Polarisation

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference has a strong focus on Indigenous Australians and the Voice to Parliament referendum, and starts with a paper by Lisa Waller, focussing on future visions for the post-referendum era. This explores in particular the speeches made on the night that the referendum results were announced: government speakers presented a limited agenda related to socioeconomic equality, while opposition speakers articulated a reactionary neo-assimilationist vision.

These speeches can be understood from a perspective of critical discourse analysis; these speeches occur in the context of mediatisation, as major televised statements immediately after the referendum results …

The next presentation in this AANZCA 2024 conference session was mine, introducing our new practice mapping approach. Here are the slides:

Up next in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Catherine Son, whose focus is also on the agenda of News Corporation in its coverage of the 2023 referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Such coverage also exerts influence on other media, of course, through an intermedia agenda-setting process. The present project examined content from a number of NewsCorp publications on the Voice, and the focus in this presentation is especially on coverage in week 9 of the campaign, when claims were made that prominent Yes campaigner Marcia Langton called No supporters ‘racist’ and ‘stupid’.

NewsCorp immediately reporting positioned such …

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Victoria Fielding, whose new book Media Inequality addresses the structural power inequalities experienced by marginalised groups in society as they are covered in the news. She notes that western democracies largely hold a liberal pluralist view of the news, where news frames compete in a marketplace of ideas and gradually trickle down to the public; this is too simplistic, however.

Instead, this contest of frames is affected by the master narratives that are seen as legitimate by the journalists covering public debates; such perspectives are also affected by the editorial …

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is my great QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard, whose focus is on the Australian far-right news channel Sky News Australia, which he characterises here as a populist media channel. Populism is a current buzzword, but is also widely understood as a thin-centred ideology that can attach itself to various political values; it centrally pits ‘the people’ against ‘the elites’, but the term is perhaps most often used – problematically – to specifically describe ‘far-right’ populism.

Media have an ambiguous role in relation to populism: media are themselves criticised for being part …

And the final speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on coding Italian news data using Large Language Models. This worked with some 85,000 news articles shared on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections, and first classified such URLs as political or non-political; it then produced and clustered text embeddings for these articles, and used GPT-4-turbo to classify the dominant topics in these clusters.

This required considerable prompt crafting, especially also to ensure that prompts remained within the LLM’s token limits. Key challenges here included the choice of LLM …