Abstract
A new wave of anti-racist politics is challenging the racialised dynamics of news media reporting. This paper explores the experiences of Indigenous journalists working in mainstream news media organisations in Australia in this changing context, and their strategies to navigate the racial political economy and news values of the industry. While many have observed the growing number of Indigenous journalists working in mainstream news, Indigenous journalists’ experiences and practices in these contexts have rarely been canvassed. I analyse 11 in-depth interviews with practicing journalists in Australia to explore how they have their mediated their positions. I suggest that Indigenous journalists engage in a specifically Indigenous journalistic practice, informed by connections to place, community and culture. This can be understood as a contested practice of Indigenous sovereignty. It also highlights the racialised presumptions of news values, including notions of objectivity, authority and balance.
Keywords
Introduction
Journalism has faced sustained challenge from movements including Black Lives Matter (BLM), which have forced recognition of systemic racism in the media. This has been accompanied by growing pressure for media and news organisations to recognise lived experience as a form of expertise, and a practice of ‘calling out’ institutions that are persistently white-dominated or engage in racist reporting (Callison and Young, 2020). In Australia, BLM and an associated ‘racial reckoning’ has prompted widespread criticism of the media’s problematic relationship with Indigenous representation, racism in newsroom cultures and the lack of Indigenous voices in mainstream news-making (Hayman-Reber, 2020). This has included some Indigenous journalists openly criticising media organisations, such as when Indigenous journalist Kodi Bedford spoke out about the depth of racism she had experienced while working at multicultural broadcaster SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), and when Channel Ten and NITV (National Indigenous Television) journalist Narelda Jacobs openly decried the slow response of news organisations to the violent murder of a Noongar teenager in 2022 (Patrick and Hayman-Reber, 2022). This paper explores the experiences of Indigenous journalists working in mainstream news media organisations in Australia in this changing context, and their strategies to navigate the racial political economy and news values of the industry.
The paper proceeds by contextualising the study within a rich tradition of scholarship that has substantially critiqued the representation of Indigenous people in mainstream news media, and connects this to critiques of journalism’s role in a racialised settler colonial context and political economy, and to critiques of normative news values. I explore the connection between Indigenous sovereignty and journalism, then outline the methodological approach anchored in Indigenous methodologies, and my positionality in relation to the research. I historicise the current moment of change within political-economic changes in journalism and debates on racialised representation and news values, considering how they have impacted Indigenous journalists, before moving to develop analysis of knowledge shared in 11 semi-structured interviews with Indigenous journalists in Australia. I locate the journalists as operating in ‘insider-outsider’ spaces (Webber, 2009), finding a distinct practice of Indigenous journalism representing an expression of sovereignty, which poses specific challenges to journalistic norms. I then consider how changing journalistic practices and enduring racialised inequalities impact this and suggest some implications.
Notably, this paper does not draw out the extensive, documented harm done to journalists in these organisations, both inside and outside newsrooms, for simply being Indigenous and/or seeking to represent Indigenous perspectives, which has been chronicled by a series of emerging studies (Carlson and Frazer, 2018; Valencia-Forrester et al., 2023) and which I have focussed on elsewhere as part of this same project (Thomas and Nolan, 2024). Rather this paper focusses specifically on outlining the unique practice of Indigenous journalism by Indigenous journalists in mainstream organisations, and the challenges it faces in the settler colonial political and economic context.
I use the term Indigenous in this paper as a broad identifier for colonised people in settler contexts and to specifically describe the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population in Australia, recognising its limitations. Interviewees regularly use terms such as ‘mob’ or ‘black’ to describe Indigenous people and communities. The use of ‘black’ is broader than a definition of skin colour. It expresses a long tradition of identity expression, collective struggle and connection to international movements and other racialised groups through language use (Maynard, 2015).
Racial political economy, news values and Indigenous sovereignty
A wealth of scholarship demonstrates how racist assumptions about Indigenous people have been promulgated in mainstream media in settler colonial contexts, producing and reproducing distorted narratives (McCallum and Waller, 2017). Others demonstrate how these patterns have implications for racialised policy discourses and practices (Fforde et al., 2013; Dreher, McCallum and Waller, 2016). However, there has been very little discussion of how Indigenous journalists operate in the context of these same institutions. Research on Indigenous journalism has tended to focus on how Indigenous community-controlled media and other forms of alternative media create space for Indigenous worldviews (Burrows, 2018; Dreher et al., 2016). For example, Burrows (2018) reported on interviews with 42 Indigenous journalists in Indigenous-controlled media from Australia, Canada, Finland and Aotearoa/New Zealand, arguing they produced a ‘modified version of objectivity’, negotiating tensions between normative news values and community values. She argues that Indigenous journalists work from Indigenous standpoints, which ‘recognise Indigenous community needs, value Indigenous truths and prioritise Indigenous voices’ (Burrows, 2018, p. 1121). However, as Nolan et al. (2020) note, the focus of scholarship on Indigenous journalists in community media spaces often fails to consider how Indigenous journalists are taking these practices into mainstream news rooms, and what unique challenges they may face in this context.
