News media and foreign policy narrative: Australian identity and the sale of uranium to China and India

Abstract

On December 4, 2011, the Australian Labor Party’s National Conference voted to permit the sale of uranium to India, an issue that has long been contentious within the party. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were becoming increasingly concerned with the ‘rise’ of India and China, as twin regional superpowers whose prominence offers both opportunities for economic prosperity and threats to settled regional power balances. Using the issue of international uranium sales as a means to examine Australia’s identity and perception of Self and Other in the international context, this paper examines the ways in which national identity is constructed through media coverage of foreign policy decisions. It undertakes a combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of newspaper coverage of Labor’s decision to resume exports of this controversial resource to India. A sample of ten national and metropolitan broadsheet and tabloid newspapers’ coverage, in the week surrounding the decision, provides the basis for an analysis that explores news media coverage to discuss the narratives of Australian identity that were evoked to explain and account for the decision. The paper explores the construction of Australian identity in relation to China and India, and the ways in which the decision to sell uranium to India was reported in relation to China; and also considers the usefulness of an interdisciplinary approach (drawing on insights from media and communications) to international relations (IR) scholarship.