Portrayal of Indigenous Health in Australian Media

Running head: INDIGENOUS HEALTH PERSPECTIVE
1
Indigenous Health Perspective
Student’s name
Institution affiliation

INDIGENOUS HEALTH PERSPECTIVE 2
Explore a range of media for news items related to Indigenous Australian’s health.
The indigenous people refer to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Stoneham,
Goodman, & Daube, 2014). The portrayal of indigenous people and health issues related to them
is normally through the media, and how they are presented affects the relationship of the people
and the mainstream society. This paper will discuss current health issues affecting the wellbeing
of indigenous Australians through examining media items and identifying how media is used to
report Australian Indigenous peoples’ health issues.
Poor health faced by aboriginal people results from failing to realize their health rights.
Aboriginal Islanders lacks an equal health chances like mainstream society. These islanders have
also not taken efficient measures to solve the lasting imbalance in health services, unlike
mainstream society. An understanding of the colonization process and its impact on health helps
to understand the social health status of indigenous Australians (Stoneham, Goodman, & Daube,
2014). The trauma, pain, grief, and anger in the present life of the indigenous people are still
present as a result of past protectionist and segregation policies.
There is a range of media for news items related to health issues faced by indigenous
Australians(McCallum, 2011). These items can include news items in daily papers, journals,
television or radio, websites, magazines (Latimore, Nolan, Simons & Khan, 2017). After
examining articles about the Australian indigenous health, a high number of articles were found
to be overwhelmingly negative in their portrayal of health issues faced by indigenous
Australians(Stoneham, Goodman, & Daube, 2014). The popular topics in articles about health
issues of the Australian indigenous people were such as nutrition, consumption of alcohol, child
abuse, mental health, smoking, violent acts and high rates of crime (Balvin& Kashima, 2012).
Nutrition

INDIGENOUS HEALTH PERSPECTIVE 3
Nutrition is one main health issue facing indigenous Australians and is portrayed in
media items such as the newspapers, televisions, and websites.
Newspaper as a media item
Nutrition health issues of the indigenous Australians are covered by the papers in
Australia. The newspapers have been used as a channel to widespread the issue of nutrition by
authors (Due & Riggs, 2011). Data extraction and the coding template are developed to apply to
each article to extract a variety of information including author, title, date of publication,
nutritional issues covered, the voice of the stakeholder and geographical focus of the article.
Contact analysis derives policy functions from the data retrieved by highlighting issues faced by
the indigenous community, reporting government announcements on nutrition benefits,
promoting programs to help in solving nutrition issues, advocating solutions, critiquing
government to create better nutrition reforms and defending the policy (Dreher, McCallum &
Waller, 2016). The coding framework is applied to all published newspapers to categorize the
policy function used. These papers examine the nature and extent of coverage, the policy
functions, and the stakeholder views that are represented. Obesity in newspapers is often framed
as an individual’s lifestyle problem or is driven by factors that are structural beyond the
individual. The structural determinants of obesity in the indigenous population are often cited in
media items, and the individual’s ability to modify their lifestyle is always overrepresented as a
solution to eradicate obesity. A range of nutrition issues is covered in newspapers in which
nearly one-quarter of them is about the supply of food and its insecurity, particularly the finite
means to acquire nutritious nourishments in remote indigenous communities. Similar proportions
of the papers focus on maternal and child nutrition and chronic diseases, which include diabetes
or kidney disease. Some papers specifically focus on micronutrient malnutrition or predominant