Peter Jackson: The tragedy of Australia's black fistic idol

Jim Corbett v Peter Jackson

Australia's greatest ever boxer Peter Jackson never forgot his first defeat. Years later on his deathbed in Roma in Western Queensland, Jackson discussed the matter at great length with his doctor Guy L’Estrange. That loss to Bill Farnan in 1884 in Melbourne was Australia’s first heavyweight fight with gloves. Jackson was already a famous and feared fighter and expected to win, despite carrying a leg injury. But Farnan beat him in three rounds.

We don’t know what rundown Jackson gave L’Estrange about the Farnan fight on his deathbed in 1901, tragically aged just 40. But there is evidence foul play was involved. In in its eulogy for Jackson, the boxing magazine The Referee published the suggestion Jackson was nobbled in the fight and had been “given a dose”.

Despite, or perhaps because of this grievance, the loss spurred Jackson onto greater things. Born in Christiansted on the island of St Croix in what was then the Danish West Indies (and is now the American Virgin Islands) in 1861, this black kid from the Caribbean found himself in the strange world of Sydney aged 16 and standing six feet tall. He was gentle and easy going and didn’t like a fight. But his weakness for food led him to Larry Foley’s Hotel. Larry Foley was one of Australia’s first boxing champions who was undefeated at bare-knuckle fighting. He liked the look of Jackson and tried him out in the back shed. Foley gave Jackson a job and the training he needed in ringcraft.

Jackson became as good as his mentor in bare-knuckle and would sometimes fight with his right arm bound. Four months after the Farnan loss, the pair held a rematch. The bout was indecisive with police stopping the fight in the sixth round after spectators stormed the ring. Farnan retained his title by default but lost it to Tom Lees two years later in 1886. Jackson beat Lees later that year to take the title. Foley gave him a special belt to celebrate the win, now in the possession of a Sydney based collector.

Having conquered Australia, Jackson went off to take on the best in the world in America. He arrived in 1888 and started with an 18 round victory over Black Canadian George Godfrey. Godfrey had previously tried to fight John L Sullivan but after Sullivan became world champion, he refused to fight black boxers. Jackson would run into the same problem with Sullivan - he would not “lower himself to fight a nigger” - and Jackson left frustrated for England.

Jackson chalked up two years of victories in England and returned to the US hoping to get another chance to take on the champion. But Sullivan still would not get in the ring with a black man and turned Jackson down. Instead, Jackson fought Sullivan’s main contender, Gentleman Jim Corbett. Jackson was five years Corbett’s senior and was ill for ten days before the fight in May 1891 and had a sprained ankle. Yet Jackson and Corbett slogged it out for 61 rounds for an energy sapping draw with most observers saying Corbett had the worst of it.

Though Corbett would later go on to defeat Sullivan and become world champion, it was the Jackson fight he remembered best in the biography The Roar of the Crowd. “That night I thought Peter Jackson was a great fighter. Six months later still tired from the fight, I thought him a greater one. I still maintain he was the greatest fighter I have ever seen.”

But Jackson would never lift the world crown. After the Corbett draw he went back to England and defeated the snarling Australian-Irish fighter Paddy Slavin to lift the British and Commonwealth titles in a difficult bout. The pair had bad blood since Sydney days and they still hated each other intensely. In the eighth round Slavin broke Jackson’s rib and a splinter punctured a lung. In intense pain, Jackson seemed beaten but rallied in the tenth to take control of the fight and pounded Slavin to pieces. The referee insisted the fight continue until Slavin was knocked out but the damage was fatal to Jackson.

The punctured lung never repaired and Jackson went on a downhill spiral. He was forced to appear in vaudeville, giving boxing exhibitions in circuses and as Jeff Rickert and Raymond Evans said about him in “Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History”, acting as a grey-wigged Uncle Tom in stage performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Suffering from tuberculosis, his last fight was against the powerful Jim Jeffries in 1898 and Jeffries knocked him out in five rounds.

Though Jackson always retained Danish citizenship, it was to Australia he returned in 1899, his career in ruins. He trained fighters in Sydney for a time but his TB worsened. On the advice of doctors, he retired to the dry heat of Roma, a shadow of the giant he once was. He died on July 13, 1901 at Argyle Cottage a privately run sanatorium which was later demolished to make way for the southern end of Roma’s airstrip. Dr L’Estrange put the cause of death of the “retired pugilist” as pulmonary phthisis exhaustion.

Jackson was due to be buried at Roma but there was a last minute change of plan. Another black West Indian boxer, Jack Dowridge from Barbados, who fought under the label of the Black Diamond, sent a telegram asking for the body to be sent by train to Brisbane. Jackson’s casket was escorted to Roma Railway Station by a band with a procession of sporting bodies and dignatories. In Brisbane, the procession went from Dowridge’s Hotel to Toowong Cemetery where he was buried in an unmarked grave.

Dowridge, with the help of several journalists and Jackson’s former coach Foley began to raise funds for a Jackson memorial. After a public subscription, Sydney mason Lewis Page carved a dazzling white Carrara marble monument over Jackson’s grave with an image that looks nothing like Jackson. The inscription repeats what Shakespeare’s Antony said about Julius Caesar “This was a man”.

But the best tribute was paid by Jack Johnson, an uppity black boxer from Galveston, Texas who achieved what was denied Jackson. On Boxing Day 1908, a white Australian crowd in Sydney was stunned when he defeated Canadian Tommy Burns to become the world’s first black heavyweight champion. A few weeks later he went to Brisbane and Dowridge took him to visit Jackson’s grave in Toowong. A.E. Austin of the Brisbane Courier said the living champion spent a quiet few moments in silent contemplation at the grave of his brother-in-arms. “It was an impressive sight to see the living gladiator kneeling for a moment over the tomb of he who was Australia’s fistic idol”, Austin wrote.

Eatock v Bolt :The stories of the nine plaintiffs – Part 1

The stories of the nine plaintiffs have been lost in the outpouring of emotion for and against the racial discrimination judgement against fact-free columnist Andrew Bolt. One of the nine, Graham Atkinson, said in court that Bolt’s articles reduced Aborigines “to that invisible group of people that government policies or government authorities tried to create in the past”. It is not just Bolt who makes them invisible. The Aboriginal plaintiffs continue to be written out of the argument that has followed the controversial case. Regardless of what you think the implications are for free speech, Eatock v Bolt offered the chance for nine Aboriginal people to tell their stories. When the dust finally settles, they will emerge as the most haunting and most illuminating part of Judge Bromberg‘s 149-page judgement.

