Government

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 speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is María Soledad Segura, whose focus is on the elite capture of communication policies in Latin America. Such capture has a very long history in Latin America: policy-making processes are unequal and worsen the asymmetries in public communication. But in the past decades there has been greater focus on reform, creating participatory institutions for the development of new communication policies; the present paper explores their operation in Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay. But did such efforts have any real impact on policy-making processes?

Such participation is as important as plurality and diversity …

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 …

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 …

Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The …