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This paper explores the 'media mentalities' about teachers and their work in the Australian print media. The notion of media mentalities draws on the theoretical concepts of discourse, mentalities, and mediatisation. This refers to the constructed realities and forms of thought in media coverage that circulate particular accounts. These are linked to institutional and journalistic practices in media that are governed by media logics. Drawing on newspaper text and interviews with journalists, the following practices are addressed: agendisation and accountabilisation which are both institutional practices; and the journalistic practices of factualisation, emphasisation, and sensationalisation -- all of which operate globally, to some degree, across and within media institutions and media practitioners, and produce the news about teacher's work within the framework of these practices.

Increasingly mediatised policy processes influence practice in schools as education becomes a site of parental anxiety and choice exacerbated by standardised national assessment and ranking of schools in the media. This paper analyses the responses to media scrutiny of six principals whose schools' national test results were reported in the Australian press following the release of the federal Labour Government's MySchool website in 2010. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of social fields, the concept of cross-field effects, and associated research on mediatisation, the evidence suggests that the relationships between the press, education policy and schools are highly contested, and that principals have some agency in talking back regarding their school's reported 'performance'.

The main argument presented in this paper is that the mediatisation of education should be viewed as forms of practice linked to specific practice effects. Drawing on Bourdieu's conceptualisation of practice--as elements of practice, practice games and field effects--the paper argues that viewing mediatisation as practice provides a set of methodological starting points for research involving media interactions with education. Taking the mediatisation of education policy as an empirical case for the argument, the contribution of the paper is to raise questions about how the term is utilised in educational research and to suggest that the practice is more open and complex than some accounts suggest. A secondary argument presented in this paper is that Bourdieu's account of practice provides resources suitable to developing research on mediatisation as an addition to social field theorising of processes. (Contains 1 table and 4 notes.)

Notes suburban Australian newspapers have traditionally relied on a junior workforce, which means they have a significant influence in training cadets and shaping the journalists of the future. Suggests lack of staff and resources mean that the loftier ideals of journalism often give way to more practical issues. Discusses the challenges facing suburban journalists and trainers in this environment. (RS)