Callison and Young (2020), in their work on journalism’s racial reckoning in the United States and Canada, suggest that the practices of Indigenous journalists offer generalisable insights about journalistic responsibility, ethics and subjectivity that can challenge normative news values. News values is a term used to describe, variously, what aspects of an event or issue allow something to be considered newsworthy by news organisations and journalists, the standpoints and set of beliefs held by news organisations and journalists, as well as the practices, cultures and routines of newsrooms and news-making (Mast and Temmerman, 2021). A multitude of studies since the 1970s have sought to define the sometimes-invisible norms and assumptions surrounding journalistic notions of factuality and truth, balance and fairness, bias, objectivity and independence, as well as the drives of timeliness, sensationalism, exclusivity and conflict (Mast and Temmerman, 2021). While critics have considered how commercial imperatives including neoliberal restructuring and digital transformation have impacted and are reshaping these norms (Harcup and O’Neill, 2017), only rarely have journalism and media scholars in western settler colonial contexts grappled with questions of positionality and whiteness as they relate to news values, and very few have considered how Indigenous or racialised journalists understand, practice and potentially challenge these values (Douglas, 2022).
However, as Robinson and Culver (2016) have argued, news values are embedded in whiteness – not least because newsrooms are predominantly white, but because, as Dreher and Waller (2022) put it, ‘racial news values’ construct ‘hierarchies of attention’ which prioritise stories about and for white people and audiences, framed in ways that normalise and invisibilise the standpoints of news organisations and journalists. In a study of 45 years of news media coverage of Indigenous political aspirations in Australia, Thomas, Jakubowicz and Norman (2019) identified three major narratives that have upheld a ‘white standpoint’ in reporting on Indigenous political aspirations in the Australian context, and identified the failure to comprehend Indigenous aspirations for sovereignty as an essential limitation of mainstream media news values. In the Canadian context, Daniel Johnson (2011) argues news values are based on racialised assumptions about what counts as authority and as expertise, producing an over-reliance on elite sources and viewpoints. He labels mainstream media ‘whitestream’ media. Callison and Young (2020) argue that news values are shaped by commercial contexts, understandings of audience and broader ideological structures which are themselves shaped by histories of racism, colonisation and capitalism. Elsewhere (2021: 1224) they argue that the ‘powers of journalism to define and legitimise’ stem from this, and must be de-naturalised. They suggest that journalism can only be reinvented if it challenges the economic and epistemic roots of the industry. Dreher and Waller (2022) suggest that it is through challenge to racialised news values that their origins and presumptions can become salient.
As Titley (2019) argues, studies of news media tend to focus on the news that is produced, rather than the structures, processes and cultures of the institutions themselves and how these may reproduce racialised news values. Over 20 years ago, Simon Cottle’s (2000) edited collection Ethnic Minorities and the Media developed a sociological analysis of news media practices and cultures in the UK. Cottle emphasised the way that racialised news values reproduced themselves through newsroom recruitment and training, through a reporting focus on elite social structures, through assumptions of a white audience and valorised liberal ideas of objectivity, and through marketing strategies and commercialisation strategies that worked to hinder critical attention to racial politics, amongst other obstinate structural features. Twelve years later scholar Sue Abel (2012: 126) identified that a ‘racial political economy’ lens was necessary to understand the political economic constraints of Māori television in the context of settler resistance to Indigenous media in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Abel argues ‘there seems to be a significant absence when considering how an indigenous media functions within a settler state’, imploring scholars to contextualise media racism and the experiences of Indigenous news organisations and journalists in histories of journalism colonisation and racialisation.
