Blog

The post-lunch session at ANZCA 2017 starts with a paper by Penny O'Donnell, on the continuing transformation of journalism. She suggests that journalism unions still play an important role in promoting occupational cohesion and jurisdictional control over what is journalism, even in spite of the substantial changes to journalistic practices.

Penny's study builds on the New Beats study, which examined newly redundant Australian journalists. Some 3,000 journalism jobs, or a third of the total workforce, have been lost within five years; often this has been facilitated through voluntary redundancies, partly as a result of negotiations between employers and the key …

The third paper in this ANZCA 2017 session is by Stephen Harrington, Tim Highfield, and me, and I'm including our presentation slides below. We explore the #milkeddry campaign initiated by Australian news entertainment TV show The Project.

The Project, which has been running on Network Ten since 2009, combines panel discussion on current news and entertainment matters with celebrity interviews and comedy; it is influenced in part by overseas formats addressing a young adult audience, like The Daily Show, but also clearly distinct …

The second speakers in this ANZCA 2017 session are Andrea Carson and Luke Heemsbergen, who continue our discussion of connective political action from an international perspective. This presentation emerges from the work of the Political Organisations and Participation group in the Australian Political Studies Association (APSA). There is an overall perspective of a move away from traditional modes of engagement to a more flexible, citizen-initiated and policy-oriented engagement with politics. This has also changed practices of organisation and mobilisation to political action.

One dimension of this is also the use of particular platforms for activism; these are often corporate-controlled, or …

The first paper session at ANZCA 2017 begins with Jenna Price, who asks what winning looks like in the conduct of activist campaigns through social media; she focusses here especially on her own Destroy the Joint campaign. This was created in August 2012 and campaigns on violence against women and related issues, and was sparked by radio announcer Alan Jones's persistent, deeply misogynistic attacks on then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the time; it has since amassed a considerable follower base on Facebook and Twitter.

This may be seen as an example of connective action, as described by Bennett and …

The second ANZCA 2017 keynote this morning is by Silvio Waisbord, who shifts our focus to the recent resurgence of populist politics around the world. We must study such populism beyond electoral results, however, reviewing broader structural trends in public communication, connecting to other structures and events, and identifying built-in trends that are conducive to the communicative politics that populism represents. What questions, then, should we ask about populism, communication, and the media?

Approaches to this include research into media effects; studies of specific types of news content; investigations of the features of populist discourse; retracings of media (industry) developments …

The second day of ANZCA 2017 starts with a keynote by Paula Gardner, whose focus here is on the ethical quandaries of the present day; these are exacerbated by the corporate and international dimensions of current problems. Paula is addressing this especially from the perspective of the International Communication Association, which has embarked on a course of greater internationalisation and decentralisation away from its traditional roots in the United States.

One of the key international problems at present is the massive flows of migrants across the boundaries of nation states, driven themselves by increasing gaps between the rich and the …

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2017 session is Scott Wright, who presents the framework for a new study on 'fake news'. He begins by asking whether there is a 'fake news' problem in Australia: the country is highly politically polarised, with decreasing satisfaction in the conventional party system; online news plays a crucial role in how citizens inform themselves; and the mainstream media system is highly concentrated. In this environment, is there still a functioning marketplace of ideas?

It is necessary, then, to study the nature, virality, and impact of 'fake news', but also the media coverage of such …

Up next at ANZCA 2017 is Sarah Baker, who again reminds us that the bending of the truth that 'fake news' alludes to is hardly new. Political propaganda has been used throughout the ages to mobilise the masses in favour of particular courses of action, but those masses have also become more adept at spotting such false stories. The latest tide of 'fake news' is again political, but also deeply connected with economic motives.

Recent developments are further complicated by the specific structures and affordances of social media, as the latest techno-social spaces for the dissemination of 'fake news'. Further …

The next presenters at ANZCA 2017 are David Nolan and Jennifer Beckett, who begin by highlighting the great moral panic about 'filter bubbles', supposedly caused by the fragmentation of media audiences. This perspective is not new, however: the dissolution of 'the' public sphere into public sphericules has been discussed since the 1990s, and this has also been seen as giving rise to new interest groups representing disadvantaged communities – so this diversification is not necessarily a negative trend.

Yet the increasing market orientation of the news industry has also meant an increasingly narrow focus of individual news outlets on particular …

The final session at ANZCA 2017 is on 'fake news' and opens with a paper by with Margaret van Heekeren, who begins by highlighting the long history of false news through the ages, as well as of legislative attempts to curtail 'fake news' and mitigate its impacts. At the same time, since the late 1800s news publishers have also actively opposed such laws, regarding them as an inappropriate restriction of their ability to report the news.

Cases of 'fake news' through the ages have also been associated with new communication technologies, including newspapers and the telegraph; such 'fake news' stories …