Mediated Justice : Mapping news media narratives about indigenous peoples’ rights and the mining conflicts in Renca (Brazil) and Gállok (Sweden)

Conflicts between the mining industry and traditional communities have been challenging indigenous peoples’ rights and endangering the environment around the world. The purpose of this study is to gain a broad perspective on the role of media representations in framing (or misframing) justice (Fraser 2009) and in reflecting (or not) media responsibility (Silverstone 2017) when reporting such events. Although recent studies have analysed news media coverage of environmental conflicts from a similar theoretical approach, few studies have addressed this inquiry through narrative analysis. Particularly, considering cases from both developed and developing countries, different media ecologies (mainstream and alternative), and scales of production and distribution (national and international). This is the gap that motivates this study. The material consists of 54 articles from diverse new media sources that have reported on two contemporary mining conflicts: the Renca mining reserve in Brazil, and the Gállok/Kallak iron mine in Sweden. The analysis focuses on how the narrator conducts the stories by mapping and comparing the structural and discursive patterns found in the material. The findings show that, in both cases (Brazil and Sweden), the majority of narratives are grounded in Western-centric perspectives that tend to misframe justice. In contrast, the results suggest that fairer and more responsible narratives are the ones told from an absolute local (Cavarero 2012) perspective