Politics

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today starts with Joseph Gotte, whose focus is on the elective affinity between political and religious discourses about the ecological apocalypse. ‘Elective affinity’ here is a concept referring to the relationship between religious beliefs and social formations, lifestyle, and economic behaviours; it is the process by which two cultural forms enter into a relationship of mutual attraction and influence.

And the final speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session on populism is Christian Wassner, whose focus is on the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least also through niche, alternative, and ‘dark’ platforms. The present project examines these ‘dark communication repertoires’ as they are employed by conspiracist groups on alternative platforms. These cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but need to be understood across actor groups and platforms within a complex social media environment.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Marko Ribać, whose interest is in the impact of authoritarian-populist politics on journalism. The project focusses on Hungary and Turkey as clearly populist and autocratic regimes, compared to Austria and Slovenia as countries with more intermittently populist governments. The focus is on the past ten years of journalistic experience in each country, and conducted through interviews with some 82 newsworkers across the four countries to identify the external forces impacting on their work.

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Sabina Mihelj, focussing on populist communication about the COVID-19 pandemic, across the US, Poland, Serbia, and Brazil. Such research is critical given the real potential (and genuine experience) of populists assuming positions of political leadership (as in the US or Brazil) and actively contradicting the health advice of pandemic experts.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on how the Portuguese and Spanish populist parties Chega and Vox construct ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ in their political discourse. Vox’s rise in Spain was party driven by the Catalan independence crisis and the growing European migration crisis; Chega mainly benefitted from internal political turmoil in Portugal.

The next session at IAMCR 2023 is on populism, and starts with Karen Arriaza Ibarra, whose focus is on populist parties’ views on public service media. In general, populism has been defined by the centrality of binary distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the ‘pure’ people and the ‘corrupt’ elites. In presenting these messages, it can then also be defined by the discursive approaches and tropes its draws on.

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.