 1993 is an example of the media's construction of crime as news and not a reporting of the facts. This becomes clear when it is contrasted with the academic article upon which it was based. That article was written from a survey conducted by Iain Hay, a lecturer in geography at Flinders University of South Australia. This was a geographic survey of levels of fear of violence and the gendered use of space amongst residents in Unley. Hackett wrote his piece in the Advertiser in response to pressure from the Flinders University Public Relations and Information Unit, which said that the rival Courier Messenger was running the story. Hackett based his news piece on Hay's article and the news item was headlined, `Grim nights in a suburb of fear'. The written copy stated that Unley had become a suburb of fear and that dread of violent crime drives people indoors after dark. The political implication of the Advertiser article was that crime was ravaging Unley. It needs to be noted at this stage that the content of the Advertiser's news was quite different from what was said in Hay's article, to the point of distorting what Hay had said. There were two distortions: first, the focus of Hay's article was about the levels of fear about crime and not the level of actual crime. Hay had said that a high level of a fear of crime existed in Unley, despite the lack of increase in the actual crime rates. This left open the cause of the high level of a fear of crime in Unley.Hackett's piece in the Advertiser, however, ignored the distinction between the fear of crime and the actual crime since he collapsed the rates of fear of crime into the rates of reported crime. In effect, Hackett's news report said that the level of actual crime was high.
The second way Hackett distorted Hay's article was when he said that the results of his study in Unley could equally apply to any other suburb in Adelaide. Hay in contrast had explicitly said in bold in his article that the results of this study could not be extrapolated to any other place.
The reading of Hay's report as `grim nights in a suburb of fear' was reinforced by the Courier Messenger's headline graphic that accompanied its piece. Its written article was explicitly about levels of fear of crime with the headline graphic that of a shadowy figure wielding a knife lurking over a man in a suit. It signified high levels of actual crime. Its front page article, spilling over to be incorporated in the `Police Beat' section next to the weekly list of local break-ins, reinforced this reading. So, Unley was constructed as a suburb of fear, where the dread of violent crime drives people indoors after dark.
What is going on here is more than news being influenced by ratings, the need to sell the `info product' or fear being used as one more commodity to be packaged and sold to a passive audience: what we have is the form of news packaged with the content of a politics of crime, which goes under the name of `law and order'. The Advertiser is using the authority of a news report to intervene in the public discussion about crime in the city to say that crime in the middle-class suburb of Unley was awful and out of control, as it was under siege from criminals. This was how others in the public sphere read the report, such as Unley City Council, Flinders University and the Crime Prevention Unit of the Attorney-General's Department. All these stepped into the political discussion in a damage control mode to prevent a moral panic amongst the little old ladies and men of Unley.
Iain Hay gave interviews to local radio stations in order to distance himself and Flinders University from the newspaper reports, but local police were irritated that they had not been asked to respond to a story about crime in their patch. The Crime Prevention Unit of the Attorney-General's Department issued a press release based on a survey of South Australians that had been done six months previously. This health omnibus survey showed that South Australians' own fear of crime had risen in the past year and that this increase was seen by those surveyed as being due to the increased coverage of crime in the electronic and print media.
This story is a sorry saga, and unfortunately I cannot fit all the detail into this Matters of Interest contribution, but it reflects how the media in an irresponsible way can distort the facts of situations and leaves quite devastating consequences of unjustified fear on the public. The PRESIDENT: Order! The honourable member's time has expired.