Urban Aboriginal Self Images and the Mass Media

Abstract

While Tatz (1980) has argued that ‘the only true and constant ally of the black people of Australia is the media, particularly ABC radio and television and the major daily newspapers’(14), Aborigines themselves have been less laudatory. Macumba & Batty (1980), Gilbert (1973) and Perkins (1975) have all stated that the exclusion of Aboriginals in the media was a glaringly obvious fact of daily life, and perceived the media as a force for the destruction of Aboriginal culture. Bobbi Sykes' evaluation of the Australian media as ‘completely white-controlled, information about what blacks in this country are suffering is completely suppressed’ (Gilbert, 1973:112–113) parallels minority perceptions of the media discerned by the Kerner Commission (1968). Charged to determine the effect of the mass media on the riots in a number of American cities, the Kerner Commission (1968:362–389) gave prominence in its findings to the fact that most Negroes perceived the media as instruments of the white power structure, that the news was presented from a white perspective, and criticised the media for their failure to report adequately on the causes and consequences of the civil disorders and the underlying problems of race relations.