While there are numerous concepts and conceptual frameworks that could be employed usefully in a project such as this one, I have chosen to ground my analysis in a set of four concepts: settler colonialism, myth, ex-nomination, and establishment media.

Settler colonialism

Among critical scholars working in a variety of fields, the framework of settler colonialism has been front and center in research on cases such as Palestine, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada for the better part of two decades. This approach is actually a belated recognition of what many pioneering yet widely ignored indigenous scholars have been saying since at least the 1960s, but there is no denying that it is now making a huge impact on contemporary scholarship.

Analysts of settler colonialism generally agree that whereas other colonial projects tend to be organized primarily around the extraction of wealth, resources, and/or labor from a particular territory for the benefit of the colonizing power, settler colonialism is animated by the colonizer’s desire to set up an entirely new and permanent society in the distant territory. As the late Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe argues, settler colonialism is driven by a “logic of elimination” – that is, the project of removing the existing indigenous people and societies in order to make room for the new settlers and the state they seek to create.

This also means that land is at the center of the settler project, even as the settlers also utilize strategies such as enslavement, racialization, forced assimilation, and genocide. Settler colonialism, as Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard reminds us, is “territorially acquisitive in perpetuity,”

[W]e should see [settler colonialism] as an ongoing practice of dispossession that never ceases to structure capitalist and colonial social relations in the present. Settler colonialism is territorially acquisitive in perpetuity. (emphasis in the original)

In a similar vein, anthropologist Maya Mikdashi emphasizes how settler colonialism’s territorial acquisitiveness is accompanied by the imposition of regimes of possession and dispossession:

Land ownership and inheritance constitute a legal relationship to the earth that indexes the near annihilation of Indigenous philosophies and ways of life. Indeed, the project of making White men out of Native Americans was to a large extent predicated on the injunction to ‘own’ property individually.

Finally, as we learn from the work of indigenous scholars such as Celeste Pedri-Spade, settler colonialism also has an identitarian element to it that is especially insidious: over time, settler ideology is increasingly oriented toward claiming Indigeneity for itself, reinforcing settler regimes of individualism and private property while also waging a biopolitical war on those whose land it has conquered:

“Mining” the archive for biological trace(s) of “nativeness” follows the same settler colonial, possessive and extractivist logic of mining Indigenous lands. Both Indigenous lands and identities are positioned as resources that people are entitled to claim and own.

So to summarize, settler colonial invasion is all about the permanent transformation of the land, including the people who belong to the land; as Wolfe famously argued, it is “a structure, not an event.” That is to say, despite hegemonic narratives that place “the colonial era” in the distant past, settler projects are ongoing by definition.

At a local and national level, these ongoing projects constitute the deepest of deep structures in the territories where they continued to be carried out. At the global level, settler colonialism has long been a defining structural feature of the modern world. We see this in the systematic facilitation of white settlement in all its forms, from territorial conquest and resource extraction to privileged processes of migration and tourism.

And now for the disconnect: scholars who use settler colonialism as a primary analytical category are rarely quoted in news coverage addressing situations of, well, settler colonialism. Indeed, the category of settler colonialism itself is a kind of ghost whose absence haunts contemporary news coverage. As I have argued elsewhere, settler colonialism is a creature that never speaks its own name – at least not in dominant public discourse. Instead, it speaks of things like security, terrorism, democracy, civilization, progress, multiculturalism, reconciliation, and peace (as defined by the settler state).

Myth and Exnomination

To explain this absence and its political significance, I turn to the concept of myth in work of Roland Barthes, the French semiotician and author of the classic book Mythologies. Barthes describes myth as “depoliticized speech” that serves the interest of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) by “turning history into nature” – that is, taking things that are the product of historical forces and making them seem natural or inevitable.

What the world supplies to myth is a historical reality, defined, even if this goes back quite awhile, by the way in which men [sic] have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality…A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and filled it with nature…The function of a myth is to empty reality; it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation…

One of the ways this works in public discourse is through what he calls exnomination – literally the “un-naming” of things. For Barthes, the paradigmatic example of exnomination is the bourgeoisie itself, which steadfastly refuses to speak its own name.

As a political fact, the bourgeoisie has some difficulty acknowledging itself: there are no “bourgeois” parties in the Chamber of Deputies.
As an ideological fact, it completely disappears: the bourgeoisie has obliterated its name in passing from reality to representation…it makes its status undergo a real exnominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named. (Emphasis in the original)

Following Barthes, we can say that “America,” “Israel,” “Australia,” and “Canada” are all myths. They are hegemonic ways of naturalizing what are, in fact, ongoing processes of settler colonization that have their roots in histories of conquest, expulsion, and genocide. These myths are enacted through the exnomination of settler colonialism itself – the systematic refusal to name it.

As Mahmoud Mamdani argues, this form of exnomination is especially strong in the United States:

If the race question marks the cutting edge of American reform, the native question highlights the limits of that reform. The thrust of American struggles has been to deracialize – but not to decolonize. Deracializing America remains a settler society and a setter state…What is exceptional about America, the USA, is that it has yet to pose the question of decolonization in the public sphere.