Following this, this paper seeks to articulate the unique practices of Indigenous journalists, focussing specifically on mainstream media, and is attentive to how the structures, processes and cultures of news media institutions themselves can reproduce racism and normative news values – as well as how Indigenous journalists challenge these structures, processes and cultures. Crucial to understanding this is a recognition of contested sovereignty. Understanding Indigenous sovereignty, as a practice and a concept, allows the contextualisation of the contestations and difficulties for Indigenous news-making and the achievements of Indigenous journalists in persisting in their own practices of news-making. The Australian continent was falsely claimed based on ‘terra nullius’, a land belonging to no-one, which set in a train a system that continues to structure the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and institutions of power in Australian society (de Souza and Dreher, 2021). The failure to recognise the distinct political communities of Indigenous peoples, and their right to self-government, is an enduring injustice. This represents a denial of Indigenous sovereignty (Hobbs et al., 2021). Additionally, I also work from the recognition, based on McKinnon’s (2018) work, that practices of Indigenous sovereignty encompass more than the assumption of rights and statehood, to include Indigenous ontological and epistemological practices – ways of being, knowing and doing – not reducible to western legal frameworks. These endure through a range of political, cultural and relational practices and expressions that resist and reframe settler norms and institutions. Indigenous sovereignty, then, names an approach to knowledge and existence distinct from, and presenting a challenge to, settler colonial structures.
Methodology, positionality and terminology
This study is authored by a non-Indigenous, white settler scholar. My approach to analysis is informed by my interdisciplinary background across Indigenous studies and media studies, and an ethical concern of challenging racism and advancing Indigenous justice. However, my own position as an ‘outsider’ to Indigeneity is a limitation of the work. I work to address this through employing methods influenced by Indigenous methodologies that emphasise participant control (Kovach, 2021). I also engaged in a process of discussion on this research with Indigenous scholars, who provided advice and feedback on this paper in its development. This study received Ethics approval at the University of Technology Sydney. I conducted 11 semi-structured interviews between one and three hours long in 2022. Interviewees were invited to correct transcriptions, and viewed the manuscript in draft form to provide feedback, consent to publication and correct or provide further comment on our analysis. The conclusions, nevertheless, are my own, and limited by own standpoint, experiences and knowledge.
All the journalists interviewed work at public media institutions or commercial media companies. I have taken care to anonymise the interviewees and to de-identify the data, for example, by excluding locations, employers and other details. The media sector in Australia is small and the number of Indigenous journalists is particularly small (Thomas et al., 2023). Participants agreed that anonymisation was an important part of the process.
Racial reckonings
The 1980s and 1990s produced a significant challenge to racist representation and to classic ideas of objectivity. An ABC documentary (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2022), Looking Black, details the recruitment of the first Indigenous journalist cadets at the ABC, following the 1988 Australian Bicentenary, when celebrations of colonial invasion and settlement were drawn into question by Indigenous protest. Langton’s (1993) famous essay ‘Well I heard it on the radio and saw it on the television’, referencing the Yolngu band Yothu Yindi’s 1991 song ‘Treaty’, expressed the sentiment of Indigenous communities feeling their political aspirations were being debated and dismissed by media without their perspectives considered or platformed (Allam, 2019). Langton’s critique of portrayals of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in film and television highlighted how the complexities of Indigenous worldviews and the shifting subjectivities of Indigeneity were often flattened by ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ portrayals alike. She captured momentum in imploring more meaningful and complex representation of Indigenous people. At the same time, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Australian Government, 1991) identified problematic media representation as a site that both enacted and encouraged violence. The Commission explained that ‘many Aboriginal people throughout Australia express disappointment in the portrayal of Aboriginal people by the media’ and called for ‘better understanding on all sides, of issues relating to media treatment of Aboriginal affairs’ (Australian Government, 1991: 208). Several of the 339 recommendations focussed on changing media practice to address racist representations (Nolan and Waller, 2021). The 1980s and 1990s also saw the expansion of Indigenous community-controlled media. In the 2000s, Australia’s first Indigenous-run mainstream television station, NITV (National Indigenous Television), commenced broadcasting; NITV’s genesis was in the RCIADIC recommendations (Nolan and Waller, 2021). This was a formative moment, propelled by the hope that improved representation could help to combat systemic racism (Thomas, 2023). And by some accounts, it had success – Australia has witnessed a growing power and authority of Indigenous voices in media and the arts since this time (Browning, 2023).
