AoIR 2021

From Cable Niche to Social Media Success: International Engagement with Sky News Australia’s Brand of ‘News’

Simon Copland, Tim Graham, and Axel Bruns

• 12-16 Oct. 2021 – long version of a paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, online
• presented as part of a panel on “'Fake News' and Other Problematic Information: Studying Dissemination and Discourse Patterns”

Video of the Presentation

Presentation Slides

Paper Abstract

The Strange Case of Sky News Australia

The Australian cable news channel Sky News Australia has charted an unusual trajectory in recent years. Operated by controversial conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and broadcast on its Australian pay-TV network Foxtel, the channel has long been regarded as comparatively unsuccessful: even in the context of the already limited audience footprint of Foxtel itself, it has struggled to attract a regular viewer base of significant size, and was ridiculed at times for being watched mainly in Qantas airport lounges (where it is the default news station by contractual arrangement) and ministerial offices (where it is seen as a reflection of Murdoch’s own political views; J. Wilson, 2020b).

Such popular disinterest has persisted even despite – ­or possibly because of – the channel’s bifurcated content strategy, presenting as an ordinary news channel during daytime hours and transitioning to an opinion-dominated format featuring a selection of well-known conservative commentators in the evenings. Described by its detractors as “Sky News after Dark” (Dixon, 2020), the latter has been shown to be heavily skewed towards viewpoints that favour the conservative Liberal and National parties in the current Australian government over their Labor and Greens opposition (Stapleton, 2019). Sky News after Dark also hosts a range of right-wing conspiracy theories, including content questioning the origins of the coronavirus, challenging the legitimacy of the 2020 US Presidential Election, and arguing that organisations such as the UN and World Economic Forum are engaged in a secret global government agenda called “the Great Reset” (Davies, 2021).

Yet this content strategy has largely failed to attract additional viewers to the Sky News Australia channel: one week into his tenure as the latest anchor in the evening line-up, for example, veteran talk radio host Alan Jones managed to attract fewer than 60,000 pay-TV viewers to his show. This compares poorly, for instance, with an audience of more than ten times that number for the daily free-to-air current affairs programme 7.30 on the national public broadcaster ABC, or the more than one million viewers tuning in to each of the major commercial channels’ nightly news bulletins (Dyer, 2020). Other members of the After Dark line-up – often similarly arch-conservative radio hosts, opinion columnists, and former politicians and advisors – have tended to attract audiences only at levels similar to that for Jones’s show.

But such unimpressive pay-TV audience ratings, which Sky claims to have improved substantially during Australian COVID-19 lock-downs in 2020 (Cheik-Hussein, 2020), obscure a considerably more significant development elsewhere: Sky News Australia’s content is shared and consumed increasingly widely in digital form, via social media. As of April 2021, its YouTube channel had 1.42 million subscribers, and its videos had been viewed more than 856 million times, well ahead of the 1.32 million subscribers and 525 million views attracted by leading Australian public broadcaster ABC News. Engagement with its Facebook content exceeds that with the content posted by other Australian news providers (C. Wilson, 2020). Conspiracy theory content often receives the greatest viewership on the platform (Davies, 2021).

A Digital Strategy with Global Ambitions

This outsized level of attention and engagement results from a digital content strategy whose ambitions extend well beyond Australia: inspired perhaps by the success of another News Corporation property, Fox News (Muller, 2021), Sky News Australia has pivoted strongly to publishing content – often featuring its ‘After Dark’ hosts – that speaks not only to conservative and right-wing audiences in Australia, but also addresses their fellow travellers at an international level. In doing so, it is increasingly also seen to be endorsing conspiracy theories and other mis- and disinformation embraced by the US and international far right (J. Wilson, 2020b). Perhaps to further bolster this international appeal, controversial ‘alt-right’ influencer Lauren Southern has now also been added as a regular Sky News on-air contributor (J. Wilson, 2020a).

With Sky News Australia thus increasingly positioning itself as a digital influence operation with global interests – resembling to some extent a commercial mirror image of the state-owned Russian news channel RT (formerly Russia Today) – this paper investigates the global reach of its digital content. To do so, we draw on a novel combination of advanced digital research methods. First, using the Digital Methods Initiative’s YouTube Data Tools (Rieder, 2015), we identified the 20,000 Sky News Australia videos posted on YouTube in 2020, and we intend to continue collecting all further YouTube videos posted to mid-2021.

Second, in order to better assess the range and diversity of audiences attracted by and engaging with that content, we are systematically querying the social media data access platform CrowdTangle for any Facebook posts that include links to these YouTube videos. For ethical and privacy reasons, CrowdTangle only provides such data for public pages, public groups, and public verified profiles on the platform, and we are thus unable to assess the further circulation of these videos in closed groups or between non-public user profiles, yet this limited insight into the public circulation of Sky News Australia videos on Facebook is nonetheless sufficient for developing a valuable perspective on the thematic interests, ideological positioning, and geographic location of the pages, groups, and verified profiles that share Sky News Australia video content, and for identifying patterns in the specific content they choose to share.