Connecting with this point, Mikdashi’s powerful narrative reminds us that settler colonialism’s ideological success has enabled “modified reproductions” such as South Africa, Canada, Australia, and Israel to recede into the shadows, hiding the fact that “techniques and lessons of genocide have always traveled in well-cut suits and rational arguments and paperwork and handshakes.”

The central argument

The ghostly absence of settler colonialism from establishment media discourse lies at the center of the research presented in this series. My core argument is that establishment media play a significant role in rendering these realities invisible or poorly understood, thereby blunting the critiques offered by the indigenous victims of settler colonial projects and making it more difficult for members of settler communities to confront their privileges and ethical responsibilities.

I also want to note that while it would also be interesting to examine coverage in Indigenous and other independent and alternative media outlets, my focus here is on the construction and perpetuation of the dominant discourse.

Establishment media

So, what are “establishment media”? I use the term to refer to the collective body of highly influential news outlets (including those sometimes referred to as ‘legacy’ outlets) whose gatekeeping and agenda-setting roles are matched by their closeness to the very centers of power they claim to be holding accountable. Key US examples within this category include the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the Wall Street Journal.

I argue that other categories typically used in news media criticism, such as ‘mainstream media’ and ‘corporate media,’ are less successful in capturing the interlocking combination of political, economic, and cultural influence that is captured in the idea of ‘the establishment.’ With its origins in critical sociological and cultural analysis during the postwar period, ‘the establishment’ as a concept connects with a range of critical perspectives, including:

Frankfurt School analysis of the culture industry
Gramscian theories of cultural hegemony
C. Wright Mills’ famous discussion of the ‘power elite’
The work of generations of media critics and independent media practitioners.

*Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities*, by Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young.

Published by Oxford University Press, 2020.

In taking a critical approach to establishment media and settler colonialism, I am drawing on the work of Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young in their excellent 2020 book, Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities. Their analysis reveals that as a field of practice, professional journalism has been remarkably impervious to “decades of cogent intellectual critique within journalism studies and beyond” while also participating directly in the machinery of the settler project:

Historically, mainstream journalism has not been…a supporter of sovereignty or self-determination and arguably has often contributed to an erasure of Indigenous voices. Contemporary journalism may in many cases offer more Indigenous voices, but the underlying challenges persist in terms of negotiation with editors, forms, and styles for journalism and objectivity.

Callison and Young also note that the journalistic ideal of “objectivity,” always a mask for hegemonic interpretations, has made it difficult for establishment journalists to meet their ethical responsibilities:

Acknowledging settler-colonialism reorganizes perception and demands a different set of commitments from journalism and journalists in terms of narrating a shared history, prioritizing structural concerns, and articulating injustice.

I share their concern with “narrating a shared history, prioritizing structural concerns, and articulating injustice,” and this concern is a primary motivation for why I chose to investigate the absence of settler colonialism from establishment media discourse. Without examining this lacuna, we cannot fully confront what Ghassan Hage calls the “White colonial paranoia” that continues to mark settler societies as they cling to their characteristic politics of denial; their liberal discussions of “reconciliation” amidst a refusal to acknowledge the colonial present; their evasive, often misleading “debates” over multiculturalism and immigration; and their racist, biopolitical obsessions with security and cultural purity.

Project Methodology

To assess the extent of settler colonialism’s exnomination in US establishment media coverage, I decided to examine three news outlets representing print (the New York Times), television (CNN), and radio (National Public Radio), keeping in mind that all three have a significant online presence as well. I looked at each outlet’s coverage of four news stories from four different settler colonial contexts: the US, Canada, Palestine, and Australia. (Click and hover for image captions and credits.)

Each of the four stories features a specific example of native or Indigenous mobilization. I chose that kind of story because one of the most important aspects of indigenous mobilization is how it inevitably reveals the ongoing nature of the settler project itself. My goal was to evaluate the extent to which the coverage actually reflected that reality. As this is a primarily qualitative study, I limited myself to specific timeframes when the story was either breaking or prominently featured in the headlines. I reviewed a total of 114 articles in the years leading up to March 2020, when the bulk of the analysis was carried out. The data set included a mix of news articles/reports, op-eds, editorials, and (in the case of NPR) studio interviews, all spread unevenly across the four stories in ways that reflect the relative emphasis placed by establishment media on each.

I began by using the online archives of each news outlet to gather all the relevant coverage of each story from the time periods I had selected. After doing some initial reading of the coverage, I used my conceptual framework and ideas from the secondary literature to generate a basic series of questions to ask in relation to each piece of coverage:

Is settler colonialism named as such?
Are settler populations/communities named as such?
Are native and Indigenous populations/communities/nations named as such?
Are present grievances clearly linked with ongoing processes grounded in history?
Are state and corporate actions clearly linked to the colonial project?
Are Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty named as such?

Next, I did a detailed reading of all the coverage in relation to these questions, stopping occasionally to reflect on emerging themes and patterns. Finally, I stepped back from the trees to look at the forest and ask: what do the patterns in coverage tell us about the role of establishment media in relation to settler colonial projects?