Journalism

The past few months have been quite busy with conferences and events, so here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to recently. I’ll start here with a handful of videos from recent events – more on my recent and upcoming conference papers, journal articles, and book chapters in subsequent posts…

First, in May I was delighted to participate in a three-part series on “Future-Proofing the Public Sphere”, hosted by the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance and the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, and the Digital Media Research Centre at …

The final AoIR 2022 session for today starts with Christian Ritter, whose interest is in journalistic newsmaking on YouTube during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. The global nature of YouTube potentially also enables decolonising discourses about climate change. The present project is interested in exploring the role of professional news organisations in covering COP26 on YouTube, which actors were given the opportunity to drive the meaning of specific terms and debates, and what themes emerged in the comments on the YouTube videos.

The project gathered video posts and comments from YouTube that referred to COP26 over …

The next session at AoIR 2022 is a panel on the social media activities around the recent German and Australian elections that I helped put together, and we start with two papers on the 2021 German election. The first is by Nina Fabiola Schumacher and Christian Nuernbergk, and Nina notes that the 2021 election was significantly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that social media played an especially important role during the election, therefore. Twitter, in particular, has come to play an especially important role in political debate and journalistic practice, as part of a wider hybrid media environment. But …

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Judith Goetz, whose focus is on the Austrian Identitarian movement. This movement has been an effort to restore far-right language and and ideas into German-language discourse, not least by exploiting certain weaknesses and opportunities in centre-right discourses. This has pushed the boundaries of what can be said with impunity further and further to the right, and has established far-right views in the mainstream media and everyday life.

The Identitarians are a typical example of these developments, and Judith has analysed their discourses by drawing on the material published on their own …

It’s the final session at ECREA 2022 already, and what an excellent conference it’s been – so good to be back away from Zoom and amongst the people. This final session is on the extreme right, and begins with a paper by Bart Cammaerts on the appropriation and normalisation of fascist, extreme-right discourses by more mainstream right-wing politicians. In the process, struggles for social justice are being abnormalised in turn.

Such normalisation involves a demand side and a supply side: on the demand side, the increasing tensions arising from financial globalisation, cultural diversity, democratic deficits, and entrenched inequalities; on the …