Australian media’s failure on the Voice is becoming too big to ignore

When our culture — from drama to sport, from fiction to advertising — has been rejuvenated this century by the offerings of First Nations peoples, and when so many social and commercial institutions have improved their approach to Indigenous matters, why has so much of our journalism become worse?

The launch of the official Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum campaign was an opportunity for the media to reset, perhaps even — as Professor Marcia Langton dared to suggest last week — “lift their game”. No such luck. Instead News Corp media turned Langton from critic to target with a misrepresentation of her comments about the underlying “racism and stupidity” of much of the claims made by the No campaign.

Australian media’s failure to meet the moment of Indigenous reconciliation offered by the Voice to Parliament is becoming too big to ignore. They’re caught in a crisis of misinformation (as the Nine mastheads exposed this week), with a First Nations journalist, Stan Grant, being hounded from journalism. 

In attacking Grant and Langton, the No case and media combined are eager to localise the traditionally threatening racist trope of “the angry Black person” into the “angry Aborigine”. Traditional media has retreated to its safe place: a narrow, all-politics-all-the-time focus on campaign tactics, while amplifying misinformation with a journalistic gentility that extends the presumption of good faith to repeat liars.

This past weekend’s Insiders flagship interview captured the all-about-politics approach, as the questioning of Noel Pearson — who has so much to tell us about the challenge of Indigenous disadvantage and how we can respond — focused on polls and campaign strategy with a poking lure to angrily slash back at Voice critics. (No media newcomer, Pearson resisted the trap, turning the questions back to the love of the Uluru offering.)  

True balance that recognises the inequality of power has been replaced by the lure of the quirky. Wow! Here’s an Indigenous person voting No, or — per the Nine mastheads this week — here’s how a dead Indigenous person would have rejected the Voice.

The No case must be laughing all the way to the ballot box, knowing it’s manipulating the daily news agenda to suck the air out of the media’s all-too-short attention span. It’s about creating safe, substance-less controversies to muddy the news cycle without any risk of actually informing Australian voters of what’s at stake.

Journalism has “been utterly asleep on Indigenous policy reporting since Abbott was elected”, Professor Megan Davis tweeted at the weekend. It’s time to listen.

But what would a better media look like? For starters, it would be one that recognises racism not as a personal foible but as something deeply embedded — systemically, structurally — in a “never all of anything, but part of everything” way (as Martin Luther King is said to have thought and as Julia Gillard said similarly about misogyny when stepping down as the first female prime minister). 

Understanding the structures of racism would have long punctured the No campaign’s talking points. It would have avoided the stupidity of this week’s attacks on Langton’s comments of the bleedin’ obvious. A “part of everything” understanding of systemic racism would have short-circuited the pointless Voice to government vs Voice to Parliament debate that has consumed so much of the parliamentary press gallery’s energy earlier this year.

But the modern news cycle is not built to report “normal” underlying structures. It’s been the all-too-rare power and responsibility of the ABC’s Four Corners to reset the news cycle, using its long-form, in-depth reporting to highlight a particular injustice — this death in custody or that abuse in child detention — laying bare the underlying structures and provoking inquiry and, sometimes, change.

In the US, which is more open in its own racial reckoning, The New York Times Magazine built out the Pulitzer prize-winning “The 1619 Project” to shape a journalistic understanding of the structural nature of racism. As lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones explained, she canvassed widely to produce a list of modern institutions and phenomena that could be traced back to slavery. The result is a radical truth-telling, a journalism of impact so powerful that its teaching is banned in Florida’s schools.

Here’s another model: a decade ago, Romanian journalists Elena Stancu and Cosmin Bumbuț picked up the migrant’s nomadic lifestyle travelling Europe in a mobile home to report from the inside on the continent’s largest migrant diaspora, the near 20% of the Romanian workforce that works outside the country, giving a voice to migrant communities through their website Teleleu.eu, in documentaries and in regular reports in Romania’s largest daily paper Libertatea. 

Journalism needs to recapture its traditional strength of reporting from the outside in. One of the big journalistic losses from the nastiness of modern Twitter has been the IndigenousX feed, which used to lend its handle to a different First Nations voice each week, empowering them to offer varied perspectives and tell their stories. 

We need more diversity — and more solidarity — within journalism. Langton warned last week that a generation of leaders are being burnt out. It risks burning diversity out of journalism too. Most shocking has been to see a journalist like Grant driven out of the craft, and the failure of the ABC to protect him and its many other Indigenous and other diverse journalists.

But in leaving the ABC, taking his energy and expertise to lead a new global centre at Monash University — the Asia Pacific arm of the Denmark-based Constructive Institute — Grant may be pointing the way to a new, solutions-based way of thinking about journalism. The institute aims at the heart of the problem. We need to change how we think about “news” and work out how we restore “nuance and dialogue”.

Understanding the deep structures that continue to shape our modern day — and embedding them in our journalism — would be a good first step.

Should journalists offer “nuance and dialogue” or just report the news?  Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.