Government

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session, and indeed the symposium overall, is Aidar Zinnatullin, who shifts our focus to Russia. This will examine the period in Russia before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (from 2015 to 2021), when it was already a depoliticised society under authoritarian leadership and political stability was the central mantra of Putin’s rule. The implied social contract here was to provide increased prosperity for the people as long as they did not become politically active.

The Russian opposition under Alexey Navalny managed to cut through this stasis by producing popular and engaging content and …

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. There is more interest from economics than media scholars in this, it seems.

Italy has long been perceived as suffering from corruption, and this is frustrating citizens and politicians – but recent corruption indices do document that corruption remains …

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 scandal evolved during 1992-4, and ended the careers of several prominent politicians. It started with the arrest of a local politician, Mario Chiesa, in Milan, but was transformed into a national media event when the secretary of the Italian Socialist Party Bettino Craxi was drawn into the scandal …

The next session at the I-POLHYS 2024 symposium starts with Giuliano Bobba, whose focus is on Italian citizens’s attitudes towards the EU during the COVID-19 crisis. There has been a growing recognition of the importance and roles of European institutions, and their activities are entwined and sometimes conflict with the political agendas of national governments; this produces a dynamic of politicisation.

Determinants of support for the EU include a cost-benefit evaluation, economic and cultural dimensions, and party cues, and such questions are further heightened at times of crisis. Immediate utilitarian considerations focus on what benefits citizens receive from the EU …

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 …

The final speaker in this session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Alessia Donà, whose focus is on the two parties of the populist radical right in Italy, Lega and Fratelli d’Italia. The populist radical right combines the thin ideology of populism with the thick ideology of nativism and nationalism: where populism often simply distinguishes between in- and out-groups, the radical right builds on xenophobia and positions foreigners as threats to the national identity and nation state, and positions authoritarianism as a solution to the problems of society.

This represents a politics of fear, presenting real or imagined threats that can build …

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Victoria Fielding, whose interest is in reporting roles in climate disasters in Australia. Her focus is on the catastrophic bushfires in 2019/20, and the Lismore floods in 2022, and the way the media did or did not link these to climate change. These natural disasters were extreme, and part of a greater trend towards growing threats from climate change, and as such became part of a highly politicised debate around climate change in Australia.

While there can no longer be any question about the reality of catastrophic climate change, consensus about …

The next session that I’m in at at ANZCA 2023 is on media and climate change, and starts with my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the mainstream media framing of UNESCO’s ‘in danger’ rating for the Great Barrier Reef on the Australian northeast coast.

Mainstream media continue to play a key agenda-setting role on social media platforms, but the way this works differs across social media platforms. Carly collected data from several social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) around the UNESCO ‘in danger’ recommendation in 2021. The recommendation was eventually ignored by the …