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The next session at ANZCA 2023 starts with David Nolan, who introduces the idea of ‘racial reckoning’ as both amplified by as well as directed at media; this highlights the failures of racial inequality and is being performed through the ‘diagnostic’ of digital media, which provide a space for critiques of conventional media. Such reckoning has often been addressed, in Australian, by the hiring of Indigenous journalists.

David and team approached this through a series of interviews with practicing Indigenous journalists on the Australian east coast, exploring their own experiences and positionality. This also highlights the embedded knowledge of First …

The second speaker in this ANZCA 2023 is Alysson Watson, whose focus is on the journalistic ‘death knock’: the way journalists approach families who have lost someone in newsworthy circumstances. This is obviously difficult, given the circumstances; it has moved from a literal knock on the door to the use of other technologies, including now especially also social media technologies.

How and why do Australian journalists use such digital death knocks? Alysson conducted a survey of some 100 journalists with extensive experience of death knocks, and interviewed 10 of them. The journalistic field is a microcosm with its own rules …

The next session at ANZCA 2023 is on journalism and war, and starts with Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen, whose interest is in how to visualise twentyfirst-century state and corporate power. Neglected from a visual perspective is that which is not seen – the invisible systems, structures, and processes of corporate-military power, and the indirect, systemic, or socially abstract invisible warfare in which we are immersed daily, and ineluctably participate on various levels.

Today, this happens at the nexus of global corporatisation, digital information and communication technologies, and modern, AI-driven warfare, and is aided by the global digitisation, corporatisation, datafication, and financialisation of …

The second full day at ANZCA 2023 started with my own keynote, on the not-so-slow demise of Twitter under Elon Musk. There was quite a substantial amount of material to work through, of course – here are my slides:

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Julie Browning, whose focus is on the role of campaigning media during the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. A referendum represents an unusual campaign in that it is polarised by design (the choice is a simple Yes or No), and can cut across party lines (as it did in this case, at least to some extent).

This can be both an advantage and disadvantage, as it can also lead to disorganised campaigning by multiple groups that otherwise have little in common with each other and do not …

And the next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is my colleague Samantha Vilkins, who continues our focus on the Voice to Parliament referendum by addressing especially the role of opinion polling and poll reporting in the context of the Voice referendum campaign. She begins by noting the long period of public debate about the Voice, going back at least to the election of the Albanese government in May 2022, with a much shorter formal campaign period before the referendum date of 14 October 2023.

Opinion polls provided a kind of spine for the coverage of the Voice debate throughout …

OK, so I skipped the previous session as I got talking about current research projects with a number of colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, but I’m back for the final session this afternoon, on the recent Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, where my colleague Sam Vilkins and I are presenting our own papers. I’m the first presenter in the session, so here are my slides:

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Howard Lee, whose focus is on truth in Singapore’s online mediascape. He begins by highlighting the independent media outlet The Online Citizen Asia and the current affairs magazine Jom, who have had various run-ins with the Lee family who have been in control of Singaporean politics for several years.

One example is the saga over former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s house, which was destined for demolition but was saved by one of his sons, who became the current Prime Minister; this resulted in an unusual spat between the siblings …

The next speakers in this ANZCA 2023 session are Carlotta Antonelli and Mauro Bomba, whose interest is in the dynamics of the political discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic in the main talkshows on Italian TV, with particular focus on the positioning of women with political roles in such discourse. In such contexts, media serve in a function as representatives of public views and responses to the issues they themselves cover.

The present study took a mixed-methods approach, analysing the content of seven daytime talkshows from seven Italian TV stations. Women represented only about one quarter of the nearly 150 political …

The first session after the keynote at ANZCA 2023 is on media, truth, and democracy, and starts with John Budarick. He begins by highlighting the considerable challenges to liberal media and democracies, from a range of interconnected crises; but from a different perspective journalism is constantly in crisis as it deals with the changing environments within which it operates.

Democracy itself is founded on a set of abstract positions that privilege the rational and ignore structural inequalities and power relations in society, and democracy’s ills are often attributed to bad-faith actors and the rise of illiberalism – but we might …