How Australian Newsrooms Continue to Do Harm to Indigenous Journalists

The next session at ANZCA 2023 starts with David Nolan, who introduces the idea of ‘racial reckoning’ as both amplified by as well as directed at media; this highlights the failures of racial inequality and is being performed through the ‘diagnostic’ of digital media, which provide a space for critiques of conventional media. Such reckoning has often been addressed, in Australian, by the hiring of Indigenous journalists.

David and team approached this through a series of interviews with practicing Indigenous journalists on the Australian east coast, exploring their own experiences and positionality. This also highlights the embedded knowledge of First Nations participants.

Such interviews often revealed the historically colonial, exclusive, and racist nature of Australian reporting, not least in Indigenous affairs reporting which often took a highly anthropological approach. Interviewees recounted experiences of overt racism in newsrooms, and found few ways to respond to such everyday racism and micro-aggression.

Yet at the same time interviewees also recounted the increase in diversity in Australian newsrooms; such diversity was sometimes difficult to encourage if the existing newsroom was entirely white and monocultural, and the growth in diversity was often driven by a narrative of repair and recovery, where diversity substitutes for structural racism but does not actually actively redress it. Drivers may also be mere optics, PR, and branding, rather than addressing the ingrained doxa of established racial hierarchies in the newsroom.

However, some newsrooms recognised that Indigenous journalists could better access genuine Indigenous perspectives in their reporting and thereby improve coverage of Indigenous affairs; the Black Lives Matter movement also provided a window of opportunity for genuine change – but this did not translate necessarily into longer-term commitment and support for such action. The solution cannot be more diverse recruitment alone, but must also include such ongoing support for Indigenous journalists in workspaces that are not necessarily safe for them. (Similar issues exist in other workspaces, including the public service.)

In such spaces, Indigeneity is often still framed at least tacitly as a deficit; Indigenous staff remain positioned as a ‘native informant’ representing Indigenous people overall rather, while at the same time seen as being given an easy ride through affirmative action, and using up resources that could have been committed elsewhere. Being seen as an ‘Indigenous hire’ can thus be a stigma in the workforce, and a form of micro-invalidation, even when staff were not actually hired specifically because of their Indigeneity.

Where Indigenous journalists are thus asked to perform additional labour as representatives of all Indigenous people, they should at least be remunerated for this extra work; they should also not be pressured to provide access to their own Indigenous networks of contacts just so that non-Indigenous journalists can find Indigenous people to talk to. Indigenous journalists should be treated as equals in newsrooms, not simply as an exploitable resource.

When they are not, this sense of exploitation also leads Indigenous journalists to self-isolate within newsrooms, in order to avoid such negative experiences. Additionally, Indigenous journalists are triggered and traumatised by their reporting on Indigenous affairs, yet receive very little support for dealing with such traumatising experiences.

These shortcomings contribute to the continuing reproduction of newsroom racism. And norms are very hard to shift, because newsroom and corporate cultures reward conformity to established norms rather than the disruption that the presence of Indigenous journalists in such newsrooms must necessarily bring. This continues to do immense harm, not least to the Indigenous journalists that this system keeps chewing up.