Last September Guardian Australia published a news story on the report by the former Northern Territory children’s commissioner Howard Bath into events at the Don Dale juvenile detention centre in August 2014.

It referred to many of the details that have become all too familiar in the wake of Monday’s Four Corners program that led to Malcolm Turnbull instantly announcing a royal commission to investigate – the teargassing, the spit hoods, the restraints, the solitary confinement, the dogs, the 14-year-old transferred to an adult jail, the quotes about pulverising “the little fucker” and “I don’t mind how much chemical you use”.

As one measure of reader interest, that story attracted 35 comments. For comparison, one story published this week, a relatively minor report on the federal election counting in the seat of Herbert, received 1,223.

A month later, Darwin correspondent Helen Davidson followed up with a wider investigation into the crisis in the Territory’s juvenile justice system (83 comments).

It is impossible not to be struck by the huge impact of the ABC program compared with the merest ripples of that earlier reporting by many media organisations, using essentially the same material. One reason, of course, is the power of the images. Once they were out, we could no longer hide behind the failure of our imaginations to grasp – or perhaps the subconscious wish not to really know – what is meant in practice by words such as “restraint”.



Keeping such images out of the public view has inhibited wider awareness of other cases, such as the death of Ms Dhu in Western Australia.



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But the obvious difference the footage made should not allow anyone in the news industry to give themselves a free pass on the failure to bring the Don Dale story to wider attention earlier. Territory and federal politicians have been rightly criticised for their refusal to act on the many institutional and media reports detailing the abuses. But there is something else at work here too.

News, by definition, is when something happens that is unexpected or out of all normal proportions.

What counts as unexpected depends in part on where it occurred and who it involves. A suicide bombing in Baghdad or Kabul is a smaller news story for the western media than one in Paris or Munich, even if many more people are killed in the former. It also depends on context – an incident at a police station in Sydney is a bigger story if it plays into a narrative such as Islamic terrorism than if it does not.

So far, so obvious. But those judgments are not scientific – they are subject to all the ingrained habits and prejudices of humans, even when made with the best of intentions. The danger for editors, reporters and others involved in making decisions about newsworthiness is to adopt a blanket reaction to a certain type of story, one that involves a certain group of people or a certain geographical area. It’s the default, jaded response that, well, that’s just the kind of thing that happens there.

There’s been an overnight shooting in western Sydney? Tell me something new. A priest has been accused of child sexual abuse? No, really?

Part of the failure to blow the Territory detention story open earlier should be sheeted home to this kind of thinking (from which obviously I do not exclude myself). News organisations in metropolitan Australia typically treat the Territory as a source of fun stories about crocs, alcohol and generally eccentric behaviour – a pattern that takes the jokey front page style and social media persona of the NT News as the true reflection, rather than its often excellent reporting on serious social matters.

It’s a long way geographically, but more importantly psychologically, from the main centres of media production. And of course this applies tenfold to stories involving the Indigenous population.

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So when we read in black and white last year that teenagers had been teargassed, “restrained”, stripped and beaten at Don Dale, it is hard not to conclude there was more than an element of fatigue in decisions about how or whether to pursue it further – a subconscious view that it’s all too hard, all too far away, and yet all too familiar.

The juvenile prison population of the Territory is 96% Indigenous. The Territory’s imprisonment rate is more than four times that of the rest of the country. Indigenous children are routinely abused by those in authority. Well, that’s just the kind of thing that happens there, and to them. It’s hardly news.

It’s to the immense credit of Four Corners that it succeeded in showing us that it is news – huge, international, BBC bulletin-leading news. The challenge for the rest of us is to resist our news instincts that let the story lie dormant for so long, and find more compelling ways to put the truth in front of the public.