NewsCorp’s Agenda-Building Efforts in the Voice to Parliament Referendum (and Beyond)

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 comments as a problem for the Yes campaign. The amount of attention that NewsCorp outlets devoted to this issue then also produced substantial further coverage in other outlets, which often adopted the NewsCorp-driven framing wholesale in their own reporting. This then was also likely to have some influence on broader public opinion. Langton was the second most mentioned person in NewsCorp’s Voice coverage that week, only falling behind the Prime Minister, and this was also used to present Yes campaigners as mean and judgmental.

This can be seen in the first place as a process of deliberate agenda-building (as opposed to mere agenda-setting, which is a great deal more passive): it actively selects perspectives and coverage approaches which promote a specific policy position, and thereby becomes part of the campaigning it ostensibly seeks to cover. This, in turn, then also affects coverage in other media, and therefore also contributes to intermedia agenda- setting.

Media coverage is thus both an input into and an output from the political system, creating a political agenda-setting (or agendas-building?) feedback loop that connects and cycles through media, political, and public agendas and can also reverse direction. Media outlets that engage in such agenda-setting and -building – like the NewsCorp outlets involved here – can be understood as engaging in conservative advocacy journalism, and break conventional liberal models of journalism.