Tackling Multimodal News: Some Implications of Critical Analytical Research on the 'children overboard' Affair

Abstract

Accounting for front-page news puts pressure on analytical resources, especially when news-making is characterised by features such as overt political intervention in visual (photographic) and verbal (attribution) news data; explicit references to and investment in visual news to support political claims about news-makers; and significant changes over time to a story, moving it from public scandal, through media disclosure to political defence. This article offers an account of how I tackled these analytical challenges in my research into the 'children overboard' affair in Australian newspapers. The affair was generated from a false claim by Liberal Party ministers that asylum seekers threw their children overboard to coerce the Australian Navy into rescuing them. The story became front-page news in October, 2001, helped to provide the Coalition with another term in office and greatly influenced public discourse about refugees and border protection. The article shows how I analysed semiotic resources such as voicing (in verbal news) and framing (in visual news) to track changes in this affair. It argues that political interventions in these semiotic resources (what I call 'first-order discourse') were pivotal in the management of news about asylum seekers. The article concludes by highlighting some implications of the methodology for critical analysis of multimodal news discourse.