Jacqui Ewart

• PhD
• Professor at Griffith University

This article uses expectation gap theory to explore news coverage of the leadership performance of a national political leader in a major bushfire disaster in Australia. It does so to identify the types of behaviors and leadership that leader enacted and embodied during these events and what fire‐affected communities expected that politician to do...

This chapter provides an overview of a toolkit for journalists, to assist them towards more informed reporting of stories about Muslims and Islam. The toolkit’s resources and training packages are hosted on a website (reportingislam.org) and produced as part of a 4-year project called ‘Reporting Islam’, in Australia. This chapter explains the proce...

Australia has experienced a number of significant natural disasters during the past few years with politicians increasingly involved in the provision of information to publics before, during and after disasters. Drawing on data from interviews with senior executives of Australian emergency management agencies we explore how these organisations mana...

Research into news media representations of Muslims and their faith has focused mainly on how Muslims are portrayed in various types of news media and how stories about or involving them are framed. However, there has been very little attention paid to the effects of news consumption on attitudes towards Muslims. Accordingly, we wanted to explore a...

This article reveals the characteristics and demographics of non-Muslim Australians who express levels of anger towards Muslims and Islam. Using data from a 2018 national social survey of a random, stratified sample of Australians, we identify key demographic characteristics amongst those expressing above-average degrees of anger towards Muslims an...

Using data from a random stratified sample of people over 18 years of age residing in Australia, this article examines participants’ opinions of the Islamic faith independently of their opinions of Muslim people. Earlier studies have not made the nuanced distinction between opinions about Islam as a religion and opinions about Muslims as people. Th...

In this chapter, we explore a variety of matters associated with relationships, including those you might have with other academics, industry, government and non-government partners during the life of your project. Getting it right when managing relationships is crucial. We explore how to develop, cultivate and grow these relationships, while also...

This chapter delves into the important topic–working with the right team on your academic project. It explores how to choose the right team for your project and how to deal with those difficult people that you will have encountered or may meet in the future. We cover a range of issues that arise in the course of managing diverse teams and working w...

Your project may be about producing materials, devices or other objects for industry or it may be a purely research-driven project, or a combination of both. No matter what approach you are taking, there are opportunities to embed research in the project design and delivery. Many academics take a prosaic approach to research. That is, their focus i...

Multi-year and large projects often give rise to issues that may not occur in smaller, more encapsulated projects. There will be unique challenges in each type of project, but ensuring good practices around management and communication at the outset will help you to cope with and benefit from some of these challenges. In this chapter, we will cover...

This chapter introduces the book and helps readers to understand why we wrote it. We also discuss how readers might want to use this book, which is they can dip into chapters when they need assistance or read the whole book. To that end, we outline the content of each of the chapters, so that readers can find what they need at a glance.

Effective governance is a time-consuming but critical requirement when managing any academic project. Academics can set themselves up to fail early if they don’t understand or establish clear partnership arrangements, and identify ways to ensure the team meets key reporting milestones. Failure to meet contracted reporting milestones or outputs will...

This chapter explores what we mean by research project deliverables—particularly the difference between outputs and outcomes. This is an increasingly important distinction to funding bodies. Research outputs, which are key performance indicators for academics, are not always the same as project outcomes. Setting expectations amongst team members an...

This chapter summarises the key concepts outlined in this book and presents a set of important strategies for managing your academic research project. We revisit some of the main benefits and drawbacks involved with managing research projects, no matter their size. While we look back at what we have covered in our book, we also look forward by disc...

Our interviewees agreed that gaining the interest of elected officials in disasters in the mitigation and preparation phases can be difficult due to the high level of competition to gain a slot in politicians’ diaries. This chapter therefore sets out to provide a greater understanding of basic disaster concepts, ranging from early research to the c...

This chapter turns to the role of political actors in disasters and crises, and the expectations of survivors and others regarding leadership, support and sense-making. The pressure involved in these types of complex and rapidly evolving environments imposes further leadership challenges, including a lack of time, resources and factual information....

The lessons learned in the course of our ten-country study are discussed in this chapter. We present our best practice ‘tandem information model’ (TIM) for the involvement of politicians in disasters. While the TIM was developed specifically for use as disasters and crises unfold, it can also be used by politicians to help guide their responses and...

We have titled this chapter ‘Voices of Reason’ because those we interviewed said this should be the role of politicians when communicating about disasters. In this chapter, we examine what constitutes effective political leadership in disasters and crises. We reveal the key factors that contribute to effective political leadership and performance a...