Anita Heiss
According to Bolt, Anita Heiss's choices were “lucky, given how it’s helped her career”. Heiss is a NSW author whose maternal grandmother and great aunt were part of the Stolen Generation. Her mother was Aboriginal (not part-Aboriginal as claimed by Bolt) and father was an Austrian who became a part of the Aboriginal community. Their marriage produced six children, three fair-skinned including Anita and three darker-skinned. Her colour didn’t stop the racial abuse. At school she was called an “Abo”, a “Boong” and a “Coon”.
Others reacted badly when she told them she was Aboriginal. At university she became conscious of injustice to Aborigines and did a PhD on indigenous literature and publishing in Australia. Since then Heiss served on numerous boards and committees involved with indigenous issues most of which are voluntary.
Heiss told the court about the irony of having been discriminated against for being dark and now being discriminated against because she is not dark enough. She was also offended by Mr Bolt’s “blood quantum” approach to racial identity and its focus on how people look.

Bindi Cole
Bolt said Bindi Cole “rarely saw her part-Aboriginal father” and chose “the one identity open to her that has political and career clout.” Cole is a Victorian artist who lived with her single English mother till she was 7 until she became unfit to be a parent. Her mother always told her that she was Aboriginal.
She then went to live with her Aboriginal father’s family for 4 years, living with her grandmother and her large family who were all Aborigines. Cole kept close ties with the family even after she moved back with her mother, aged 13.
Cole studied to become an artist and photographer in 2001 and is recognised within the Koori community and the broader Australian art community as an Aboriginal artist. In 2008 she and exhibited a series of photographs called “Not Really Aboriginal”, referred to and misunderstood by Bolt.
The series questioned the perception of the stereotypical look of an Aboriginal person based on her personal experience of being fairer skinned. Cole said she was intimidated by Bolt’s articles and insulted by his phrase “distressingly white face.” The article affected the whole Aboriginal community and her aunt rang to ask her “why are they saying that about us?”

Geoff Clark
Geoff Clark is a Victorian and the former chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. His mother is Aboriginal and his father is Scottish-Australian. His parents never lived together. Clark and his two sisters were raised by his Aboriginal grandmother at Framlingham, near Warrnambool.
Framlingham is one of the longest established Aboriginal communities in Victoria established in 1861 and Clark has lived there most of his life. Here he watched his grandmother making traditional medicines, baskets and food and here he went hunting and fishing with his uncles. Relatives and elders passed on traditional knowledge of sacred sites and stories and he is now a custodian of this knowledge and an elder of the Tjapwhuurrung people.
Clark first became exposed to racism and prejudice at high school in Warrnambool. His classmates talked about their grandfathers shooting and poisoning Aboriginal people and told him he was too white to be Aboriginal. This casual racism motivated his involvement in Aboriginal issues. He was a delegate to the Convention of the International Labour Organisation dealing with the rights of indigenous people elected Victorian ATSIC representative in 1999 before becoming national chair. Clark was outraged by Bolt’s articles which he said were the essence of prejudice and racism in Australia.

Wayne Atkinson
Wayne Atkinson is a Victorian academic whose parents are from the Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung tribal groups. He had one great grandfather born in Mauritius of Indian heritage. Atkinson was raised by his maternal grandmother until his early teens on the riverbanks of Mooroopna in an Aboriginal fringe camp. He spoke English and Aboriginal languages at home and experienced racism at school.
He dropped out at year eight in order to work in unskilled jobs. After a decade, he began his studies about his history and culture and work for his community. He is now a senior elder of the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation a principal claimant for their native title claim and teaches Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Atkinson told the court the idea he was not sufficiently Aboriginal to be extremely offensive and was frustrated after 30 years of teaching about his culture, people do not accept who he is. He said Bolt affected a huge number of people in the Aboriginal community with the content of his articles.

Graham Atkinson
Graham is Wayne Atkinson’s brother and a member of the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council and chair of the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation. Being Aboriginal was not something Graham had to think about growing up until he and a cousin were the only Aboriginals at a technical school. Students taunted him with “Blackie”, “Abo”, “Boong” and “Nigger”.
His parents and siblings supported him which strengthened his self-esteem and pride in his identity. He also experienced racism whilst serving in the army in Vietnam. In 1977 he was one of only three Aboriginal students at Melbourne University and he graduated with a degree in Social Work and later he gained an MBA.
He told the court he was highly offended Bolt said he identified as Aboriginal only because Thomas James had married his (and Wayne’s) great-grandmother. He said the attribution of identity based on skin colour as making no sense.

Part 2 tomorrow looks at the stories of the other four plaintiffs.

Centre-right has landslide win in Hungarian election

The centre-right Fidesz Party has won power from the ruling Socialists after winning over half the vote in Sunday’s Hungarian parliamentary elections. Fidesz performed as well as the opinion polls had predicted and won 52.8 of the vote which translates to a healthy majority of 206 seats in the 386 seat legislature. The socialists were routed and ended up with just 28 seats barely two more than gained by the far right Jobbik Party. The Greens also passed the threshold to get into parliament, securing five seats. A second round of voting follows on April 25 to elect another 121 members but Fidesz already has the numbers to rule outright.

Nevertheless the second round of voting is important as they are in sight of a two-thirds majority it needs to push through vital reforms. The victory will see Fidesz party leader Victor Orban take the prime minister’s job for the second rule. The Oxford educated Orban is a veteran of Hungarian politics despite being just 46 years old. He was a foundation member of Fidesz (an acronym of FIatal DEmokraták SZövetsége which means "Alliance of Young Democrats" ) in 1988 at the end of the Communist era. He took over the leadership of the party two years later in the first free elections and became Hungary’s second youngest ever Prime Minister in 1998 after he led a Coalition to victory. He oversaw Hungary’s admission into NATO but was beset by scandals which helped him lose office in 2002. Fidesz were defeated again in 2006 but with his leadership secure Orban was in a position to capitalise this time round on electoral dissatisfaction with the Socialists savage budget cuts.

With unemployment running at 11.4 percent and an economy that contracted by 6.3 percent in 2009 Orhan faces a massive task to avoid the same fate despite his strong mandate. Fidesz campaigned on cutting taxes, creating jobs and supporting local businesses but was hazy about how to deliver on a promise to create a million jobs in 10 years. Fidesz has also said could double the deficit target set by the IMF and EU as part of a rescue package by slashing local government and implementing efficiencies in health care and education.

