Working the borders in racist discourse: the challenge of the ‘Children Overboard Affair’ in news media texts

Abstract

This paper tackles some of the analytical challenges of multisemiotic texts in the production of racist discourse in news stories. In particular, it offers a critical analysis of the ‘children overboard’ affair in Australian newspapers. This notorious incident, in which Liberal Party ministers wrongly claimed that asylum seekers threw their children overboard in an effort to coerce the Navy to offer them sanctuary, claimed front-page news for some time in Australian newspapers. The effects of the claims about ‘boat people’ are still being played out in political struggles over border protection in late 2003. Media treatment of the incident presents distinctive challenges for analysis in part because it is work at the borders of discourse that most powerfully shaped public perceptions of the issue. In this paper I adopt the notions of ‘framing’ (for images) and ‘voicing’ (for verbiage) to explore (re)presentations of the ‘children overboard’ story in two Australian newspaper articles. I also posit some telling homologies between voicing and framing at three stages of the unfolding media story. The paper argues that the politics of race are increasingly being played out by means of visual ‘news’ and that critical discourse analysts need ways of analyzing the synergies between visual and verbal representations of news makers and their effects on public discourse surrounding them.