Last week, a man was fatally stabbed in Sydney. He was an Israeli. We know this, because in a shocking incident where two men jumped out of a car at 9.45pm and killed someone on the street, the most important aspect in the news coverage was apparently his nationality. News.com.au eventually ran with the headline, "Stabbed Israeli in a Bad World".

Was this a reference to the kind of world where someone can be walking down the street, and suddenly be bashed and stabbed to death by two people passing by? No, no - this aspect covered only two paragraphs of an entire story which chose to instead focus on the alleged "bad world" of the Israeli himself. A vague source was interviewed, and by the end of the story, the man was a cold blooded drug dealer, and another middle eastern criminal had been murdered, Gaza-comes-to-Australia style.

A couple of days later, police dismissed the connections, and the story was magically withdrawn. Turns out the victim was a hard-working panel beater, who received nothing but glowing praise from those who knew him. Police confirmed there was not a single racial element to the crime.

 

Last Summer, when Sydney's beaches suddenly became the battleground of racial hatred, our racism was largely justified by a concept of Muslim men as gang rapists. Despite the fact that there had been no actual reporting of gang raping on the Cronulla beaches, young anglo Aussie after old Anglo Aussie (and, of course, Alan Jones) proudly told news cameras that Middle Eastern men were diseasing and terrorising our great nation by systematically gang raping our young - white - Aussie girls. Never mind that statistically speaking, that simply isn't the case. The terrible trial of Bilal Skaf, a Lebanese leader of a rape gang, handed to us an image upon which all the racism deliberately fueled by politics (after it realised that instilling fear into a people is an efficient smokescreen, and a great way of staying in power) would be culturally projected.

The media has increasingly connected crimes with ethnicity. At first, this is a kind of reaction, deliberately tapping into the new age of fear, using any psychology available to sensationalise and incite powerful emotions amongst readers and viewers. But inevitably, the line becomes blurred, and whether media, in this way, is following culture or actively creating it is impossible to identify.

Except, in one rather famous case. One of the things we so conveniently ignored in the example of the Cronulla riots, was that arguably the event itself was a media creation. The local tensions certainly pre-existed, and the incident with the lifegaurds had the locals heated up. But a small local dispute is very different to what it became. And what it became, was certainly generated through  the media. From the initial reports of the lifegaurd incident (which were incorrect), to the front pages of The Daily Telegraph, which ran with the headline, "Give Us Back Our Beaches"; leading up to that fateful day, there were pages upon pages of racial copy, news report after news report of sensationalised alarm bells over Muslim gangs (playing very much upon the Skaf case - there was hardly a single report that failed to remind us of the Skaf gang). Racial fear was selling papers, there's absolutely nothing else to it. The politicians had already worked out that racial fear could be exploited for votes; now the media had figured out it could transform the same dynamic into consumerism.

And then, there was Alan Jones. He ran with the story all week, hitting the airwaves day after day, sitting on his self-appointed throne, spewing out racist mantra like this;

"What kind of grubs? Well I’ll tell you what kind of grubs this lot were. This lot were middle eastern grubs."

Eventually, it was Mr Jones who received word of the infamous text message. The circulation of a text message in three short days has logically limited capabilities. So what did Jones do? He read out the text on live national radio, and furthermore, supported it. I don't know a single person in Sydney who received the text. But I also don't know anyone who didn't know about the impending riot, thanks to Jones and the media who then reported it.

Three days later, we all know what happened. News coverage was littered with drunk, angry Aussies, staggering the streets telling any news camera how the Lebanese were raping our women. In a Four Corners exclusive, one of the young men involved in the violence, explained his justification for the actions. Amazingly, in responding as to why he attacked the Lebanese at Cronulla, he answered by discussing the Skaf gang, as if they are the same people he attacked on the beach. Here, the Skaf gang becomes "they" - effectively generalised to "all" Lebanese, as this incident is used to justify the attack on the same "they", despite the fact that these were people who had no connection to Skaf, whatsoever... except, of course, for ethnicity. This is the mechanics of racism in full view...