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a central policy of the Chinese government. This paper analyses the evolution of BRI narratives from 2013 to 2020 in Australian newspaper journalism. In the field of media and communications, there has been a lack of analysis regarding the BRI narratives in Australia. By employing frame analysis, this paper fills in the gap to record the evolution of the BRI narratives in Australian journalism. This paper selects six representative journalists' works from four Australian mainstream newspapers: The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), The Age, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review (AFR). It shows how the BRI has been gradually politicized and the BRI narratives in Australian journalism shifted in tone from mostly positive to highly critical. More concretely, this paper elucidates that from 2013 to 2020, the BRI has been gradually related to allying with like-minded countries to stand up against China, human rights violations of the Chinese government in Xinjiang and Tibet, Australia's sovereignty, Australia's global order choice between China-led authoritarianism and liberal democracy, and the debt trap strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Australia's only national general newspaper, with an elite 'political class' audience, The Australian has been at the forefront of newspaper proprietors' attempts to influence media policy. This article analyses The Australian's reporting of two key media policy proposals affecting newspapers: the establishment of the Australian Press Council in 1975-76 and the Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation (the Finkelstein inquiry) in 2012-13. While the events were 36 years apart, the paper's stance and rhetoric were remarkably similar. However, its approach to journalism and to providing information to its audience changed in several important respects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lack of an objective, universal measure of newspaper quality has led researchers to apply a wide range of criteria suited to their particular needs. But one commonly accepted starting point is that adequate editorial staff levels are a necessary though not necessarily sufficient condition to ensure newspaper quality. A basic industry guide of one editorial staff member for each 1000 circulation does not allow for the distortions imposed by economies of scale. This article adapts the 1:1000 model to produce a newspaper quality index which can be applied both comparatively and longitudinally, and tests it on Australia's metropolitan newspapers. The article concludes by arguing that such an objective indicator of newspaper quality is vital because of the economic and other forces in the community that militate against quality journalism, and the ramifications this has for all of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines key aspects of the Australian public's response to swine flu through an analysis of interviews and focus groups with people deemed “at risk” by medical authorities. The wider context for the study is provided by risk theory, research on public responses to emerging infectious diseases (EID) and the concept of biocommunicability. We focus on reflexivity in engaging with media, views on the government's response, and vigilance and behaviour change. EID fatigue, a predisposition toward distrusting the media, personal circumstances and location within particular social networks, shaped responses to news reporting of swine flu. People did not link swine flu to already stigmatised groups because they identified it as “resident” in the community. The continuing dependency of lay publics upon governments and expert systems may help to explain the lack of criticism directed at more traditionally powerful groups. Distancing took a variety of forms. While newspapers emphasised the “novel” and “deadly” swine flu narrative, audiences readily described it as just another flu and were unconcerned about contracting it. However, some imagined that others were more vulnerable to the effects of media reporting. Some reported searching the internet for information, which may explain the differences between how they saw it and how it was reported. Also influential was the fact that their lived experiences did not bear out the novelty or seriousness of swine flu. Our discussion is informed by our concurrent analyses of media coverage and interviews with EID experts and journalists involved in the reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The power of the print media lies not simply in its capacity to attack opponents, but in its unwillingness to grant timely or sufficient right of reply in its Op-Ed pages. Perhaps the greater regulation advocated by Finkelstein would begin to change this. Amid all the restructuring and the rivalry, the opportunity for a more comprehensive review of journalistic regulation, broached by Finkelstein, may well slip away in the cross currents of the Convergence Review, the prospect of new media mergers and acquisitions, precarious federal parliamentary politics, and the turmoil of the broadsheets themselves. Yet it is a debate that we have to have; like our protracted debt crisis, it cannot be postponed indefinitely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coal industry is a high-profile and significant sector of the Australian economy that is coming under increasing criticism as a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper offers a Bourdieusian field analysis of major Australian newspaper coverage of the coal industry in relation to economic, political and environmental issues. Theoretically, it extends Bourdieu's field model to embrace the issue of visibility and invisibility of agents and their positions in the field, using the work of Goffman, Giddens and Ericson. Empirically it finds that both journalists and their sources actively engage with factors of invisibility and visibility in contesting the representation of coal industry interests in media coverage. Overall there is a common journalistic endorsement and visibility across all newspapers of the national and regional economic benefits of the coal mining and power generation industries, but marked differences among individual newspapers in how they position themselves and their sources with respect to climate change impacts and issues. A key factor in the contestation over the journalistic coverage is the production of visibility and invisibility for specific information and activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is facing many of the same trends in journalism that are occurring in other countries with mature media industries including declining numbers of journalists, fragmenting audiences, a loss of advertising revenue for media organisations and other challenges to their traditional business models including shifting patterns of news consumption, new competitors for old media and new technologies that demand more time from audiences. However, Australia is also in a unique position. It has a small population and unusually concentrated media ownership; recent newspaper circulation declines have not been as large as in the United States or United Kingdom; and Australia's major media organisations have “colonised the Web” to a larger degree than in many other countries. This has led to suggestions that Australian journalism will be immune from many of the most damaging international trends. Yet other evidence suggests Australia is already in the midst of an economic and professional crisis in newspaper journalism and that this is even more advanced than in other countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. This paper tests these competing propositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examined a database of Australian daily news- papers on the terms cochlear implant and deaf children to investigate how journalists and columnists report competing models of deafness: as either "medical" (deafness is a condition to be cured) or "sociocultural" (deafness provides a way of life to be lived). The results from the cochlear implant search favored a medical model, but the results from the deaf children search were more balanced, with a slight preponderance of articles favoring the sociocultural model. A number of representative quotes from articles in each model are provided and discussion entered into as to the possible effects of the articles on public reactions to deafness and especially hearing parental responses to the birth of a deaf child and the life choices that this event presents them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral panic has become a popular concept to explain a media frenzy that has provoked public alarm. A largely unexplored area of panic has been the exceptional allegations of pro-Nazi secret agents in Australia during World War II. Moral panics have often been viewed as the outcome of the media acting as a single entity to generate wild reporting and mass hysteria. This article proposes a refinement of the concept by showing that the press published varied reporting about a government crackdown on so-called fascist spies. The article focuses on the British accused spy and self-proclaimed journalist, Adela Pankhurst, and John Curtin, a hard-hitting labour reporter who became Australia's wartime prime minister. Rival newspapers provided stylised expressions of civility and outrage about the sensational crackdown. The news of a battle against powerful traitors also shaped popular views of Curtin's leadership and Australia's need to uphold a democratic British identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of women in the newspaper industry. While discussing the status of women at the top level of newspapers in Australia, the author mentions that very few women can be found at the editorial and management meetings. The nation has a single major metropolitan newspaper which is edited by a women. This shows that newspaper culture is quite hostile to women. The culture accepts male hegemony as natural and normal. But, now the scenario is changing women are creating their own newspapers and it is building pressure on newspaper culture as they are making their demand on the system.

