Media narratives and social events: the story of the Redfern riot

Abstract

This article uses a narrative framework to analyze the role of newspapers in discursively reestablishing social order during times of social crisis and upheaval. Using the coverage by three diverse newspapers (Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, and Koori Mail) of the 2004 Redfern Riot in Sydney, Australia, the article will explicate the way each paper narrates social actors, discourses, and events in order to make sense of the riot and promote a way to reestablish social equilibrium. It is argued that the narratives of the two mainstream papers (Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph) converge in a coverage that draws on powerful cultural tropes of race and crime in Redfern to explain the riot. The Indigenous owned and run Koori Mail, in challenging many of those same tropes, is left with fewer publicly available narrative resources through which to conclude its story of the riot.