The Dynamics of News and Indigenous Policy in Australia

Despite intense concern among academics and advocates, there is a deeply felt absence of scholarship on the way media reporting exacerbates rather than helps to resolve policy problems. This book offers rich insights into the news media’s role in the development of policy in Australia, and explores the complex, dynamic and interactive relationship between news media and Australian Indigenous affairs. Spanning a twenty-year period from 1988 to 2008, Kerry McCallum and Lisa Waller critically examine how Indigenous health, bilingual education and controversial legislation were portrayed through public media. The Dynamics of News and Indigenous Policy in Australia provides evidence of Indigenous people being excluded from policy and media discussion, as well as using the media to their advantage. To that end, the book poses the question: just how far was the media manipulating the national conversation? And how far was it, in turn, being manipulated by those in power? A decade after the Australian government introduced the controversial 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response Act, McCallum and Waller offer a ground-breaking look at the media’s role in Indigenous issues and asks: to what extent did journalism exacerbate policy issues, and how far were their effects felt in Indigenous communities?