In this chapter, we explore the intricacies of dealing with the power of political press secretaries, also known as media minders or media advisers. We delve behind the scenes by drawing on our interviews and case studies, where we find a common theme: much of the play for publicity is driven by the political actor’s media minder taking advantage o...

In this chapter, we examine the complex and multi-faceted relationships between politicians and emergency managers with a view to identifying what works most effectively in establishing these relationships. We found that a cooperative approach to relationships, based on mutual respect and understanding of the different roles played by politicians a...

This chapter lifts the curtain that sits behind the frontline to explore the realities of efforts to save life and property when media interest is intense and political actors head for the first photo opportunity. This chapter examines how emergency managers attract the attention of political elites in peacetime between disasters and deal with the...

Unpredictable violent acts of nature—earthquakes, cyclones, tornadoes, floods, droughts, fires—need some form of connection to humans before they become a ‘disaster’. An earthquake in a remote area with no impact on humans is not a disaster; it only becomes a disaster when humans are affected—indirectly, such as through crop losses, or directly, su...

Australia is a country beset by natural disasters including fires, severe storms, cyclones, droughts and floods. While organisations charged with managing disasters in their various phases are increasingly using social media to distribute information about these events, communities involved in disasters continue to rely on local and community media...

This book explores the role of elected leaders in disaster management. Filling a significant gap in disaster literature, the authors take a pragmatic approach to the relationships between the public under threat, the operational response, and the interests and actions of elected officials. Key tactics are explored, from the ways operational manager...

This book is an essential resource for academics managing a large and complex research project. It provides important practical insights into the processes that inform such research projects and delivers insights into the delicate balance between industry, stakeholder and academic needs. It gives practical advice about developing relationships with...

Journalists play a key role in providing information to various publics affected by disasters or crises. They have important social and ethical responsibilities in relation to disseminating information during the various disaster phases. News media are important in shaping public responses to disasters and in connecting people and communities. This...

In the context that Australian journalists and the Australian public are largely ignorant of Islam and Muslims and where racism and Islamophobia are historically rooted and persistent, this study reports on where Australians source their information about Islam and Muslims. In this study, we find that while a sample of Australian journalists believ...

This study emerged from an incidental, and somewhat surprising, finding that 15 percent of working journalists who attend training on improving the ways that mainstream new media report stories about Islam and Muslims, wrongly associated Sikhism with Islam. We wondered if this was indicative of the Australian population and, through a random strati...

Much of the research about disasters has focused on the poor and unethical practices of journalists reporting on disasters, but relatively little has been written about best practice approaches to news media coverage of such events. This article uses two sources of data, interviews with senior emergency managers in eight countries and the body of r...

It is more than a decade since social geographer Kevin Dunn first described non- Muslim Australians’ ignorance about Islam and its adherents and outlined a series of recommendations about how Australian governments could address this as a pressing social policy issue. Recently researchers have re-assessed non-Muslim Australians’ perceptions of thei...

We know much about how the news media report on the topic of Muslims and Islam, but we know very little about the journalistic practices and processes that contribute to the way these issues are framed and reported. Whereas research has until now largely focused on the ways in which Islam and Muslims are represented in various news media, there is...

We know quite a lot about how access to talkback radio programmes is controlled by producers and hosts, but we know relatively little about the extent of audiences’ knowledge of these rules and their understanding of the conditions of access to talkback. Drawing on data from focus groups with audience members of 12 Australian talkback radio program...

Despite the pressure on politicians to show leadership in times of disaster, many struggle with the extreme leadership challenges imposed by a calamity that is quickly consuming life and property. Drawing on data from elite interviews with senior personnel from disaster agencies in eight countries, we find that emergency managers want to engage wit...

Research into talkback radio has provided a great deal of information about shock jocks and their interactions with audiences, their political power and the power of radio to mobilize its audiences in negative ways. Talkback radio has been traditionally perceived as a participatory form of media, albeit limited by various gatekeeping and rules of a...

Politicians are increasingly involving themselves in the frontline delivery of information in the lead up to disasters and as they unfold. They are often placed as spokespeople and represent the public face of disaster, be it anthropogenic or natural. A disaster also offers opportunities for a politician to participate in intense media coverage and...

