Andrew Jakubowicz looks back at the year 2001, and asks: was it a good one for media and diversity?

In 2001, the Easybeats’ Friday on My Mind was voted the best Australian song from between 1926-2001 by the Australian Performing Rights Association.

Now I'm working for the rich man
But I'll change his tune one day.

The same year, George Bush, or The Man, took office just as John Howard’s electoral standing went as low as… Meanwhile President Wahid was impeached in Indonesia, the Euro took on its now-stumbling role as the common currency of Europe, the royal family of Nepal was massacred, and China entered the World Trade Organisation. That’s without children overboard, the Tampa affair, 9/11, the anthrax attacks or the war in Afghanistan. And before Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or Web 2.0.

One of the major differences of life in 2001, compared to today, was that we lived in a world BSM.

Before social media there was the internet, there was email, there were even search engines. But the populace, the punters, were relatively passive recipients of the one-way flow of information, comment and opinion. The blogosphere wasn’t there to test the validity of claims made by governments that were uncritically replicated by media practitioners.

The year 2001 provides great examples of moral panics, how to build them and how the media gets sucked into playing along, or indeed how they become part of the fuel pack for the conflagration.

One way of figuring out whether or not the media served its role as the fourth estate that year - defending truth and democracy, and promoting critical self-awareness - is to pick the trifecta that bowled through Australia in early spring and dragged Howard from far behind into an unassailable winning position in the November election.

First, a bit of context. In 1998, the Howard Government commissioned research into Australian racism. This was during the height of Pauline Hanson’s influence, and amidst the national hysteria around Asian immigration.

One of the findings was a widespread desire for “community harmony”, anger at those who didn’t or wouldn’t “fit in”, and a fierce attachment to “commitment to Australia” as a core value. “Diversity” and “tolerance” didn’t rate, while nearly 60 per cent of Australians were described as strongly or moderately racist in their views.

While the report was suppressed (but finally released under Freedom of Information in October 2011), the information was available to the government and its strategists.

How to secure the support of all these racists, too many of whom had deserted the Coalition in the early months of 2001? Three key ideas sprouted in that spring and found a fertile soil, nourished by the humus generated by the media’s search for heat rather than light.

Idea 1: Australia is Not Australia

August 2001 - The Tampa provided two key opportunities to change our ideas about ourselves. While the Tampa was only brought in to rescue the 438 otherwise doomed passengers on the Palapa 1 after the Government couldn’t get the Indonesians to accept the boat (“turn back the boats” indeed), the moment was monumentally opportune.

With the “rescue” and the turn-back of the ship from Christmas Island, the Government moved to excise Christmas Island from Australia’s migration zone. This piece of geo-political necromancy embedded a new concept – that there were two Australias: one where people had rights, and one where they didn’t. That cleavage allowed another division to become embedded, unquestioningly conveyed by the media: people who had the full range of human rights and people who didn’t, and shouldn’t.

Idea 2: War on Terror

September 2001 - The Twin Towers/Pentagon attacks in the USA became the media event of the year, and also the decade. Everyone from Al Jazeera to the Peoples’ Daily rated it the top story of the year.

The idea it created was something else: there was to be a War on Terror, a Crusade led by The Man. In a blink, a world at peace became a world at war. The slowly dissolving euphoria that had greeted the end of the Cold War was now submerged in a sea of roiling hatreds and passions.

Idea 3: Children Overboard

October 2001 - Who could be more of a challenge to the core values of Australia than people who would use their children to blackmail honest Australians into letting them arrive “illegally”? It soon became clear that the images depicting asylum seekers throwing their children overboard were incorrectly framed and the explanations by the Government were concocted to fit the concerns it was already raising about Australia’s vulnerability.

The children overboard story has been pored over for years. The narrative ran first in the Murdoch press (surprise surprise), where it was wrapped in rhetoric worthy of a major seaborne invasion.

So 2001 was a good year for moral panics, and the creation of some key ideas that we cannot shake out of our heads. Did the media create them? Grab hold of them and puff them up? Or just report the reality?

Andrew Jakubowicz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Technology Sydney and Co-director of the UTS Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Key Research Strength (Research Centre). He is a chair of the NGO Institute for Cultural Diversity. He has published widely in the fields of cultural diversity, social policy, refugees, Jewish cultural studies, media sociology, and new media. The website that he co-ordinates Making Multicultural Australia in the 21st Century is designed for teachers and students interested in cross-curriculum diversity perspectives, and is produced in conjunction with state education and arts bodies around Australia.