Headlines and hashtags herald new ‘damaging effects’: Media and Australia’s declining PISA performance

Abstract

This chapter provides a comparative analysis of print and social media representations of Australia’s changing performance on the OECD’s triennial Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), focusing on the 2016 dissemination of the 2015 results. After identifying media logics of practice, we draw on concepts of mediatisation to analyse print and digital newspaper and Twitter coverage of Australia’s PISA performance over a 26-day period in December 2016. This yielded 35 newspaper articles and 29,585 tweets. Using content analysis, we outline the similarities and differences between these modes of coverage. We found social media putatively more democratic and inclusive of many actors, focusing to a greater extent on issues of equity. In contrast, high quality investigative print and digital newspapers used a narrower set of actors and focused on limited aspects of PISA such as rankings and declines; nonetheless, they putatively provided some critical and evidence-informed accounts. Both modes of media potentially heralded new damaging effects as they lobbied to influence policy makers and politicians, within a complex interplay between print and digital newspapers and social media.