Key Findings and Implications
The overarching finding of this research is closely connected with a key observation made by media and communications scholar Lilie Chouliaraki:
Journalism is about doing things with words, not simply about using words to report facts. What journalism does with words, and indeed with pictures, is that it brings into being the community of people it addresses as its audiences. Journalism is, therefore, performative in the sense that it evokes or ‘performs’ the very public that it claims to inform. (emphasis added)
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, including:
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
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.
Beneath this overarching finding, I have identified the following specific findings:
1. Exnomination: The analysis strongly confirms my hypothesis about the exnomination of settler colonialism, settlers, settler privileges, and ongoing settler actions (state and corporate).
2. (Some) natives exist, but they don’t resist: In keeping with the impulse of liberal multiculturalism, establishment outlets are generally careful to identify native and Indigenous people as such (except when those people are Palestinians!), but they are much less careful when it comes to helping audiences understand what it means to resist settler colonialism. When mobilization occurs, it is “protest,” not resistance.
3. Incomplete historicization of Indigenous grievances: Establishment outlets acknowledge that the people mobilizing have grievances. Yet when it comes to situating those grievances in a context that connects them with the ongoing impact of territorial conquest, the coverage falls well short. The closest thing to an exception is the Australia coverage, where Aboriginal grievances are sometimes connected with land loss; and the Gaza coverage, where land loss is noted but couched in ambiguous language that hides exactly how and why the land loss happened.
4. Naturalization of corporate and state actions: Establishment media coverage presents state and corporate actions as natural facts rather than as contemporary expressions of colonial power. In this coverage, the state is not a settler state. Rather, it is a democracy facing protests that force politicians, police, and military commanders to make difficult decisions.
5. Decontextualized divisions: Establishment media love to dwell on divisions within Indigenous populations (e.g., pro- vs. anti-telescope, hereditary vs. elected chiefs, Hamas vs. other Palestinian groups), but they rarely tell us anything about the role of the settler state and settler capital in fostering those divisions and empowering those who are more willing to accept settler rule.
6. Absent experts: In this coverage, experts on settler colonialism don’t exist. The entire set of 114 stories contains exactly one (very brief) quote from such an expert (J. Kēhaulani Kauanui).
7. Unthinkable decolonization: For establishment media, decolonization of settler societies is simply not “thinkable.” It is not admissible as a relevant concept, horizon, or goal.
Conclusions and implications
So, what are the implications of this research? I want to highlight three.
First, establishment media are settler media. Grounded in settler wealth, these powerful media outlets represent the world back to settler communities, and in the process, they actively participate in the perpetuation of the colonial project. We need to wrap our heads around that reality.
Second, exnomination facilitates ethical avoidance. The coverage I have reviewed avoids any direct discussion of how settler colonialism permeates contemporary social realities as part of what scholars such as Anibál Quijano call the “coloniality of power.” There is regular acknowledgment of past harms and the need for present “reconciliation,” but there is nothing in the coverage that would push audiences to connect that history with their bank, their house, their land, and their privileges in the here and now.
Finally, discourse matters, but we need to make it matter differently: Those of us who are settlers on this land, or on other lands, have a responsibility to demand better, more ethical coverage from settler media. News media discourse is a site of struggle – struggle over how historical and contemporary realities will be understood, who will shape that understanding, and who will be allowed to speak uncomfortable truths. Basman Derawi, a poet from Gaza, speaks directly to this struggle:
The eyes:
You shot one
but I still have another.
I still stand to expose your actions.
If your truth is the truth,
why do you shoot?
Basman Derawi, “We still see you”
Equally important, these contemporary struggles are also struggles to define a horizon of possibilities. By engaging in these struggles in the news media arena, we can play an active role in shaping the conditions of possibility for a truly liberating, decolonial future.