Since 2020, however, a protest-driven wave of anti-racist politics has forced new reckonings with structural racism, and pushed critiques of colonial violence and the nature of the settler state into the mainstream (Thomas et al., 2020). Underscoring this moment are issues such as a debate over celebrating ‘Australia Day’, questions of truth-telling about Australia’s past and the need for truth commissions and treaties, and the embrace of BLM as a slogan and practice to draw attention to ongoing Indigenous deaths in custody and systemic racism (Carlson and Farrelly, 2023). At the same time, the Indigenous political sphere’s strategic engagement with media has been recognised as a feature of the news landscape (McCallum and Waller, 2017). There is increasing demand for Indigenous journalists, stories and content creators as audiences demand to see under-represented or marginalised groups telling their own stories (Carlson et al., 2018). As Interviewee 2 explained, [We are seeing] a paradigm shift in the way media handles Indigenous people and our issues and our stories. I think it’s happened in the last I would say less than five years, you now see evidence of commercial media organisations investing money and production in telling Indigenous stories . . . I think that’s been driven from outside . . . maybe it has to do with a greater, a high volume of interaction around media and everyone consuming media in a way they hadn’t before through the last two decades.
Complicating this, authenticity and identity itself has become a commercial imperative (Malik, 2022). Critiques of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in institutional settings – which have abounded in the BLM era – have explored how a ‘commodified organisational culture . . . governs cultural difference’, where corporations want to be seen to ‘check themselves’, conceiving of representation as a way to add value (Malik, 2022). Other critics argue that the promise of these initiatives is often stymied by stubborn economic, political and cultural economies within institutions (Ahmed, 2012; Douglas 2022). This has all occurred as a shift to digital media and social media since the 1990s has changed how audiences consume and respond to news, and produced immense changes in production. These have given previously under-represented groups new ways to represent themselves and challenge media institutions, as well as raising a series of broader ethical and political concerns concerning privacy, abuse and violence (Carlson et al., 2018).
The politics of representation are also propelled by detractors: in the Australian context, this includes conservatives who are threatened by the implications of questioning Australia’s settlement and ongoing racial inequalities, as the defeat of referendum for a Voice to Parliament in October 2023 demonstrates (Allam, 2023). The news landscape has become substantially more concentrated amongst a handful of large corporations. The ‘conservative legacy media’ is dominated by Murdoch and Nine/Packer whose record of negative coverage of Indigenous peoples is clear (Dreher et al., 2016). Fairfax-Nine, Seven West and the Ten Network remain the other major commercial players alongside public broadcasters ABC and SBS. The Guardian is a significant new actor in the space, with an explicit commitment to Indigenous news. Philanthropists too have also entered the fray, with Judith Nielsen and the Balvanes Foundation funding positions for Indigenous journalists at Fairfax/Nine and the The Guardian respectively (Nolan et al., 2020). At the same time, Indigenous community-controlled media has struggled to maintain its presence in news-making as funding and resources have stagnated (Thomas et al., 2023). In this context, the push for Indigenous content and Indigenous journalists has largely been felt or targeted at mainstream media organisations (Nolan et al., 2020).
Between Indigenous sovereignty and racial political economy
Understanding this contradictory period of change prompts us to consider how these processes of change in news are navigated by Indigenous journalists operating in mainstream arenas. Black Canadian journalist Desmond Cole (2022) in The Skin We’re In discusses the impossibility of separating oneself from the racial communities one is a part of, despite the expectation that this be a feature of news reporting. Māori scholar Melinda Webber (2009: 5) explores the idea of occupying clashing or contradictory spaces, explaining that her affiliation with both Māori identity and the academic research community is ‘fraught with difficulty and costs’ in how her identity is interpreted in these ‘contradictory communities’. A recurring theme of interviews was how the nature of Indigenous identity, place, community and culture places moral and ethical obligations on Indigenous journalists. This includes their responsibilities tellers and holders of stories, and their relational accountability to their communities they work with in news-making, often expressed in reciprocal obligations. As Interviewee 2 explained: Our lived experience teaches us certain things about our community and about our place in our community and our responsibility to others. . . we are a network of obligations and responsibilities, and you can’t dispense with that just because you’re working for a mainstream or any media organisation.
Indigenous journalists articulated how they work to maintain these obligations and responsibilities in the context of mainstream journalism’s racialised political economy.
Community, accountability, intimacy and trust
How do Indigenous journalists mediate between their communities, and their workplaces, and the pressure of being seen to represent both? Interviewee 2 explained that ‘on the hand you represent the organisation’ as well as a ‘sector of the population that media organisation may be seeking to bring in’: So sometimes you’re at cross purposes, you’re in the middle and you don’t quite know where you stand, but the organisation has what it thinks you do, and the community has what it thinks you do. So, the journalist themselves has to mediate between those two I guess their pressures, expectations . . . the community would expect you to always be a member of the community regardless of where you come from, who your mob is . . . Then the organisation has demands that it places on you, you have to get the story, but it’s always a question of at what cost.
