Journalism

The next speakers in this ANZCA 2023 session are Claire Fitzpatrick and Ashleigh Haw, who extend our focus to a comparative analysis of the ‘freedom’ movements in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. In Aotearoa, the protest was organised by a diverse group of participants without clear leadership, and the atmosphere around the protest declined precipitously as prosocial and family-oriented protests were overwhelmed by some much darker messages calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government.

The last day at ANZCA 2023 starts for me with a session on ‘freedom’ movements, and we begin with Ciaran Ryan and a paper on the 2022 ‘Convoy to Canberra’. This was a gathering of some 10,000 Australians in Canberra in early February 2022 to protest COVID-19 measures, and was inspired to some extent by the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ to Ottawa, which blocked the city centre. Both convoys were largely organised and promoted through social media.

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Cameron McTernan, who is interested in news diversity on social media. Media diversity has long been an issue and a priority in media policy, but has often focussed on media ownership and media content at the outlet level, without necessarily taking into account the role of social media in the distribution of content. This is becoming increasingly important because media supply chains are becoming less linear as social media logics and algorithms affect news distribution.

The next session at ANZCA 2023 starts with David Nolan, who introduces the idea of ‘racial reckoning’ as both amplified by as well as directed at media; this highlights the failures of racial inequality and is being performed through the ‘diagnostic’ of digital media, which provide a space for critiques of conventional media. Such reckoning has often been addressed, in Australian, by the hiring of Indigenous journalists.

The second speaker in this ANZCA 2023 is Alysson Watson, whose focus is on the journalistic ‘death knock’: the way journalists approach families who have lost someone in newsworthy circumstances. This is obviously difficult, given the circumstances; it has moved from a literal knock on the door to the use of other technologies, including now especially also social media technologies.

The second full day at ANZCA 2023 started with my own keynote, on the not-so-slow demise of Twitter under Elon Musk. There was quite a substantial amount of material to work through, of course – here are my slides:

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Julie Browning, whose focus is on the role of campaigning media during the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. A referendum represents an unusual campaign in that it is polarised by design (the choice is a simple Yes or No), and can cut across party lines (as it did in this case, at least to some extent).

And the next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is my colleague Samantha Vilkins, who continues our focus on the Voice to Parliament referendum by addressing especially the role of opinion polling and poll reporting in the context of the Voice referendum campaign. She begins by noting the long period of public debate about the Voice, going back at least to the election of the Albanese government in May 2022, with a much shorter formal campaign period before the referendum date of 14 October 2023.

OK, so I skipped the previous session as I got talking about current research projects with a number of colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, but I’m back for the final session this afternoon, on the recent Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, where my colleague Sam Vilkins and I are presenting our own papers. I’m the first presenter in the session, so here are my slides:

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Howard Lee, whose focus is on truth in Singapore’s online mediascape. He begins by highlighting the independent media outlet The Online Citizen Asia and the current affairs magazine Jom, who have had various run-ins with the Lee family who have been in control of Singaporean politics for several years.