Besides Orhan’s routing of the ruling party, the elections other big talking point was the dangerous rise of Jobbik. The anti-semitic and anti-gypsy party came from nowhere in the last four years capitalising on discontent with the major parties. Led by 32-year-old history teacher Gabor Vona, the party tapped into nationalist sentiment of shame over Hungary’s reputation as a sick economy. Jobbik campaigned on a platform of blaming Jews and the Roma for Hungary’s ills and their rise brings back uncomfortable memories of the Nazi era. Much of their support was in poor rural areas with high unemployment and they were helped organisationally by the Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard) a paramilitary group with black uniforms to the Arrow Cross, Hungary's original Nazi party. Though the Guard was disbanded by court order last year for breaking association law in continues under an assumed name. Vona is a founding member of the Magyar Garda.

Prime Minister in waiting Orhan has said he is deeply unhappy with Jobbik’s rise and has no plans to bring them into a coalition. He will be relying on an improvement in the economy to curb their growing appeal. Orban said good governing was the best defense against the far right. “I am convinced that the better the performance of the government is, the weaker the far right will be in the future,” he said. However it is also likely Orhan will restrain Jobbik’s influence by embracing its social conservatism and family values while adopting its tough attitudes on law and order.

The BBC and Nick Griffin

When Nick Griffin and fellow British National Party candidate Andrew Brons won two seats at the recent European elections there was no rioting or storming the gates of parliament. Yet when Griffin was invited to talk on the BBC last week all hell broke loose. Television succeeded where the ballot box did not and the appearance of Britain’s fifth largest party on the BBC caused an outbreak of national soul-searching and riots that besieged the broadcaster’s London headquarters. Opponents were furious that the venerable broadcaster was legitimising a far-right wing group by giving them the “oxygen of publicity”. Anti-fascist protesters tried and failed to shut the program down. Supporters said the BNP deserved to be heard, and some free speech advocates defended Grffin’s right to appear on Question Time while expressing a Voltaire-like disagreement with every word he uttered. (photo of BBC riots by Reuters)

The entire affair seems overblown given how irrelevant the BNP are. The party won ten percent of the European election vote in heavily working class areas where the Labor Government is on the nose. Its overall vote was actually down on the 2004 election. It is likely many this year’s protest votes will swing back at the next general election. The BNP are a lunatic fringe for the disaffected with few coherent policies. Its now illegal membership criteria requires that all members be part of the "Indigenous Caucasian" racial group (purely on looks alone) and want everyone who is not so Aryan to go “home”.

Membership of the party is currently closed while apparatchiks write a new constitution to be presented to members for acceptance. The BNP’s limited appeal is based (as was the National Front of the 1970s) in the notion that Britain is being “swamped” by miscellaneous “others”. The party will never win an election or gain any sort of power. While their views might be repugnant to many, they also give voice to the frustration of many who want to blame someone else for their own inadequacies.

What the controversy really showed is the immense power of the national broadcaster. Popular media such as the BBC can amplify any subject matter. According to www.ranking.com, bbc.co.uk is one of the world’s 25 most used websites and the second most accessed news site (after CNN). Its British television stations remain hugely influential and eight million people watched Thursday’s episode of Question Time which featured Griffin and other British politicians including Labor Lord Chancellor Jack Straw.

In Britain there has been a strong tradition of public ownership of media going back to the invention of broadcasting in the 1920s. The BBC was created with a government-appointed board of governors and funded by an annual licence fee. Under John Reith the BBC established a high-minded tradition that eschewed the position of the popular tabloid newspapers in favour of high culture. Committed to the avoidance of sensationalism, it did not hire its first newspaper journalist until 1932. According to journalism academic Michael Schudson, the BBC forbade discussion of birth control in the 1930s and 1940s under its government-regulated monopoly. In the face of changing social values and competition from ITV in the 1950s it was discussed along with divorce and other controversial topics. Competition finally gave the BBC something to worry about other than their political paymasters.

The BBC rose to the new challenge with a topical political question-and-answer radio program. “Any Questions?” started on the Home Service in 1948 and runs to this day. Notably the program was stopped for ten minutes in 1976 when far-right politician Enoch Powell appeared and anti-fascist protesters threw bricks at the church where the show was recorded. Three years later, the format was tried on television as Question Time. Three panel members from each of the main parties were joined by a non-politician to face questions from the audience. In 1999, a fifth panel member was invited who was either from the minor parties or another non-politician. Over 30 years the show has become the BBC's flagship political panel show.

The BNP have been persona non grata until their recent European and council victories. When Griffin finally did appear on the show, it was almost an anti-climax. The BNP leader was sensible enough to leave his more outrageous opinions in the dressing room and he tried to steer a course of a drastic, but understandable, reaction to an immigration crisis. Like most politicians he used as many words he could to say as little as possible. He claimed was a “moderniser” who simply wanted to end immigration. He was also nervous and the target of intense questioning and jeering from the crowd.

Nearly every question was related to BNP politics and Griffin was pilloried by a multi-cultural audience. One person told him that “the vast majority of this audience finds what you stand for to be completely disgusting.” The libertarian Brendan O’Neill wrote in Spiked called the debate “surreal” and a “cultural lynching of Griffin by members of a political elite bereft of ideas and lost for words.” He saw it as an act of moral distancing that established a sense of “us and him” that made Griffin a “voodoo doll they can stick pins in to try to ward off their own political misfortunes.”

Griffin will probably feel the pain of these pinpricks is worthwhile and the BNP will undoubtedly gain traction as a result of his appearance. The party’s issues will temporarily get on the agenda. Many will sympathise with the way Griffin was torn apart on the program and others will react positively to his racist message. Nevertheless the BNP will always be a fringe party that will be handicapped by Britain’s first past-the-post electoral system. The BBC was right to allow him on Question Time and have the right to invite who ever they see fit to appear on their shows. Broadcasting asserts a right to public access. By encouraging more people to keep informed it encourages more participation in public life. More participation will likely mean more unsavoury voices in the public sphere but it is crucial they be heard. Anything less is toxic to democracy.

Antic Hey Hey: On blackface, racism and disguise

Channel Nine’s Hey Hey Its Saturday was juvenile unfunny entertainment when it appeared in the 1980s and 90s and doesn’t appear to have improved with age. But the Michael Jackson skit that appeared last night had less to do with racism than it was about disguise. It was offensive to Harry Connick Jnr, the program guest from New Orleans who was there to judge the act. But even Connick himself acknowledged the damage wasn’t intentional. He was worried less about the racism than how the skit would affect his reputation back home. He said he would not have gone on the show if he had known about the act. Connick told the audience that cheered the act that “We try to hard not to treat black people as buffoons". Though perhaps as some believe about Connick's own president, Americans don't try hard enough. (photo by Dequella manera)

The Australian buffoons were six doctors collectively known as “the Jackson Jive”. Channel Nine introduced them as a “tribute” to Michael Jackson. Five men in blackface presented themselves (see video at Crikey) as the black Jackson brothers and one front man was the “whitened” Michael Jackson of later years. The joke was that 20 years ago the same sextet performed on Hey Hey with a “black” Michael Jackson. Two decades ago, the six were medical students. Today they are all now pillars of the medical community. One is a radiologist, another a neurologist, a third is an anaesthetist, and there is a psychiatrist and a cardiologist.

