The Racial Hatred Act: Case study 5
- interpretation of complex research findings, surveys, and polls
in news storiesReports:
- 'Federal laws blamed for Sydney's
welfare ghettos', Paul Sheehan, The Sydney Morning Herald, 1
July 96- 'Ethnic ghettos claim 'irresponsible',
Illawarra Mercury, 2 July 96- 'Urban Ghettos', Melbourne
Yarra Leader, 8 July 96Comment:
- The following journalists/editors comment on their coverage of Ernest
Healy's report.- The Sydney Morning Herald's
Paul Sheehan- AAP's Margaret McDonald
- The Illawarra Mercury's Peter Cullen
- The Melbourne Yarra Leader's Bob
Osburn- Ernest Healy, researcher
and author of 'Welfare benefits and residential concentrations amongst
recently arrived migrant communities' on how his report was misinterpreted
by the media.- The Federation of Ethnic Communities
Councils of Australia comments on the harm done to communities
through the use of loaded language and offensive terminology in the media.Please note that none of the reports in the case studies have been the
subject of complaints or queries under the Racial Hatred Act.
Peter Cullen, Editor in Chief, Illawarra
Mercury, comments:
There is really no hard and fast policy on how race issues are reported
in the Mercury except to say that one tries to be as sensitive and
as decent as possible. Our job is to report the news by presenting the
facts and the place to make moral judgements is in editorial columns.In terms of this article on Healy's report, we ran it straight off the
wire - it's AAP's story. We don't check the AAP sources because we pay
them a big fee to do the checks and balances on reports. Naturally we would
undertake those checks and balances if the article reported a local angle
and local sources were used.
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