While reading Marsha Woodbury’s chapter, “Jewish Images That Injure”, I couldn’t help but reflect on the stereotypes presented in Australian media (2003).
Lately, while watching television, I have noticed advertisements leaning towards a more multicultural array of actors, most notably in the medibank advertisements now including images of African and Asian families alongside the familiar Caucasian faces.
However, there is still a deficiency of Indigenous actors in these advertisements. When advertisements do include Aboriginal actors, they tend to be negative portrayals, for example the Federal Government’s anti-smoking campaign included a public service announcement depicting a low-socio-economic Aboriginal woman discussing quitting smoking now that her grandfather had passed away.
As Michael Robert Evans points out in his article, “Hegemony and Discourse: Negotiating Cultural Relationships Through Media Production”, mediating cultural and ideological representations that promote the dominated group (in Australia’s case middle-class white people) is “neither deliberate nor mean-spirited” but it does need to be recognised (2002, 312).
As Woodbury says about Jews, Indigenous people are just as varied and complex and need to be included in this new push for multiculturalism and identified to be as much a part of Australia as refugees and immigrants (Woodbury 2003, 130).
Evans, Michael Robert. “Hegemony and Discourse: Negotiating Cultural Relationships Through Media Production.” Journalism, 3(3), 2002: 309-329.
Woodbury, Marsha. “Jewish Images That Injure.” In Images that Injure: Pictorial Stereotypes in the Media, by Dennis, E.E. & Lester, P.M. (Eds.), 121-130. London: Praegar, 2003.
Youtube link:
Australian Government "Break the Chain" TVC - AdNews. Accessed Tuesday 24th April:
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