Rather fittingly Anand Deva, the man who played “Michael Jackson”, is now a plastic surgeon. Also providing irony perhaps is Deva’s own ambiguous colour. Deva is Indian and he said the group of doctors were from multicultural backgrounds. He apologised and said the skit was not meant to cause offence. As Andrew Bolt says, it’s no defence against charges of racism to claim you’re Indian. But Bolt also says Deva had the right to lampoon the Jacksons who are a fair target but not a right to mock blacks generally.

Yet a blackface skit was never going to be the best way to do that in front of a Southern American guest. Channel Nine’s insensitivity in not realising this in advance was appalling but at least they scrambled a quick on-air apology. After an ad break, host Daryl Somers admitted blackface was an insult to Connick’s “countrymen”. Graciously accepting the apology, Connick worried how the Jive would be treated if they turned up looking like that in America. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Through media such as Twitter and Youtube (which did not exist in Hey Hey’s heyday), the skit quickly moved beyond what Crikey called “slack-jawed suburbanites and pensioners” to travel around the English-speaking world.

That world was not impressed. Gawker said blackface in America is “one of those things that you can only show if you're talking about how awful it is because, well, it is pretty awful.” The Guardian wrote that the corollary of Somers’ apology to Connick’s countrymen was blackface in Australia was "perfectly acceptable".

Both Gawker and The Guardian were both overacting in their mad scramble to gain the high moral ground. The truth about blackface is far more complex than either publication would care to admit. Blackface is not perfectly acceptable in Australia and is very rarely shown on television. But it is also not a long time since the genre was incredibly popular in Australia as it was in the US and Britain. Historian Lyn Murfin says blackface is a difficult topic to write about in a politically correct age, when the concept of racism is fully developed and blacking up is widely considered abhorrent. It dates back to the 19th century when racism was a social phenomenon that did not know itself and as such had not been publicly named.

Blackface first emerged in antebellum America where it grew as a “dirty” rebellion against the anal retentiveness of capitalist Protestant culture. “Minstrelsy”, to give it its proper name, took off after the Civil War and its rise was surprisingly linked with baseball. The two occupations shared a language, a colourful culture and both announced the arrival of black men as powerful entertainers in the 1870s. Minstrelsy served a dual function. Firstly, it was a mask of blackness that represented the first cultural aesthetic that was uniquely American. Secondly, it framed American race relations by lampooning abolitionists and black citizenship. It took the black rights movements of the sixties to finally push blackface underground.

Blackface was an early arrival to Britain with the 1836 arrival of T. Daddy Rice and his Jump Jim Crow act. Despite continual cross-Atlantic traffic, minstrelsy in Britain developed along distinctive lines. The Kentucky Minstrels transcended the genre’s visual imagery with their British radio show. Meanwhile the Black and White Minstrel Show was hugely popular on BBC television from 1958 to 1978 and the stage show ran for another ten years beyond that.

Blackface also has a long history in Australia. On the tense night Ned Kelly was hanged, hundreds of people crammed into Melbourne’s Apollo Hall where they paid a shilling each to listen to Ned’s sister Kate and brother James. The hall was full despite the press downplaying the speakers as “relatives to that reckless scoundrel”. Apollo Hall was in a lively area of Bourke Street next to the Eastern Market and was primarily a blackface venue. The Georgia Minstrels sub-leased the hall to the Kelly siblings. According to Melissa Bellanta in her “Australian larrikins and the blackface minstrel dandy”, there is no suggestion that the minstrels performed on the night Kelly died. But Bellanta said the choice of venue was appropriate as the family was often described in terms of blackness.

Occasionally an African-American would perform at Apollo Hall but usually the troupe were white people who “blacked up” using burnt cork. Their minstrelsy’s combination of character songs, ballads and burlesques attracted huge crowds and appealed to a far more diverse audience than in the US or Britain. A standard feature of each show had leading characters delivering a stump speech in “nigger” dialect.

The meaning of nigger here is stylised African American speech as imagined by white Australians. But there weren’t many black Americans in colonial Australia. Their role at the bottom of the ladder was taken by the Irish and the Indigenous. Kelly’s family were poor white trash who missed out on the Australian gold boom of the 1850s and 60s. Ned and his brother Dan were “blackguards” and loved the attention of their two years of being outlaws. While they were on the run, a play called “Catching the Kellys” used white actors with black faces to portray the black trackers who failed in their attempts to hunt down the gang. At the end of the play, a plot twist revealed the blacks to be Irish.

The play showed blackface in Australia moved with ease between caricaturing Aboriginals, Southern American slaves and the Irish. As far back as the medieval period, blackness signified a range of despised qualities so blackface had a history that pre-dated the first American minstrel shows. Minstrelsy was initially the preserve of the lowest classes. In New York and London, as in Australia, minstrel-acts were to be found in the cheapest saloons. In England, they migrated to music halls by including popular songs in their repertoire. Writing about madness in nineteenth-century America, Benjamin Reiss said that popular black minstrelsy was a proletarian provocation but which was often sanitised by white supremacists to fit their notion that blacks were backward. It is no wonder blackface became frowned upon in the more race-conscious 1980s and 1990s.

But the proletarian provocation reminds us that blackface is as much about disguise as it is about racism. Historian David Roediger says the purpose of the minstrel mask is as much to maintain control over a subversive act as much as to ridicule. Is the Hey Hey offence a class related issue? Are those who don’t like it also upset by Orson Welles blacked up to play Othello? Well may we wonder why it matters that a white American took offence at an Indian dressing up as an Afro-American on a vacuous Caucasian-produced television program. Meanwhile few people pay attention to the need to solve genuine issues like life expectancy in Australia’s most racially deprived community.

Indian students in Australia asked to stop protests against racial violence

Indian community leaders in Australia have asked students protesting against the racial attacks to put an end to their street rallies, saying they have served their purpose. Yadu Singh, coordinator of the Indian Consul General's community committee on Indian students' issues, said all parties have agreed to stop the rallies which have been going for three days in Sydney’s Harris Park. “They are disrupting the normal life of the people in the suburbs,” he said.

The protests began in Melbourne when Indian students were incensed by a wave of violence including a screwdriver stabbing which left one man in hospital. Attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney have dominated Indian media headlines for almost three weeks. Though exact current figures are hard to come by, at least 11 Indians have been attacked or mugged in the past month. Some say the problem has been growing for several years. Bloomberg reports that violent crime against Indian students has risen by a third in the past year in the state of Victoria with 1,447 assaults in the 12 months to June 2008.

