The Australian: Bill Leak
In my Rhetorics and Politics class we had a look at this article about un upset 25year old indigenous student named Melissa Denisson. How she took the cartoon shown above which portrays an Aboriginal man with a beer can not remembering his son’s name, to the Human Rights Commission as it made her feel degraded and humiliated, to the point she couldn’t eat or sleep. Then the National chief correspondent of the Australian, Hedley Thomas though an interview with ‘Hack’ expressed his thoughts on her response to the cartoon as grossly exaggerated.
Originally the reason why we had a look at this media piece (the cartoon) was to discuss whether it was a logos, pathos or an ethos. In my opinion it is strongly pathos as my first response to this cartoon was anger and sadness. As coming from the Northern Territory i subconsciously got to observe and experience the culture and lifestyle of the indigenous community which is why perhaps i felt more strongly against the cartoon. So was Melissa’s action and feelings a gross exaggeration as Hedley Thomas has said? Or could he say that because he has no relations to the Indigenous Australians and therefore is impossible for him to feel any sort of empathy towards the misfortunes they have gone through and still experiences till this day.
The cartoon was definitely successful in creating a controversy looking at how many complaints it has received (over 700) by the Australian press council and i guess that is what every mediated text wishes for these days to grab more of the publics attention. I understand that it raises awareness of Australia’s current affairs in a flavourful way but in this case i think that the somehow attacking satirical criticism was perhaps aimed at the wrong target. As for all i know the Indigenous Australian fathers are not the ones who condoned or directly set up such unsafe and deprived environment of the Northern Territory Youth detention centre, so it seems to me that the Australians have abused their authority in disguise of delivering a satirical point which was heavily subjective to make the audience blame the wrong target; then when people got offended and opposed to their ‘humour’, instead of trying to understand where they are coming from and politely excuse themselves they just made them seem like a bunch of drama queens.