Conservative Advocacy Journalism and Its Challenges to Liberal Media Frameworks

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 directions of different media organisations, some of which also have the power to set coverage agendas for secondary media outlets. This represents a two-step process of frame adoption and frame replication, and lends power to some groups in society while denying it to others; the liberal model of news media is no longer working effectively (and perhaps it never was).

Where this is exercised in practice, it often results in what Victoria calls conservative advocacy journalism: conservative media outlets use their power to squash voices that challenge that power. This was the case for instance in News Corporation’s coverage of the Voice to Parliament referendum campaign – coverage which engaged in amplifying the No campaign, attacking Yes advocates, excluding and de-emphasising Yes arguments, melding commentary with reportage, mobilising the audience against the referendum, creating new No campaign content, and delegitimising other media. Such practices are present in many other contexts beyond the Voice referendum, too.