Adam Goodes is a former Australian Rules Footballer who called out racism both in the football industry and Australian community. Spanning from 2013 up until 2020 traditional media companies have used social media platforms to share their coverage of the controversy.
Australia’s media landscape is largely controlled by News Corp, which circulates roughly 70% of the traditional daily news coverage and Fairfax owned by parent company Nine Entertainment Co. which roughly controls 20%. Australian media platforms often toe the line of neutral reporting often funnelling political views of the business through news stories and opinion pieces.
A Reddit thread posted in 2019 by PolitQuoll depicts a chart aligning each traditional media source in the political position they tend to take, as voted by the Australian public.
The annotated version of the chart found on the thread identifies The Herald Sun, owned by News Corp, as a publication which focusses more heavily on issues at the right of politics, assisted by their opinion pieces. The chart also indicates The Guardian Australia, owned by the Guardian Media Group, a company which aims to ensure editorial independence, as a publication which focusses more heavily on left issues through their opinion pieces using facts and topic experts rather than The Herald Sun’s shock jock counterpart. This can be seen in the comparison between the opinion pieces written about the issue of racism in sport, brought to the forefront by Adam Goodes in 2013 becoming a raging debate till this day, highlighted in figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Tweets posted on July 30th, 2015 at both publications, opinion pieces with drastically different tunes.
The contrast between the two publications is seen in its different coverage style, both tweeting on July 30th 2015 opinion pieces discussing the Adam Goodes controversy. The Herald Sun tweeted a piece written by Andrew Bolt, a white, conservative male, which discusses his thoughts on white men, he believes, being blamed for societal issues such as racism, tweeting that the “reconciliation movement casts us as enemies in senseless Adam Goodes divide”. This tweet spreads the narrative that The Herald Sun, through twitter a platform which can be liked and retweeted, is trying to push, the narrative that Adam Goodes is “crying wolf”, a phrase used in a May 31st, 2015 tweet (figure 2), about the boos being racially motivated. The issue of Adam Goodes is discussed in The Guardian’s tweet promoting a piece written by Stan Grant an Aboriginal man. The piece highlights the systemic racism that Aboriginal people have faced after centuries of dispossession tweeting “I can tell you how Adam #Goodes feels. Every Indigenous person has felt it”. This tweet echoes the positive social media response that The Guardian has adopted with other tweets like on January 25th 2015 sharing Goodes’ sentiment that “Australia still has a way to go in eradicating racism” (figure 3).
Figure 2: The Herald Sun tweet covering the Adam Goodes controversy, May 31st, 2015
Figure 3: Guardian Australia tweet covering the Adam Goodes controversy, January 25th, 2015
Throughout the Adam Goodes booing controversy, arguments erupted both amongst the AFL community and in Australian society on whether the treatment of Adam Goodes, after speaking out about the racial vilification he received from the crowd, was racially motivated. This debate is highlighted in the coverage by The Guardian and The Herald Sun indicated in their twitter feeds from 2013 to 2020.
In the period from 2013 to 2020 The Guardian Australia tweeted a total of 95 times about the treatment of Adam Goodes with its peak in 2015 according to the graph below. The data was calculated using the advanced search option on Twitter narrowing down the feed to tweets sent from @GuardianAus with the keywords Adam Goodes, posted in the period from 2013 to 2020, that feed was then scraped by Data Miner, which collects the tweets, hashtags, and date.
Figure 4: Graph tracking the number of tweets about Goodes on @GuardianAus
Figure 5: Graph tracking the number of tweets about Goodes @theheraldsun
The peak in 2015 highlighted in both figure 4 and figure 5 above is notable and possibly due to 2015 being the year of Goodes’ retirement and a year which saw him take indefinite leave from the game due to the mental toll. The Guardian’s tweets about Adam Goodes increased to 62 that year with the tweet content overwhelmingly in support of Adam Goodes and condemning the booing with 58 out of the total 62 tweets tone in support for the boos as a racially motivated event, figure 6.
Figure 6: Collage of The Guardian’s twitter coverage sentiment in 2015
Mirroring the path of The Guardian’s twitter feed The Herald Sun also peaks in 2015 highlighted in figure 5 tweeting 54 times that year, but what is interesting though is that whilst both feeds have a slight peak in 2019 due the release of Ian Darling’s archival documentary The Final Quarter, The Herald Sun doesn’t tweet about Adam Goodes once in 2020 after the release of Stan Grant’s documentary The Australian Dream, which premiered at the Melbourne Film Festival in 2019 and released to Australian TV audiences on the 23rd of February this year, whilst The Guardian tweets three times.
When analysing the coverage of the first documentary ‘The Final Quarter’ by the two publications it is interesting to see the shift in The Herald Sun’s tone. Once a feed which pushed the narrative of a player disliked not because of the colour of his skin but because of his acts on the footy field, now turned to one of its only reporters who supported Goodes throughout the booing saga, Mark Robinson, to write a piece praising the film as addressing racism in this country. Shown below in figure 7 a tweet published July 18 2019 stating “Tonight’s Adam Goodes documentary is confronting but everyone should watch it”. Although, the positive sentiment was over within a few days after the publications twitter feed shared an opinion piece from Andrew Bolt stating that the documentary explores “commentators who are desperate to despise Australia and its people as racists” shown in figure 8. This can still be seen as a change from the feeds support of Adam Goodes’ harassment shown in figure 9, with the tweeting of an article that condemns the booing, giving their audience a balanced, brief view of opinions.
Figure 7: Herald Sun tweet July 18, 2019
Figure 8: Herald Sun Tweet July 22 2019
Figure 9: The Herald Sun twitter sentiment about the booing at its peak in 2015
The social media feeds of both The Guardian Australia and The Herald Sun seeks to fulfil the interests of their readers. As the news you see on social media is tailored to you it makes sense that the news publications would change their feeds to fit the demographics and political beliefs of their readers. The Guardian’s coverage of the Adam Goodes booing saga on their twitter feed was of overwhelming condemnation of the racially charged boos, whilst The Herald Sun, enlists the help of shock jocks, debate, and denial of racial connotations throughout the majority of their feed.
Grace O'Dea 
