Journalism

Because of the coffee queue I came in late to the Thursday morning session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, where Jan Miessler is already in full flight summarising structural functionalism. His overall aim here is to critique the systemic perspective on media systems that was popularised with the seminar work by Hallin and Mancini, which tends to neglect the social actors within the system, and presents a ‘real’ and ‘holistic’ perspective that is actually conjured by the authors.

But a holistic perspective means that nothing can be known, since there is no way to exhaustively describe a system …

My final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore for today is on global conflicts, and starts with Nicole Marie Klevanskaya, whose focus is on Russian state-controlled and independent television reporting on acts of terrorism. This includes the 2024 terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall entertainment complex, which resulted in at least 140 deaths. This was Russia’s largest terror attack in years, and Putin quickly and incorrectly blamed Ukraine for it.

Russian media consists of independent and regime-critical journalists in exile, and state-controlled domestic media outlets that toe the official line. Studies on this media system often predate …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Hanye Yang, with a comparison of fact-checking operations in China and Hong Kong. Fact-checking has grown substantially in recent years, in response to the rise of mis- and disinformation; there is not a sizeable fact-checking sector in Asia too. But do western models of fact-checking apply here, especially in the context of non-democratic political systems and limited press freedom?

The difference between China and Hong Kong is interesting here, since their media systems diverged under British rule in Hong Kong but are perhaps converging again with …

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 …