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)
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.
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.