Journalism

It is an unseasonably cold Thursday morning in Hamburg, and after a great opening session last night with Aleksandra Urman, Mykola Makhortykh, and Jing Zeng we are now starting the first full day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium. I’m presenting the morning keynote, on our current work assessing the news and social media debate around Australia’s failed Voice to Parliament referendum as a possible case of destructive polarisation.More on this as the research develops, but for now my slides are here:

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Rita Marchetti, who shifts our attention to another scandal: the Qatargate case. She notes the limited attention of media scholars to corruption issues, even in spite of growing funding for anticorruption studies of legacy media – the potential role of social media in anticorruption activism has received very limited attention, in particular.

The final session at the I-POLHYS 2024 symposium in Bologna starts with Marco Mazzoni, whose focus is on media populism – and he centres his presentation on the politicisation of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal as a media event in the early 1990s, which became the starting-point of media populism in Italy.

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Sergio Martini, whose interest is in the role of media in perceived polarisation. This might be driven by the conflict focus in media coverage, and its attention especially to extreme positions – but are there ways to counteract this and contribute to depolarisation instead?

The second day at I-POLHYS 2024 starts with a paper by the great Laura Ianelli and Giada Marino, who will recap I-POLHYS research activities on the connections between polarisation and problematic information. These concepts have been increasingly connected in the literature, and Laura and Giada conducted a systematic literature review of such research – yet only a small handful of the articles referencing both phenomena actually address them in any meaningful way; elsewhere the terms are more often used as buzzwords.

And we’ll finish the day at I-POLHYS 2024 with my keynote, which builds on the work of my Australian Laureate Fellowship team to review the types of polarisation that have been identified in the literature and develop the concept of destructive polarisation as a particularly concerning stage of polarisation dynamics. Our research proposes five distinct symptoms of destructive polarisation – and in the keynote I reflect on the recent Australian referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament to explore to what extent these five symptoms of destructive polarisation were present in the news and digital media debates in the lead-up to the referendum.

Here are the slides for the presentation:

The final speaker in this excellent opening session at I-POLHYS 2024 is the equally excellent Fabio Giglietto from the Vera.AI project, whose focus is on media political partisanship and polarisation in Italy. Especially noteworthy here is also that his project explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in news and social media research – a new approach that also needs a great deal of new validation approaches.

The next speaker in this session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Ana Sofia Cardinal, and her interest is in (news) partisan sorting. This builds on digital trace data from the Web browsing practices of Internet users in several European countries and the US. This work is important given the suspected increase in political polarisation, the decrease in trust in the media, and the rise of far-right parties in several countries.

The next speaker in this opening session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Richard Fletcher, whose focus is in polarisation amongst news audiences. Has such polarisation increased over time, and how does it differ between news audiences in different countries?