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This chapter examines the changes proposed to the current media ethics and regulation regime in Australia following a government inquiry by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein. The inquiry was prompted by The News of the World phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom, which resulted in that publication being closed down by its publisher, News International, and principal shareholder Rupert Murdoch. While finding no evidence of similar misbehaviour by journalists and proprietors in Australia, Finkelstein recommended the establishment of a statutory News Media Council, and the inclusion of online media outlets in this new regulatory regime. This chapter argues that such a regime is unlikely to come into effect, given that it will be opposed by media proprietors and working journalists alike, as well the Federal Opposition, and the taxpayer funded ABC, and that a government with low levels of political capital is unlikely to risk much of that capital in a fight with the media industries in an election year.

This paper explores how firms within the audience measurement industry, specifically its radio and television markets, have navigated myriad market and nonmarket challenges. The market strategies and the nonmarket forces that constrain those strategies are largely defined by two features: the delineation of its geographic markets by political boundaries and markets that have natural monopoly characteristics. While the pre-monopoly stage or periods of competition may be comparatively short-lived, they are still telling. Monopolists undertake market strategies designed to ensure that they are not supplanted and nonmarket actions geared to avoiding undesirable constraints and reputational damage. Depending on their legal and regulatory environment, customers of the measurement services have used both market and nonmarket actions to mitigate the market power of the audience measurement firms. This paper focuses primarily on the U.S. radio and television audience measurement markets that Arbitron and Nielsen, respectively, have dominated for decades. Non-U.S. markets, which frequently feature America’s foremost firms, illustrate alternatives to America’s largely laissez-faire approach.

Media power plays a role in determining which news is told, who is listened to and how subject matter is treated, resulting in some stories being reported in depth while others remain cursory and opaque. This chapter examines how domestic violence and abuse (DVA) is reported in mainstream and social media encompassing newspapers, television and digital platforms. In the United Kingdom, newspapers have freedom to convey particular views on subjects such as DVA as, unlike radio and television broadcasting, they are not required to be impartial (Reeves, 2015).

The gendered way DVA is represented in the UK media has been a long-standing concern. Previous research into newspaper representations of DVA, including our own (Lloyd & Ramon, 2017), found evidence of victim blaming and sexualising violence against women. This current study assesses whether there is continuity with earlier research regarding how victims of DVA, predominantly women, are portrayed as provoking their own abuse and, in cases of femicide, their characters denigrated by some in the media with impunity (Soothill & Walby, 1991). The chapter examines how certain narratives on DVA are constructed and privileged in sections of the media while others are marginalised or silenced. With the rise in digital media, the chapter analyses the changing patterns of news media consumption in the UK and how social media users are responding to DVA cases reported in the news. Through discourse analysis of language and images, the potential messages projected to media consumers are considered, together with consumer dialogue and interaction articulated via online and social media platforms.

National media have always represented the views of prominent national corporate actors, whether they are governments or business groups. Thus, they present a public agenda that has a built-in point of view. For instance, in Britain the conservative tabloids of Murdoch's empire are generally anti-EU, pro-business, and in favor of free market policies. The columnist “Bagehot” (The Economist, September 11–17, 2010, p. 70) argues that British tabloids enjoy political power in several ways. First, “thanks to weak taboos about privacy, they wield the threat of personal exposure of politicians.” And second, “when they are not humiliating individuals, the tabloids shape political debate by the hammer of repetition. They tempt governments into policymaking by headline – a method that prizes speed, simplicity, and emotional satisfaction over sober analysis of costs and benefits.” The author concludes that years of hostile headlines about the EU have made sensible public debate impossible. The recent scandal enveloping the Murdoch media empire in Britain has exposed the extent of its media power.

Academic literature and news media on young people’s activism predominantly champions young people who align with liberal or progressive values, evident most recently in the youth-led climate strikes around the world. Research is often undertaken by scholars who see their work as advocacy for children and young people, countering deficit-based depictions of politically disengaged or ill-informed youth. Yet, this scholarship rarely includes young people whose forms of political activism align with conservative, right-wing, or even alt-right politics. Such ‘selective advocacy’ reinforces a limited picture of the who and what of young people’s political participation. In this chapter, I explore what it might mean for the field of youth studies to provide a more complex picture of young people’s activism and the necessary discomfort that emerges when the desire to advocate for young research participants conflicts with a researcher’s own political and moral concerns. Through a feminist post-structural frame, I examine media and public discourses surrounding instances of young people’s activism in conservative, right-wing, and alt-right spaces. I present the case of a conservative protest organised by a group of university students and targeting a drag queen hosted children’s story time at a library in Brisbane, Australia. This case highlights the importance of maintaining ‘epistemic uncertainty’ when it comes to the complexity of youth and activism. If we are to provide a fuller picture of youth activism, I argue that it is important not to overlook less ‘comfortable’ forms that do not neatly align with the progressive advocacy that dominates the field of youth studies.

In this chapter, the authors focus on a range of Australian news articles selected for their relevance to key themes in the area of child abuse and examine two high profile cases of child abuse deaths that were extensively reported on by the media and led to system reform. Challenges for media reporting on child abuse in Australia including a changing media landscape, lack of available child abuse data and lack of publicly available serious case reviews are discussed. The authors argue that there is a need for attention to be paid to children's resistance and agency in the context of violence and abuse to counter the objectification of children and uphold their rights. Following Finkelhor (2008), the authors argue that media reporting on child abuse in Australia reflects a general approach to child abuse that is fragmented, with different types of abuse viewed as separate from one another, and call for a more integrated understanding of child abuse. The authors highlight the complexity of media responses to child abuse in Australia, noting that while the social problem of child abuse can be misrepresented by the media, media reporting has also triggered significant systemic reform and advocated for children in cases where other systems failed them.