Tuesday, 27 November 2012
By Tim Roxburgh for 270+ community radio stations
The way the media cover indigenous issues sometimes leads to bad policy, according to a group of academics studying how these topics are reported.
“Research over many years has reinforced and shown time and time again that the most dominant feature of news reporting is that largely mainstream media aren’t interested in Indigenous issues at all,” the lead researcher, Kerry McCallum, told me.
She is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Canberra. “When a topic does become of interest, it becomes of intense focus. The effect of that is that Indigenous issues often appear to be pricey, problematic, dramatic issues that need to be solved.”
Ms McCallum says this often triggers “kneejerk” responses from politicians that don’t take account of the existing evidence in the field.