The problem has been brewing for several months. On 1 December 28 year old Sukhraj Singh was attacked and brutally beaten up at a Sunshine Indian grocery store where he was about to buy naan bread for a party. Singh was left in a coma for three weeks. He still suffers from dizziness, a lack of balance and anxiety. Five men of varying ethnic background have been charged with his beating and three have pleaded guilty. Singh says he still has no idea if the attack was racially motivated. Western districts police Commander Trevor Carter told The Herald-Sun violence was almost never racially related to race, but with the intention of stealing phones and wallets.

Carter’s statement is supported by the rationale offered by another Indian student who is the friend of a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Adelaide. The sociologist blamed the increasing casualisation of the workforce in Australia and decreases in housing affordability. Jobs are less stable and people spend more time commuting between work and home. Overseas students on low-paying casual work are among the worst affected forced to travel longer distances, alone and late at night, all increasing their vulnerability to attack.

But another Melbourne victim, Sourabh Sharma, has no doubts racism is the underlying cause. Sourabh was coming home by train from a workshift at KFC when six young men boarded at Aircraft station, between Laverton and Hoppers Crossing. They attacked him, took his phone and bag and kicked him in the head and face and ribs, while laughing and dishing out racial abuse. The attackers got off at the next station. Sourabh was left unconscious and bleeding, with broken teeth and a fractured cheekbone.

The role of the Indian media has been crucial in stoking up reaction with its emotive and racially inspired descriptions of "curry bashing". Australian High Commissioner to India John McCarthy said their constant coverage of the issue had done inestimable damage to Indian-Australian relations. "India's voracious 24-hour cable news channels helped stoke the wave of fear and outrage among Indians in both countries,” he said. McCarthy said that although the news cycle was now coming to an end, negative perceptions of Australia would linger. “You can't have three weeks of that sort of television without the perception of Australia among Indians being damaged."

Australia stands to lose considerable income from the education industry if South Asians vote with their feet. 97,000 Indians are currently studying in Australia contributing $16 billion to the local economy. They make up 18 percent of the total student population second only to China. Almost half of these are in Victoria. The federal Government's $3.5 million campaign to attract more Indian students as a recession busting measure is now in serious jeopardy.

Belatedly, authorities have begun to act. In May Victoria launched a helpline to assist Indian attack victims. Last week Victorian Premier John Brumby announced new measures to improve safety at railway stations with a record of violent behaviour. The measures include additional patrols by uniform police, transit members, the dog squad, mounted branch and air-wing, as well as traffic operations and booze buses targeting trouble sports in and around Sunshine, St Albans, Thomastown and the Clayton and Dandenong areas.

This is a good start, but is it enough? Writing for The Times of India, Sarina Singh says perception appears to be the fundamental stumbling block. Singh is an Australian of Indian descent who says the federal government has acted too late to stop the rot. She agrees with Indian student groups who have requested a more multicultural police force. “As someone who has specialised in travel writing about the sub-continent,” she was "aware of the damage that can be done by inadvertent cultural misunderstanding.”

But this is not high on Australia’s priorities. Multiculturalism has been marginalised by federal governments for over a decade. As David Ingram wrote in New Matilda Australia has “dropped the ball on multiculturalism. He said the media and ethnic groups had become complacent because they thought the battle had been won. Then the antagonistic Howard Government removed the phrase from the national discourse replacing it with the more strident “new nationalism”.

Michael Clyne says the Rudd government has followed this “by a discourse of covert exclusion through invisibility.” Clyne says the Prime Minister is not on public record using the term multiculturalism or any synonym such as "cultural diversity" when referring to Australian society. Nor is there a minister for multicultural affairs. “Social inclusion ought to empower all sections of Australian society to fulfil their potential and to make their contribution to the nation from their background and experience,” says Clyne. We have some way to go to get there but multi-million dollar losses may concentrate the minds wonderfully.

Sol Trujillo and racism in Australia

Former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo punched a hole in Australia’s fragile ego when he said had experienced racism in Australia and that working here was “like stepping back in time.” Speaking to the BBC in San Diego, Trujillo said Australia’s isolation meant it had a “different operating climate” from most countries but was slowly evolving and maturing. In the week where the “bogus bogan” Clare Werbeloff got her 15 minutes of fame by blandly talking about “fat wogs” and “skinny wogs”, it would appear that maturity is materialising very slowly.

Meanwhile Australian reaction to Trujillo’s criticism is typically thin-skinned. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s spokesperson called the statements “ridiculous” and said they will disappoint Australians who welcomed him to this country. The disappointment part may be true but are the comments really ridiculous? More ridiculous, say than Rudd’s single word reaction to Trujillo’s resignation from Telstra: “adios”, or the constant media cry of the “three amigos” that greeted Trujillo (and his two offsiders Greg Winn and Phil Burgess)? Trujillo, like Winn and Burgess, is American not Mexican, and may feel rightly aggrieved at being defined (no matter how playfully) by his heritage.

Back in March, marketing expert Dr Stephen Downes wrote an article in Crikey about Trujillo’s racial stereotyping in the media. Downes said Trujillo’s name and ethnic background became more important than his qualifications and experience. He quoted Eric Ellis who noted how cartoonists always depicted Trujillo in a sombrero astride a donkey, while shock jocks mimicked an imagined Mexican accent, even though his family came to the US 200 years ago. “Did cartoonists feel compelled to draw former CEO Ziggy Switkowski (born in Germany) in lederhosen and eating a bratwurst?” asked Downes rhetorically.

So let’s look again at what was said in Trujillo’s BBC interview. The reporter said: “I noticed reading the papers there that when you were referred to they would always point out that you were, had a Hispanic background or whatever...in Britain and in America it would have been neither here nor there. In Australia it was invariably pointed out. And the Prime Minister when asked what his parting words to you would be, he said, "Adios". Was that racism?” Trujillo responded to the last question first. “I think by definition there were even columnists that wrote stories that said it was,” he said. He then addressed the broader point: “But you know, my point is, is that you know that does exist and it's got to change because the world is full of a lot of people and most economies have to take advantage, including Australia, of a diverse set of people. And if there's a belief that only certain people are acceptable versus others, that is a sad state.”

A team at University of Western Sydney and Macquarie University have done considerable research into this “sad state” of acceptability. In 2001 they conducted a telephone survey of 5,000 people in NSW. This was backed up by a further sample of 4,000 Victorians in 2006. Overall, the researchers found that racism is quite prevalent in Australian society though its occurrences differ from place to place. If you were older, non-tertiary educated, only spoke English, were born in Australia, and were male, you were more likely to be racist.

