Politics

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.

Populist divides between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, and promotes the rule of charismatic, usually male, leaders; it promotes illiberalism, not least also through the skilful use of social media; and this produces populist challenges to expert authority that can fall on fertile grounds …

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 present paper examined the Facebook posts from both parties in January to March 2023, drawing on some 240-280 posts from each party. For Vox, these featured (in order of importance) anti-minority (including migrants as well as women …

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. Embedded into this is also a powerful sense of grievance and nostalgia, harking after a lost golden age that was lost and can be restored again by strengthening certain social in-group …

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 NMBC was an attempt to address this through policy intervention, and in line with other moves towards rebalancing bargaining powers between Big Tech and news organisations – for instance also at the EU level. The NMBC was introduced in late …

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. But did such efforts have any real impact on policy-making processes?

Such participation is as important as plurality and diversity …

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.

Media capture itself has been used by political economists to describe capture by either governments exercising …

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.

But there has also been a public response to this that has agitated for better support for local journalism, and the UK government and parliamentary …

And the last speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is my colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting one of the research projects within my Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are his slides:

This project examined the Brazilian and Danish elections of 2022, with particular focus on the leading contenders in each election: Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, and Ellemann-Jensen and Frederiksen in Denmark. We collected the Facebook posts by these leaders, using CrowdTangle, and engaged in a manual coding (by a Brazilian and a Dane) of these posts …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Pablo Ortellado, whose interest is in the segregation of Brazilian political communities on social media during the Bolsonaro presidency. The network analysis literature offers two major approaches to measure this, focussing either on both the separation and internal cohesion of clusters, or solely the separation of clusters, and the former seems to align more with definitions of polarisation that focus both on increased separation between and increased cohesion within polarised groups.

Analysis of Facebook data from 2013 and 2014 seems to support such patterns: after the major protests in 2013, there …

My presentation was up next at IAMCR 2023, and outlines the overall agenda of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are the slides: