THE INDIGENOUS PUBLIC SPHERE Journalism and indigenous public spheres

JOURNALISM has played – and continues to play – a crucial role in ‘im-agining ’ indigenous people and their affairs for most non-indigenouspeople. Although the trend in the past 20 years has been away from the overt racism of the colonial press, institutionalised racism is manifested in the systematic omission of indigenous voices in the news media. Indigenous sources make up a fraction – between one fifth to one third – of all sources used by journalists in stories about indigenous affairs. This alarming statistic has remained unchanged in Australian journalism for the past 20 years and is a prominent feature of news coverage of Native people in the United States and Canada (Weston, 1996; Meadows, 2001). Adam (1993) reminds us that journalism is ‘a form of expression that is an invention. It is a creation – a product of the Imagination – in both an individual and a cultural sense. ’ In making his case, Adam suggests that the world – through acts of nature – is ‘born in our imaginations’. Here, he is drawing on the work of Anderson (1984) who highlights the role played by the media – journalism, in particular – in the process of ‘imagining ’ the mod-ern nation state and our place within it. Journalism is a key cultural resource in the strategic management of cultural goods, like the media – hence, a cen-tral process in what we call the public sphere. In the eyes of many theorists – including Jurgen Habermas (1989), generally acknowledged as the instigator of the idea of the public sphere – the media and the public sphere are one and the same. Much earlier, Antonio Gramsci (1988), himself a journalist, recog-nised the media as the ‘most dynamic part ’ of the ideological structure of society. Since then, global media systems have extended their power and reach. The point I want to make here is that the cultural practice of journalism, a