While these findings appear to back up Trujillo, that is not to say he is beyond criticism. His time at the helm did little to halt Telstra’s slide. Shares in Telstra fell 38 per cent under his leadership, compared with a 13 per cent drop by the S&P/ASX 200 index in the same timeframe. Telstra was also excluded from the $4.7 billion original tender process to build a broadband network after it submitted a non-compliant bid and found itself further on the outer when the government announced a new company would deliver the $43b National Broadband Network. Trujillo quit his job early, leaving Australia six weeks before his publicly announced end date of 30 June.

The Australian’s former senior business correspondent Michael Sainsbury said Trujillo’s problem is one of perception. He says Trujillo did not show a lot of interest in Australia or understanding Australia. “I think that's why he's kind of got that perhaps a little bit wrong,” he told the ABC. BBY Telecoms analysts Mark McDonnell was also unsympathetic saying there was an element of jocularity about the “three amigos” jibe. “I don't think there was anything demeaning or malicious intended by it,” he said. But even if that is true, and it is debatable, it does not excuse the amount of racially motivated mocking Australians dished out to him. Sol Trujillo may not be the world’s best businessman but that does not entitle Australian politicians or the media to rob him of his dignity.

Israel flexes its muscles: The West’s shameful boycott of the Durban Review Conference

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said she is “shocked and disappointed” by the US decision not to attend the anti-racism Durban Review Conference which starts today in Geneva, Switzerland. The US joins Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, Netherlands, Germany and Italy in boycotting the conference. Speaking yesterday High Commissioner Navi Pillay said these countries have allowed a couple of issues to dominate, outweighing the needs of numerous groups who suffer worldwide on a daily basis. “These are truly global issues,” she said “And it is essential that they are discussed at a global level, however sensitive and difficult they may be."

Navi Pillay is right. It is shameful that these Western nations have allowed their Israeli interests to trump discussion of a wide range of important human rights issues. According to the Financial Times, the boycotters say they want to avoid a rerun of the original 2001 Durban meeting at which Israel was attacked over its racist policies towards Palestinians. Although this year’s draft communiqué was reworded to address concerns, the US was still unhappy at the final product.

The Obama administration announced its decision on Saturday. State Department spokesman Robert Wood said that although the US was “profoundly committed to ending racism and racial discrimination”, it could not sign up because the language in Friday’s communiqué text reaffirmed the 2001 Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA). “The DDPA singles out one particular conflict and prejudges key issues that can only be resolved in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians,” said Wood. “ The [US] also has serious concerns with relatively new additions to the text regarding ‘incitement,’ that run counter to the US commitment to unfettered free speech.”

Australia used similar arguments in announcing their boycott. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said he’d taken the decision with regret “as Australians are a people committed to eliminating racism and racial discrimination.” He claimed Australia was committed to advancing human rights and had put in place policies to close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people (one of the main items for discussion at the conference). However, he said he could not support a document which reaffirmed the DDPA in its entirety. “We cannot be confident that the Review Conference will not again be used as a platform to air offensive views, including anti-Semitic views,” said Smith. “Of additional concern are the suggestions of some delegations in the Durban process to limit the universal right to free speech.

US and Australian concerns seems over dramatised when looking at the actual text of the original 2001 DDPA (pdf). Just one out of 122 issues related to the treatment of the Palestinians. This is issue 63 which reads: “We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion.”

Hardly over controversial, and sentiments shared by many across the world. The decision looks even more suspicious having looked at the agenda of the 2001 conference. It dealt with five major human rights themes: trafficking in women and children, migration and discrimination, gender and racial discrimination, racism against indigenous peoples, and protection of minority rights. In none of the press releases related to these five areas, is Israel mentioned by name.

The call for laws against incitement is more problematic, but some boycotting nations already have similar laws (eg Volksverhetzung in Germany) on their books. The relevant passage in the DDPA (Action 145) urges “States to implement legal sanctions, in accordance with relevant international human rights law, in respect of incitement to racial hatred [through the Internet]”. In any case, the action is stated as an “urge” and does not imply outright agreement. And even if the states disagree with the provision, this is surely not reason enough to boycott the entire conference? This means the only logical reason countries are pulling out is because they do not want any public discussion of Israeli policy in the Palestinian territory.

Admittedly early draft versions of the Durban 2 declaration were rabidly anti-Israel. The 3 March version found by Ha’aretz found that Israel's policy in the Palestinian territories constituted a “violation of international human rights, a crime against humanity and a contemporary form of apartheid”. However the final version I read this evening (Rev 2) contained no explicit mention of Israel at all. The commitment to avoid a just settlement in Palestine has trumped “the commitment to prevent, combat and eradicate racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” The US and Australian position on human rights commitments has been shown up as a pious platitude and the boycott is shameful politicking.

MLK Day

As yesterday was the third Monday in January, it was Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day in the US. This year the holiday corresponded with King’s actual birthday of 15 January. Observed since 1986, it is one of only three American federal holidays that is named for a person (the other two are Washington’s Birthday and Columbus Day).

It took 15 years of lobbying to achieve, only the third new national holiday of the twentieth century after Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. MLK Day was initially founded by labour unions as a contract negotiation tool. Democrat congressman John Conyers (the man who appeared in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 to state members of Congress "don't read most of the bills") introduced a bill to make King’s birthday a national holiday barely four days after King’s assassination in 1968. In 1970, they submitted petitions to Congress carrying six million signatures. Though support on the Hill was slow in coming, the pressure was maintained by Mass marches in 1982 for voting rights and again a year later for the 20th anniversary of King's “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C.

Some conservative senators such as Jesse Helms and John P East questioned whether King was important enough to merit a holiday. Senator East argued that to establish a special holiday just for King was to "elevate him to the same level as the father of our country and above the many other Americans whose achievements approach Washington's”. Others objected that King’s birthday was too close to the Christmas and New Year holidays. However many senators of both parties were keen to court the black vote and anyone who questioned the need for the holiday was likely to be accused of racism. Finally Democrat rep Katie Hall from Indiana brokered an agreement by moving the observance to the third Monday of January each year. The idea of a three-day weekend, plus the fact that the third Monday often follows Super Bowl Sunday, helped gain the necessary numbers for success. President Reagan (himself an opponent of the day) signed the legislation in November 1983.

King is one of the few social leaders of any country to be honoured with a holiday (Gandhi in India is another). Such status by a member of a country's racial minority is almost unheard of. As these honours are usually reserved for military or religious figures, this holiday is a powerful tribute to King's philosophy and stature.

