Thread by @joshuabadge

A thread: a bunch of white folks rocked up at a train station with baseball bats in Melbourne yesterday looking for black people to assault. How do the Australian & Herald cover it? #auspol

theaustralian.com.au/news/victorian…

In a story where race is actually relevant for once, there's no initial no mention of ethnicity. The title and lede obscure the whiteness of the group and avoid mention of the racial motivation. Instead the article repeatedly focuses on a prior assault

The prior assault allows the piece to associate people "of African appearance" with a violent incident in a story that is actually about white people bringing baseball bats to a train station

It additionally functions as a kind of speudo-apology: the "group armed with bats" *only* came after teens "of African appearance" staged a robbery. It minimises the agency of the white teenagers and emphasises the prejudiced association between violence and blackness

Notice the language: typically when there's three or more black people it's automatically a gang, but when there's a mob of white people with baseball bats looking for violence it's "a group of youths"

Additionally, the black youths in this story were accosted but it's quietly ignored. Somehow the Australian manages to use the phrase "of African appearance" three times in the piece without mentioning the race of the bat-wielding teens even once

The Herald fares slightly better: it's not mentioned in the title but the lede acknowledges that the white teens were targeting black teens before leaning into a similar kind of pseudo-apology

Notice how both articles identify with the white group, sympathising with them to the extent of explaining their actions as a logical consequence of earlier violence which is cleanly ascribed to "African-Australians"

Interestingly the Herald calls the white group a "gang" in a caption only by calling the black teenagers a "gang" as well. So it is that a white mob accosting innocent black bystanders in a train station becomes a "standoff" between "two gangs"

The takeaway here is that much of Australia's media landscape is invested in negative stereotypes about people of colour and will, as a rule, only acknowledge race when it suits a profitable narrative like "African gangs" but rarely ever whiteness