School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemPolicy news in the digital age: an examination of Australian election reporting( 2018)This thesis examines news coverage of policy issues in Australian federal election campaigns from 2001 to 2013. Focusing on three policy domains (health, education and taxation), it evaluates news coverage primarily through a quantitative content analysis of four key elements: media attention to policy issues, the amount of policy information provided, the sources quoted, and the frames and narratives adopted in these reports. In doing so, this study examines 1270 newspaper articles, 128 television news stories and 86 online news reports. Additionally, it analyses how media coverage intersects with political communication through a quantitative content analysis and qualitative language analysis of 10 campaign launch speeches. This study provides an original contribution by bridging a major gap in the Australian scholarship. It investigates news coverage of policy issues and campaign launch speeches over a period of immense technological, political and economic change in Australian political communication. Australia’s traditional print and broadcast media organisations are facing significant threats to their businesses models in the twenty-first century. A clear tension exists for Australia’s news organisations as they attempt to balance their commercial challenges with their democratic obligations to inform the public sphere. To examine this empirical problem, this thesis addressed the following question: What, if anything, has happened to traditional news media reporting of policy issues during Australian federal elections in the twenty-first century (2001-2013)? This study finds an overall decline in the quality of policy reporting provided by the press during election campaigns in the twenty-first century. The evidence suggests that policy reporting provided in later election cycles was limited in its capacity to facilitate a contest of diverse ideas and inform voters about policy matters. News coverage in later campaigns contained less policy information, adopted more game and strategic frames, and quoted fewer sources than earlier election cycles. However, this decline in the quality of policy reporting cannot be blamed entirely on Australian journalists. This study concludes that a combination of factors including financial pressures experienced by media outlets and changes in political campaigning adversely impacted on policy reporting in the 2000s.
-
ItemRepresentations of gender in the Indonesian media: a case study of the coverage of Megawati Sukarnoputri's presidential campaigns in 1999, 2004 and 2009 elections( 2015)This thesis examines the representation of gender in the Indonesian media with a case study of Megawati Sukarnoputri’s presidential candidacies. The objective of this study is to demonstrate how media representations of a female presidential candidate were shaped by different contextual variables, in particular different newspapers’ policies, different electoral systems, and different political positions. It analyses the coverage of Megawati’s presidential bids in three different national newspapers namely Kompas, Jawa Pos and Republika, in the 1999, 2004 and 2009 elections. Applying the critical discourse analysis developed by Norman Fairclough and Teuw Van Dijk, this study examines the coverage of Megawati’s presidential bids in the three newspapers and its link to sets of social, cultural and religious values as well as the newspapers’ political and economic interests. Drawing on extensive analyses of news articles selected from the three national newspapers and in-depth interviews with the chief editors, political reporters, women’s activists and Megawati’s campaign team, this thesis argues that the continuous pattern of stereotypical narratives of femininity when reporting on female political leadership was evident in the three post-Suharto elections. It also argues that femininity attracted more media attention than that of the masculinity in the political arena because Megawati as a female presidential candidate was considered as a novelty. This thesis concludes that the political euphoria and the liberalisation of press in post-authoritarian Indonesia opened up new opportunities for the Indonesian media to discuss women’s political participation. Furthermore, the thesis suggests that the Indonesian media freely exacerbated the polemics about Megawati’s presidential bids in the three elections, resulting in heightened gendered reporting and that the media tended to treat gender and politics as saleable news commodities. The thesis concludes that the newly found media freedom brought novel forms of stereotyping that might influence people’s perception about female political leadership.