Government

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Benedetta Brevini, reflecting on the Australian experience with its News Media Bargaining Code. This was prompted by the crisis of journalism (and journalism funding) in the country, producing news deserts especially at local levels outside the largest cities. Some 5,000 news jobs were lost over the past two decades.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is María Soledad Segura, whose focus is on the elite capture of communication policies in Latin America. Such capture has a very long history in Latin America: policy-making processes are unequal and worsen the asymmetries in public communication. But in the past decades there has been greater focus on reform, creating participatory institutions for the development of new communication policies; the present paper explores their operation in Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay.

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2023 session are Mandy Tröger and Hendrik Theine, who continue to address those concerns about media environment capture. They begin by noting that most of the debates here are limited to national or regional contexts, and influenced by the specific and idiosyncratic settings found there, without taking a more general, overall perspective informed by theory. Such a perspective can build on the concept of media capture by developing it into the idea of media environment capture, in particular.

The third full day at IAMCR 2023 starts with a panel on the political economy of Big Tech platform funding. We start with Natalie Fenton, whose focus is on the demise of local journalism in the UK, and the work of the Media Reform Coalition there. Local journalism in the UK has declined over time, with cutbacks and newsroom consolidation as part of the move to digital, while of course retaining news organisations’ profit margins.

Next up at IAMCR 2023 are Aleix Martí and Roger Cuartielles, whose focus is on the circulation of information in Spain during the COVID-19 crisis. Legacy media as well as social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram played key roles in this infodemic. Social media in particular played a disintermediating role, enabling the further spread of mis- and disinformation.

Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The slides alone may not do it justice, but there’s a huge amount of work behind this analysis of a broad range of affective signalling by lead election candidates in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Perú, and the patterns that are emerging from this are fascinating. Still more work to do in analysing and processing this, but expect more insights from this research at a conference near you soon…

Sebastian Svegaard, Tariq Choucair, Kate O'Connor Farfan, and Axel Bruns. “Affective Polarisation in Political Leaders' Discourses: A Comparison between Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Perú.” Paper presented at the ICA 2023 preconference Comparative Digital Political Communication: Comparisons across Countries, Platforms, and Time, Toronto, 25 May 2023.

As the year and my Guest Professorship here at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich are coming to an end, here are a handful of final updates hot of the presses.

First, I’m very happy to say that at article about the Russian propaganda organ RT’s audiences on Facebook has just been published in Information, Communication & Society. This was a difficult piece of research not least because it involved coding data in six languages, but I’m delighted to say that we managed to find native speakers of all those languages (Russian, English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and German) in-house at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. My sincere thanks especially to my excellent colleague Sofya Glazunova for leading this project.

Sofya Glazunova, Axel Bruns, Edward Hurcombe, Sílvia X. Montaña-Niño, Souleymane Coulibaly, and Abdul K. Obeid. “Soft Power, Sharp Power? Exploring RT’s Dual Role in Russia’s Diplomatic Toolkit.” Information, Communication & Society, 21 Dec. 2022. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2155485.

Just a few days earlier, a new article about the social media amplification of articles in The Conversation that referred to preprint content relating to the COVID-19 pandemic also came out, in Media International Australia. But I have to stress that I only had limited involvement with this work – most of the heavy lifting was done by DMRC Visiting Scholar Alice Fleerackers (usually of Simon Fraser University) and my DMRC colleague Michelle Riedlinger.

Alice Fleerackers, Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess. “Academic Explanatory Journalism and Emerging COVID-19 Science: How Social Media Accounts Amplify The Conversation’s Preprint Coverage.” Media International Australia, 19 Dec. 2022. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221145022.

A few months ago my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals and I also published a new article in Media and Communication that explores how journalists have perceived and reacted to the challenge of ‘fake news’. This was based on Aljosha’s extensive interviews with newsworkers in Australia, the UK, and Germany, and provides some fascinating insights into the journalistic mindset in relation to this critical challenge.