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

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Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture ((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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Megan McElhone

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  1. Megan McElhone
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Correspondence to Megan McElhone .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law, Criminal Justice & Computing, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK

    Dimitris Akrivos

  2. School of Law, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

    Alexandros K. Antoniou

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McElhone, M. (2019). Portrayals of Middle Eastern Background Communities as Criminal in Australian Popular Media. In: Akrivos, D., Antoniou, A.K. (eds) Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04912-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04912-6_12

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04911-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04912-6

  • eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)

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