Macken- Horarik, M “The Children Overboard Affair” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 26.2, 2003
The weeks reading which I have decided to focus on is Mary Macken- Horarik’s, “The children overboard affair”. It’s an interesting read about how both text and image were manipulated by newspapers to portray asylum seekers a certain way in 2001 following the infamous “Children Overboard” scandal. This was done to support the governments “fiction” of what really happened at the time the apparent story occurred and to promote “racist discourse” (p251).
Macken- Horarik states that “increasingly, in western media, news is a multimodal creation” (p252). By this she means having pictures or photographs ‘complementing’ a story. A quote by van Leeuwen, arguing that “words provide the facts… images provide interpretations” (p253) can be contested as to its accurateness, particularly in relation to modern ‘tabloid’ newspapers. The children overboard story was used by the government to promote it’s policies and provided newspapers with 3 days of front page headlines while an apparent photograph of one of the incidents in question was made public.
According to Macken- Horarik, and supported by van Leeuwen, as readers of the articles about asylum seekers, we tend to “feel close” to the politicians (albeit the Liberal ones) involved in the story, rather than ‘the boat people’, as they are referred to generically as opposed to specifically, as the politicians were. Another way the audience is supposedly made unsympathetic to asylum seekers through media discourse is the lack of ‘functionalisation” of them. While other ‘characters’ of the story are referred to by their occupation, the asylum seeker is merely ‘a boat person’ or ‘chid’ or ‘parent’. Finally, the Role Allocation of each person is an important concept to understand. Macken- Horarik states that in the photograph, the boat people are ‘passive’ and the navy officer is the ‘rescuer’. This is supported by the caption of the photo, saying that she “helps a woman and child from the people- smuggling boat”.
