Ah, “objectivity”: the foundation of true and good journalism, according to my university degree — and also a term weaponised against marginalised folks who dare to give their community a voice in an industry rooted in white supremacy and racism. This might sound controversial, but it’s an established pattern, and one Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Dr Amy McQuire calls out in her powerful new book, Black Witness.
It is a harrowing time to be a journalist in Australia. It’s been more than a year of Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on Gaza, which the ICC has deemed a plausible genocide, and yet Australian reporting on the matter remains uncritical of the IDF and laden with racist and dehumanising language.
During the past year, we have seen journalists banned from reporting on Palestine for signing an open letter calling for balanced reporting, over claims their objectivity was compromised. Lebanese-Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf is currently in a legal stoush with the ABC after she was fired for sharing posts by human rights organisations about war crimes in Gaza — which apparently meant she wasn’t “impartial” enough. She was also the target of a coordinated campaign by Israeli lobby groups.
Earlier this month, a bombshell racism report surveyed 120 current and former ABC employees, and all except one reported experiencing racism at work. Unsurprisingly, this also came a year after Wiradjuri journalist Stan Grant left the broadcaster, which he accused of failing to defend or protect him from racist trolls. He also slammed Australian media as a whole, stating: “Too often, we are the poison in the bloodstream of our society.”
It was in this same year that Australia voted ‘no’ in a referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament — which you could argue has been a result of harmful media reporting. Even the ABC’s Laura Tingle admitted that, under the guise of being “objective” and “balanced”, Australian media platformed disinformation and normalised anti-Aboriginal talking points.
As a Muslim journalist, the last year has been a formative and radicalising one. I’m sure many Muslims and Arabs in the industry have had a crisis of faith in the media because of reporting on Palestine, and I can’t imagine the mental toll of writing about the referendum would have had on Aboriginal journalists.
Walkley-award winning journalist Dr Amy McQuire, who has been working in this industry almost as long as I’ve been alive, had her crisis of faith in Australian media two decades ago, when she first entered journalism as a teenager. It took mere weeks for the violence of this industry to become obvious to her, and she has been battling against it ever since.
Black Witness, her debut non-fiction book for adults, is a searing indictment of Australia’s utter failure at reporting factually and sensitively about Indigenous affairs. It spans her career from when she was a bright-eyed and eager 17-year-old cadet to an award-winning Indigenous affairs journalist, and ultimately, to where she is now: a cynical post-doc researcher at the University of Queensland.
Told in two parts titled ‘Black Witness’ and ‘White Witness’, the collection of McQuire’s previously published articles (as well as new essays) outlines key examples of the harmful, degrading and violent reporting Australian media has published about First Nations people — and also examines McQuire’s own reporting, identifying biases she didn’t know she had at the time.
“When I looked back at some of what I had written, particularly when I was younger, I was really cringing,” she tells Missing Perspectives over Zoom.
McQuire began her career in journalism at the National Indigenous Times, and so she luckily bypassed a lot of the toxicity Black journalists endure in mainstream media. But even at a Black publication, she would sometimes catch herself writing for the white gaze — something she has spent the rest of her life railing against.
“There’s this perception that you have to fit into certain values of journalism, which I think is still there today,” she tells me.
“But when you actually look at how those values have emerged, or what they actually do, or what they conceal, or what they silence, you realise ‘Oh, actually, maybe we should be thinking of different forms of journalism.’ And what is a good journalist even? It makes you think about what sort of journalist you want to be, or what you should aspire to, or even if you think journalism is the mode in which you should be writing.”
For many journalists, objectivity is aspirational — but the harsh truth of the matter is that it’s a state only afforded to white journalists. The rest of us are accused of being biased to our communities, because we are visibly not the ‘norm’.
“We’ve never had that pretence of being objective because we can’t be objective, like, literally, we’re never going to be read as objective,” McQuire stresses.
“Objectivity has always been a myth, and it has always been used against those who are being oppressed. Your voices are always going to be seen as irrational. Your lived experience, your testimony, your witnessing always has to go through the prism of these supposed objective or impartial observers, and that’s in every single industry, but particularly in journalism. And so I see objectivity as this colonial notion that emerges from the enlightenment and all of those Western processes, whereas what you see with Indigenous journalists and independent journalists, and even journalists working within mainstream media — we never say that we’re objective because we can’t be.
“My reason for entering the media was to actually speak the truth about what was happening, to act as a resistance to what was happening in mainstream media. And I think that’s a very different aspiration.”
The weaponisation of objectivity against people of colour in the media has never been more salient than now, as Muslim and Arab journalists like myself are either sidelined, silenced or barred from reporting because of our anti-genocide stances regarding Palestine. But this isn’t a recent problem — it’s been a conversation happening regarding Aboriginal journalists for years.
“There’s been a continual question in Aboriginal media about whether Aboriginal journalists should be telling stories, or whether Muslim journalists or other people of colour and other minorities should be telling their own stories, because there’s always the perception that white journalists are always going to be objective. But they’re not,” McQuire says.
“Whiteness exists by making itself invisible and making itself normal and objective. So [white journalists] feel that they can be an objective observer when they’re not because they’re coming from that position of power. They’re coming from that position of whiteness.”
McQuire believes in the liberatory power of independent Black media which leans into its Aboriginality and centres its people’s experiences — but these publications are few and far between. She has witnessed first-hand the harms Australian media has caused her community.
“Media has always been used to justify colonial projects,” she says, citing the ground-breaking work of Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist Edward Said. Said was among the founders of post-colonial studies, best known for his book Orientalism which is a foundational text in literary theory and Middle Eastern studies. She also notes the way Europeans journalled about colonised people, which Said analyses in his works.
“If you look at the history of print media, it is actually tied up in colonialism and imperialism. And that’s where those values come out.”
So, when we talk about returning to the “roots” of journalism by aspiring to be objective and impartial, well, it looks like that’s a nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. Instead, Black Witness calls for Aboriginal journalists (and really, all marginalised people) to use the tools journalism affords them, to tell their stories — but not objectively.
Forget aspiring to western ways of thinking that look down on empathy and connection to community as weaknesses that muddy the water of good storytelling. McQuire says that feeling outrage at the injustices do not make someone a bad journalist — and in fact, it’s important to preserve these feelings, instead of trading them for objectivity (which eventually leads to normalisation).
“I think that’s a form of resistance,” she says.
“Our bodies are never seen as mournable or grievable bodies, and our deaths are never seen as newsworthy deaths, even when what has happened fits the criteria of news values that have been there for years and years and years we’re never seen as newsworthy.
“It’s so important to preserve your outrage and your sense of morality and to feel things. But also, ensure that you have that collective around you, because we’re just seeing so many horrific things all the time. I never want to be conditioned to think that that’s normal and to feel like we’re not supposed to feel that it’s not normal. And sometimes you just have to feel that horror.”
Black Witness is full of horrors. McQuire revisits and painstakingly interrogates racist, fear-mongering and dehumanising reporting from the early 2000s. But she also laments the ways these stories could have been told if Aboriginal witnesses were believed over unreliable, bigoted white witnesses. Of what could have been.
It’s a heartbreaking, rage-inducing time machine — but it also shows that there is still room for change, and that it’s not too late to make that change.
McQuire’s main message, if you wanted to condense Black Witness into one, is simply: believe Black witnesses. This is the way forward — and it’s one that can not only change lives, but save them.
Photo: UQP