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The newspaper as political antagonist

Editorial discourse and the othering of Maori perspectives on the foreshore and seabed conflict

Massey University, New Zealand, s.phelan{at}massey.ac.nz

The 2003 political conflict over the ownership of the country's foreshore and seabed, which followed a June 2003 Court of Appeal ruling, was regarded by many New Zealanders as a defining moment in the evolution of the country's post-colonial relationship between the Crown and Maori. This article examines how the conflict was discursively constructed in the first editorial on the issue by New Zealand's four biggest-selling daily newspapers, all of which asserted their strong support for the Government's promise to quickly introduce legislation that would reinstate the status quo assumption of Crown ownership. My analysis shows how the editorials established an antagonistic discursive frontier between `national' and `Maori' interests. This was mainly done by constituting the conflict through a culturally available set of discursive assumptions that were prejudicial to nominal Maori perspectives and foreclosed open-minded assessment of the Court's ruling.

Key Words: antagonism • Aotearoa New Zealand • discourse theory • editorials • foreshore and seabed • Maori

Journalism, Vol. 10, No. 2, 217-237 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1464884908100602


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