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ABSTRACT
News media perform an important role in shaping how Canadian society views Indigenous peoples and issues. They are rarely passive, neutral bystanders, as media routinely employ a particular set of frames (e.g., criminality, economic burden, threats to unity, promotion of social justice) when covering Indigenous stories. We explore how the use of such frames is influenced by dynamics of power as they relate to majority/minority linguistic differences. Through a controlled comparison, we examine the 2008–2019 media coverage of Indigenous responses to Ontario’s Far North Act and Québec’s Plan Nord – both of which concerned resource development on or near Indigenous territory. We find that where media serve the linguistic majority, they are much more likely to frame Indigenous responses to development plans as a threat to national unity. In contrast, where media serve the linguistic minority, they are significantly more likely to frame Indigenous responses in terms of social justice. Our findings suggest that traditional understandings of the differences between mainstream and ethnic or minority media fail to capture the complex dynamics at work in multilingual states. The paper addresses this gap in the literature and provides a broader understanding of how media and power dynamics shape the representation of Indigenous contentious politics.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2019 meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association and the 2021 meeting of the International Studies Association. Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Secrétariat du Québec aux Relations Canadiennes (Programme d’Appui à la Recherche), and a Sir Edward Peacock Faculty Research Grant from the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University supported the article. We thank Jayna Green, Rachel Whalen, Katherine Morton, Laurel Huget, Badriyya Yusuf, and Joshua McEvoy for their welcome research assistance. We also thank Scott Matthews, Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, W. R. Nadège Compaoré, the three anonymous referees, and the journal editors for their helpful comments and suggestions, which improved the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This excludes social media. We agree with Fleras (Citation2011, 199) that “most original reporting and news still comes from traditional sources and online users overwhelmingly rely on so-called legacy media”.
2 However, a recent study by Thibault et al. (Citation2020) did not find empirical support for this hypothesis.
3 For a critical discussion of the concept of settler colonialism, see Veracini (Citation2013).
4 This frame included references to collective action that broke the law, involved militants or terrorists, focused on weapons used, etcetera (Wilkes, Corrigall-Brown, and Ricard Citation2010, 46).
5 Includes actions where economic interests or economic costs of collective action are highlighted (Wilkes, Corrigall-Brown, and Ricard Citation2010, 47).
6 Articles deemed to have “threat to race relations/unity” frame if they mentioned “at war with white people”, “creating national divisions”, or “threats to ongoing peaceful negotiations” (Wilkes, Corrigall-Brown, and Ricard Citation2010, 46).
7 Such frames included references to “legacy of colonialism”, “aboriginal rights”, or “problematic government policies” (Wilkes, Corrigall-Brown, and Ricard Citation2010, 47).
8 Bill 173 (Mining Amendment Act), which also focused on natural resource governance, was passed by the same provincial government in 2009 and encountered similar criticisms concerning the quality of consultations with Indigenous communities. See Grant et al. (Citation2014) and Panagos and Grant (Citation2013).
9 The number of Indigenous people affected by the Plan Nord varies somewhat depending on publications and calculations. A Postmedia News (May 8, 2011) article states, for instance, there are 10,000 Inuit, 16,000 Cree, and 1,000 Naskapi.
10 Due to media amalgamation in recent years, newswire services such as Postmedia News and Canadian Press/La Presse Canadienne (which are used by a large number of both French and English newspapers in Québec and other provinces) are heavily present.
11 See Online Appendix 2 for two illustrative examples (one in French, one in English) of how coding was done.
12 Training started with the PI elaborating on what each code and frame represented (e.g., who are industry professionals; who are Indigenous activists; what is a “social justice frame”). The coders and the PI then coded news articles side by side, discussing any potential discrepancies. This allowed for the development of a common understanding of codes and frames. Once results became consistently similar (after approximately five articles), coders started to work on their own. When another coder joined the team after six months, another training session took place with all team members. This ensured that coding strategies remained consistent over time. This type of training is one of the more prevalent ways to establish inter-coder reliability and replicability, particularly when coding something complex like a frame (see Greenberg and Hier Citation2009; Belfer, Ford, and Maillet Citation2017). The two coding training sessions were the only instances where the same article was coded by multiple coders – all other articles were only coded by one person. This was due to the inclusion of French and English articles, which made it much more challenging to have multiple coders code the same article.
13 For an Indigenous perspective on the problematic ways in which the mainstream media cover Indigenous contentious politics, see CBC (Citation2020).