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Article Excerpt
Abstract
This study examines Canadian media coverage of a female visitor from the Congo, suspected of carrying a deadly disease, to show how "race" has been constructed and sustained in Canadian society. Critical discourse analysis of four major Canadian newspapers constitutes the data of the paper. Findings show that the media used the case to cause panic in the Canadian population by cross-articulating immigration and racial identity with health risks. Analysis of the media coverage reveals that anti-racial diversity discourse in the media is coded in non-race terms. We argue that news coverage of the event reinforces broader racial ideologies around immigration and risk that are capable of tapping into the anxiety of Canadians over the growing presence of racial minorities in Canada.
Resume
Cet article porte sur la couverture mediatique au Canada d'une visiteuse congolaise suspecte d'une maladie mortelle, et vise a montrer comment se construit et se maintient la notion de > dans la societe canadienne. Il s'appuie sur l'analyse du discours critique de quatre journaux les plus importants du pays. Il en resulte que les media se sont servis de ce cas pour provoquer une panique dans la population en faisant l'amalgame entre immigration et identite raciale d'une part, et les risques de sante d'autre part. Une analyse de la couverture mediatique revele que, dans les medias, un discours contre la diversite raciale se cache derriere des termes non-raciaux. Nous soutenons que les nouvelles rapportant cet evenement ont renforce des ideologies raciales non seulement plus generales jouant sur le duo immigration et danger, et ayant la capacite d'exploiter l'anxiete des Canadiens concernant la presence grandissante de minorites raciales au pays.
INTRODUCTION
The mass media in Canada, as in other modern societies, have influence on public opinion. Hall et al. (1978), attribute the importance of the mass media to their ability to present information about events that occur outside the immediate and direct experience of the majority of society. In considering the central importance of the mass media to the structure of society, van Dijk (1993a) asserts that the media are an important vehicle through which an ensemble of dominant ideas in society is disseminated to its members. News reporters and journalists are considered front-line workers in the case of representing and telling the stories of the greater world beyond the reach of the ordinary citizen. Although modern journalism is a profession that makes claim to "value-neutrality" and "objectivity" in the reporting of stories (Knight 1982,18), it often misrepresents racial minorities and reinforces existing social inequalities in society (van Dijk 1991, 1993a; Henry and Tator 2002; Fleras 1994).
This paper examines the media coverage of a Congolese visitor to Canada who was suspected of carrying the deadly Ebola virus. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (van Dijk 1993a; Henry and Tator 2002) of articles in four major Canadian newspapers--the National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the Hamilton Spectator--constitute the primary source of data for the study. Our study demonstrates how the Canadian press used the case to problematize immigration of non-Europeans to Canada by its cross-articulation with racial diversity and health risk to Canadians. We have also shown through the study how the idea of "race" can be sustained in non-racial terms (see Henry et al. 2000; Li 2001; Barker 1981).
Beck (1992) has indicated that risk consciousness in a risk society is not only rampant, but conflicts over risk get displaced. The displacement model of risk leads Beck to suggest that the risk society is a "scapegoat society" (1992, 75). The anti-racial diversity subtexts in the print media, as we argue, serve as an index of collective insecurities of Canadians stemming from the "disorder" of social change. The anxiety over these insecurities is displaced to non-European immigrants in an attempt to impose a sense of social order (see Barrett 1994; Li 2003). It is, therefore, our contention that the media reports on the suspected Ebola case, as a problem of immigration, find resonance in the public that already has what Barrett (1994, 270) refers to as "racial capacity," largely derived from the colonial discourse on the Other. Coupled with the entrenched racial capacity, as we argue, it is feasible that when racist discourses are articulated in non-racist terms via media coverage, the public is actively and emotively involved, and is capable of interpreting what they see in the media in terms of their past experiences and attitudes they have developed through the "mutual knowledge incorporated in encounters" (Giddens 1984, 4).
THE "NON-EBOLA PANIC"
February 6, 2001 marked the first print media appearance of an Ebola positive patient from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was on a visitor's visa, being admitted to a Hamilton hospital. The four Canadian newspapers examined for the study indicated that the woman fell iii while she was visiting an acquaintance in Hamilton on Sunday, February 4, 2001. According to her "host," as reported in newspaper stories, that Sunday an ambulance had been requested to transport the Congolese woman to the Henderson Hospital in Hamilton. During the initial medical examination, Ebola was considered a probable cause of her illness by the medical practitioners who attended her. The Globe and Mail (February 7, 2001), quoting a source familiar with the case, reported that by Monday, February 5, the woman's illness had become so severe that she was "bleeding from several sites on the body." According to news media reports, the situation was serious enough that those who came in contact with the woman, including five ambulance workers, were immediately identified for isolation, and the ambulance in which she had been transported was decommissioned (Globe and Mail, February 7, 2001; Hamilton Spectator, February 8, 2001).
