Abstract:
This article reviews three case studies in the Australian media
reporting of international humanitarian crises. The case studies
cover a six-month period in 1999 and draw on all media over
that period. The three case studies are: the violence in East Timor
at the time of the 1999 independence ballot, the imprisonment in
Yugoslavia of Prall and Wallace, two employees of CARE
Australia, and the floods in Mozambique. While the three case
studies collectively exhibit many of the standard characteristics
of media coverage of humanitarian issues, individually they differ
significantly in the scale and orientation of coverage. We suggest
that a significant factor in these differences was the relationship
between the sources for the stories and the journalists,
which in turn depended on other factors. We review the adequacy
of the Hall and Ericson positions on the source-journalist
relationship in explaining these differences, and suggest that a
field analysis derived from Bourdieu is helpful in explaining the
involvement of sources from the political, economic and military
fields, which in turn impacted on the relationship of the media to
the stories.
