Towards the end of Channel NewsAsia’s Talking Point show on the new MDA licensing regime, a caller asked Acting Minister of Manpower, Tan Chuan-jin, to confirm on air that blogs would not be subjected to licensing in the future.
The Minister repeated his mantra of the show: the regulations are meant to cover news sites, and not blogs. Unless, of course, the blogs evolved into news sites.
But when does a blog evolve into a news site? When there are so many websites that host both reports and commentary, and when even the mainstream media is moving towards blogging (just look at Singapolitics), how do we decide what a news site is?
Tan Chuan-jin had no satisfactory answer for that. All he could do was repeat that the regulations were meant to cover news sites, not blogs. Unless the blogs became news sites.
Many of us tuned in to Talking Point to see how a government minister was going to defend the licensing scheme and the way it had just been pushed through without consultation or parliamentary debate. Judging from the online reaction on Twitter and Facebook, I’m not the only one still in the dark.
Introduction
Plenty of work has gone into advocating change in laws and attitudes when it comes to rape. The media plays a crucial role in this process as it “influences beliefs about the nature of rape offenses and victims” (Ardovini-Brooker and Caringella-MacDonald 2002). Media coverage of rape trials has also shown how the courtroom becomes a “significant public site of struggle over meanings of rape” (Cuklanz 1996).
The rape case in the small town of Steubenville, Ohio, is one of the latest examples of a trial that sparked discussions about rape in the United States of America. Two teenage boys – both promising members of their high school football team – were accused of raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl (‘Jane Doe’). A photograph of her being carried between Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond was shared widely on social networks (Goddard 2013).
In a country that takes pride in sport and its athletes, reactions towards the rape was somewhat similar to that observed by Camille Nurka (2013, p. 49) when she studied fan reactions to rape claims made against Australian rugby players; reactions tended to “reproduce deeply disturbing misogynistic rape mythologies” that encouraged victim-blaming. Some of this played out in the media, where focus on the trial allowed various platforms to push their own ideology and framing of rape.
Considering the views of many conservative right-wingers on the issue of rape and violence against women – such as former US Representative Todd Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape” – one could say that the right-wing media has been an active participant in Cuklanz’s (1996) “struggle over meanings of rape.” This essay will seek to analyse the response of the right-wing media to the Steubenville rape trial, thus examining their role in the discussion of rape in the United States.