Interviewee 4 explained ‘we are expected to get it right on both counts’. Others described, however, that these reciprocal obligations were essential to building trust: In New South Wales, culturally we have this thing, there’s mutual obligation. So, you do something for one person, they do something for you. That’s how – there’s an expectation that you will both benefit from the exchange . . . You give them something, they give you something and then everybody’s square. So, that’s how you build trust.
This had real consequences for the intimacy of the connection between journalist and their ‘talent’, and between journalist and audience. Often, it required developing deeper personal relationships based on relationality and reciprocity; as Interviewee 5 explained, ‘it comes with a huge amount of responsibility and it comes with a huge amount of accountability’. This accountability and the expectation that journalists act in relation to community also has consequences – Interviewee 7 talked about the ‘gammon meter’ to identify Indigenous journalists and creators who were not accountable: We’ve seen people in the past . . . coming up in the Aboriginal media sector I think who get a little bit too big for their boots and crumble very quickly because they lose that trust . . . they don’t take accountability for what they say . . . they kind of get to that point where they think they’re above it.
Navigating these dualities and obligations meant that journalists expressed a set of ethical questions and obligations driving their journalism. These appeared in distinction to normative news values which often place ideas of truth or newsworthiness above concerns of affected communities: I feel like being transparent’s really important. So really being open about who’s running the show, who’s making the decisions. I think that listening to the voice of the community, constantly asking yourself, are we servicing the community? Are we actually doing our community justice? If you get to that point where you can’t confidently say yes to that, that’s where I find the trust starts to disappear. (Interviewee 8) You have to be willing to let go of something you think is newsworthy out of respect for the people you’re dealing with, that’s if you’re going to do it at all. (Interviewee 4)
The patience required to build and maintain these trusted relationships could also clash with the time-pressured environment of journalism, where responsiveness is usually seen crucial to newsworthiness. Interviewee 10 explained that ‘community may take five days to get back to you’, and that respecting this process was necessary for developing relationships and stories. Interviewees saw this patient process of building trust and demonstrating accountability as a source of joy and connection, and crucial to their ethical journalistic practice: The more settled they become the better talent they become . . . it is about actually putting in time to make those personal relationships. (Interviewee 1) Like there’s just an intimacy among our mob where if I show up for an interview and the person might not know that I’m black and we show up and we have a chat. It’s just like this sigh of relief. Between the both of us, I think. (Interviewee 3) It’s just the lived experience . . . like if you’re trying to do a story, just being very comfortable engaging with community members or Aboriginal organisations, that just being normal . . . like community is much more happy to engage. (Interviewee 9)
The intimacy of these connections – based on shared experiences of being Indigenous in Australia – meant that journalists were able to engage in processes of repair where mistrust of news organisations was apparent: I’ve had to do a lot of work to undo the harm that [news organisation] has done to them, to their community. . . once that trust is broken it’s so difficult to get back. (Interviewee 1)
The journalists’ appreciation of the need for time, and their understanding and care, produced enduring relationships: I think people we’re interviewing historically have not had a good relationship with the Australian media. I think there’s a lot of pride from Aboriginal communities in the work that Indigenous journalists do . . . a level of comfort that people can share their experiences and know that we understand their history and we understand where they’re coming from . . . there’s a level of deep care for the people we interview. I can’t tell you how many contacts I’ve got through work who are now people that I’ll talk to for a long time, and people I’ve met who are like family to me now. (Interviewee 3)
At the same time, the dual pressures to represent both community and news organisations created a specific set of pressures on Indigenous journalists. The ethical forms of accountability they engendered stand in contrast to normative news values, and demand a reflexive relationship to news based on relationality, trust and repair – a source of both serious, continuing obligation, as well as joy, care and connection. These approaches may confound ‘whitestream’ processes of news-making: a challenge to the time and tempo of journalism in the digital era, an emphasis on relationships and respect over newsworthiness, and an emphasis on maintaining trust and intimacy, sometimes at the expense of ‘getting the story’. These and other distinct pressures and approaches point to a perceptible practice of Indigenous journalism.
An Indigenous journalism
Interviewee 4 explained that there is an ‘Indigenous journalism that is different to the mainstream’. Interviewee 2 also theorised that Indigenous journalists bring a ‘a different kind of worldview’ that is ‘underrepresented’. I suggest this practice of Indigenous journalism has some characteristics: validating lived experience, including traumatic experience, as a form of expertise; challenging the ways that audiences can or should engage with content by reconsidering notions of ‘talent’; and contextualising systems and processes of settler colonial worlds to engage in processes of truth-telling.
The importance of lived experience was seen as crucial to generating empathetic and grounded perspectives. Interviewee 5 explained that ‘we’re reporting on issues we’re experiencing ourselves personally . . . that really changes the way we can tell the stories’. This also linked back to the community relationships and accountabilities of journalists, explained Interviewee 8: I think when you're an Indigenous journalist and you’re embedded in your community and you’re identified and known in your own family and in those structures, you’re able to get an insight that all journalists wouldn’t get access to.
That insight was not only relevant to getting beyond the weaknesses of existing Indigenous-focussed reportage, but could more generally promote different ways of seeing the world: I think there’s also a storytelling way and a voice that isn’t heard very often . . . It’s not just Indigenous stories, having Indigenous journalists cover mainstream stuff. It’s a different angle, we are culturally different people.
This approach enabled journalists to challenge the ways that audiences were used to engaging with Indigenous stories, and how Indigenous people were represented. Interviewee 4 described how they had ‘an instinctive approach around the cultural aspect’. This included asking interviewees how they would like to describe themselves, and handing back ‘labelling power’ for people to ‘introduce themselves the way they wanted to be described’. Other journalists discussed how their approach to storytelling pushed back on ideas about the pacing and the structure of stories: We need to expand our understanding of what a good story is and what a good talent is. I think that that’s one of the biggest things that we bring to the table when we’re in these spaces . . . having people who are in the actual seat of the content maker who aren’t fitting the mould means that we’re more willing and more open to understanding that sometimes our guest isn’t going to fit the mould but it doesn’t mean that they’re not the person to speak to . . . there is a circular way in which [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander] people will tell a story, and it’s very long winding. I do it myself. I think the value of having black journalists means that we understand why that is happening, and that you will give space to it. Kind of pushing back on ideas about pacing . . . Leave enough space that those people can be part of it and can feel connected, like they’re at a dinner party and we’re just the most fascinating people that happen to be having the conversation right now. There’s something really beautiful in that and it also encourages a particular way of talking. It’s intimate, it’s immediate, and it is accessible. (Interviewee 1)
Others sought to challenge the damaging imagery of Indigenous people in the news, and reconsider stereotypical depictions that homogenise Indigenous people and promote ideas of deficit and deficiency. As Interviewee 3 describes: Typically, in TV, you see that wallpaper of impoverished blackfellas telling a story. We’ve used that kind of wall—we use that wallpaper vision of black arms in prison and it—I think it has kind of added to a sense that these people are faceless and nameless rather than human beings.
This was linked to broader perspectives on Australian settler colonial society, anchored in an understanding of colonisation and its relevance to understanding contemporary injustice and Indigenous disadvantage: Any journalist with half a brain can go, oh yeah, lower life expectancy, poorer health, poorer education, lower incomes, but a more fuller understanding of the invasion underpinnings of the issues that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people face [is required] . . . Instead, it is that ‘blame the blackfellas’ for their own problems mentality and not comprehending the impact that non-Indigenous Australia has had causing many—if not most, if not nearly all—of the issues that our mobs face. (Interviewee 8) [with] the really hard, uncomfortable conversations, stories around child removal, stories around death in custody . . . with Indigenous journalists we are not looking at isolated incidences and just blaming the situation. They’re looking at, what are the key factors here? What are the historical issues? What are the policy failures? How did we get here? What is actually going on? There’s a wider lens and a lot of non-Indigenous journalists have not covered the stories in that way. They’ll look at the situation and be like, this man did this crime and that’s why he ended up in jail and then he just miraculously died in his cell. That was his fault. He made choices. Whereas it’s a very different storytelling way when it comes from us mob. (Interviewee 9)
By validating lived experiences, reframing norms of storytelling and seeking to challenge the deficit lens, the journalists interviewed were consciously working to share power with their ‘talent’ and reframe norms of engagement in news-making. Flowing from Indigenous journalists’ connections and responsibilities, it was rooted in specific ways of relating to others and relating to their stories. The responsibility of challenging normative representations was both a natural outcome of journalists’ position and connection to their communities and audiences, as well as a deliberate strategy to contextualise and historicise stories and avoid familiar sensationalist and damaging news frames.
Objectivity, balance and the racialised newsroom
Perhaps inevitably, then, these practices often brought the journalists into conflict with the structures and demands of racialised newsroom culture. Some interviewees spoke of news values as ‘rules’ of how to do news-making, and their connections to ideas of authority: There’s a lot of rules that people, journalists in particular, will kind of spout about what a story should look like or sound like and how it should come together and who the best person to talk to is, all in the name of finding this authority. (Interviewee 1)
They explained that this had direct consequences for their reporting, for example, in their decisions over whether to use subtitles: We had a few run-ins with the editors about running our interviews with people who they couldn’t understand very well. They wanted voiceovers, and we said, no, you just have to try harder to listen. Neither of us had a problem understanding what the mob were saying. It really was about their capacity to listen. (Interviewee 4).
These ‘values’ were sometimes quite explicit, and included limiting the amount of Indigenous content in news based on ideas of low audience interest and popularity, or threatening Indigenous-specific content: Really gross things get said . . . ‘we’ve done an Aboriginal story this week’, and you’re just like, oh, just one, okay. You’re happy with that being your quota? We shouldn’t have an idea that there is a certain number of black stories that is too many. (Interviewee 1) We survived many attempts to [axe our program]. . . they put us in dead time zones. They tried to take us off the podcasting offer. (Interviewee 4)
While there was a growing recognition of Indigenous journalists’ value to storytelling in the experience of some interviewees, others felt that it was regarded as a given and a negative, rather than a specialised expertise: If I’d done a Bachelor of Economics, and I was an economics reporter, I would be remunerated for that because I’m bringing a level of expertise. But because I’m Indigenous and I can navigate an Indigenous space, that’s considered a given. It’s also considered a liability. (Interviewee 10)
This raised more general questions for the idea of journalistic objectivity and the notion of neutrality. Some journalists felt they were under distinct pressure to establish their objectivity, with their identity considered a source of bias which other, non-Indigenous journalists were presumed not to have based on their background. As Interviewee 11 explained the newsroom culture as, ‘You know if a non-Indigenous person says it, they are credible’. Others carefully rebalanced these notions, seeing their expertise as a developed method of independence – but not without difficulties: I still very firmly believe in my independence and in my impartiality. Particularly on issues of Indigenous politics, I very much like being—sort of sitting back and taking in different people’s views but if you’re involved in a story where there are very deeply held beliefs or passionate views and you’re a black journalist, it’s difficult within our communities. It’s difficult the expectations that people have on you. (Interviewee 3)
The practice of Indigenous journalism was grounded in rethinking the notion of ‘balance’ by grounding reporting in an understanding of dispossession and colonisation. But more traditional ideas of balance were persistent obstacles for many journalists, as Interviewee 10 described: I kept being told that I needed balance. I was like, what do you mean? They were like, a ‘black diverse opinion’ . . . yeah, balance was always one I would question, particularly when you're the only Indigenous [content in news organisation] . . . You are the balance! . . . They’re talking balance, and then they go and interview a white supremacist!
Decision-making around stories at mainstream news organisations was also sometimes informed by traditional ideas of who audiences were, and what they wanted or needed: Loads of different workplaces have perpetuated what I think is a myth that there’s no interest in Aboriginal affairs. . . . It’s kind of like chicken and the egg. It’s been like, stories haven’t been on the front page or they haven’t been at the top of the seven o’clock news or they haven’t been leading the radio bulletin. So how do you drive interest issues if there’s no sustained coverage or they’re not elevated? . . . We’ve very much smashed that kind of perception because we’ve got huge numbers on our stories . . . if stories are done badly, no one’s going to read them. I don’t want to. I’m Aboriginal and I don’t want to read half the Indigenous affairs stories I’ve seen in the last 10 years. (Laughs)
It was here where the practices of Indigenous journalism clashed with the norms of the newsroom – the ‘rules’ surrounding who has authority, whose stories are important, the definition of ‘balance’ and what sort of information and contextualisation journalists have a responsibility to provide.
Changing practices, challenging structures
Indigenous journalists were undertaking this work in the context of the changing political-economic structures of the newsroom, and the growing focus on anti-racism and representation in the BLM era. Several argued that in contrast to earlier decades, there were now greater opportunities to debate colonial narratives and promote Indigenous perspectives in mainstream news: I think January 26 [Australia Day] is a really good example of how many people in the community get involved in the debate. Whereas before there was a sense of it didn’t matter what we thought. Now there’s this broad acceptance of this is an issue that is complex, and that Indigenous people have a right to say how they feel about this issue. (Interviewee 2) A couple of really pivotal points happened in our industry, and that is Black Lives Matter and what the power of media did with the George Floyd case. . . the point of that visual being captured, and that conversation about equality and how that reverberated back here. (Interviewee 6)
Others saw that the shift to digital also provided an opportunity to get around the assumptions of editors and embedded news values. Beyond the norms of lead stories in print and television, digital news’ more diffuse circulation also showed reluctant editors that there was substantial interest in Indigenous stories, according to interviewees. There was a sense that it was less constrained, as Interviewee 3 explained: I love digital print, whatever you want to call it because I just feel like you can own it more . . . I just have more power there. I have more autonomy.
