Brittany Higgins' story or the Brittany Higgins story? Journalism, politics and narrative rhetoric

Abstract

This article investigates the high-profile, years-long, media coverage of former federal government staffer, Brittany Higgins, in the wake of a 2021 television interview in which she recounted her experience of sexual assault in Parliament House. Higgins' story can foremost be understood as an example of the ‘speaking out’ genre of feminist politics, but it must also be approached in terms of the journalistic genre of the news story that mediated it. Employing the Factiva database to track two key phrases – ‘share your story’ and ‘control the narrative’ – in ongoing coverage, the article analyses how these phrases operated as metajournalistic narrative rhetoric in an intramedial struggle for moral and epistemic authority between Australian news organisations. In doing so, the article draws upon socio-linguistic research into ‘small stories’ to redefine breaking news as a recursive narrative phenomenon involving multiple tellers and iterations across platforms.