The Deepest Fake News: Establishment Media and the Erasure of the Colonial Present
An original news analysis series from Weave News Editorial Director John Collins
Based on original research conducted under the auspices of the Piskor Faculty Lectureship at St. Lawrence University, this series explores the absence of settler colonialism as an explanatory framework in the coverage provided by three establishment media outlets: the New York Times, CNN, and National Public Radio. The series includes case studies of stories from four sites of ongoing settler colonial projects: Australia, Hawai’i, Palestine, and Canada. (Cover image © Diego López Calvin)
The Deepest Fake News: Project Introduction
These two examples reveal a fundamental disconnect that lies at the center of this project: a disconnect between the importance of settler colonialism in scholarly and activist arenas and its relative absence from everyday news narratives and the public “conversation” they influence.
Concepts and Methods
While there are numerous concepts and conceptual frameworks that could be employed usefully in a project such as this one, I have chosen to ground my analysis in a set of four concepts: settler colonialism, myth, ex-nomination, and establishment media.
Case 1: Australia Day/Invasion Day
Overall, the establishment media coverage fits comfortably within a white, liberal worldview that emphasizes progress through “healing” and “coming to terms with the past” rather than confronting (and potentially dismantling or abolishing) materially oppressive structures in the present. In general, the coverage foregrounds the voices of white politicians who speak about their commitment to facing the past even as they continue to fuel the political debate about the Australia Day issue.
Case 2: Mauna Kea
The exnomination of settler colonialism here is significant as it leaves an explanatory vacuum which is then filled in a way that is most comfortable for US establishment journalists: with a binary frame, either “protesters” vs. “authorities,” “sacred space” vs. “economic development,” or, even more tendentiously, “science” vs. “culture.”
Case 3: The Great March of Return
I reviewed 49 Great March stories from the three establishment media outlets. None of them mentioned settler colonialism, none identified Israeli Jews as settlers, and none identified Palestinians explicitly as native or indigenous to the land.
Case 4: Wet’suwet’en Land Defenders
Coverage of the 2020 blockades provided an excellent opportunity for establishment media to make the explanatory link between settler colonialism and the very foundations and contemporary structures of Canada’s settler economy.
Key Findings and Implications
The establishment media coverage I have examined in this project ‘performs’ and constitutes a particular kind of settler community – a community characterized by collective denial and claims to innocence. It does this by exnominating settler colonialism in ways that fail to take into account the most central elements that a settler colonial framework would highlight: the logic of elimination, the ongoing nature of the settler project, the complicity of state and private sector forces in this project, the issue of sovereignty, and the origins of white settler wealth. The coverage then fills this explanatory vacuum with explanations that are more palatable to liberal (settler) audiences. In this sense, to return to Roland Barthes, we can say that establishment media coverage is a kind of settler myth factory.