Introduction: The Mass Media and the Court of Public Opinion

Studies of court and/or conciliation decisions about credible complainants and legitimate sexual harassment reveal that in determining what is reasonable and indeed in assessing whether behaviour was sexual and unwelcome and resulted in humiliation, it is often the complainant’s identity, history and behaviour that are scrutinised and evaluated by conciliators and judicial officers.^[382] Youth can enhance credibility if the alleged harasser is older.

These findings also confirm the feminist perspective that law must be looked at within the broader cultural context — in this instance in the broader context of beliefs about sexual harm. Those beliefs and the broader context are both reflected by and contributed to by the media. The media has been described as a shaper of attitudes through its use of narrative techniques:

Stories create a causal chain: this happened because she did that, he responded by doing this. They identify notions of responsibility and blame; they make sense of the chaos of events “out there”, and in doing so steer the audience’s response towards one view of the world rather than another.^{[384] [385]}

In examining how female victims of sexual harassment are portrayed by the media, we must be aware that media reporting may be simplistic, misleading, and overly reliant on cliched and “archetypal characters” as “ancient as they are inflammatory” — the seductress, the victimised man, and the man-hating woman.^[386]

The language of the media is limited: “Feminists” are always “ideologues”.

Indeed it has been noted that feminism will always be working “against the grain” when engaging with the media:

The forms of feminist theory and practice that most challenge the liberal status quo are the most likely to be misunderstood and/or mistreated by the media because of the media’s own reliance on a liberal paradigm. This presents a significant challenge for those feminists who attempt to work with or within the commercial media.^[388]

Much of the critical analysis of the media focuses on the idea of propaganda, with the media responsible for providing messages to subdue the populace, even in “enlightened” liberal democracies.

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.^[389]

The media constructs a version of “reality” that favours those in power. Continuing in this vein, the media’s use of cliched characters can be seen as a shorthand method of reinforcing dominant social values about gender and the law. This use of media shorthand has been described as both political and problematic with television as “myopically focused on the foreground of ordinary experience”^[390] favouring the simple (and indeed the simplistic) at the expense of the complex:

It filters out: 1) more abstract and conceptual structures or relationships, including systems (which are relationships that interact over time to produce particular results or to maintain a particular balance); 2) causality, particularly remote causal histories and destinies, evolutionary change, and uncertain or incomplete processes of change; 3) context, which is likewise relational and causative; and 4) ambiguity, ie, uncertainty of meaning, and ambivalence, or uncertainty of value.^[391]

This tendency for over-simplification, eschewing of context and reliance on broad-brush characterisation can be seen in media reporting of sexual harassment law, together with a love of drama and exaggeration. The latter would fall at the inflammatory, screaming headlines “tabloid”- style coverage of the spectrum in contrast with the more thoughtful, detailed yet buried analysis associated with broadsheet articles beyond the front page.^[392]

In “Ripples from the First Stone”, Anya Poukchanski also identifies a blend of sensationalism and scepticism in the media when reporting sexual harassment cases.

Journalists refer to the “alleged victim”, but it is the victim who is doing the alleging, against a person she claims to have committed a crime against her — the alleged assaulter. Referring to the “alleged” victim immediately casts the foundation of her claim into doubt; well she might be a victim, or she might be putting the whole thing on.^[394]

Identifying the ties

In the following chapter we look at the style of writing in the reporting of a selection of Australian sexual harassment cases. We contrast broadsheets with tabloid, and the extent to which Mead’s flattened/melodramatic dichotomy applies. We also particularly focus on how those who allege sexual harassment cases are characterised.

We analyse the reporting by a sample of Australian newspapers of five sexual harassment cases from mid-2010 through 2011. Using microfiche archives from the National Library of Australia and the online database Newsbank Newspapers Australia, we conducted an analysis of selected print media coverage of three New South Wales (NSW) based cases — Fraser-Kirk and David Jones, Bridgette Styles’ complaint against Clayton Utz and Carole-Ann Britt’s complaint against Patrick Stevedores and two Victorian matters — Susan Spiteri’s complaint against IBM and Sallyanne Robinson’s complaint against Rivers. For the NSW matters, articles appearing in three major Sydney newspapers — the broadsheet The Sydney Morning Herald, its weekend tabloid The Sun Herald and the populist tabloid The Daily Telegraph were identified. We used articles in the daily broadsheet The Age, and the tabloids Herald Sun and Sunday Herald Sun for the cases that took place in Victoria.

For each of the five, we looked at the “splash” period, focusing our attention on the first month of reporting of the case. This period was chosen because at this time the case was “fresh” in the minds of journalists and readers. In the IBM case, we looked at two distinct “splash” periods — when the case first hit the headlines in April 2011, and when the claim was filed in the Federal Court in October 2011.

Having developed a pro forma template, we recorded variables such as how the media portrayed the parties, the behaviour complained of, the relationship between the complainant and alleged harasser, whether the complainant’s response to harassment was discussed and whether the age of the complainant was mentioned. We also noted and report below relevant “grabs” that are indicative of sensationalism and/or stereotyping and melodramatic versus flat reporting. After the textual analysis was complete, aside from looking at the aggregate findings, we compared the broadsheet to the tabloid coverage.

Caveat

The generalisability of our findings is limited both by the small sized sample and our focus on reportage in only several Australian newspapers. Any conclusions must be regarded as preliminary and not necessarily true for other print or visual media or for other types of cases.