Australian Broadcasting Corporation Research Articles

Legacy media outlets also stand in dock over Gaza: How RNZ, ABC and other Western media failed to challenge Israeli war narratives

As Israel faces charges at the International Court of Justice in The Hague of breaching the 1948 Genocide Convention, for many people Western media institutions also stand in the dock. Critics have pointed to a media failure to effectively challenge a narrative that framed Israel’s actions in terms of an erroneous claim to Israeli ‘self-defence’, a de facto diplomatic cover for war crimes, ethnic cleansing and probable acts of genocide. In the Pacific, news leaders at Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), by alleged omission, story framing, inaccuracies, passive editorial stances, including a refusal to adjudicate contentious claims when the evidence was available, fall into the category. Such failures call into question claims of due impartiality, a fundamental tenet media outlets use to anchor their credibility as trusted sources of news. Failure to adequately create awareness of Israeli crimes also raises questions over whether state-funded public broadcasters are fulfilling the informational needs of democratic citizenship and serving the public interest, or whether they are serving the interests of a Western power elite.

Total Control: “Black bitch” offending the offenders

Total Control (2019–2024) is a political drama that follows the story of Rachel Griffiths as the prime minister of so-called Australia and Deborah Mailman as her political rival. Available on demand on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) iView, Total Control was initially called “Black Bitch” to draw attention to the historical racial slur but was forced to change its title due to a social media storm. Total Control demonstrates striking parallels with the treatment of real-life Indigenous women in politics. This article looks at the role of social media as a platform that provides a way for Indigenous women to engage in public politics. It discusses these technologies as providing settlers with the means to publicly malign Indigenous women. It draws from research on the use and abuse of social media in relation to Indigenous users and is underscored by the blurred boundary between fiction and non-fiction Indigenous realities.

“Stay tuned!"

“Stay tuned!"

Framing Islam and Islamism in the Australian news media: A content analysis of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Australian

Representations of Muslims in the Australian media have been overwhelmingly negative and stereotypical, affecting the way non-Muslims perceive Islam. Research also suggests anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia tend to conflate the religion of Islam with political Islam, often termed Islamism. This research examines how Australia’s newspaper of record The Australian and the public broadcaster the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), reported on and at times conflated Islam and Islamism, between 2018 and 2019. While there is a significant volume of literature on media representations of Islam and Muslims, few studies consider the distinction between Islam and Islamism in the news media. By examining instances where The Australian and the ABC conflate Islam and Islamism, this article posits that such reporting needs to be recognized as it contributes to misinformation, pejorative public sentiments about Islam and Muslims, and reinforces extremist propaganda.

Improving news headline text generation quality through frequent POS-Tag patterns analysis

Original synthetic content writing is one of the human abilities that algorithms aspire to emulate. The advent of sophisticated algorithms, especially based on neural networks has shown promising results in recent times. A watershed moment was witnessed when the attention mechanism was introduced which paved the way for transformers, a new exciting architecture in natural language processing. Recent sensations like GPT and BERT for synthetic text generation rely on NLP transformers. Although, GPT and BERT-based models are capable of generating creative text given they are properly trained on abundant data, however, the generated text suffers the quality aspect when limited data is available. This is especially an issue for low-resource languages where labeled data is still scarce. In such cases, the generated text, more often than not, lacks the proper sentence structure, thus unreadable. This study proposes a post-processing step in text generation that improves the quality of generated text through the GPT model. The proposed post-processing step is based on the analysis of POS tagging patterns in the original text and accepts only those generated sentences from GPT which satisfy POS patterns that are originally learned from the data. We exploit the GPT model to generate English headlines by utilizing Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) news dataset. Furthermore, for assessing the applicability of the model in low-resource languages, we also train the model on the Urdu news dataset for Urdu news headlines generation. The experiments presented in this paper on these datasets from high- and low-resource languages show that the performance of generated headlines has a significant improvement by using the proposed headline POS pattern extraction. We evaluate the performance through subjective evaluation as well as using text generation quality metrics like BLEU and ROUGE.

