10. A Discursive Monopoly: The Role of the Canadian Mainstream Media in the Social Dislocation of Aboriginal Peoples
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This poster investigates the Canadian mainstream media’s power and participation in discourses of subjugation surrounding contemporary Aboriginal issues in a manner that discriminates against the realities of Aboriginal cultures and peoples and the historical context of the inequitable Aboriginal social location in Canada. I examine the ways in which the Canadian media has engaged in “reality construction” whereby a particular ideological perspective is imposed on the public that constructs Aboriginal peoples through stereotypes, omission of historical fact, and appropriation of identity. This is demonstrated by an analysis of the portrayal of Aboriginal peoples as a monolithic “problem people” for the Canadian nation in four prevalent categories: 1) as a threat to Canada’s national interests; 2) as a risk to Canada’s social order; 3) as an economic liability; and, 4) as a problem for the criminal justice system (Fleras and Elliot 2003:327). This was evident in reporting on the Kaschewan Reserve water contamination in 2000, the Marshall Decision court ruling in 1999, and the Oka Crisis protests in 1990. The discourses analyzed here are derived from particular power relations that produce stereotypical reporting in support of the dominant interests, thus manufacturing public opinion that divides Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal citizens by reducing the complexities of Aboriginal concerns. This reporting serves to justify the biased prescriptions of the Canadian federal government that discriminate against the values and realities of Aboriginal peoples. Finally, I identify the potential for resistance to these discourses through evidence of expanding Aboriginal media control and expression.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".