In addition to the conference presentations I covered in my last post, the last few months have also seen a number of new publications from my team and me – including no less than three new articles in the great Media International Australia journal.
Just days from the end of the year, my colleagues Simon Copland, Tim Graham, and I finally published our analysis of the domestic and international audiences of Australian right-wing news channel Sky News Australia (no relation to Sky News in the UK and elsewhere) on Facebook during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the US presidential race in 2020 and early 2021:
Simon Copland, Axel Bruns, and Timothy Graham. “Sky News Australia as Network Propaganda: How a Niche Cable Channel Became an International Right-Wing Propaganda Machine.” Media International Australia (2025). DOI: 10.1177/1329878X251406899.
This builds on our conference paper from AoIR 2021 (slides here), and documents the curious mix of audiences that Sky News Australia addresses via its video content as it is shared on Facebook. Audiences range from a smaller but committed Australian following to a much larger but less regular US and international audience, connected by a shared interest in 'alternative news' and conspiracy theories. We're glad for this to finally be out in the form of a journal article.
Sky News and other Australian media also feature prominently in another new article, in the Media International Australia special issue collecting research presented at the AANZCA 2024 conference:
Katharina Esau, Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, Samantha Vilkins, Laura Vodden, and Thet Zin Myint. “Division, Not Reconciliation: Mapping News Media Polarisation during Australia’s Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum.” Media International Australia 197 (2025): 7-34. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X251380961.
Here, we build on an extensive manual coding of Australian news content related to the Voice to Parliament referendum in October 2023, an effort which was led by my colleague Katharina Esau (AANZCA 2024 slides here); having identified the various ways in which Australian news media presented issues related to the referendum, we applied a modified practice mapping approach to the analysis of these patterns, in order to identify diverging coverage approaches and practices that might point to polarised divisions within the Australian media landscape.
Media polarisation was also central our third article in Media International Australia, also led by Katharina Esau. Here, we took a mixed-methods approach including computational text analysis to articles about mainstream and fringe climate change protest groups in Australia and Germany, exploring how they were covered differently in both countries:
Katharina Esau, Hendrik Meyer, Mike Farjam, Axel Bruns, Helena Rauxloh, and Michael Brüggemann. “Polarised Media Framing of Climate Movements: A Comparative Mixed-Methods Analysis of Australia and Germany.” Media International Australia (2025). DOI: 10.1177/1329878X2513775.
The results from this work (which was first presented at ICA 2024) show that, regardless of their own ideological leanings, news media in both countries treat these groups quite differently in their coverage, but also that there are notable differences between Australian and German news media in their specific approaches.
And in addition to these journal articles, we also have two entries in the new Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication, edited by Alessandro Nai, Max Grömping, and Dominique Wirz. In my solo contribution, I revisited the concept of gatewatching:
Axel Bruns. “Gatewatching.” In Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication (Vol. 2), eds. Alessandro Nai, Max Grömping, and Dominique Wirz. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025. 87–91. DOI: 10.4337/9781035301447.vol2.00024.
And in an entry co-authored with Katharina Esau, we explored the topic of networked public spheres:
Katharina Esau and Axel Bruns. “Networked Public Spheres.” In Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication (Vol. 3), eds. Alessandro Nai, Max Grömping, and Dominique Wirz. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025. 46–50. DOI: 10.4337/9781035301447.vol3.00015.
And finally, I also have an article on information overload and destructive polarisation in a new Italian-language collection edited by the great Giovanni Boccia Artieri. I'll say more about this when this comes out in English, but for now, here's a reference for the Italian text:
Axel Bruns. “Spiegazioni Semplici in un Mondo Complesso: Dall’Iperconnettività alla Polarizzazione Distruttiva.” In Democrazie ai Margini: Disinformazione e Manipolazione dell’Opinione Pubblica nell’Era Digitale, ed. Giovanni Boccia Artieri. Milano: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2025. 257–272.
Meanwhile, there are a number of further articles in the works at the moment; I'll post further updates about those when they're out!
