Background:

No one would argue it is difficult to generate negative stories about Australian Aboriginal communities when we have an 11-year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, increasing rates of diabetes, kidney disease and asthma among Indigenous people and more than 26% of Australia’s adult prisoners being Aboriginal.

Methods:

To ascertain how the media portrayed Aboriginal health issues in the media, PHAIWA collected and analysed all articles relating to Aboriginal health from print media in The West Australian, The Australian and The Sunday Times and from the ABC Online news service during 2012. Following coding and allowing for some exclusions, a total of 335 articles were analysed.

This research was cleared through the Curtin University Ethics Committee as a low risk project.

Results/Discussions:

We found that overwhelmingly, the articles were negative in their portrayal of Aboriginal health with 75%  negative, 15% positive and 11% neutral coverage. The most common negative topics were alcohol, child abuse, petrol sniffing, violence, suicide, deaths in custody and crime. The four most common positive subject descriptors included education, role modelling for health, sport and employment.

Conclusions/implications:

This paper will briefly discuss the implications of this negative portrayal of Aboriginal health and recommend strategies for public health practitioners, journalists and media practitioners to enable them to positively influence the way in which Australian Aboriginal people are portrayed in the media.