Politicians are both a help and hindrance in the provision of information to the public before, during and after disasters. For example, in Australia, the Premier of the State of Queensland, Anna Bligh, was lauded for her leadership and public communication skills during major floods that occurred late in 2010 and in early 2011 (de Bussy, Martin an...

The project idea reflects European Commision recommended Work Programm 2013 for information and communication technologies management. Surveys conducted by analysts such as Forrester Research (2012) demonstrate that social technologies continue to grow in popularity inside the society and these developments will have an influence on policies and dr...

After a disaster, the media typically focus on who is to blame. However, relatively little is known about how the narrative of blame plays out in media coverage of the release of official disaster reports. This paper examines coverage by two Australian newspapers (The Courier-Mail and The Australian) of the release of the Queensland Floods Commissi...

Media Framing of the Muslim World examines and explains how news about Islam and the Muslim world is produced and consumed, and how it impacts on relations between Islam and the West. The authors cover key issues in this relationship including the reporting on war and conflict, terrorism, asylum seekers and the Arab Spring. © Halim Rane, Jacqui Ewa...

Crime waves make great headlines, and can be an ongoing source of stories for news media. In this article, we track the news media promotion of the spectre of a crime wave at Queensland's Gold Coast and the interplay between politics and policy responses to the media campaign. By analyzing news media reports, government, local government and police...

Is there a clash of civilizations? Is conflict between Islam and the West inevitable? A quick scan of history would suggest that this is the case. Since the advent of Islam in the 7th century, Christian writers in the Near East and Europe have regarded the conquering Muslim empires as an enemy, a civilizational rival sent by God as punishment. In t...

As discussed throughout this book, the events of 9/11 have had a profound impact on Islam-West relations in terms of both intercommunity relations in Western countries and international relations in the global context. In the international realm, we have witnessed war and conflict between Muslim and largely Western forces. Within Western countries,...

Since the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, the world has witnessed popular uprisings against long-standing regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. To date these uprisings have resulted in the toppling of the Tunisian president Ben Ali, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi. Other regi...

From the Western media perspective, the Muslim world looks monolithic, static, different and oppositional. We wrote in Chapter 1 that Muslims will soon comprise one-quarter of the world’s population, with approximately 60 per cent residing in the Asia-Pacific region, while only 20 per cent live in the Middle East. These figures contradict the popul...

Largely as a consequence of intense media coverage since 9/11, Islam has been brought to the attention of people across the globe. However, most Westerners know little about the faith and its adherents. This chapter begins with a basic overview of Islam’s main teachings and looks at the prevalence of Islamic beliefs and practices among Muslims arou...

There is a long tradition of armed struggle in Islam that dates back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad. At its advent, Muslims fought numerous battles with the polytheists of Arabia for the preservation of Islam and for the establishment of the Islamic social order across the Peninsula. Like Islam’s spiritual struggle in respect to prayer and cha...

Given the extent of pejorative political, media and public discourse on asylum seekers, particularly where Muslims are concerned, it is ironic that migration and particularly asylum seeking have a special place in the Islamic tradition. At the advent of Islam in 610, many of the early converts to the new monotheistic faith were severely persecuted...

Much of what is known about Islam and Muslims in Western societies is derived from the mass media. Studies have shown that over three-quarters of people in Western societies rely on the mass media, mainly television, as their primary source of information about Islam and Muslims (Rane, 2010b). The scholarly consensus is that, in the aftermath of th...

This chapter documents the realities of being a Western journalist covering the war in Iraq during the pivotal years of the conflict from 2004 onwards as the security situation further deteriorated. The Iraq war was immensely divisive in the Middle East; it was looked upon as an exercise in US imperialism and a thinly veiled grab for resources just...

Talkback radio in Australia has primarily been conceptualized as a space where populist meta narratives are constructed and, through repetition, entrenched. However, little attention has been paid to talkback that occurs beyond populist programs. This article focuses on the contributions non-populist talkback programs make to local news and communi...

This article backgrounds the Australian experience with national security laws using case studies to highlight tensions between Australia's security laws and the media's Fourth Estate role. It compares the Australian and UK human rights contexts and suggests a cautious approach to the renewal of such laws, particularly those restricting public deba...

This article explores talkback radio programmes' creation of community during disasters. It examines how community is formed by the contributions audience members make to talkback radio during natural disasters, thus probing beyond the instrumental value of providing information on air as a disaster is unfolding. Normative theories of crisis commun...

