HELEN BASILI asks whether media sources from ethnic minority groups are treated unfairly in comparison to their white counterparts.

Young people in Sydney’s southwestern suburbs often get a rotten deal when it comes to their portrayal in the mainstream media. Living in some of the poorest and most ethnically diverse areas of the city, they are frequently exposed to harsh scrutiny from journalists.

All the vital ingredients of a ‘great’ news-story are embodied in youth from the southwest: there are elements of exoticism, interethnic conflict, drugs, gangs and violence. Before an audience of hundreds of thousands, their lives are dissected, ritualised and judged like a remote tribe being studied by anthropologists. Their real identities and aspirations and the problems facing them remained neglected. At the end of the day, the journalists get their story and a pat on the back from their editors while the young people are left feeling exploited, marginalised and bitter.

Nobody knows this better than Rose Nakad and Vincent Doan, youth workers in the southwestern suburbs of Wetherill Park and Cabramatta. When it comes to giving interviews to the mainstream media they know all the ropes. Nakad is a Lebanese Australian and Doan a Vietnamese Australian. The fact that both are from ethnic-minority backgrounds, are closely involved with young people and are highly articulate makes them irresistible media sources. "I’m sure the way [journalists] see me is that I’m somebody in between. I speak the language and I can talk to them but I run with the natives so to speak," says Nakad.

Nakad has been interviewed by journalists from SBS television, The Sydney Morning Herald, ABC radio and Juice magazine on issues relating to young people from Sydney’s Arabic-speaking communities. Doan, who works with young Vietnamese people, has been interviewed extensively by journalists from SBS and ABC television and radio, all the commercial television stations, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, local newspapers and foreign publications.

Nakad and Doan are passionate about the rights of young people and are well aware of the real problems they face. Despite the fact that they have learnt some painful lessons along the way, they have continued to engaging with the mainstream media to redress the negative coverage of their clients. Their contact with the media is an ongoing struggle and one in which they cannot afford to be complacent. Journalists are pushing for a ‘newsworthy’ (read sensational bad news) story, while Nakad and Doan are pressing for a calm, measured consideration of the issues effecting young people. "Media, if you know how to use them, become a good weapon to tackle the issues, whatever you want to say. But if you don’t know how to use them it becomes a knife and stabs you in the back," says Doan.

The journalists, for their part, use the prized quality of objectivity as a weapon in the struggle over whose account of the issue wins priority. Media researcher Van Dijk in her book Racism and the Press noted that spokespeople from ethnic minority groups are considered by journalists to be partisan and therefore less credible, whereas white authority figures are assumed to be ethnically neutral. It is a contradiction that Nakad is well aware of: "There’s a few Lebanese women or Arabic women [in positions of power]. They can’t be ‘Arabic’ so to speak, because that’s seen as being unobjective. So somebody who’s a journalist or a judge or whatever can be white, can represent the mainstream, because they’re still going to be objective somehow, because they are ‘normal’," she says.

It is because of assumptions like these that spokespeople from ethnic minority groups receive limited coverage in comparison to their white counterparts. It is a pervasive, insidious form of media racism, which is far more dangerous than outright name-calling. Australian media educator, Eric Loo, examined the news coverage of the murder of Cabramatta MP John Newman. He found that the Daily Telegraph Mirror favoured sources such as Bruce Ruxton, Ron Casey and John Laws who linked ethnicity and crime in Cabramatta. Similarly, when Channel 9’s A Current Affair covered the issue they gave five minutes airtimes to Australians Against Further Immigration (AAFI) and less than one minute to four Vietnamese sources critical of AAFI’s stance.

Although both Nakad and Doan have had some success in getting their message across in the mainstream media, they were able to point out a number of occasions when the most crucial part of their message was heavily edited or omitted altogether. Several years ago, a Sydney Morning Herald journalist who was writing a series of articles on the 5T’s triad interviewed Doan based at Cabramatta. Tri Minh Tran, the 21 year-old alleged leader of the 5T’s had just been shot dead in his flat. Doan was keen to ensure that the concept of ‘Cabramatta gangs’ was not sensationalised. He wanted to demystify people’s ideas about gangs and to explain why some young Vietnamese congregated in groups.

"To me, gangs are more like a group of people who have to get together because they need to. Regarding the kids in Cabramatta, they need to group together because they need to survive on the streets. Nobody gives them any money, nobody gives them any support, there’s no home, there’s nothing... I guess naturally, in order to survive, they need to do something and unfortunately what they do is what we call criminal activities. Gangs do happen in Cabramatta but they don’t happen in the way people think," says Doan.

