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 Mc Callum 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, Mc Callum 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?
Tabella dei contenuti
Part I: Setting the Scene
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 1: Introduction: Media dynamics and policy intractability
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 2: Policy histories and discursive environments
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Part II: Media Coverage of Indigenous Affairs
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 3: Race, indigeneity and the media: Theoretical trajectories in Australian studies of Indigenous media representation
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 4: News from another country: Remote Indigenous reporting for mainstream audiences
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 5: The Australian and Indigenous affairs
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Part III: Indigenous Health Policy
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 6: Key moments in Indigenous health policy, 1988–2008
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 7: Framing Indigenous health in the Australian news media
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 8: Policymakers’ media-related practices and ‘new paternalism’ in Indigenous health
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Part IV: Bilingual Education
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 9: Bilingual education: A case study
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 10: Saving bilingual education: Media-related practices of Indigenous policy advocates
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 11: A game of mirrors: News, policy and bilingual education
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Chapter 12: Conclusion: Change and continuity in media and Indigenous affairs
Kerry Mc Callum and Lisa Waller
Circa l’autore
Professor Lisa Waller is associate dean, communication, in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia. She has taught and researched different aspects of Australian news media and journalism since 2006. Her practice-led approach to understanding news is grounded in twenty years’ experience as a journalist at some of Australia’s leading newspapers.
Contact: School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Bowen Street, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia.