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Portrayals of Middle Eastern Background Communities as Criminal in Australian Popular Media

  • Megan McElhoneEmail author
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture book series (PSCMC)

Abstract

The popular media plays an important role in staging, describing and interpreting race, ethnicity, culture, class and criminality for the public. This chapter presents a qualitative content analysis of three Australian popular media texts that frame Middle Eastern background communities in Australia as being crime-prone. The texts analysed are The Combination (2009), Underbelly: The Golden Mile (2010) and Down Under (2016). The chapter argues that these texts represent Middle Eastern background communities as having proclivities for gang membership and firearms-related violence, and as displaying disregard for police and the rule of law. As such, this chapter complements and extends the body of literature that has considered the racialised framing of Middle Eastern background communities as crime-prone in Australian news reporting since the 1990s.

Keywords

Arab other Middle Eastern background communities Popular media Sydney 
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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.University of New South WalesSydneyAustralia

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