Black summer on TikTok and ABC news: Shaping cultural identity during an Australian bushfire crisis

This study investigates the role of two intermediaries, a mainstream media outlet and a popular digital media platform, to shape cultural identity through a case study of the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire crisis (colloquially known as the ‘Black Summer’). Theoretically framed by networked publics, this study explores the vernacular creativity of social media users and mainstream media coverage during the Black Summer bushfire crisis. Findings draw on a thematic analysis of 100 news articles published between September 2019 and January 2020 by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) randomly selected from a larger corpus of bushfire coverage ( n = 1269) and 120 TikTok videos posted between November 2019 and January 2021 that included prominent hashtags associated with the bushfires. Findings from news coverage highlight the ways in which the ABC framed the role of social media to connect with wider audiences while preserving their values as a public service media outlet. Findings from TikTok videos illustrate the role of ‘templates’ that encourage user participation and vernacular creativity on the platform. Comparing coverage of the bushfires on the ABC and TikTok revealed a shared set of striking visual elements used to shape cultural identity, communicate information, and make sense of a significant public crisis. This article offers directions for future research to explore the relationships and tensions between digital content creators and journalists and their capacity to create and contest cultural identities and imaginaries.

The future of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia’s ‘chilling’ mediascape

Two decades after Pierre Bourdieu published On Television and Journalism chronicling the decline of French public broadcasting and serious news, Australia’s national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), is in the throes of a similar decline. Besieged by a combination of funding cuts, allegations of political interference, pressure from the commercial media sector, nepotism and legislative frameworks at both federal and state levels that have sent a chill through Australian journalism, the ABC is facing challenging times. Through long-form interviews with journalists and senior bureau figures from the ABC Brisbane Bureau, this study seeks to gauge the extent to which the landscape for conducting public interest journalism in Australia has changed since 2018 and what the future of the ABC may look like.

News media framing of the Murray–Darling Basin ‘water theft’ controversy

An Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Four Corners investigation, screened on free-to-air television on 24 July 2017, revealed a series of improper conducts pertaining to the Murray–Darling Basin river system. The journalistic exposé included allegations of water theft, questionable compliance decisions and collusion between water regulators and irrigation lobbyists. This interdisciplinary study explores the revelations and their framing in a sample of state and national media reports about the ‘water theft’ controversy and its fallout. It compares these with the normative frames adopted by critical green criminology, which views the allegations at the heart of the Murray–Darling Basin controversy in terms of state-corporate interests, industry capture of regulators and the notion that water ‘theft’ constitutes a ‘crime’ because of the environmental harm that results from excessive water extraction. This article presents the findings of the study, which elaborate on the impacts of media framing of crimes of the powerful (such as large agricultural companies and state government agencies), including the shaping of public understandings of environmental matters.

Dismantling the Deadlock: Australian Muslim Women’s Fightback against the Rise of Right-Wing Media

In Australia, as in other multicultural countries, the global Islamophobic discourse linking Muslims to terrorists to refugees results in the belief of an “enemy within”, which fractures the public sphere. Muslim minorities learn to distrust mainstream media as the global discourse manifests in localised right-wing discussion. This fracturing was further compounded in 2020 with increased media concentration and polarisation. In response, 12 young Australian Muslim women opened themselves up to four journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). They engaged in critical journalism research called Frame Reflection Interviews (FRIs). The process gave journalists important knowledge around the power dynamics of Islamophobia and empowered participants to help shape new media discourses tackling Islamophobia. This paper proposes that the FRIs are one method to rebuild trust in journalism while redistributing risk towards the journalists. These steps are necessary to build a normatively cosmopolitan global public sphere capable of breaking the discursive link between refugees and terrorism and fighting back against the rise of the far right.

‘We are all content makers now’: Losing form and sense at the ABC?

This article considers the rise of discourses emerging with the digital ‘content revolution’ at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), in the context of severe budget cuts and restructures since the emergence of Brian Johns’ 1996 ‘One ABC’ policy. The article explores key decisions, rhetorics and thinking surrounding the radical dismembering of ABC’s unique ideas and cultural outlet Radio National (now ‘RN’) from 2012 onwards, as it was forced to jettison core parts of its programming and shed specialist and experienced staff. The article seeks to identify how – under the influence of an infectious complex of ideas and discourses associated with ‘digital convergence’, neo-liberalism and managerialism – conditions were in place that favoured the expansion of platform-agnostic journalism and of related topical ‘content’ across the ABC at the expense of other forms and understandings of this ‘rich mix’ network. Core aspects of the ‘project’ as it had evolved over decades were endangered and diluted. Drawing on important historical and comparative research, the article argues that RN is relinquishing its historic ‘special status’ as a media leader in ideas and cultural broadcasting in Australia.

