Journalism

The third speakers in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore are Xiaoyang Lai, Xiaozhen Jiang, and Yajing Zhu, who begin by referring to a recent incident in China where a car rammed into a crowd of people. They point out that media reporting about the reasons behind this attack was edited after the fact, and are interested in why this might be the case.

This incident can be seen as a case of lone-wolf terrorism, and such cases are reported very differently in mainland and diaspora Chinese media. Chinese media tend to favour a disruption-response-restoration framing, emphasising …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting on the methodology of our ongoing analysis of climate coverage in the Australian media. This explores patterns of polarisation within journalistic content, but polarisation is not particularly well-defined in the literature, so we have developed the concept of destructive polarisation as an approach to defining when polarisation becomes problematic.

There is no clear information on how polarised the Australian media landscape is. Therefore, this project examines climate change coverage across some 26 Australian news outlets from the mainstream to the …

And the final speaker in this entertaining session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Junbin Su, whose interest is in algorithmic gatekeeping in AI news recommendations. What values guide such gatekeeping decisions?

Conventional journalistic gatekeeping reflects editorial decisions about news values, and a number of competing lists of such news values have been proposed over the decades. Algorithmic gatekeeping may build on these values, or introduce others – not least also linked to platform metrics like user engagement or shareworthiness. This might under- or overemphasise certain news values.

This study explored this by identifying some 100 news recommender …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Timothy Koskie, looking for media pluralism in AI-generated local news. But actually, these systems are not necessarily artificial intelligence in the full sense of the term: they are simply content generators. These systems feed on media content, and will make mistakes as they do so; this is not necessarily all that different from human-driven news media, however.

But how do AI content generators fit into the media ecosystem? Can they contribute to media pluralism, and thereby increase the media ecosystem’s health? If so, this could considerably …

And the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Haroon Hakimi, whose focus is on the BBC’s representation of Afghanistan in its news reporting. Internationally, people are often perceived through the popular image of their nation, and this is especially pronounced for countries which many people will have no personal experience of, such as Afghanistan.

More generally, national image can be shaped at the personal level, through friends and contacts; at the organisational level, where PR companies might run image campaigns; and the mass media level, where news reporting strongly affects how audiences perceive …

The next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is on news and social media framing, and starts with Xu Pengfei, examining how Chinese and Korean news reported on the Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge in 2023. Chinese and Korean news outlets reported intensively on this, given the fears about how the nuclear waste might affect their coastal regions.

Key to this study is news framing theory, which tends to identify a number of key framing approaches; in East Asia, historical frames are especially common in international reporting. How, then, did Chinese and Korean media frame the event, and what …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Harry Li, whose interest is in affective polarisation in China towards Russia and the United States. Such affective polarisation describes in-group favouritism and out-group hostility, but past research has mainly examined how this plays out in two- or multi-party political systems, rather than towards broader issues and themes.

In China, while there is a one-party system that does not allow for partisan polarisation, polarisation around specific issues and topics may nonetheless exist; here we might regard friendly or allied countries as part of the in-group, and …

The final speaker at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project for today is Florian Muhle, who begins by highlighting the transformation of social media bot detection approaches to take into account a much more complicated and hybrid environment.

Bot detection was already very difficult, and is no universal solution: human users also engage in inauthentic content amplification, for various commercial, political, and other reasons. It is therefore more useful to focus on the effects of such artificial amplification: and here, a continuing focus on single platforms is no longer useful since many such amplification efforts aim at dispersing …

The next speaker in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session is Ana Sofia Cardenal, who has recently finished a project on pathways to misinformation that built on Web tracking data. The results of this work also inform a new project which constructs simulated environments for online discussions in order to explore how different discursive settings affect the dynamics of such discussions.

The earlier project addressed the substantial problem of mis- and disinformation, across digital and social media environments and beyond. It showed that visits to fringe and problematic information sources are actually fairly rare, even though many people hold at …