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Australian Journalism Review - Volume 44, Issue 1, 2022

Volume 44, Issue 1

Volume 44, Issue 1, 2022

Language: English
  • Commentary

      • The song remains the same: Media regulation a decade after the Finkelstein inquiry

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ajr_00085_7

        This commentary draws on a keynote panel held (virtually) at the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia’s (JEERA) annual conference, hosted by the University of Canberra between 30 November and 3 December 2021. The panel comprised four people who had been involved in the last major attempt to reform media regulation in Australia, in 2011–12: Ray Finkelstein, who was appointed by the federal Labor government to inquire into the media and media regulation; Matthew Ricketson, then professor of journalism at the University of Canberra, who was appointed to assist Finkelstein; political scientist Rodney Tiffen who acted as a consultant to the inquiry, and Emma Dawson, who was the media policy adviser in the office of the Communications minister, Stephen Conroy. The government, which had already set up the Convergence Review, took the recommendations of both inquiries and introduced a package of bills to parliament in early 2013 that was strongly opposed by both the Liberal Party and the media industry. Most of the bills were withdrawn. The commentary summarizes the discussion and asks whether media regulation has improved in the intervening decade and if not, why not.

  • Research Articles

      • Improving news media oversight: Why Australia needs a cross-platform standards scheme

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ajr_00086_1

        Australia currently has fourteen standards schemes that oversee journalists and news media, making for both duplication and inconsistency. The result is a torn and frayed patchwork leaving broadcasting heavily regulated but some areas of online content without any applicable standards or clear avenues for consumer complaint. In this article, we describe Australia’s confusion of news media standards schemes amid the global challenges to media oversight in a digital age, including from the algorithmically driven delivery of news via social media and other digital services. We argue that internationally the ongoing disruption of news media is being accompanied by a parallel disruption of news media standards schemes. This creates significant uncertainty, particularly since citizens and journalists have contrasting expectations about news media oversight. However, this uncertainty also presents an opportunity for reform. We then draw on international scholarship and regulatory developments to make four high-level arguments. First, Australia should implement a coherent cross-platform standards scheme to cover news content on TV, on radio, in print and online. Second, digital services and platforms ought to be brought under this scheme in their role as distributors and amplifiers of news, but not as ‘publishers’. Third, this scheme ought to have oversight of algorithms. And fourth, citizens ought to be afforded a greater role in the operation of this scheme, which has significant potential to serve the public interest by improving public discourse.

    • Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in university journalism education: Exploring experiences, challenges and opportunities

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ajr_00087_1

      News media coverage of Indigenous Australian peoples and perspectives is often absent or, when present, unfair or shallow in context or understanding. This raises the question of how much – and what kind of – exposure to Indigenous knowledges and perspectives journalists-in-training receive in their university studies. To find out, this study analyses 30 unit outlines and assessment details of journalism subjects at three Australian universities. It follows this analysis with interviews of seventeen undergraduate journalism students at these universities to explore their perceptions of if and how their journalism programmes paid attention to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander topics and perspectives in the classroom setting. The results reveal that the journalism students in this sample, even those from the same university, had an uneven experience related to Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in their university journalism subjects. This testifies to the generic nature of unit outlines and learning objectives and to the broad discretionary power that individual tutors and lecturers have to shape the flow of information that is engaged with during the learning opportunities they oversee. Student recommendations for how Indigenous knowledges and perspectives could be more usefully integrated into journalism education were also gathered and reported.

    • Measuring news media frame building during an Australian industrial dispute

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ajr_00088_1

      News media play a crucial role in supporting liberal democracy by holding the powerful to account and facilitating a diverse, balanced and equal marketplace of ideas. In this marketplace of ideas, groups and interests like unions and employers compete for attention and to have their ideas legitimated by journalists. Although framing theory is used extensively to understand how news media represents different issues, due to its theoretical ambiguity and the methodological challenge of determining how and why frames are built by journalists, it is difficult to quantify how effectively news media delivers equity between competing perspectives. Entman, Matthes and Pellicano’s diachronic process model of political framing helps to overcome these challenges by providing a theoretical model, which is used in this article to investigate a case study of Australian media representation of competing industrial dispute narratives. The article identifies and compares two of the model’s framing junctures: industrial spokespeople’s narratives during the contemporary Australian case of the Victorian Country Fire Authority (CFA) in dispute with firefighter members of the Victorian United Firefighters Union; and their alignment with news media reports about the CFA dispute. The findings reveal inequity between the representation of workers and their union as compared to the employer, and thus present a case of imbalanced or biased frame building in the marketplace of ideas. These findings are applied to discussions of conscious and unconscious bias to theorize why this inequity occurred.

    • ‘I can say I was a journalist during a global pandemic’: Australian students’ experiences of a newsroom in lockdown

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ajr_00089_1

      The COVID-19 pandemic presented university journalism educators with a dual challenge: transitioning subjects online and helping students navigate an industry that is experiencing disruption to work practices and job losses. The impact was particularly felt in practice-based subjects such as student newsrooms. While work-integrated learning programmes have become ubiquitous in journalism courses to produce job-ready graduates, the pandemic required educators to implement swift changes to accommodate online learning in them. The pandemic provides an opportunity to explore how students perceive the value of curriculum-related newsrooms during significant industry upheaval. Many studies have examined these practical journalism education programmes; however, the student perspective is often lacking. This case study, based on student questionnaire responses and educators’ observations, chronicles the experiences of working remotely in a curriculum-related newsroom during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns. It situates this within Jaakkola’s ‘pedagogical newsroom’ that blends pedagogical and journalistic principles to simulate practice within a flexible environment. Due to this flexibility, educators were able to adapt content for unanticipated online delivery to meet learning outcomes and even to create new learning opportunities. Student survey responses showed that despite the disruption, they believed the programme offered vital preparation for industry and generally remained optimistic about their career prospects.

  • Emerging Scholars

      • ‘It’s always there’: A study of the sources and motivations for Australian teens’ news consumption

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ajr_00090_7

        There is much to learn about the news habits of Australian teens and this study contributes to the small body of current research through an exploration of the news-consumption practices of 13–17-year-olds at a Victorian independent school. In doing so, it explores the complex behaviours of younger people who are immersed in a physical and digital environment where, in their own words, news and information ‘is always there’. Through an analysis of focus-group data, informed by Potter’s theory of media literacy, this study supports international research findings that teens are aware of a range of daily news sources but mostly experience them incidentally. They purposefully seek news when it is a topic that holds their interest or is somehow personally relevant to them. Other significant findings suggest that Australian teens rely heavily on the search engine Google for news and information and have little to no allegiance to specific news providers. Teens believe ‘knowing’ the news will become more relevant to them as they get older and take on adult responsibilities.

    • Consumers and commodification: The marketization of aged care in the Australian press

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ajr_00091_7

      This article explores links between the Australian press and the marketization of aged care in Australia. By using critical discourse analysis as a research tool, and a data set of 61 news articles from eight mainstream Australian newspapers published in April 2012 and August 2013, this article argues that dominant discourses around ageing in the sampled newspapers are in the language of economic rationalism, and aged care is constructed as a commodity. Elderly people are constructed mainly as consumers of aged care, reflecting and reinforcing official narratives towards the marketization of care. The study from which this article is drawn found that most Australian journalists not only relayed official messages about the commodification of aged care without critical engagement, but also included few opposing opinions.

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