Samantha D. Stevens

This post reflects on methodological insights from my doctoral research on Canadian news media and treaty discourse. It is intended as public-facing explanation rather than argument or commentary.

As I near the end of my PhD dissertation, I’ve been asked, more than once, what exactly I’ve been doing for the past five years.

The short answer is: I’ve been reading news coverage of the same court case over and over again.

The more accurate answer is: I’ve been analyzing how journalism helps produce shared assumptions, often taken for granted, about Indigenous rights, public money, and reconciliation in Canada.

My research focuses on media coverage of Restoule v. Canada (2021), a long-running treaty annuities case involving 21 Anishinaabe First Nations and the Crown. But the central contribution of my work is not an interpretation of the case itself. It is an examination of how news media structure what becomes publicly intelligible about treaty obligations and state authority.

Through my years of study, I’ve learned that journalism doesn’t just report disputes. It organizes them.

A common assumption about journalism is that it reflects public debate. What becomes visible through close analysis, however, is that journalism also organizes debate by establishing interpretive boundaries in advance.

This happens through routine professional practices:

• whose voices are treated as authoritative
• which questions are framed as legitimate
• which concerns are foregrounded, and which are rendered peripheral

Over time, these patterns stabilize a “common sense,” even in areas where legal, political, and ethical disagreement remains unresolved.

One of the clearest patterns in this research only became visible through comparison across Indigenous, regional, and national outlets.

Indigenous media coverage of the case tended to foreground treaty relationships, continuity, and Indigenous legal authority. Regional outlets often emphasized political dynamics, local economic implications, or jurisdictional tension. National coverage, by contrast, frequently abstracted the dispute into questions of public finance, procedural timelines, and the need for “resolution.”

These differences are not simply editorial preferences. They reflect how media institutions position themselves within broader systems of governance and public legitimacy.

In other words, language does institutional work.

Words such as “settlement,” “negotiation,” “dialogue,” and “taxpayer interest” appear neutral or pragmatic. In practice, they often carry assumptions about finality, authority, and closure. When used without scrutiny, they can recast treaty obligations as administrative challenges and legal rights as fiscal pressures.

Now, this is not an argument about journalistic intent. It is an observation about how inherited narrative frameworks and institutional routines shape what counts as a reasonable or responsible story.

This matters beyond Restoule v. Canada (2021). Although the dissertation is grounded in a specific legal dispute, its implications extend beyond the case.

Understanding how news discourse operates:

• helps journalists recognize how framing choices constrain meaning
• helps policy professionals see how legitimacy is narratively constructed
• helps readers question why certain explanations feel natural or inevitable

In this sense, the work is about making visible the mechanisms through which public understanding is shaped.

As I move from drafting to revision, I’m increasingly interested in how analytic approaches from media studies and discourse analysis might be made more accessible to people working in journalism, communications, education, and public policy.

Clarifying how meaning is produced, and whose authority is reinforced in the process, is one way to support more accountable public explanation.

If this research has reinforced anything for me, it is that journalism plays a central role not only in informing publics, but in governing how political and legal issues can be understood in the first place.