Is objectivity ‘colonial’? Amy McQuire argues Black, activist journalism must compensate for our mainstream media’s blindness
- Written by Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University
This article contains information on deaths of First Nations people in custody and the names of people who are now deceased.
Do the names Mulrunji Doomadgee or Layla Leering or Fionica James mean anything to you? Have you heard of the case of Rebecca Maher? What about that of Kevin Henry?
If you are anything like me, an older white man in a position of privilege, you probably have heard of the first name. Mulrunji Doomadgee died in a Palm Island police cell in 2004 after an altercation with a police officer, Chris Hurley. Hurley was charged with manslaughter, but acquitted. You have probably heard of that case because it was written up in an acclaimed 2008 book, Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man, later a documentary.
Black Witness: The Power of Indigenous Media – Amy McQuire (UQP)
The other names I had not heard of. Had you? They are among the many Indigenous women and men who have been killed, whether by strangers, their partners or police in recent years The deaths of Leering and James were initially listed as suicide. But the Northern Territory coroner found in 2020 that these women had suffered sexual violence, referring their cases to the Director of Public Prosecutions. I’ll come later to Maher and Henry’s cases.
The names listed above are all from Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist and academic Amy McQuire’s important book, Black Witness, which delivers a stinging critique of the way mainstream media operates.
McQuire rejects outright journalistic norms espoused by the mainstream media, such as objectivity, which she believes are “colonial”. By this, she means notions of “balance” and “fairness” need to be seen through the prism of who has the power to decide what is reported and what isn’t, rather than assuming balance and fairness apply equally to everyone.
Quoting Aileen Moreton-Robinson, McQuire says this is why it is imperative that First Nations people take control of their representation. “As Black journalists, we write or broadcast in service of our communities […] That means Black journalism is never separated from activism; it is an arm of it”.
Indigenous Grandmother Against Removals member Aunty Hazel Collins (centre) at a press conference at Parliament House in 2018.
Undeterred, the grandmothers switched tactics, marching up to the Parliament House lawns, standing behind the television panels, waving their banners and chanting their protests. The TV crews were exasperated but the protesters refused to budge. “At home, viewers across Australia were eating their breakfast with a side of sovereignty,” comments McQuire.
During a break, Channel Nine’s host, Karl Stefanovic, came over to the protesters. McQuire reports that he told them:
I’m not going to bullshit you. All I’m saying is at the moment we are concentrating on the leadership spill […] I’m happy to talk to you after.
But after Stefanovic’s shift finished at 11am, he was “nowhere to be seen”.
You could argue few news events would have outranked a leadership spill, and from the perspective of a white witness you would be right. But try putting yourself in a black witness’s shoes and it probably feels like the prospects for getting coverage are small, tightly framed and highly conditional.
The Palm Island uprising
The second example concerns the events following Mulrunji Doomadgee’s death in 2004, which are usually referred to as the Palm Island riots but which McQuire calls the Palm Island uprising. The protests, she writes, were not a random outburst of violence, but “were strategic and full of meaning”. The protesters had burnt down the police station where Doomadgee died – and the house of the person they believed was responsible, senior sergeant Chris Hurley.
To McQuire, most coverage of what happened in Palm Island exemplified the phenomenon of white witnesses becoming war correspondents in their own land. She calls them credible observers venturing out to the borderlands of remote Australia where “blackness is seen as savage and violent, and the victims are given no voice, no agency, no humanity”.
They report dysfunction and hopelessness with a veneer of impartiality “because to tell it like this is to ensure the White Witness is only the correspondent and never an active player”.
Included in McQuire’s critique is Hooper’s The Tall Man, a book I’ve long admired and have written about previously. McQuire acknowledges The Tall Man is a sympathetic account of a family and community seeking justice for Doomadgee, but argues Hooper portrays the uprising from a perspective of “white fear”. She believes Hooper overplays the danger posed, underplays the mismatch in the weapons used and uncritically accepts the police version of events.
Indeed, several years later the Indigenous man who led the uprising, Lex Wotton, won a landmark racial discrimination case that saw the Queensland government paying an historic settlement to the community of $30 million. Justice Debbie Mortimer found the police force’s response to the uprising was disproportionate, grounded in racist views and would not have occurred “elsewhere in Australia, nor in Queensland, outside an Aboriginal community”, reports McQuire.
Lex Wotton outside the Federal Court Townsville.
Cameron Laird/AAP
Exposing and righting injustices
What actually happens inside Aboriginal communities is McQuire’s focus in the second part of the book. She is less interested in evoking a range of experience, as, say Debra Dank does in her 2022 memoir, We Come With This Place, than in exposing and righting injustices.
One such case concerned Goreng Goreng man, Kevin Henry, who had been convicted of the rape and murder of an Indigenous woman in 1991, the same year the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody released its final report. Throughout the next 29 years, he proclaimed his innocence. He was released on parole in 2020.
McQuire tells how her father worked as a prison guard at Etna Creek prison (otherwise known as Capricornia Correctional Centre) outside Rockhampton, where Henry served his sentence. Prison guards hear many protesting their innocence and rarely doubt the correctness of a conviction. But this time, he did.