Previous research on the 9th and 10th anniversary coverage of 9/11 has found that sections of the Australian news media have focused less on blame and those responsible for the attacks and focused more on the victims and reconciliation. If the media has “moved on” from 9/11, have audiences followed? In order to answer this question, we conducted a...

This article analyses Australian television news programmes' framing of the tenth anniversary of the events of 9/11. Our findings build on and reaffirm the earlier work we did in this area—showing that television news programmes in Australia have moved away from conflating terrorism with Muslims and Islam. We found that the tenth anniversary covera...

This article examines the sustainability of newsroom change through the lens of an ambitious change project called “Readers First” at a group of Australian regional newspapers. Survey data were gathered over 3 consecutive years from rank-and-file newsworkers who participated in the program. It was found that, contrary to the problems usually associ...

Stories about alleged terrorism and terrorist activities typically conflate Islam and terrorism, but there are few examples of cases where the news frames used to present these types of stories change over time. This article explores how four key Australian media outlets framed Australia's biggest and to date most costly terrorism investigation, th...

It's no secret that the representation of migrant groups in the media has been particularly problematic, as has been their access to mainstream media, and both issues have attracted a great deal of research. Far less attention has been paid by researchers to how these groups respond when they experience such difficulties, and the various forms of m...

Definitions of social inclusion and exclusion are fluid, and researchers and policy-makers have not agreed upon an all-encompassing definition. For wider society, social inclusion requires the transformation of these emerging definitions into 'lived experience' and actions. For the media, reporting on social inclusion is complicated by the confusio...

The positive role that some forms of talkback radio play in the lives of audiences has received relatively little attention from researchers. Participants in a study that explored why Australian talkback radio program audiences listen to and call particular programs revealed engagement with this form of radio makes a significant contribution to the...

This article investigates how five Australian television stations reported and framed the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. In Australia, Eid, the Muslim festival held to celebrate the end of Ramadan, coincided with the ninth anniversary of the events of 9/11. This provided an opportunity to examin...

This article explores the attitudes of journalists towards the introduction of a corporate-change program in the newsrooms of 14 regional daily newspapers in Australia. It draws data from a survey of journalists working for one of Australia largest regional media corporations, Australian Provincial Newspapers. The article examines the journalists'...

The article discusses a study which explored the treatment of women as news sources by the "Barcoo Independent." It offers a look at several studies which found that women have been underrepresented and misrepresented by the Australian news media. It discusses a case study which reveals some of the factors that have enabled the "Barcoo Independent"...

The first comprehensive study of the Australian community radio sector at the turn of the millennium revealed insights into the contemporary operations of the sector, particularly in terms of its connections to communities, production of local content, and creation of a citizens media. It offered an analysis of the people working in community radio...

This paper examines the role regional media play in constructiing a region's publics. It examines how journalists at one regional newspaper conceptualise the public and investigates how these concepts are played out through a series of articles from the same newspaper.

Public journalism, with its citizen-centred approach, has been positioned as a way of changing journalists’ sourcing patterns. It is also supposed to be a method by which traditionally under-represented groups, such as women and indigenous people, can achieve a voice in the media. Some academics suggest it might even provide a way of addressing tra...

Australian newspapers are on the cutting edge of technological change, with regular upgrades of computerised production systems now a fact of life. In keeping abreast of technological advancements many newspapers have sacrificed the key elements that were the basis of traditional newspapers. This paper examines how pagination technology has reduced...

This article paints a picture of the professional culture of journalists at one regional daily newspaper in Queensland, Australia in relation to their self-described practices in the representation of indigenous Australians. The author suggests that journalists' ideologies and self described practices tend to conflict. However this conflict tends t...

Disasters bring out the best, and worst, in journalists. They provide examples of journalistic practice and communication under extreme circumstances. They challenge journalists mentally, physically, ethically and emotionally. This paper examines the reporting practices of journalists covering an "everyday" natural disaster, in which human life was...

Griffith University researchers in 2002 presented the final results of a national survey of community radio stations. The final report 'Culture Commitment Community - The Australian Community Radio Sector' contained a wealth of information on the sector and covered many 'station-based' perspectives on issues such as localism, funding and sponsorshi...

Yes Yes

The experiences of a group of Australian university journalism students from diverse backgrounds are explored as they become involved in producing five editions of a new newspaper for the isolated community of Blackall in the Queensland Outback, 1500km north-west of Sydney. During this learning experience, non-traditional journalistic sourcing meth...