The intersections between journalism and democracy are explored in this paper through an analysis of the `voices' through which the news is `told' by specific segments of the Australian print media. We argue that evidence of the extent to which a newspaper fulfils its roles to democracy and society is partially found in the range of sources quoted in the news stories it publishes, and in the prominence and dominance it gives to various types of sources in those stories. Our goal was to quantify the validity of the widely held assumption that, in Australia, regional newspapers are closer than metropolitan newspapers to their readers. This suggestion guided our content analysis of the types of news story sources quoted or paraphrased in the general news published in four regional newspapers and one metropolitan newspaper in one Australian state. The assumption of closeness to readers for Australian regional newspapers did not hold up well in this test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognising the importance of who gets to speak in constructing knowledges about Indigenous peoples, this article examines power relations regarding mainstream news coverage of the Indigenous policy of Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) in Australia. Integrating content and discourse analysis of newspaper and television stories over a 3-year timeframe with interviews with journalists, this article found media coverage of the NTER, commonly known as the Intervention, followed a pattern of decline, with occasional peaks around events that were newsworthy through the lens of conventional news values. Further, analysis of three key discourse moments found ‘official’ discourses, particularly by the government, overpowered those of Indigenous peoples living under the policy. This article demonstrates how particular journalistic practices – news values, ideas of audiences, and use of sources – together with resource limitations and discursive practices of government provided dominant discursive power on the Intervention to government representatives. The article concludes that daily routines of news media and discursive practices of media savvy social actors perceived as ‘official’ or ‘expert’ by media professionals form a ‘vicious cycle’ of two-way dependence which is hard to break for potential sources with less official status, such as representatives of various Indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies two major forces driving change in media policy worldwide: media convergence and renewed concerns about media ethics, with the latter seen in the UK Leveson Inquiry. It focuses on two major public inquiries in Australia during 2011-2012 - the Independent Media Inquiry (Finkelstein Review) and the Convergence Review - and the issues raised about future regulation of journalism and news standards. Drawing upon perspectives from media theory, it observes the strong influence of social responsibility theories of the media in the Finkelstein Review and the adverse reaction these received from those arguing from Fourth Estate/free press perspectives, which were also consistent with the long-standing opposition of Australian newspaper proprietors to government regulation. It also discusses the approaches taken in the Convergence Review to regulating for news standards, in the light of the complexities arising from media convergence. The article concludes with consideration of the fast-changing environment in which such proposals to transform media regulation are being considered, including the crisis of news media organization business models, as seen in Australia with major layoffs of journalists from the leading print media publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case study of editorial content in an ongoing 'war of words' between two Australian publications - independent daily email news source Crikey and the Murdoch-owned broadsheet newspaper The Australian - in order to demonstrate one of the struggles over professional status in the changing Australian media environment. This negotiation over professional status exemplifies the way in which rhetorics of professionalism are used to gain authority over the particular jurisdiction of journalism. Considering this example in relation to dominant discussions of journalistic professionalism, this article demonstrates the limitations of the ways in which many of these discussions are framed, and works to place professionalism within a framework that positions journalism as a cultural technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]