King was born in 1929 with the name of Michael Luther King Jr in Atlanta, Georgia. His father Martin Luther King snr claimed the doctor mistakenly put Michael on the birth certification. King was from a line of pastors. His grandfather, father and Martin himself all served as pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Young Martin attended segregated public schools in Georgia. Aged just 19, he received a BA in sociology in 1948 from Atlanta’s all-male all-black Morehouse College. King then went north to do post-graduate studies and earned his Ph D in 1955 studying Systematic Theology at Boston University.

By now King was also a church pastor, based at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. 1955 was a watershed year in US race relations and Montgomery was at the epicentre. On 1 December 1955, Montgomery seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested and charged for violating racial segregation laws when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. This was a calculated act by Parks to challenge the Jim Crow laws. She had just completed a course in race relations and her arrest was a NAACP plan to test the laws using a guinea pig that was above reproach. The Monday after her arrest, she was found guilty in a local court and fined $10 plus a court cost of $4. Parks appealed. Meanwhile the black community launched a bus boycott. King quickly became a leader and spokesman for the protest.

The boycott lasted over a year. Black taxi drivers lowered their fare to the same price as a bus ticket until the city forced them to increase their fares. When the city then pressurised insurance companies to stop insuring cars used in carpooling, the boycott leaders arranged policies with Lloyds of London. A Montgomery grand jury indicted King along with 88 other boycott leaders for ignoring a state statute that barred boycotts without due cause. King’s parsonage was bombed and his wife and daughter narrowly escaped injury. Finally the protest ended in victory when the US Supreme Court decision outlawed racial segregation on public transport.

Buoyed with this success, King created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He became a national black leader, organising marches for the right to vote, desegregation and labour rights. The FBI, under the paranoid leadership of J Edgar Hoover, began to take an interest in King. Hoover had strong personal animosity against King and his agents routinely broke into SCLC premises. The FBI started wiretapping him in 1961 fearing that communists were trying to infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement. They found no proof of this but used incidental material found in the taps to eventually discredit King. This was deliberate. In 1964, Hoover asked his agents to gather “information concerning King's personal proclivities ... in order that we may consider using this information at an opportune time in a counterintelligence move to discredit him.”

1963 was a watershed year for Martin Luther King Jnr. He was arrested after a protest in Birmingham, Alabama. There he wrote his "Letter From Birmingham City Jail," which advocated civil disobedience against unjust laws. In order to pressure congress to pass a Civil Rights Act, black leaders arranged a march on Washington. An estimated quarter of a million people marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where they heard speeches including King’s most famous words which with his dream they would all be “"Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

For his gains in the South, King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. In the years that followed, King and others tried to spread the movement north. King moved into a Chicago slum tenement to attract attention to the living conditions of the poor in the big cities of the North. But King alienated the mainstream media after making comments critical of US involvement in the Vietnam War. Time magazine criticised his “Beyond Vietnam” speech as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi".

On 3 April 1968 King went to Memphis to make a speech in support of striking black sanitary public works employees. There he said “Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain! And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land”. His impassioned oration was prophetic. King was shot dead one day later on the balcony of the Lorraine motel.

Because escaped convict James Earl Ray confessed to the crime and pleaded guilty to avoid the death sentence, there was no trial. Ray was sentence to a 99-year prison sentence. He admitted owning a rifle similar to the one used in the shooting and he also rented the room at the flophouse where the shot was fired. Later he recanted his confession and told a 1977 House Select Committee on Assassinations that he did not shoot King. A former Missouri deputy sheriff Jim Green claimed to be part of an FBI conspiracy to kill King and Ray was just a ‘patsy’ for the crime. Ray had all requests for a trial rejected and he died in 1998 still proclaiming his innocence.

King’s legacy is immense. His gifted oratory has inspired millions around the world to action. He was instrumental in destroying the Jim Crow laws with the passing of two key pieces of legislation, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, both passed in 1965. He was a major influence on the civil rights movement in apartheid-era South Africa. His boyhood home in Atlanta and nearby buildings are now deemed a national historic site. He was turning into such a dangerous radical, it is likely the FBI had him killed. But more than anything else, King was a consummate man of action and an inveterate optimist. When faced with a moment of doubt a few days before he died, he talked himself out of it “We must turn a minus into a plus," King said, "a stumbling block into a steppingstone--we must go on anyhow." Martin Luther King Jnr Day is a fine tribute to his honour.

Media ethics: Who was to blame for Cronulla?

This essay will examine the events surrounding the Cronulla riots of 11 December 2005. It will discuss how the story broke and demonstrate the media chain reaction that made the riot inevitable. It will then examine the role of the media in the immediate aftermath of the riot. While there were many media reporting on Cronulla (TV, radio, press, internet news, weblogs) the essay will concentrate on the key roles played by Sydney’s highest-rating radio breakfast announcer and Sydney’s highest-selling newspaper. This essay will show how these media hid behind their public sources to implicitly encourage the events that followed. The conclusion will show that poor ethical practices in both media were justified to further commercial interests.

The sequence of events were caused by a crime. On Sunday 4 December 2005, two surf lifesavers were attacked and injured on Sydney’s North Cronulla beach. The wire service AAP broke the story. Their initial report was that “two young surf lifesavers have been bashed in an attack by a large group at a beach near Sydney” (AAP 5 December 2005). Other than conflating “large group” with “four people”, the report was a model of ethical hard news journalism. There was no unnecessary emphasis on personal characteristics. An attack on lifesavers, the iconic symbol of Australian beaches, was itself an angle for a major story. But there was a second angle. The four men the police were looking for were Lebanese Australians.

It was Alan Jones who exposed the second angle. Jones does the influential breakfast slot on 2GB radio where he gets 16.4% of the radio audience. That amounts to 182,000 radios tuned to his program in the Sydney region every day. That Monday a caller “Bill” rang to say he had seen the news on Channel Nine about the “horrendous bashing”. “Bill” continued, “…gang acts on the beach at Cronulla yesterday. I mean, what type of grubs do we have in this...?” Jones finished the sentence for him:
“What kind of grubs? Well, I'll tell you what kind of grubs this lot were. This lot were Middle Eastern grubs. And you're not allowed to say it. But I'm saying it.”

The “you” Jones mentions, are journalists whose second commitment of their code of ethics forbids them to emphasise “race, ethnicity, (and) nationality”. Jones put himself outside the pale as he knew it would mean the angle could now be open spoken about. And it was the only real angle on offer - the lifesavers were not on duty at the time of the attack. That fact was buried as the media frenzy grew in the week that followed. Now that Jones had done their dirty work for them and named the “Middle Eastern grubs”, the Daily Telegraph could now join in.

