Abstract
ABSTRACT Expert voices in media coverage facilitate a well-functioning democracy by informing public debates about policy issues. Experts can fill knowledge gaps in reporting, fact-check statements, refute misinformation, and offer non-partisan perspectives on policy problems. Recent scholarly debates have largely focused on the prevalence of expertise in the public sphere. Critics claim that the demand for instantaneous entertainment has undermined expertise and hastened the decline of expert-informed news coverage. However, opponents argue that journalists are more reliant on experts to make sense of complex political and policy information. This article examines these rival propositions through a longitudinal study of expertise in Australian election reporting. Drawing upon a content analysis of 1270 newspaper articles, this article analyses news coverage of policy issues from the first five Australian election campaigns of the twenty-first century (2001–2013). This article finds that the prevalence of experts in policy coverage largely remained unchanged over the 2000s. In other words, newspapers were consistent in their use of expert sources. However, the evidence does suggest that journalists were politicising policy news by promoting partisans voices, political insiders, and political personalities over policy experts.
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