Despite assurances from the journalist, Doan said that the articles were indeed sensational focusing on drugs, money, death and power. The inequities and deprivations, which lead to young people grouping together in so-called ‘gangs’, remained unapprised. There were also some important questions about Tri Minh Tran, whom Doan had been acquainted with, that were neglected.

"If his gang is so powerful, then how people can get into his door and knock on the door and kill him straight away like that? He would have security people, he would have people to look after him and not living in a flat and you open the flat and there is no furniture, he sleeps on the floor. So how powerful is he? What money is he making out of the gangs? What sort of things are the gangs doing to make money then?," says Doan.

Nakad’s message was completely lost when she was interviewed for the SBS program Insight. None of the footage from her interview was used as her message was not congruent with the angle of the program which, according to Nakad "ended up fetishising one of the young [Arabic-speaking] women as a female hip-hopper and a rapper with a hijab on."

When the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s National Inquiry into Racist Violence reported in 1991 it noted that a frequent complaint about media coverage of ethnic minority groups was that the focus was generally on negative, inflammatory events. The antidote is not necessarily the inclusion of more positive stereotypes either. Media theorist Andrew Jacubowicz and his colleagues at the University of Technology, Sydney, view positive stereotypes as a simplistic response to the problem of negative coverage. They say that to really challenge the problem, ethnic minority groups must be given opportunities to attain positions in the media where they can decide how they should be covered.

Nakad is also wary of the use of positive stereotypes. "Even positive news stories can position people outside the margins," she says. She explains that a success story about a young Vietnamese person is only considered newsworthy because there is a general assumption that "most of them are scum".

Doan, however, has decided to manipulate this ‘bad news paradigm’ to his client’s advantage. Last year, Doan became concerned about the publication of a photograph of a 13 year-old injecting heroin in the Sydney suburb of Redfern. He felt that, as a result of the controversy surrounding the photograph, the needle and syringe exchange program in Cabramatta would be closed down. He rang a journalist from The Sun Herald and struck a deal. Doan agreed to provide the journalist with access to three teenagers who were using the Cabramatta needle and syringe exchange program and could explain the benefits of the program. In return, he asked the journalist to write another article about three young people who were attempting to give up drugs and to explain why this was so difficult for them. Both articles were published and Doan was reasonably pleased with the outcome.

Nakad and Doan have become more discerning about which journalists they speak to, as they become more media-savvy. Before agreeing to an interview they question the journalist about the proposed content of the article and what angle they intend to take. If they are satisfied with what the journalist has to say, they proceed with the interview.

Despite these precautions, Nakad and Doan acknowledge that once the interview is finished, they lose control over the process. "Later on you don’t know how they cut it, how they edit it and how they process the information you give. So when a journalist sits down to write their story...they’re going to have their own idea of what they want or what their editor wants and they’re easily not going to use the things that you think need to be said," says Nakad.

Doan has similar feelings: "At the end of the day, when you see an article in the newspaper or things on the TV, some things you are surprised that...what you have been told by the journalist or the reporter, the whole thing has been turned upside down. When you contact those people who interviewed you their answer is ‘it’s out of my control’," he says.

Nakad and Doan can hardly be described as passive media sources. Both of them are extremely knowledgeable about how the mainstream media works and are actively working within these limitations for the benefit of young people in their communities. Their approaches differ with Nakad now focusing her energies on teaching young people in Sydney’s southwest to create and manipulate their own media images and Doan continuing to work directly with the media to give them an accurate account of ethnic minority young people in Cabramatta.

Nakad feels disenchanted by her experiences as a source with the mainstream media. She is increasingly feeling that interacting directly with the media is somewhat futile and has difficulty accepting the mainstream media and its inherent power structure. Doan, on the other hand, views the mainstream media more dispassionately. "We need them anyway, we need them in our life so whether I like them or hate them it’s just a fact of life. If I think that I have an opportunity to use them in some way to bring the benefit back to the community, particularly those kids in Cabramatta, I’ll do it," he says.

Doan is always prepared for the possibility that journalists may misrepresent him. To minimise the likelihood of this, he consciously borrows a tactic he has learnt from watching politicians being interviewed by journalists: "See how the politicians talk! They stick to what they want to say. They don’t give a shit what you are asking. If they want to say it, they want to say it. They say it, they repeat it, and it doesn’t matter what the question is. That’s exactly what we have to learn to deal with the media."