Essay
While newspapers are supposed to be impartial and avoid controversial topics such as racism, a more subtle form of racism encoded in the usage of language is still to be found in the media of modern societies such as Australia.
Newspapers are supposed to respect the ethos of journalistic objectivity, to be impartial and play a fair role in community cohesion. Nonetheless, a deeper analysis of these aspects shows that the rhetorical force of the media often encodes a certain ideology. It is incontrovertible that journalism has more power to shape our understanding about events, ideas, people and the relationships between people than any other form of communication. (Richardson: 220) The language, in this instance, is the tool which makes this form of communication possible and it has a crucial role in mediating reality. Therefore it is inevitable that a wide range of linguistic features which have a subliminal message are used in the newspapers in order to shape their ideological view.
English: Cabramatta Railway Station
English: Cabramatta shops
Freedom Plaza, CabramattaThe purpose of this essay is to reveal to what extend the usage of language in newspapers can conceal a highly controversial topic such as racism. This issue will be analyzed by focusing on the usage of textual features in one of the news reports which appeared on the sixteenth of July 1995 in the newspaper The Daily Telegraph in Sydney Australia. The headline was entitled "Kids make big bucks feeding misery of suburban addicts".
First of all it is very important to have an overview of the context in which this article was written. In the period from which the article is dated, there was a Vietnamese gang in Australia known as 5T, whose violent and drug dealing activities were famous and which operated openly in the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta. As a result,