The CCTV Headquarters—Horizontal Skyscraper or Vertical Courtyard? Anomalies of Beijing Architecture, Urbanism, and Globalisation

The CCTV Headquarters—Horizontal Skyscraper or Vertical Courtyard? Anomalies of Beijing Architecture, Urbanism, and Globalisation

Uncovering a Climate Catastrophe? Media Coverage of Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires and the Revelatory Extent of the Climate Blame Frame

The Black Summer of 2019/2020 saw the forests of southeast Australia go up in flames. The fire season started early, in September 2019, and by March 2020 fires had burned over 12.6 million hectares (Werner and Lyons). The scale and severity of the fires was quickly confirmed by scientists to be "unprecedented globally" (Boer et al.) and attributable to climate change (Nolan et al.). The fires were also a media spectacle, generating months of apocalyptic front-page images and harrowing broadcast footage. Media coverage was particularly preoccupied by the cause of the fires. Media framing of disasters often seeks to attribute blame (Anderson et al.; Ewart and McLean) and, over the course of the fire period, blame for the fires was attributed to climate change in much media coverage. However, as the disaster unfolded, denialist discourses in some media outlets sought to veil this revelation by providing alternative explanations for the fires. Misinformation originating from social media also contributed to this obscuration. In this article, we investigate the extent to which media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires functioned both to precipitate a climate change epiphany and also to support refutation of the connection between catastrophic fires and the climate crisis.

Engaged Journalism and Climate Change: Lessons From an Audience-led, Locally Focused Australian Collaboration

ABSTRACT Strengthening media coverage of climate change is a top news and societal priority. The magnitude and impact of global warming and rising sea levels is challenging to communicate, and to comprehend, at global and local scales. Media efforts are frustrated by a myriad of factors, including increased audience reliance on social media for news and information and how that can be compromised by brevity or misinformation. Scientific complexity, and political and cultural conflict, along with psychological factors also shape how people engage with climate issues. The situation is exacerbated by a dramatic decline in the number of print and TV local news outlets and loss of journalism jobs, and rising consumer news avoidance and public distaste for negative coverage. Curious Climate is an engaged journalism experiment by Australia’s public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), in collaboration with scientific organisations in the island state of Tasmania. The ABC asked the public for climate change questions which were answered with content and events led by scientists. Survey data from audiences and journalists contributes empirical evidence on how such new approaches to audience-led local journalism can deliver relevant local news, expand audiences, and provide trusted, relevant sources of information on complex issues.

A push from the bush: An introduction to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Remote Communities Project

In early 2018, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) launched a ‘slow journalism’ initiative, funded by the ABC’s Remote Communities Project (RCP). Reporters and producers from regional and local ABC radio stations were invited to pitch for funding that would facilitate up to two weeks in remote, rural and regional communities to create stories that would provide audiences with insight into life outside of metropolitan cities. The ABC labelled this project ‘slow journalism’ because the reporters were working without the time constraints highly influential in contemporary work practices associated with delivering bulletins, online updates and fast turnarounds of workflows. Through interviews undertaken with personnel involved in the initiative, including reporters, producers and ABC management, this article analyses the pilot project carried out in December 2017. The article also examines the pilot project’s influence in shaping project implementation as well as its relationship to ‘slow journalism’, as defined in previous academic studies. We contend that while the RCP contains elements commonly associated with slow journalism, it also adds to the understanding of slow journalism as both a practice and a concept by discovering characteristics specific to public broadcasting models such as that reflected by the ABC.

The Presence of Portuguese and Indonesia in Timor Leste as Depicted by Australian and British Broadcasting Corporation

The discussion in this paper is intended to describe how Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) views Timor Leste during the period of Portuguese occupation, Indonesia’s presence, until the present-day conditions. Using some van Dijk’s models of CDA to examine the statements to represent its history in some editorials published by ABC and BBC news resources, the analysis was carried out at the levels of selected statements with regard to the linguistic features of lexical choices, nominalization, passivization, and overcompleteness. The results of the analysis show that the statements constructed by ABC and BBC’s news editorials as the news discourse about the history of Timor Leste in such relations are discursively biased in terms of CDA. With various differences in terms of the linguistic features, the result also in line with the view that both ABC and BBC’s statements are mostly dichotomizing Portuguese into ‘Us’ while Indonesia into ‘Them’ in terms of van Dijk’s ‘ideological square’.

