Media must abandon negativity bias to walk with Uluru Statement

Australia’s news media face a profound challenge: can they meet the needs of the national moment posed by the Uluru Statement from the Heart? Or will journalism’s weaknesses drag down the statement’s promise?

Journalism’s core values of truth and truth-speaking should bind the craft easily to the historic mission: strengthening and celebrating the consensus around the national yearning for something better through a Voice and the truth-telling of Makarrata.

Trouble is, this sits at odds with how journalism has taught itself to understand “news” as bent to the bad, with reporting focused on conflict, a “negativity bias” that prioritises process over substance, trees over forest, the Canberra theatre over the real world. You can see that tension reflected in this week’s journalistic struggle to manage the bad-faith demand for “detail” about the Voice.

The immediacy of the referendum — almost certainly in the next 18 months — has caught much of Australia’s political media by surprise.

“Savvy” thinking in the gallery since the 1999 failed republic referendum has been that constitutional change of the sort demanded by the Uluru Statement is a pipedream. It was a conviction unshaken by the result of the marriage-equality vote.

When then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull dismissed the Voice as an unacceptable “third chamber” in 2017, the gallery responded with a sorrowful head-nodding that, yes, a referendum was a bridge too far.

Over his three years as opposition leader, Albanese opened just about each set piece with a radical commitment to the Uluru Statement in full. For the gallery, it was largely ignored as out of step with the “small picture” it was busy drawing. And when the soon-to-be-ex prime minister Scott Morrison shook the idea off with the pugnaciously rhetorical “Why would I?” in early May, it was read as common sense, not what is now grasped as his infamous tin ear.

But from 2017 on, largely outside the traditional media gaze, First Nations peoples and supporters of the Uluru Statement have refused to accept the condescension of dismissal or the second-best rhetoric of symbolic reconciliation. Door to door, gathering by gathering, support for the statement has grown. It’s now overwhelming.

It takes this moment beyond conflict-based politics as usual. As an invitation from First Nations peoples “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future”, Prime Minister Albanese seems to understand his job is delivery more than design. He deliberately defers to First Nations peoples. (“They’re just over there, they’re all around,” he gently chided David Speers on Insiders on Sunday.)

It’s a risk that tempts with the gotcha moment. It’s a humility that sits at odds with the blustering announceables of the man-in-charge, prime-ministerial model that Australia’s political reporting has encouraged us to think of as “leadership”.

Outside Canberra, Australia’s media has already been deepened by the Uluru dialogue.

The ABC has long been actively employing and engaging Indigenous journalists (including in covering and presenting politics) and other program-makers. This has positioned the public broadcaster as a key channel for the real debates the country has been having. Its depth was demonstrated again this past week by its programming around the Garma Festival and by the work of some of its political reporters (like RN Breakfast’s Patricia Karvelas).

Indigenous media — like NITV on SBS or IndigenousX — has provided a depth to the media ecosystem that traditional media has long lacked.

News Corp is, surprisingly, all over the place, caught between its entrenched, knee-jerk, anti-woke reflex and a decades-long commitment to change by some of its senior reporters and editors. In its news pages at least, The Australian has long sustained a commitment to reporting Indigenous stories. Despite the emerging anti-Voice commentariat on Sky News’ after dark, there’s hope that this nuance will provide the space for the Liberal and National parties to sign up for change.

Sure there are details to work through — such as how self-determination of the Voice will work in practice. As the first all-Indigenous panel on Insiders on Sunday pointed out, this calls for consultation with First Nations peoples.

It’s time for Australia’s news media to discard the negativity and embrace journalism that picks up the offer to walk together in the truth embedded in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Are the media pushing a negative agenda for the Voice proposal? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.