The post-lunch session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is on mis- and disinformation, and starts with Tauel Harper, whose focus is especially on the role of public service media in combatting such problematic information. Disinformation is a serious threat to democracy in Australia and elsewhere, of course; its impact on the public sphere is deeply concerning, especially since the role of the public sphere is to regulate claims to truth.
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the relationship between trust in government and the efficacy of policy; this also points to the importance of meaning-making spaces to the construction of truth – spaces like QAnon, for instance, construct and mutually reinforce alternative worldviews that undermine government trust and policy efficacy.
COVID-19 also showed the continuing importance of public service media; these became the most visible and influential media during this time of acute crisis, and their content was also widely shared across social media platforms. But to research this is also becoming more difficult, especially also with declining access to trace date from social media platforms.
Public service media are still highly trusted, and therefore play a crucial role in the context of the present polycrisis, but citizens must also be engaged in this process. Media must not be paternalistic, and public service media cannot purely focus on content creation only.
And public service media are under threat on various fronts. Chronically underfunded, they are unable to keep up with current events; social media and boutique news sources are now a key pathway to news content; public service media are inherently chaotic organisations serving various divergent objectives; and meaning-making is collaborative and foundational to the generation of trust.
This means that public service media should shift further from content production to content moderation and the evaluation of content credibility; this also includes fact-checking and other forms of quality evaluations. Such evaluations may involve several aspects: creator judgments, public judgments, and expert judgments; they might benefit from the existence of a separate public social media platform where such processes could play out.
Truth itself remains a slippery concept at best, but it is more possible to assess what is not true, since many false statements being made are demonstrably false. Public service media should take a central role in this effort.