Determining public perceptions of a proposed national heat protection policy for Australian schools.

Across Australia there are inconsistent and varying guidelines or 'recommendations' across a number of jurisdictions for the protection of school children from heat-related consequences, yet there is no national policy for heat protection in school settings. The aim of this study was to determine public perceptions of the efficacy of implementing a heat protection policy for Australian schools. A sample of public perceptions was drawn upon from public comments posted on a national Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) news article on the proposed heat protection policy. Public comments were analysed using a social-ecological model thematic content analysis. Themes that emerged to support a national heat protection policy for schools included: protection from the consequences of extreme heat, reliance of children on adult/school decisions and utilising modern knowledge/technology advancements. In contrast, criticism emerged relating to the importance of having resilient children, air conditioning costs, perceived over-regulation and heat exposure being a lifestyle choice in some contexts. Overall, this study provides support for the introduction of a national heat protection policy with a number of key considerations identified for implementation to benefit and protect Australian school children. SO WHAT?: As a number of the heat guidelines are developed by individual organisations with differing messages, determining the public efficacy of comprehensive heat protection strategies can help lead to the development of policy for a widespread and consistent heat protection program across Australian schools.

SKYWRITING – MAKING RADIO WAVES by Robyn Ravlich: book review

Robyn Ravlich’s Skywriting - making radio waves is partly an extended dissertation on feature-making and radio art, and partly an autobiography of this acclaimed Australian audio feature maker from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It is reviewed by Mike Ladd, poet, audio producer and an erstwhile ABC colleague.

Exploring creativity and innovation in broadcasting

We consider the emergence of design innovations in process, emerging around the form of polyarchy. This is done by using a case study of innovation conducted by a production organization’s project that was embedded in and hosted by a bureaucratic public institution, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The research reported here was part of a larger project comparing the BBC and ABC’s use of different modes of organization. It focused mainly on the organization designed to deliver a six-part television series, The Code. The innovative process of Scribe, the organization in question, in producing the story is a good example of idea work being instituted in a polyarchic design process. Scribe represents a new organizational design characterized by a polyarchic structure, which is soft and decentralized, with strict and relatively insuperable social and symbolic boundaries. This results in a project-based organization to coordinate collective innovation that is curated by making the writer also the creative director or showrunner. The research contributes further to exploring organizational idea work, through prioritizing creativity and innovation by an explicit positioning of a product and collaborative generative idea work.

Addressing Growth in Viewership Through Various Media Streams Within the ABC: A Review of Enterprise Architecture and Proposed Solutions

The objective of this report is to identify and review the implementation, use, maintenance, and extension of existing technology systems within the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) organization and establish success factors for enhancing their sustainability and flexibility to evolving user requirements and how data is transferred within the organizational system. It will go through a revised Enterprise architecture strategy that has been adapted to the fast paced technologically enabled changing market.Currently, the ABC is experiencing a growth in viewers/customers due to new streams of media, public interest, generational targeting therefore and the widespread adoption of accessing news via social media. This EA (enterprise architecture) strategy will be implementing new technology through capital investment which will optimize the ABCs operational capabilities.This report firstly analyzed the problem of ABC current situation which followed by coming up with an improved TOGAF approach, an implementing plan and an expected result in the end.

Newsbots That Mediate Journalist and Audience Relationships

News media organisations are experimenting with a new generation of newsbots that move beyond automated headline delivery to the delivery of news according to a conversational format within the context of private messaging services. To build the newsbot, journalists craft statements and answers to users’ questions that mimic a natural conversation between a journalist and user. In so doing, journalists are experimenting with styles of communication that reflect very particular journalistic personas. We investigate the persona of the news chatbot created by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the better to understand how the public broadcaster’s forays into social media service delivery and automation are shaping new relationships between public service broadcasters and their audiences. We find that, for a section of the audience that uses it, the friendly newsbot contrasts favourably with their previous experience with news and the journalists who produce it. The public service journalists who operate the bot are, in turn, using the bot to try to reach new audiences by experimenting with a more informal, intimate relationship with citizen users. The supposedly “intelligent” (but in actual fact very much human-crafted) newsbot is the vehicle through which this new relationship is being forged.