Journalism

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 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 …

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

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Laura Teruel Rodríguez, with a paper on the intersection of polarisation and disinformation. Disinformation (and other forms of information disorder) has played a considerable part in driving polarisation, especially in contexts such as the Brexit vote or the election of Donald Trump as US President; the project is interested, therefore, in the correlations between polarisation and disinformation in the European quality press since 2017.

Newspapers chosen were major publications from France, Spain, and the UK, and some 286 relevant articles were coded for their framing. 45% of the sample were from …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Mazlum Kemal Dagdelen, whose focus is on nationalist discourse in the late-1960s Turkish Cypriot children’s magazine Tuncer (named after a teacher supposedly killed by Greek Cypriots). Cyprus is of course an island divided between Turkish and Greek Cypriot areas since the Turkish invasion of the early 1970s, and populated by Turkish and Greek communities since at least the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus.

Nationalism is a discourse structured around the nodal point of ‘nation’, and its distinction from other national identities, so the present study takes a discourse-theoretical approach. Here, this is …

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.

The present project sought to explore the information consumption habits of Spanish news users, including the role of social media, the perception of disinformation, and the perception of official information channels. It approached this through a survey of some 1,000 …

The next speaker in this afternoon session at IAMCR 2023 is Ester Minga, with a focus on the intertwined crises of migration and COVID-19 in Portugal. Portugal does not receive as many asylum requests as larger European countries, but has been very proactive in taking in its share of migrants since the major refugee crisis in 2015; this is a continuation of Portuguese Luso-Tropicalism.

The present study explored attitudes towards migration in Portugal by examining articles from a number of key newspapers in the country and analysing the news frames they used, especially in the context of COVID-19 outbreaks in …

The post-lunch session on this second day at IAMCR 2023 starts with Vered Elisha Malka, whose focus is on the consumption of news about the current Russian-Ukrainian war in Israel and Germany. Media coverage of the event has been extensive, of course, and news media consumption patterns may be influenced by a number of underlying parameters. Such media consumption patterns also affect public opinion about the war, of course.

Most existing studies of such patterns tend to focus on how people facing war use media to suit their information needs; the present study, by contrast, is interested in how people …