They also described how campaigning journalism in Indigenous affairs had become a crucial part of their work – noting that television reporting still had an enormous audience: The impact you get from TV is still huge. . . it still has a very influential audience and it has a national audience. We still find a lot of politicians and policy makers watch.
Others, however, saw no room in their ‘insider’ status, finding themselves clashing with ‘whitestream’ news agendas in their efforts to carry out their work. They drew the conclusion that the space could not be reformed, and was better shifted by independent initiatives and Indigenous-controlled media: I didn’t like the way all of the newsrooms were run, I didn’t like the way the stories were being done and the way stories were being told. It’s a bureaucracy. It’s a large bureaucracy. For me, the key learnings there were, I need to go work with Indigenous media and I need to work in an environment where we can maintain some independence from the colony. (Interviewee 8)
Findings and conclusion: cracking a hole in the white structure?
This study has identified a distinct practice of Indigenous journalism in mainstream news organisations in Australia. This can be interpreted through the frame of sovereignty: the expression of a range of political, cultural and relational practices which have particular consequences for the practices of Indigenous journalists, situated within intimate community networks of accountability and relationality. Practices often included slow and long-term processes of generating trust, and in some cases repairing the relationship between Indigenous communities and mainstream news organisations through this work. The journalists interviewed emphasised how validating Indigenous lived experience as a form of expertise and knowledge, reconsidering assumptions of a white audience, and contextualising Indigenous news within colonial and settler systems of inequality where crucial to their practices of news-making. This suggest that Indigenous journalists working in mainstream news organisations often desire to, and sometimes achieve, the expression of their own news values which challenge the whiteness of normative news values.
This has significant import for considering practices of news-making today. Journalistic practices in settler colonial states have faced challenged from within and without, propelled by movements such as BLM. Since the first major challenge to Indigenous representation in the 1990s, media has changed dramatically, creating mixed and sometimes contradictory changes in how journalism has approached questions of race and Indigeneity. In the new era of anti-racist reckoning, news organisations may want to be seen to engage with a diversity of perspectives, feel compelled to attend to their reputations and to correct recognised problems with Indigenous representation (Douglas, 2022). Indigenous journalists interviewed recognised how the reverberations of BLM and Indigenous-led protests in Australia generated opportunities for journalists to push the normative boundaries of news, while the opportunities of digital journalism also appeared to create space for Indigenous-led content informed by the practices of Indigenous journalism. As Callison and Young (2000, 2021) suggest, these practices may herald insights for new ways of doing journalism that can move past the failures of ‘whitestream’ news.
However, the interviewees often found themselves in conflict and tension with normative white news values and many unchanged structures and assumptions in newsroom cultures, practices and routines. Dreher and Waller’s (2022) argument that racialised news values become salient through challenge is borne out here. The interviewees demonstrated that their practices of Indigenous journalism regularly come into conflict with stubborn, spoken and unspoken, ‘rules’ of the newsroom that centred whiteness and failed to consider Indigenous sovereignty. This included the pressure for Indigenous voices to be interpretated through a white lens, reflecting whiteness as the continuing invisibled centre of interpretation and knowledge. Assumptions that Indigenous content was unmarketable or uninteresting were driven by assumptions of the market and audience interest that continued to presume a white audience. Moreover, Indigenous journalists encountered notions of ‘balance’ that compelled the inclusion of anti-Indigenous views, and confronted the accusation that Indigenous journalists by nature of being Indigenous could not perform journalistic objectivity. This raises alarming and urgent questions about the racialised interpretation and practice of ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity’ in newsroom cultures, practices and routines in Australia. It also suggests that Indigenous journalists, in their challenge to these values, largely continue to work around news organisations that remain governed by stubborn racialised dynamics and a racialised political economy of news-making. However, a willingness on the part of journalists to continue their work despite this is nevertheless clear – as Interviewee 4 explains, ‘We knew that they didn’t want to keep it going but we saw real value in it. We cracked a hole in this very white structure’.
