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The final AANZCA 2024 conference session for today is one I’m also presenting in, but we start with a paper Terry Flew and Cameron McTernan. Terry starts by noting that Australia has long had one of the most concentrated media systems in the world. The Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMICP) is a new initiative to further explore such concentration patterns here and abroad, and trace their dynamics over time. This ultimately examines the network media economy, including telecommunication and Internet infrastructure, online and traditional media services, and core Internet applications and sectors.

This integrated approach better reflects the …

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 …

The first speaker in the post-lunch session at AANZCA 2024 conference is Ian Anderson, who is interested in the emergence of socialist counterpublics in the present context. Such counterpublics are in a conflicted space: they are fundamentally sceptical about social media (and especially Twitter, even pre-Musk) but also acknowledge social media’s importance for message amplification and community connection; for this reason they combine social media work with more conventional activist practices, such as doorknocking.

Social media thus serve as a kind of unavoidable frame for politics, whether they are fetishised as a utopian communicative space or not. The Victorian Socialists …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in the sharing of Australian news on Facebook, especially by politicians. This can be understood through the lens of agenda-setting theory: news media content plays a crucial role in shaping what public issues audiences learn about, and politicians’ sharing of news media content seeks to channel and affect these processes. (There are also questions about the extent of such agenda-setting power.)

Cameron’s work focusses on Facebook, which remains a major and influential social media platform in Australia, with the vast majority of federal politicians active …

Up next in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Agata Stepnik, whose interest is in stakeholder perspectives on the sustainability of commercial and publicly-funded news production in Australia. Her project is engaging in interviews with stakeholder groups – publishers, policy-makers, journalists, advertisers, and platform operators – and explores how they have conceptualised news media’s digital transformation since the emergence of Web publishing in the 1990s, and what futures for news production they envisage.

Across all these interviews there was a strong recognition of the social and institutional value of news to democracy; however, news was also strongly positioned as a …

The first paper session I’m attending at the AANZCA 2024 conference is a panel on democracy in crisis, and starts with my QUT colleague Stephen Harrington. His focus is on ‘dark political communication’, as a way of moving past the overemphasis on mis- and disinformation and recognising that such practices are just one part of a much broader range of communicative dysfunctions in contemporary political systems.

This then also incorporates a greater focus on recent changes in political PR: political PR has been a growing focus in the study of politics in recent decades, with attention paid to its arrangements …

It’s late in November, and I’m at my penultimate conference for the year: we’re about to begin the AANZCA 2024 conference with a remote keynote by the great Pablo Boczkowski. He starts by sharing two selfies: one, entering the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which nominated the Harris/Walz presidential ticket; that event addressed several internal and external publics, including journalists, influencers, delegates, voters, and the general public. It was characterised by an atmosphere of expectation and enthusiasm, choreographed to lead up to the actual nomination itself.

The second selfie is from fieldwork in Buenos Aires, which has the highest concentration of …

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 …