Limited interests, resources, voices: power relations in mainstream news coverage of Indigenous policy in Australia
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recognising the importance of who gets to speak in constructing knowledges about Indigenous peoples, this article examines power relations regarding mainstream news coverage of the Indigenous policy of Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) in Australia. Integrating content and discourse analysis of newspaper and television stories over a 3-year timeframe with interviews with journalists, this article found media coverage of the NTER, commonly known as the Intervention, followed a pattern of decline, with occasional peaks around events that were newsworthy through the lens of conventional news values. Further, analysis of three key discourse moments found ‘official’ discourses, particularly by the government, overpowered those of Indigenous peoples living under the policy. This article demonstrates how particular journalistic practices – news values, ideas of audiences, and use of sources – together with resource limitations and discursive practices of government provided dominant discursive power on the Intervention to government representatives. The article concludes that daily routines of news media and discursive practices of media savvy social actors perceived as ‘official’ or ‘expert’ by media professionals form a ‘vicious cycle’ of two-way dependence which is hard to break for potential sources with less official status, such as representatives of various Indigenous communities.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it