Journalism and indigenous public spheres

Abstract

Journalism has played—and continues to play— a crucial role in 'imagining' indigenous people and their affairs for most non-indigenous over racism of the colonial press, institutionalised racism is manifested in the sytematic omission of indigenous voices in the news media. Indigenous sources make up a fraction—between one fifth to one third— of all sources used by journalists in stories about indigenous affairs. This alarming statistic has remained unchanged in Australian journalism for the past 20 years and is a prominant feature of news coverage of Native people in the United States and Canada (Weston, 1996;Meadows, 2001). Adam (1993) reminds us that journalism is 'a form of expression that is an invention. It is a creation—a product of the Imagination—in both an individual and a cultural sense.'