Ian Law

Race in the news

Acknowledgements - Introduction - Conceptualising and Evaluating Racism in Media Representation - British News: The Great Anti-Racist Show? - Bashing the Bias: Rape, Migration and Naming - Anti-racism and the News - Citizenship, Positive Action and the News - Conclusion - References - Index

Modernity, Anti-Racism and Ethnic Managerialism

Abstract This article situates racism and anti‐racism within the tensions which are inherent in the complex of ideas defined as modernity. The ‘modernist’ approach to issues of racism and ethnicity, with all its pitfalls, is particularly evident in governance strategies in the 1990s with an emphasis on finding managerial solutions to complex political and social questions. The ambiguous and contested conceptualisations of ‘racial equality’ and the failure to adequately construct the idea of ‘difference’ within the idea of ‘equality’ characterise such strategies. The assessment of equality of treatment and outcome against the ‘white norm’ is a fundamental flaw. Allied to these issues are an unjustified faith in rational bureaucratic procedures which fail to take into account relative positions of power and powerlessness across ethnic groups and within public services. These issues are exemplified through analysis of the operation of ‘ethnic managerialism’ in two organisational contexts; the Benefits Agency...

Positive Action, Particularism, and Practice

This article provides an analysis of conceptual and operational issues surrounding racerelated positive action strategies in Britain and connects these with broader concerns about difference and universality. Two case studies - of developments in housing and in media representation - are examined to asses the extent, nature and impact of positive action strategies. Here limited success of old-style positive action is shown in relation to programme goals. Our evaluation is exploratory and there is a need to develop further research and an effective evaluation methodology. The paper then looks beyond the immediate successes and limitations of positive action strategies, to consider the implications of increasing recognition of differentiation, and increasingly particularistic claims, in a context of ethnic and experiential diversity. Positive action strategies are by no means unproblematic in a climate where there are pressures to respond to differences of culture, gender, age, ethnicity, impairment or sexual orientation. Universalistic programmes and standards retain considerable merit in such a context, and the fit between these and positive action strategies may be crucial. In addition, attention to organizational goals and needs, organizational change and the compelling interest to actively respond to continuing patterns of discrimination are highlighted as key issues for the practice agenda.

Bashing the Bias: Rape, Migration and Naming

The news media, particularly the press, selectively repeat, rework and reinvent a simple pattern of key racist messages which have ‘helped to build a respectable, coherent, common-sense whiteness’ (Gabriel, 1998:188)

Anti-Racism and the News

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the meaning of Anti-Racism and the nature, extent and implications of Anti-Racism in news reporting. The primary focus here is British news, but a series of questions about the extent to which USne ws either denies or highlights racism, racial discrimination and ethnic diversity are also raised. In Chapter 2, about three-quarters of race-related news items were identified as broadly presenting an Anti-Racist message. Anti-Racism has been defined rather narrowly and a-historically in the British context (Law, 1996), particularly through its linkage to municipal Anti-Racism in the 1980s. The term is used here, in a wider sense, to refer to media frames (Wolfsfeld, 1997) which seek to expose and criticise racist attitudes, statements, actions and policies, which address the concerns of immigrant and minority ethnic groups and show their contribution to British society, and which embrace an inclusive view of multicultural British identity. It has been established that media coverage of race issues in the British news has undergone a substantial shift in the last decade moving in many ways to become an ‘Anti-Racist show’. The dominance of racist discourse, particularly in the press, in the 1980s has been replaced by a more ambivalent set of news messages, many of which contain and exhibit a preoccupation with exposing racism. This trend has run parallel to marked continuities in the transmission and reproduction of racist messages, which were demonstrated in Chapter 3.

Conceptualising and Evaluating Racism in Media Representation

Race has been a newsworthy topic of particular interest in Britain, Western Europe and the USA for over two hundred and fifty years.The news media have, over this time, been a key site for the representation of ideas about racialised groups, providing a mass of speculation, commentary and information. This cultural archive provides an immense store of knowledge, values and images that have assisted in the maintenance and reproduction of both racist and Anti–Racist ideas, which fuse in both historical and contemporary forms of racial ambivalence.

British News:The ‘Great Anti-Racist Show’?

In a recent account of the sociology of journalism, Brian McNair claims that ‘racism is dying’ and that racists are ‘increasingly isolated, finding no endorsement of their views from the media’ (1998: 31). As this chapter will show, McNair is tragically wrong. The extent to which news media continue to shape the process of racialisation in a variety of terrains, particularly those of crime, social pathology, migration and both normative and progressive whiteness requires careful scrutiny. The capacity for renewal of hostile news messages about groups who are positioned outside the white nation by news producers is regularly demonstrated year after year. Running alongside this significant core of racial hostility and migrant animosity is a parallel set of news stories which counterpose and document an undeniable message of social inclusion, opposition to racism and a vision of racial justice. The nature, scope and extent of these opposing news themes is the focus of this and subsequent chapters.