“Remote and dysfunctional”: a study of print media construction of Australian Aboriginality Post 2000

Given that there is increasing media and community discussion of minority issues engendered by such occurrences as the arrival of asylum seekers, the Australian government’s apology to the Stolen Generations and the Northern Territory Intervention, it is timely to undertake an investigation into how the Australian media portray minorities, specifically Aboriginal, persons and issues. Much work has been done on the topic of media and minorities in other countries and this study seeks to further research in this area with particular regard to the activities of the Australian print media with respect to Aboriginality. A corpus-based study was undertaken examining specifically print media coverage of a 2004 death in custody, events in 2006 in the Aurukun Aboriginal community and the 2007 police and army intervention in the Northern Territory of Australia. Two thousand and fourteen articles dealing with these topics were extracted from the Newsbank newspaper article repository (www.infoweb.newsbank.com) and a further 404 dealing with more general matters also were extracted for reference purposes. It was hypothesised that there would be differences in the amount and style of reportage of Aboriginal matters with respect to that of more general matters and that there would be differences in the style of reportage within Aboriginal matters dependent upon which topic was being reported. A numerical analysis was performed on the numbers of articles extracted from various publications as well as a statistical analysis of the lengths of the articles. A Keyword, Concordance and Descriptor analysis using Wordsmith Tools, version 5.0.0.273 (© Oxford University Press, 1996, Mike Scott, 2010) was undertaken to determine if certain terms were used more frequently with regard to Aboriginal reportage than more general reportage. This analysis also was used to ascertain if certain terms appeared more frequently in the presence of other terms. A random selection of articles was examined by three native English speakers to ascertain the positive or negative slant of the headlines and the positive or negative tone or affect of the articles themselves. These articles also underwent a novel method of determining journalistic voice or journalistic ownership of their content. This method involved the assignment of paragraphs into categories dependent upon whether they consisted of quotations or other forms of reportage. It was found that there is, indeed, a statistically significant difference in the average length of articles dealing with Aboriginality compared with those dealing with more general topics. It was also found that there is a large difference in the numbers of articles published by the various newspapers on any of the three topics dealing with Aboriginality and that only a minority of publications contributed articles to all three topics. Results further indicated that certain terms appeared more frequently in reportage of Aboriginal topics than in that of more general topics and that, due to this, there was present a “patina of negativity” in reportage of Aboriginal topics. In addition, it was found that certain terms appeared frequently in the presence of others in stories dealing with Aboriginal topics, again lending a sense of negativity to the reportage. Finally, results indicated that there were marked differences in the journalistic ownership of the contents of articles dealing with Aboriginal topics compared with those dealing with more general topics and that there also were differences in the journalistic ownership of the contents of articles in line with the Aboriginal topic being reported. In light of the above findings, this study is important in that it can be extended to cover the reportage of many minority issues and groups and it might well lead to changes in the way journalism surrounding these areas is taught. This, in turn, might lead to more positive reportage of Aboriginal and minority issues, which might subsequently lead to more positive attitudes towards these groups and issues amongst the general public.