Indigenous and Multicultural Discourses in Australian News Media Reporting

Abstract

This paper critically analyses the 'uneasy conversation' (Curthoys, 2000) between multicultural and Indigenous discourses as it is re- flected in news reporting. We explore how journalists negotiated their responsibilities to report a story of local inter-cultural tension between Indigenous and Samoan communities following a 'bashing death' in Brisbane in 2008. Using news frame analysis, we examine how 'race conflict' came to dominate the reporting of the issue at the expense of an 'Indigenous rights' perspective, and how journalists marked out these two 'outsider' groups from their 'mainstream' Australian readership. We also analyse how different audiences engaged with the issue. Our paper argues that, in spite of the complexities that underlie relations between Indigenous Australians and racialised minorities and the policies that govern them, reporting contexts such as these often lend themselves to a narrow framing of events, providing audiences with a limited range of understandings about cultural diversity in Australia.

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