Morning Herald Research Articles

Media tone and trading activity on the Sydney Stock Exchange 1901–1950

We examine how media reports influenced trading volumes and order imbalances on the Sydney Stock Exchange (SSX) from 1901 to 1950, focusing on wool market reports as a substitute for broader financial advice in the absence of a specialised investment press. Given wool's status as Australia's primary export and its integration with various sectors, we construct a weekly media sentiment index based on news about wool sales and auctions from the Sydney Morning Herald. Our findings reveal that positive news about the wool market correlates with increased trading volumes and reduced order imbalances on the SSX. This relationship persisted during significant events such as the UK government's wool purchase plans, the 1929 Wall Street Crash, World War II-related trading restrictions, and the short selling ban.

Balancing independence, collective interests, and media responsibilities: a framing analysis of COVID-19 coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald

This study conducted a framing analysis of the Sydney Morning Herald’s media coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Five main frames and themes were identified: (1) cases and numbers (e.g., active cases, recovered people, deaths, and tests), (2) awareness (of spread, prevention, treatment), (3) state policies, (4) collective interest and wellbeing, and (5) promotion of civic values. While all of these themes decreased in 2021 due to an overall decrease of reports in our sample (from 252 to 98 articles), the awareness frame increased, likely due to increasing coverage of vaccination awareness. In conclusion, the coverage of the pandemic reveals how the SMH prioritizes the Australian government’s interests in the control of the COVID-19 disease and how it promotes values of civility to protect human life. Since the SMH disseminates discourses that serve the interests of the Australian government, ethical principles of the media and journalism, such as independence, are compromised to promote civility that helps protect life.

Australia II: A Case Study in Engineering Ethics

Australia II became the first foreign yacht to win the America's Cup in 1983. The boat had a revolutionary wing keel and a better underwater hull form. In official documents, Ben Lexcen is credited with the design. He is also listed as the sole inventor of the wing keel in a patent application submitted on February 5, 1982. However, as reported in New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and Professional Boatbuilder, the wing keel was in fact designed by engineer Peter van Oossanen at the Netherlands Ship Model Basin in Wageningen, assisted by Dr. Joop Slooff at the National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam. Based on telexes, letters, drawings, and other documents preserved in his personal archive, this paper presents van Oossanen’s account of how the revolutionary wing keel was designed. This is followed by an ethical analysis by Martin Peterson, in which he applies the American NSPE and Dutch KIVI codes of ethics to the information provided by van Oossanen. The NSPE and KIVI codes give conflicting advice about the case, and it is not obvious which document is most relevant. This impasse is resolved by applying a method of applied ethics in which similarity-based reasoning is extended to cases that are not fully similar. The key idea, presented in Peterson’s book The Ethics of Technology (Peterson, The ethics of technology: A geometric analysis of five moral principles, Oxford University Press, 2017), is to use moral paradigm cases as reference points for constructing a “moral map”.

Analysing ‘Jihad’ Rhetoric in the Australian Context

This paper focuses on how jihad – a term synonymous with ‘struggle’ in Islam – has been associated with and used in entirely different meanings in Australian newspapers. Orientalism permeates Australian newspapers even today and different media outlets tend to follow an agenda when presenting news. The media is a powerful tool and has the capacity to influence people’s perceptions and outlook towards any phenomenon. Australian newspapers’ representation of jihad in a particular context solidifies its meaning as a ‘holy war’ whereas the Qur’ān has an entirely different meaning for this concept. Jihad is used in articles that focus on terrorist activities carried out by Muslims, issues related to Muslim immigration and even when presenting news regarding counterterrorism measures adopted by the Australian government. However, as demonstrated in this article, the representation of these issues varies extensively across newspapers, with The Australian being a much more biased newspaper than the Sydney Morning Herald.

A Kingdom of Possibility

A Kingdom of Possibility

Australian Newspaper Framing of the 1905 Papua Act

Australian newspapers detailed the progress of the Papua Act (1905) through the early Australian Federal Parliaments. This article explores this reporting in two leading newspapers of the time: Melbourne’s The Age and Sydney’s Sydney Morning Herald. Attention is paid to journalist news framing; these include the Othering of the Papuan nation and the presentation of the nations’ colonialist interest, especially regarding land and liquor. First, drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and then on Teun van Dijk’s analysis of strategies of cognition, it is found that Othering and the presentation of Whiteness were used to champion the Parliament's approach without challenge or dissent.

