Australia Day protests, 2021. (Image source: BBC)

For the case of Australia, I chose an issue that has brought Aboriginal mobilization to the forefront of news from and about the country: the debate over “Australia Day,” the national holiday commemorating the arrival into Sydney Cove of the first fleet of British ships in 1788.

Aboriginal activists have been engaging in organized opposition to the holiday for more than 80 years, but over the past decade, that opposition has started to make some inroads with the settler population. There have been major demonstrations joining settlers and Aboriginals united in their rejection of the holiday, and one popular suggestion has been to rename the holiday “Invasion Day” and use it as a moment for critical reflection on the nation’s history. It remains an ongoing, hot-button political issue.

Screen capture of CNN story on Australia Day protests.

(CNN 1/26/17)

News coverage of the Australia Day issue is predictably episodic, driven largely by the annual nature of the holiday and the protests that tend to be concentrated around it. I looked at coverage between 2009 and 2020, and I found a total of 24 stories from the three establishment outlets referencing Australia Day.

Significant absences

In those 24 stories, settler colonialism is named only once – in a New York Times article about a Melbourne suburb that has long been a gathering place for Aboriginal activists. Beyond that, settler colonialism plays no significant explanatory role in any of the news coverage. While there is plentiful naming of Aboriginal people as an Indigenous group, the coverage never applies the label “settlers” to non-Aboriginal Australians in the present.

Any references to settlement or colonization are entirely segregated in the past. The unspoken assumption is that the settler project somehow ended with the establishment of the Australian state. Not surprisingly, the coverage provides virtually no explicit linkage between current state or corporate actions and the settler project. Aboriginal grievances are framed as part of a national dialogue about how the past should be commemorated or (less often) how Aboriginal people continue to be disadvantaged socioeconomically because of things that happened in the past, such as the “Stolen Generations.”

There is minimal discussion of any issues related to land and sovereignty claims in the present. When scholars appear in the coverage, they do so as “neutral experts” standing in the middle of a binary, “for or against” debate. Finally, there is no reference of any kind to decolonization; instead, the coverage emphasizes “reconciliation” as a viable path forward.

A liberal narrative

Overall, the establishment media coverage fits comfortably within a white, liberal worldview that emphasizes progress through “healing” and “coming to terms with the past” rather than confronting (and potentially dismantling or abolishing) materially oppressive structures in the present. In general, the coverage foregrounds the voices of white politicians who speak about their commitment to facing the past even as they continue to fuel the political debate about the Australia Day issue.

Journalists frame the debate as taking place within a liberal democratic structure that is evolving progressively from a colonial past. This frame centers the agency, the political diversity, and the moral dilemmas of the settler population in relation to debates over history, but never in relation to their own material privileges in the present.

NPR and the cultural frame

NPR’s coverage in particular reveals some important patterns I have identified elsewhere: using cultural coverage as a less threatening way to address sensitive political issues that should arguably be the focus of news coverage.

Of the 8 NPR stories on the issue, two use white cultural figures (a novelist and a composer) as “bridge” figures to reach a presumably white audience, and two other stories spotlight Aboriginal musicians either breaking barriers within the industry or using their platform to speak about social issues.

Another story covers a ban on rock climbing at the Uluru sandstone monolith that is sacred to indigenous people, a story framed as a “decadeslong disagreement between tourists and its traditional owners.” Even when NPR addresses land issues in relation to state actions, as in a report on major bushfires in Australia, it does so without any explicit reference to the settler project in Australia.