TY - JOUR
T1 - Enduring silence
T2 - racialized news values, white supremacy and a national apology for child sexual abuse
AU - Dreher, Tanja
AU - Waller, Lisa
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by Australian Research Council [Grant Number DP190101282]. We acknowledge the very valuable research assistance of Dr Isaac Yeboah Addo who conducted data collection and preliminary analysis of media content. The interpretations and arguments presented in the paper are those of the authors alone. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for feedback which greatly improved the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022/7/4
Y1 - 2022/7/4
N2 - This article examines news coverage of Australia's 2018 National Apology to Victims of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse to reveal how conventional news values and practices produce racialised hierarchies of media attention that routinely position whiteness at the pinnacle. Via content analysis of media coverage, informed by critical discourse analysis, we focus on whether news reporting of the Apology reflected the Royal Commission's stated commitment, care and attention to ensuring First Nations people, who were over-represented among victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse, were afforded voice and agency in media. The coverage was remarkable for its failure to connect the 2018 Apology to the 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations, or to ongoing concerns regarding high rates of Indigenous child removal and over-incarceration. Overall, we argue that news values and routines work to structure media representation through logics of white supremacy and relegating colonial violence to the past.
AB - This article examines news coverage of Australia's 2018 National Apology to Victims of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse to reveal how conventional news values and practices produce racialised hierarchies of media attention that routinely position whiteness at the pinnacle. Via content analysis of media coverage, informed by critical discourse analysis, we focus on whether news reporting of the Apology reflected the Royal Commission's stated commitment, care and attention to ensuring First Nations people, who were over-represented among victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse, were afforded voice and agency in media. The coverage was remarkable for its failure to connect the 2018 Apology to the 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations, or to ongoing concerns regarding high rates of Indigenous child removal and over-incarceration. Overall, we argue that news values and routines work to structure media representation through logics of white supremacy and relegating colonial violence to the past.
KW - Indigenous
KW - institutional child sexual abuse
KW - Media racism
KW - national inquiry
KW - news values
KW - white supremacy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85114649091&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/01419870.2021.1971732
DO - 10.1080/01419870.2021.1971732
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85114649091
SN - 0141-9870
VL - 45
SP - 1671
EP - 1692
JO - Ethnic and Racial Studies
JF - Ethnic and Racial Studies
IS - 9
ER -