Syntactic Expressivity in Cultural Reporting: Insights from Australian Media

The article aims to study the usage and influence of expressive syntax within a variety of culture-related articles featured in contemporary Australian digital media. Leveraging textual analysis on online articles sourced from prominent Australian newspapers such as “The Sydney Morning Herald”, “The Alice Springs News”, “Katherine Times”, and “The New Daily”, the research provides insights into the frequency and novelty of expressive syntactic elements employed within. Particularly prevalent techniques, such as parenthetical inclusions, interrogative sentences, elliptical, nominative, and parcelled constructions, are thoroughly examined for their expressive potential. The study offers a comprehensive breakdown of these syntactical elements, highlighting key types, delineating their general attributes, and enumerating the specifics of their implementation within the researched texts. It especially highlights the frequent interaction of various expressive syntax within single sentences, proposing that this phenomenon increases the techniques’ effectiveness. Furthermore, the study explores the amplification of expression through the usage of specific punctuation marks, including quotation marks, dashes, colons, brackets, semicolons, and ellipses, each undergoing a thorough analysis for potential effect. In summarizing the principal outcomes of the research, the study asserts the significant role of expressive syntactic techniques in crafting engaging and impactful cultural articles within modern Australian media.

Transitivity Analysis on The Portrayals of Indonesian Police Image by The Jakarta Post And The Sydney Morning Herald in Ferdy Sambo Case

The image of the police has become a topic of intense public interest, largely due to the extensive media coverage they have received, with the recent case involving Sambo serving as the latest example. The present study looks at how a local media, The Jakarta Post, and an international media, The Sydney Morning Herald, reported the case. The study utilized Critical Discourse Analysis as a research method, with a specific focus on analyzing the transitivity structures of both news articles to find similarities and differences in their depictions of the Indonesia’s Police Force. The result of the analysis showed that both news articles used Material processes considerably yet with a different focus on the participants. The Jakarta Post placed the police as Actor and thus acknowledged its authoritative role in resolving the case. Meanwhile, The Sydney Morning Herald presented the case as Actor and downplayed the presence of the police by employing a frequent usage of passive sentences. It was found through analysis of the Verbal process that both news articles utilized almost equal numbers of statements from related sources. However, The Jakarta Post put the police mainly as Sayer while The Sydney Morning Herald only used one statement from the police in their report.

Going for woke: How The Australian, the Herald Sun and The Sydney Morning Herald adopted the lexicon of ‘wokeism’

The word ‘woke’ emerged from within African American vernacular and then, after a process of pejoration, became popular as a political exonym among conservative adherents of so-called ‘culture war’. The study examines the word’s adoption by three major Australian newspapers (The Australian, Herald Sun and The Sydney Morning Herald). By focusing on the type of journalism in which ‘woke’ appeared, it documents the role of conservative advocacy in popularizing a term that then spread throughout the publications as a whole.

Representing Online Hostility against Women

Representing Online Hostility against Women

What are you doing it for? Realist writing – the riddled boundary that divides fiction and reality

ABSTRACT In this essay, I respond to Australian author Charmian Clift’s question about writing: ‘what are you doing it for?’ (Wheatley 2022, 291). This question is the title of one of Clift’s essays, from a collection of narrative-driven essays, written for the Women’s Pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, after Clift’s return to Australia in 1964. I consider the similarities between realist fiction and writing that (by classification) purports to bear a closer allegiance to the author’s autobiographical life. I understand realist writing to be a representation of living | memory – the complicated and multi-faceted nature of our interior selfhood. This essay reflects my preoccupation with the cartwheels of our inner consciousness as it relates to what-I-write | how-I-write | why-I-write, and how we engage with the work of others, both writers we know in the everyday, and writers we ‘know’ through the page. I consider the act of producing narrative as a sensate response to enigma, a creative response to rumination and (perhaps) an antidote to ongoing rumination – shirking the discussion about autobiography in favour of a discussion about impetus – considering writing as a reflection upon the operations (and inherent conundrums) of an interior consciousness.

Politicized or popularized? News values and news voices in China’s and Australia’s media discourse of climate change

ABSTRACT Despite worsening material realities of the climate, discursive tensions between a need to popularize climate issue and an increasing politicization trend in climate change communication continue to unfold. Politicizing climate change as an ideological conflict may mislead the public to perceive it as essentially a topic about politics rather than science and health. It also creates discursive and real political space for local governments and intergovernmental organizations to defray responsibilities and delay action. To closely examine the ways popularization and politicization are localized, this article focuses how the same issue was discursively constructed as different newsworthy events vis-à-vis news voices of different power status in People’s Daily and Sydney Morning Herald, the most read newspaper in China and Australia respectively. Findings demonstrate that while People’s Daily tends to globalize China’s local climate efforts and polarizes the climate issue as international conflicts between developed and developing countries in general, and between China and the US in particular, Australia’s media tends to localize global climate efforts and represents it as domestic conflicts between the Coalition government and the rest of domestic society. Findings were explained by recourse to different societal functions of news media and changing power dynamics.

Newspaper Leaders as Moral Exhortation: Understanding the Rhetoric of Civil Religion in Colonial Australia

This article argues that the leading article, or leader, of a newspaper played a role in the ‘secular’ society of colonial Australia not unlike that of the sermon in the religious sphere. One of its primary objectives was moral exhortation to encourage Australian colonists to follow a path that would enable the colony to fulfil providence and create an appropriate moral order. Their celebration of the British political order was a form of civil theology that matched the more dogmatic theology to be found in church sermons. This similarity was also assisted by the fact that a significant number of clergy either edited newspapers or wrote for them. This article considers several expressions of this civil theology, and then concentrates on the Rev John West who edited the Sydney Morning Herald and who used his leading articles to castigate his fellow colonists for their failure to live up to the ideals of their British political heritage. He was particularly harsh on the workings of colonial democracy which led him into conflict with another cleric, the Rev John Dunmore Lang.