Early Results and Further Steps

Preliminary analysis of Crowdtangle data for a subset of the list of 20,000 YouTube videos posted in 2020 already highlights a number of key patterns, and demonstrates the utility of our approach. Using a random sample of 20% of the videos, fig. 1 depicts a hybrid network between Facebook pages (in blue) and groups (in green), and the videos they have shared (in red); it reveals several overlapping interest groups engaging with Sky News Australia content. On the right, two widely shared videos promote conspiracy theories about President Biden and his son Hunter (one of them claims to present an exclusive report about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and is shown to be the most widely shared video in this dataset by the large halo of pages and groups surrounding it); other somewhat less widely shared videos in this region of the graph similarly provide critical coverage of Biden’s campaign and administration. Towards the centre, several key videos criticise the World Health Organisation for its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, promote hydroxychloroquine as a possible remedy, and link the pandemic with conspiracy theories about the ‘Great Reset’.

Fig. 1: Hybrid network between Sky News Australia videos (red) and the Facebook pages (blue) and groups (green) that share them, for 20% of the total list of YouTube videos.

On the left, a selection of considerably less popular videos address more domestic Australian themes, including government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and Australia’s increasingly testy relationship with China. Here, too, the balance between pages and videos changes: while elsewhere individual videos are shared by large numbers of pages and groups (shown as a single red video node surrounded by a multitude blue page and green group nodes), in this part of the network a small set of public groups (including the far-right ‘Wake Up Australia’) have shared a substantial number of videos (shown as multiple red video nodes surrounding a single green group node). This suggests a committed but narrow audience for Sky News Australia videos in the Australian Facebook community, while there is broader but potentially more casual sharing of its content at an international level.

For the full paper, we will extend this analysis to our entire dataset of Sky News Australia videos, and conduct a comprehensive analysis of the clusters in this content sharing network to determine the key attributes – such as shared thematic interests, political positioning, or geographic location – that define them. This will build on a mixed-methods computational and manual analysis of page and group descriptions as well as of the textual content of the posts in which Sky News Australia videos are shared. Further, we will also extrapolate the likely reach of these videos beyond the pages and groups that have initially shared them, by taking into account available data on the Facebook reactions, comments, and shares received by each post sharing a video.

In combination, this analysis develops a substantially more comprehensive picture of the social media footprint of Sky News Australia, offering significant new insights about its role in disseminating heavily ideologically coloured and potentially problematic information.

Acknowledgment

YouTube data collected via the Digital Methods Initiative YouTube Data Tools. Facebook data from CrowdTangle, a public insights tool owned and operated by Facebook.

References

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Cheik-Hussein, M. (2020). Sky News Posts Record Audience Growth during Pandemic. Ad News, 6 July 2020. https://www.adnews.com.au/news/sky-news-posts-record-audience-growth-during-pandemic

Davies, A. (2021). Sky News Australia Is Tapping into the Global Conspiracy Set – and It’s Paying Off. The Guardian, 24 Feb. 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/24/sky-news-australia-is-tapping-into-the-global-conspiracy-set-and-its-paying-off

Dixon, D. (2020). It's Happening Here: The Perils of Sky News After Dark.” The Canberra Times, 16 Nov. 2020. https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7013000/its-happening-here-the-perils-of-sky-news-after-dark/

Dyer, G. (2020). Let’s See Alan Jones Talk His Way Out of His Falling Sky Ratings. Crikey, 10 July 2020. https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/07/10/tv-ratings-alan-jones-sky-news/

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Rieder, B. (2015). YouTube Data Tools. Version 1.22. https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/

Stapleton, J. (2019). Dark Side of Sky at Night: Analysis of Murdoch TV Network Reveals Extent of Anti-Labor Comments. The New Daily, 14 May 2019. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/election-2019/2019/05/14/andrew-bolt-sky-news-labor/

Wilson, C. (2020). ‘In Digital, the Right-Wing Material is 24/7’: How Sky News Quietly Became Australia’s Biggest News Channel on Social Media. Business Insider, 6 Nov. 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/sky-news-australia-biggest-social-media-channel-culture-wars-2020-11

Wilson, J. (2020a). Lauren Southern Is on the Comeback Trail, and Australian Conservatives Are All Too Happy to Help. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/10/lauren-southern-is-on-the-comeback-trail-and-australian-conservatives-are-all-too-happy-to-help

Wilson, J. (2020b). Sky News Australia Is Increasingly Pushing Conspiracy Theories to a Global Audience Online. The Guardian, 21 Dec. 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/21/sky-news-australia-is-increasingly-pushing-conspiracy-theories-to-a-global-audience-online