Politics

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Jasmin Surm, whose interest is in recent changes to global television news. The transnational TV news landscape has changed profoundly in recent times – with more highly ideological content and more overt alignment with political agendas.

Networks have transcended traditional national boundaries and are now delivering content to global audiences; this gives audiences immediate access to global events worldwide. More recent networks such as RT or CGTN are engaged in an intense struggle for ideological supremacy, pursuing explicit public diplomacy objectives, while domestic networks like Fox News are …

The next speakers in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session are María Luengo and Teresa Gil-López, whose interest is in the BBC’s breaches of its impartiality rules. Examples for such breaches were a presenter’s criticism of PM advisor Dominic Cummings for his breaches of lockdown rules; a presenter’s glee over the news roundup; and the well-publicised case of sports presenter Gary Lineker’s criticism of the UK’s inhumane treatment of refugees.

This presentation explores the analytical distinction between regulative and constitutive news rules, and uses social network theory to explain actors’ opportunities and constraints; together, they mean that some news …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Tim Vos, whose focus is on the relationship between press and police in four liberal democracies. Journalism should usually maintain a critical distance from power, yet also have to have a transactional relationship with police in order to be able to do their work that sometimes gets rather too cozy; how are journalists now rethinking that relationship, especially in the wake of a wave of citizen-generated coverage of police violence and oppression? How does the rise in populism and animosity towards journalism affect the relationship – and how …

The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with my own presentation on behalf of our larger team, so here are the slides:

The second day at Future of Journalism 2023 conference in Cardiff begins with a pre-recorded keynote by my former QUT colleague John Hartley, and John is also standing by for the Q&A later. He begins with the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, killed by bandits in Inner Mongolia in 1935 – after whom a memorial travelling scholarship at the University of Wales is named.

Is Jones the ideal type of the fearless truth warrior in journalism, though, or a pawn in the Great Game of imperialist powers? The existence of a scholarship and the rhetoric around it suggests the …

The final speaker in this last Thursday session at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Steen Steensen, whose focus is on the impact of political fact-checking during the 2021 parliamentary election in Norway (as part of the Source Criticisms and Mediated Disinformation project, or SCAM). Fact-checking during election campaigns has emerged recently as an important practice, but there is not much impact on the reach and impact of such fact-checks – much of the research to date has focussed on the practices of fact-checkers instead.

Ordinary people are more likely to engage with and share fact-checks that are conclusive …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Carolyn Jackson-Brown, who highlights the dilemma for journalists inherent in their dual missions to inform and entertain (or, more to the point, attract clicks from news users). Her focus here is on the reporting of the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022, and she worked with journalism students on how they received news about the war – in the first place, from TikTok, Twitter, and professional journalists’ accounts.

Quickly, the students discovered that much of the early coverage by pro-Russian actors on TikTok was fake. Moving to the …