The Murdoch owned Telegraph is Sydney’s biggest selling daily newspaper. It sold 403,000 copies in the first six months of 2004. They missed the story entirely on Monday but on Tuesday they splashed the headline “Fight for Cronulla: we want our beach back”. The article described the attackers as a “group of thugs” but also quotes surf lifesaving Sydney rescue services manager Stephen Leahy who said it was common for Middle Eastern men from Western Sydney to taunt Cronulla surf lifesavers. This disingenuous quote left readers in no doubt as to the identity of the “thugs”.

By Wednesday, the Telegraph had posted Luke McIlveen on the job. His prior front page exclusives on both Schapelle Corby and Ivan Milat were exposed by Media Watch as foundless. Although the quality of McIlveen’s reporting may be suspect, his sensationalism is a major weapon in their circulation war. This is the Janus view of news media. The media have both business and public utility aspects. McIlveen was brought in for the business aspect. Immediately he uncovered a history of beach thuggery and found one interviewee who was “harassed and assaulted by thugs of Middle Eastern descent”. The article concluded with a plea from the newspaper for follow-up information from the public. “Have you been harassed at the beach? Tell us at…” (McIlveen and Jones 2005). The newspaper was not interested in good news about Cronulla.

By Thursday the Telegraph was in full flight. There were reports of a second incident on the beach on the Wednesday and the newspaper printed six Cronulla articles on the day. They offered the “grim possibility” of future ethic based attacks and quoted a “disturbing” SMS which advocated “Leb and wog bashing day”. In each article the Telegraph reporters used the third journalistic ethical commitment (“aim to attribute information to its source”) as a way of avoiding conflict with the second commitment on ethnicity. They pushed the story hard on Friday and Saturday, setting the scene for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlike journalists, the newspaper is not bound by the code of ethics. Its quest for healthy circulation figures breeds a desire to publish stories that have “sensational impact that titillates readers”.

While the Telegraph reported that police and political leaders were calling for calm, they also reported NSW State Opposition leader Peter Debnam on the Friday. He was not advocating calm: “Debnam called for police to be given permission to take a zero-tolerance approach to youths who threatened to turn Cronulla into a battleground. These thugs need to be arrested and locked up," he said.” Debnam was indulging in wedge politics. Wedge politics preys on prejudice and fear and involves so-called ‘dog-whistle’ messages using outwardly reasonable language that nonetheless carries a very specific message to the target audience. The Telegraph was tacitly approving the transformation of a fight among youths into a ethnic battleground.

Jones too was firing up his audience to gain radio ratings. After feeding them with Middle Eastern grubs on the Monday, he warmed to the topic in the days that followed. On the Tuesday, a caller rang in to recommend vigilante action and Jones did not demur. He told his listeners he "understood" why the offensive SMS text went out and he read it on air. This form of empathy is known as a schema theory. People form stereotypical models of their world to help them cope with the flood of new information they receive on a daily basis. These models are called schemas. While schemas are beneficial in handling vast quantities of new data, they are negative when over-generalised and lead to stereotyping and prejudice. Jones’s schema was coming home to roost. By Thursday he was reading out anonymous emails detailing how Cronulla’s beaches were “taken over by scum” and although he carefully cautioned his listeners not to take the law into their own hands, he warmed to listeners who had exactly that intention. Jones was in breach of the first item of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) ethical code “(do not) give distorting emphasis”. As a result there were three complaints to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in the week before the riots. However the ACMA has not acted on these complaints. Their website states “The primary responsibility for ensuring that programs reflect community standards rests with radio and television stations”. The Australian Press Council is also an ineffective watchdog and frequently seen as a captive of the industry. Internal MEAA disciplines are also weak and application is limited to its members. Its procedures are secret and the ultimate sanction is dismissal from the union. Such a threat would be idle for a wealthy broadcaster like Jones given his consistently scant regard for the ethical code.

Unsurprisingly, given the encouragement of the media, events transpired as dismally predicted on the Sunday, December 11. There were 10 arrests on the day and a small number of injuries. The riot provided a rich diet of stories for the Telegraph for the entire following week before tapering off when the violence was not repeated. Journalists’ role in the communication process has fundamentally shifted in the modern era. They no longer decide what information the public should know but instead help audiences make sense of it. They function as “forum leaders”. The forum leaders at the Telegraph gave full warts-and-all coverage of the riot on the Monday. It deemed the day “a national disgrace”. They blamed alcohol and hate but did not point to any media failings. Instead it turned the temperature up: “youths of Middle Eastern descent have warned of pay-back” (Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2005).

And as gangs looked to pick out innocent victims on the train, Jones’ pre-riot suggestion seemed eerily prescient, “invite one of the biker gangs to be present in numbers at Cronulla railway station when these Lebanese thugs arrive, it would be worth the price of admission to watch these cowards scurry back onto the train for the return trip to their lairs”. Jones himself was not around to face the consequences of his actions. He had scurried back to his lair by going on holidays commencing Monday 12 December. That left 2GB picking up the pieces left by their star broadcaster. They claimed that two thirds of calls coming into station supported “what happened” in Cronulla. But it was the absent Jones’s on-air exhortations that turned a mild dispute into an explosive issue.

The Telegraph too shares the blame. It had a vested commercial interest in making the story bigger. And its journalism never looked at the root causes. There are three levels in construction of journalism. Level 1 is reactive (observation and fact). Level 2 is reflective; dealing with the how and why of events. Level 3 is analytical and involves the identification of trends and possible underlying causes. It is only at these higher levels of inquiry do journalists challenge initially “authoritative” accounts of events. The Telegraph Cronulla coverage rarely operated at level 2 and never at level 3. Two questions they never asked: 1. Are the beachside communities of Sydney’s south some kind of cultural tinderbox? and 2. How are we to manage public behaviour and etiquette in contested public spaces to allow respect for all? These are level 3 questions. But the Janus view is unlikely to allow Telegraph journalists the space and time to aspire to that level. They are among the sections of the news media that thrive on shock, horror and human drama. Circulation pressures will drive the market and journalists will face increasing pressure to shape their product to information-and-technology rich elites with the possible consequence of a general downgrading of news involving the poorer sections of the population unless they happen to have an impact on the wealthy.

Both the Telegraph and Jones’s employer 2GB will continue to shape their product according to their audiences. Both shaped the outcome of the Cronulla riots with their practices and neither are signatories of the MEAA code of ethics. Nor were the ACMA or Press Council effective in issuing sanctions against their actions. Arguably the most effective regulator is the one with the least powers – ABC’s Media Watch. Its power lies in the fact that ethical breaches are screened on national TV when journalists know their colleagues are watching. It will be needed. Ethical standards are likely to remain contested ground in whatever future holds for the media.