Riot, Resistance and Moral Panic: Demonising the Colonial Other

This chapter explores how the economics of news production, and the news values of the media, align with the interests of politicians in representing riots in Indigenous communities as the product of irrationality, lawlessness, or passive victimhood. This chapter also documents the failure of politicans and journalists to acknowledge the role that Indigenous community anger at deaths in custody, and perceived injustices by the police, have played in these riots and demonstrations.