Politics

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in the sharing of Australian news on Facebook, especially by politicians. This can be understood through the lens of agenda-setting theory: news media content plays a crucial role in shaping what public issues audiences learn about, and politicians’ sharing of news media content seeks to channel and affect these processes. (There are also questions about the extent of such agenda-setting power.)

Up next in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Agata Stepnik, whose interest is in stakeholder perspectives on the sustainability of commercial and publicly-funded news production in Australia.

The first paper session I’m attending at the AANZCA 2024 conference is a panel on democracy in crisis, and starts with my QUT colleague Stephen Harrington. His focus is on ‘dark political communication’, as a way of moving past the overemphasis on mis- and disinformation and recognising that such practices are just one part of a much broader range of communicative dysfunctions in contemporary political systems.

It’s late in November, and I’m at my penultimate conference for the year: we’re about to begin the AANZCA 2024 conference with a remote keynote by the great Pablo Boczkowski. He starts by sharing two selfies: one, entering the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which nominated the Harris/Walz presidential ticket; that event addressed several internal and external publics, including journalists, influencers, delegates, voters, and the general public. It was characterised by an atmosphere of expectation and enthusiasm, choreographed to lead up to the actual nomination itself.

The second selfie is from fieldwork in Buenos Aires, which has the highest concentration of psychologists on the planet and serious concerns about mental health; this is exacerbated by the severe poverty crisis in the country. Here, Pablo visited a hospital named after Elvira Perón (where Diego Maradona was born) – a worn-out, crumbling place where the strains of the past decades are evident in staff and patients and poverty and inequality are a constant part of personal stories.

The next speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Hendrik Meyer, whose interest is in detecting stances in climate change coverage. This focusses especially on climate change debates in German news media, focussing on climate protests, discussions about speed limits, and discussions about heating and heat pump regulations.

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is my QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is especially on the use of LLMs in stance detection in news content. A stance is a public act by a social actors, achieved dialogically through communication, which evaluates objects, positions the self and other subjects, and aligns with other subjects within a sociocultural field.