Planning Queen Elizabeth II’s Visit to Bondi Beach in 1954

Planning Queen Elizabeth II’s Visit to Bondi Beach in 1954

The Clothes Maketh the Cult

The Clothes Maketh the Cult

A News-based Discourse Analysis of China’s Economic Image in Australian Mainstream Media in the Context of COVID-19 —The Case Study of Sydney Morning Herald

A News-based Discourse Analysis of China’s Economic Image in Australian Mainstream Media in the Context of COVID-19 —The Case Study of Sydney Morning Herald

News Values, Older People and Journalistic Practices in Australia and Malaysia

This article builds on a research project examining news values, journalistic practices, and media power in Australia and Malaysia. These two countries differ from each other in socio-cultural, religious, regional, political perspectives, and journalistic practices but share the presence of indigenous people, appreciation for multiculturalism, and increasing numbers of older people. The comparison of journalistic practices – Asian-based development journalism and Western journalism practices – along with other differences, especially socio-cultural values, provides the rationale for the selection of these two countries. The study draws on Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis and Caple and Bednarek’s discursive news values analysis to explore the discursive practices of journalists in providing voices and prioritising different actors in news stories. 99 news articles from 8 mainstream Australian newspapers – The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Advertiser, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail, The Herald Sun, and The Canberra Times – and 5 English-language Malaysian newspapers – New Straits Times, The Malay Mail, The Star, The Borneo Post, and The Sun – published between January 2011 and December 2013 are selected as the dataset in this study. The study finds that reference to elite persons remains a uniform news value in both Australian and Malaysian newspapers, indicating the role of journalists in reflecting and reinforcing the status quo, and the imbalance of power in society. This dominant news value amongst journalists tends to silence those who are not conceived as newsworthy or seen as less newsworthy, such as older people. While the dominance of elites can be linked to social norms in Malaysia that prevent challenges to the social hierarchy and the maintenance of a high regard for people in authority such as political leaders, the discursive practices of Australian journalists do not align with their role to provide a uniform forum for the exchange of ideas, as elderly Australians are given limited opportunities to be active participants.

THE REPRESENTATION OF SOCIAL ACTOR STRATEGIES ENFOLDED IN AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPER

The purposes of this research are to explain how and why Sydney Morning Herald communicates its ideologies in such a way through the social actors represented in news reports. The data collected were analyzed by using Fairclough’s and Van Dijk’s model of Critical Discourse analysis (CDA) and Theo Van Leeuwen’s framework of the representation of social actors. The findings show that the newspaper viewed the Out group social actors which were Indonesian government, Indonesian army and Indonesian military officers and In Group social actors which were Australian, Papuan activists and those who support Papuan conflict, in terms of assimilation, nomination and categorization, functionalization and identification, Impersonalization. These categorizations serve different purposes. Those which are related to the Out groups express a purpose to emphasize their brutality, superiority and dominance towards the indigenous Papuans. However, In Groups social actors were indicated as peace makers. These findings illustrate Australia’s political ideologies and hidden agenda for Indonesia. Australia is liberal country which respects individual freedom; therefore, government must protect and get justice. That is why, it is also became Australia’s responsibility to give aids to Papuans who is seeking better place as stated in the international law. Furthermore, Australia’s attitudes in trying to interference the conflict by providing a place for the Papuan asylum seekers is a picture of how this country is concerned towards Indonesia

THE REPRESENTATION OF SOCIAL ACTOR STRATEGIES ENFOLDED IN AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPER

The purposes of this research are to explain how and why Sydney Morning Herald communicates its ideologies in such a way through the social actors represented in news reports. The data collected were analyzed by using Fairclough’s and Van Dijk’s model of Critical Discourse analysis (CDA) and Theo Van Leeuwen’s framework of the representation of social actors. The findings show that the newspaper viewed the Out group social actors which were Indonesian government, Indonesian army and Indonesian military officers and In Group social actors which were Australian, Papuan activists and those who support Papuan conflict, in terms of assimilation, nomination and categorization, functionalization and identification, Impersonalization. These categorizations serve different purposes. Those which are related to the Out groups express a purpose to emphasize their brutality, superiority and dominance towards the indigenous Papuans. However, In Groups social actors were indicated as peace makers. These findings illustrate Australia’s political ideologies and hidden agenda for Indonesia. Australia is liberal country which respects individual freedom; therefore, government must protect and get justice. That is why, it is also became Australia’s responsibility to give aids to Papuans who is seeking better place as stated in the international law. Furthermore, Australia’s attitudes in trying to interference the conflict by providing a place for the Papuan asylum seekers is a picture of how this country is concerned towards Indonesia

From Australia to Italy and Palestine

From Australia to Italy and Palestine