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Journalistic news values and digital technology align with education policy and practice to construct a narrow world of Indigenous educational achievement and contribute to a discourse of negativity, failure and disempowerment. Digital technologies have enabled the online publication of educational performance that is a valuable source of news for journalists and editors. In this virtual world, Indigenous students are numerically ranked and publicly compared to their 'mainstream' peers. Despite significant criticism of the educational trend towards high-stakes testing and league tables there has been little investigation into the role of news media in the reporting of Australia's National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). This article takes a media studies lens to examine the measurement and comparison of Indigenous school performance through the online publication of NAPLAN results and the "My School" website. A textual analysis of 143 news reports about Australian Indigenous students' NAPLAN results over an eight-year period from 2010 to 2017 found that Australia's news media told the story of Indigenous educational performance through a language of measurement and failure. This focus on deficit metrics fails to question the underlying assumptions of educational testing and comparison and perpetuates a discourse of deficit in Indigenous education.

Local news plays an important role in generating a sense of community attachment. However, the relationship between local news and wellbeing is less explored. Based on a national survey of 6,367 Australians, this study found that trust in and satisfaction with local news were linked with higher personal and community wellbeing. News-related factors (motivation, satisfaction, trust) were more strongly related to community wellbeing than to personal wellbeing. Accessing local news for community-related reasons was the strongest predictor of wellbeing. Guided by uses and gratifications theory, this study provides new insights into the role of local news in peoples' lives, and emphasises the need to protect local news from further decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of a local newspaper in shaping a community's collective memory of child sexual abuse by documenting changing representations of a former rural orphanage and its custodians where such horrific crimes took place. The paper conducts an across-time analysis of news coverage (1944–1954 and 2010–2020) to map these changing representations in their media, policy and social contexts. It extends scholarship around collective memory and temporal reflexivity as a provocation for journalists to acknowledge and engage with their news outlet's own mediated past (no matter how uncomfortable) when reporting on and interpreting events such as Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of institutional listening in deliberative democracy, focusing particularly on its contribution to the transmission process between the public sphere and formal institutions. We critique existing accounts of transmission for prioritizing voice over listening and for remaining constrained by an 'aggregative logic' of the flow of ideas and voices in a democracy. We argue that formal institutions have a crucial role to play in ensuring transmission operates according to a more deliberative logic. To substantiate this argument, we focus on two recent examples of institutional listening in two different democracies: Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the United States' Senate Judiciary Committee's confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. These cases show that institutional listening can take different forms; it can be purposefully designed or incidental, and it can contribute to the realization of deliberative democracy in various ways. Specifically, institutional listening can help enhance the credibility and visibility of minority groups and perspectives while also empowering these groups to better hold formal political institutions accountable. In these ways, institutional listening helps transmission operate according to a more deliberative logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guardian Australia has made a strong commitment to covering Indigenous affairs, offering an alternative approach to other mainstream Australian news media since its establishment in 2013. In this article, the concepts of boundary work and boundary-drawing power provide a framework for analysing how Guardian Australia negotiates, extends, and concedes its professional journalistic ground in ways that support more diversity in news-making in the space of Indigenous affairs. In doing so, the article looks beyond Guardian Australia's award-winning journalism to its "everyday" coverage of Indigenous affairs. Through a content analysis of 1048 items published between March 2018 and February 2020, it identifies and discusses who contributes or produces the content, the types of content and the range of stories that are covered, and how Guardian Australia itself categorises these stories. Our analysis finds that Guardian Australia's Indigenous affairs coverage presents more sustained and diverse reporting than previous studies of legacy media have found, and its content expands journalistic boundaries by embracing the affordances of digital networked media and the contributions of diverse First Nations writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalistic news values and digital technology align with education policy and practice to construct a narrow world of Indigenous educational achievement and contribute to a discourse of negativity, failure and disempowerment. Digital technologies have enabled the online publication of educational performance that is a valuable source of news for journalists and editors. In this virtual world, Indigenous students are numerically ranked and publicly compared to their 'mainstream' peers. Despite significant criticism of the educational trend towards high-stakes testing and league tables there has been little investigation into the role of news media in the reporting of Australia's National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). This article takes a media studies lens to examine the measurement and comparison of Indigenous school performance through the online publication of NAPLAN results and the My School website. A textual analysis of 143 news reports about Australian Indigenous students' NAPLAN results over an eight-year period from 2010 to 2017 found that Australia's news media told the story of Indigenous educational performance through a language of measurement and failure. This focus on deficit metrics fails to question the underlying assumptions of educational testing and comparison and perpetuates a discourse of deficit in Indigenous education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a time sensitive critical text analysis of Australian news reporting that has identified, mapped and analysed news reporting about Indigenous education from 2008 to 2018. Three key themes were identified: school attendance; performance as measured by national testing, and boarding school education. A braiding metaphor is introduced to illustrate how the three themes operated independently over time, intersected and together wove a discursive braid steeped in deficit. The analysis is an act of 'unbraiding' that aims to reveal how news media coverage was integral to constructing Indigenous education as an unquestioned problem for society, a policy problem for governments to solve and an intractable pedagogical conundrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]