Dissecting Populism in Sky News Australia’s News Coverage

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 of the elite, but hyperpartisan news media also promote some of these critiques, and in doing so also further polarisation in society. Such populist critiques represent a politics of ‘against’, and are often highly emotive and affective. Meanwhile, populist and popular should not be confused: being popular is not inherently bad.

Sky News Australia, then, is a major exponent of such populist media. It is a very strange construct: it has a huge presence in the Australian media and political landscape, but has only a tiny audience on cable TV; its audience here skews heavily towards the (far) right. Most audiences encounter its content through YouTube and social media, however; TV segments are packaged in small, short videos that flood these platforms, both through the central Sky News Australia channel and through channels for its major shows and presenters. Such videos include both relatively straightforward news reports and far more opinionated and tendentious commentary by its anchors.

This study focussed on Sky News reporting on climate change, gendered violence, and the Voice to Parliament referendum, exploring the combination of audio, visuals, and texts in these videos. In climate change reporting, it found a strong anti-elite discourse, science scepticism, and a mocking and outraged tone, but also some less loaded straight news reporting; on gendered violence, there is considerable emotion, but an absence of mocking in the reporting, and experts representing NGOs are valued by the predominantly female news anchors, while the language in the opinion shows is much sharper and takes a culture-war approach that attacks feminism and the supposedly ‘woke’ agenda; on the Voice to Parliament, such culture-war discourses are furthest to the front, with strong anti-‘woke’, classist, and conspiracist rhetoric, outright glee at the prospect of the referendum’s failure, sharp and unflattering soundbites presenting the Prime Minister’s contributions, and a visual presentation that presented white hosts and Indigenous ‘no’ campaigners on a very large desk.

Further work from this will now also explore the use of computational methods to extend this analysis and extend it to other contexts and channels.