As the media coverage intensified, so did public reaction in the Hamilton area. The Heritage Front, a self-proclaimed white supremacist organization, picketed the hospital and distributed anti-immigration pamphlets bearing the headline "Immigration Can Kill You!" (Hamilton Spectator, February 12, 2001). Hospital workers panicked and threatened legal action against the hospital for exposing them to danger. Some news reports claimed that Black children in some elementary schools in Hamilton were segregated by their white peers (Hamilton Spectator, March 02, 2001). Subsequent newspaper reports stated that, after a series of medical tests lasting a few days, Ebola and other suspected hemorrhagic fevers had been ruled out (Hamilton Spectator, February 21, 2001). In spite of this, other news reports called attention to the fact that the woman's medical care had been costly (National Post, March 14, 2001) and that she was also being investigated by the authorities for alleged diamond smuggling (National Post, March 03, 2001).
MASS MEDIA, MORAL PANIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE
The literature on moral panic has provided insights into the relationship between the mass media and collective social action (Cohen 1972; Hall et al. 1978; Critcher 2003). Hall et al. (1978) ground their analyses of moral panics in episodic reaction to social and economic change, and argue that moral panic discourse provides a rallying point for the power elites to seek hegemony in times of social change. Drawing on the Gramscian strain of Marxism, Hall and his colleagues argue that the media helped the British ruling class amplify a crisis in order to cement its hegemony at a time of fragile consensus in Britain. Through what Hall and his colleagues refer as a "signification spiral," urban Black youth, who were constructed as the "folk devil;' were criminalized. The disproportional reaction to the objective harm of crime associated with urban youth was motivated by the "signification spiral"--"a way of signifying events which also intrinsically escalates their threat" (Hall et al. 1978, 223). One of the escalating mechanisms of the "signification spiral" is "convergence," which entails a cross articulation of two or more events "so as to implicitly or explicitly draw parallels between them" (ibid.). Articulations of diseases with the racialized "Other" (see Tomes 2000; Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta 1989; Power 1995; Dubois 1996; Washer 2004) and sexual minorities (see Thompson 1998) have been empirically grounded in more recent studies.
Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994,135) refer to Hall et al.'s perspectives on moral panics as "an elite-engineered model": "a conscious undertaking by the elite group to generate and sustain concern, fear, and panic on the part of the public over an issue that they recognize not to be terribly harmful to the society as a whole." Instead of this elite-engineered model, Goode and Ben-Yehuda favor a "grassroots model" and "interest group theory." They argue that moral panic is not an ideological imposition from the top, given that the situation leading to a moral panic must be organic to a society. Thus, a grassroots model of moral panic posits that "panics originate with the general public; the concern about a particular threat is a widespread, genuinely felt--if perhaps mistaken--concern" (127). However, public concerns do not lead to panic unless they are articulated. Therefore, Goode and Ben-Yehuda state that moral panics stem from the middle rungs of society. Interest groups, they claim, such as "professional associations, police departments, the media, religious groups, educational organizations" have the ability to shape "the content or timing of panics" (139).
Scholars like Goode and Ben-Yehuda maintain that a moral panic founders in the absence of a grassroots endorsement because pre-existing fears and concerns need to be brought to public attention by those in the middle rungs of society. In this view, the media cannot be held fully responsible for fuelling panics, given that there must be prevailing issues or sentiments for the media to tap into. Thus, Goode and Ben-Yehuda's approach to the concept of moral panic is also influential in this study. While the power elite plays a major role in using the media to influence the public, apropos Hall and his colleagues (1978), the public only responds positively to the elite's discourse of domination in situations where the discourse resonates with their material condition and understanding of the world (Hier 2002).
RISKS, INSECURITY, AND ANTI-RACIAL DIVERSITY
The works of Giddens (1990; 1991) and Beck (1992) emphasize the existential peril of contemporary living. While conflicts over the distribution of material resources characterized the early stage of modernity, risk becomes an organizing principle of late modern societies (ibid.). Risks of late modernity include environmental risks, such as pollution, floods, and tire, and also medical risks, such as medical care and treatment, and deadly infectious diseases (see Lupton 1999). The preponderance of risks in the contemporary world leads to social anxiety in the population. In the words of Beck (1992, 49):
The driving force in the class society can be summarized in the phrase: I am hungry! The movement set in motion by the risk society, on the other hand, is expressed in the statement: I am afraid! The commonality of anxiety takes the place of the commonality of need. The type of the risk society marks in this sense a social epoch in which solidarity from anxiety arises and becomes a political force (emphasis in original).
The sequestration of time from space (Giddens 1990; 1991) globalizes risks. But major modern risks are human-made, and they are often consequences of globalization. Lupton and Tulloch (2001, 20) describe examples of these risks, such as "the dangers associated with nuclear weapons, the threat...
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