After interviewing Martin Hodgson, a human rights lawyer specialising in wrongful conviction cases, McQuire teamed up with him to re-investigate Henry’s case. What they have found, they believe, was that Henry’s confession to the crime was forced. Hodgson says this happens more often than is recognised.
McQuire cites the US-based Innocence Project. DNA exonerations over its first 25 years, from 1989–2014, show that among wrongful convictions overturned on DNA evidence, one quarter had given a false confession. (The Innocence Project’s most recent estimate is even higher, at 29%.)
Kevin Henry was susceptible to giving a false confession. He was illiterate, not given access to a lawyer despite asking for one, confused by the police stopping and starting the interview and, he says, eventually threatened with violence. In addition, the physical evidence of the crime did not accord with his confession.
McQuire writes that police alleged the victim’s body was placed in the Fitzroy River on one side, but it was found two kilometres downstream on the opposite side, which was highly unlikely according to the tidal records for that night. Police alleged Henry would have trudged through the river’s mud with the body, but no mud was found on his clothes.
Anger ‘the best sustenance’ for writing
A second case concerned a Wiradjuri woman, Rebecca Maher, a 36-year-old mother of four who was walking along a street in Cessnock, New South Wales, late at night when she was detained by police on the ground she had breached bail. She had not, writes McQuire.
The police said she was being drunk in a public place and took her to the watchhouse in Maitland. By 6 o’clock the following morning she was dead. She had not been drunk but was addicted to drugs. A bottle of pills she had with her was not taken away by police. A coronial inquest ruled police failed to properly search her, over ungrounded concerns she had HIV. “She would die of mixed drug toxicity,” writes McQuire.
The inquest found police should have taken Maher to hospital rather than detain her, and that they displayed a lack of concern for her welfare. McQuire is at pains to mention Maher’s qualities as a loving mother but she does not have much additional information to round out the picture, unlike a number of portraits of other women in Black Witness.
Maher’s story was included in a piece McQuire wrote for The Saturday Paper, following the horrific videotaped killing of George Floyd in America in 2020. It was headlined: “There Cannot be 432 Victims and No Perpetrators”, referring to the 432 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who had lost their lives in custody since 1991.
Like other Indigenous people, she was angered by the news media paying so much attention to Floyd’s death “while remaining apathetic towards black lives here”. She wrote a Substack piece about the issue, which garnered 80,000 hits, prompting The Saturday Paper’s commission.
According to McQuire, anger is “the best sustenance with which to write”. She does not qualify the statement just as she is adamant that orthodox notions of objectivity in journalism are “colonial”.
‘Let’s play spot the bias’
I don’t agree that journalistic objectivity is a useless idea, nor that journalism and activism are inseparable. But then again, I would say that, as someone who has benefited from the status quo. Media Diversity Australia, which has been tracking whose faces are seen on Australian television news and current affairs, found in 2022 the proportion of TV presenters, commentators and reporters with an Anglo-Celtic background had increased from 75.8% to 78%. The proportion of on-air appearances by those with an Indigenous background was 5.4%.
Arguments about how journalists should go about their work are not new.
McQuire is absolutely right to point to the values – whether personal, cultural or ideological – that underpin news coverage. She’s equally right to point to many journalists’ inability or unwillingness to seriously consider how news is made, or their role in influencing events and newsmakers.
In a scientific sense, objectivity is impossible to achieve, simply because journalists are human beings. The more journalists and editors cling to the idea their news reporting can be objective, the more they hold up a sign saying, “Let’s play spot the bias”.
What journalists can and should pursue is an objective method of verification, according to Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s book, The Elements of Journalism, now in its fourth edition. At its simplest, this means seeking out as many views or perspectives on a news event as possible, and then reporting those perspectives dispassionately. This does not mean accepting any and every view, for instance in offering a platform to Holocaust deniers.
When Deborah Lipstadt was about to publish her book on the history of Holocaust denial, she was invited by numerous television producers to appear on talk show panels – with a Holocaust denier. She refused, but that didn’t stop a talk show on CBS from inviting on Holocaust deniers along with Holocaust survivors for a debate. Before a commercial break, host Montel Williams urged viewers to stay tuned so they could learn whether the Holocaust is a “myth or is it truth”.
McQuire’s criticisms of objectivity have been mirrored in the US, where Wes Lowery, a Black journalist who covers race, law enforcement, and social justice, left The Washington Post in 2020 after falling out with management over his use of social media. Last year, he published an essay for Columbia Journalism Review titled “A Test for the News”. In it, he explained how journalists from diverse backgrounds are becoming increasingly frustrated and disenchanted by the way news stories are selected and framed from what Lowery sees as a primarily upper-class, white, male perspective.
Kovach and Rosenstiel argue there needs to be a way to maintain the idea of journalists being independent from any particular faction without “either denying the influence of personal experience or being hostage to it”. They agree strongly with the need for greater diversity in newsrooms along racial, gender or gender-identity lines, while arguing newsrooms also need intellectual and ideological diversity.
Whether and how their ideas square with McQuire’s conception of journalism is not clear to me. After reading Black Witness, what is clear is why she holds the views she does. What she has helped (or made) me do is attend to the unstated assumptions of white witnesses, while hearing the voices of black witnesses.
Authors: Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University
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