Abstract

In mid-February 2020, the Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced: ‘We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic’ (Ghebreyesus, 2020). A survey conducted by First Draft’s Sydney bureau during the coronavirus restrictions showed only 14.1 percent of Australian journalists said that they have had adequate training and support to deal with mis- and disinformation. Yet journalists were faced with reporting on a proliferation of online narratives including dangerous health messages, misrepresentations of ethnic and Indigenous communities and attempts to fuel anti-Asian racial divides.

Based on a survey, this paper provides a background to the attitudes, experiences and urgent needs for the future as Australian journalists report on mis- and disinformation. Against a backdrop of COVID-19 related business model challenges and in an environment where consumers are engaging with information digitally at historically high levels, the ability of journalists to recognise and counter mis- and disinformation and be supported in their pursuit of non-contaminated information is at its peak requirement.

Abstract

This article makes the case for the liminality of Australia’s COVID-19 epidemic. It acknowledges the distressing loss of life and periods of significant societal disruption and contrasts this with the relative success Australia has had in being free from unrestrained contagion. The liminality of Australia’s COVID-19 experience is particularly discernible in the diversity of affective consequences the pandemic has had. In documenting elements of this liminality, the article reads various ‘citizen writing’ repositories, which it frames as Australia’s emergent COVID-19 archives. These archives – read as texts – exemplify the diverse affective experience Australians have had of COVID-19. It shows how Australians have experienced much grief, anxiety and fear during COVID-19; but at the same time, Australia’s COVID-19 archives reveals other emotions just as consistently: such as solidarity, humour, and care.

Abstract

COVID-19 re-shaped the political landscape across the world but in particularly the United States. While partisanship has long defined US politics, the lack of trust between political protagonists was highlighted throughout 2020, and even shaped everything to do with the virus. It emerged when discussing the way President Trump was handling the crisis as well as just how seriously the threat should be taken. Despite using social media to dismiss concerns of the virus, it was not pandemic-related posts that ultimately led to Trump’s removal from social media but the events at the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021, when throngs of people stormed the Capitol Building subsequent to a public speech by Trump earlier that day decrying perceived election injustices. The fact that Donald Trump’s statements regarding COVID-19 did not draw de-platforming, yet his statements regarding election integrity did, present a new context for consideration of a perennial question of free speech versus censorship: how do we define harm sufficient to justify removing someone’s right to express themselves in that way? If Trump’s behaviour via social media was harmful in both the pandemic context and the context of the capitol riots, why was one harm sufficient to justify his de-platforming while the other was not? Contextualising this question with the contemporary ‘public square’ of social media, we unpack the power of private organisation’s ability to shape the public sphere.

Abstract

For most of 2020, the entire world was subjected to daily breaking news, television forums, health announcements and references to risk about the coronavirus. Australians have been varyingly warned, given instructions, locked down, and unlocked down. Rates of infection, death tolls, social restrictions and vaccines were major topics of conversation with people from all walks of life. The aim of this paper is to identify and explain the main concepts on Twitter surrounding the pandemic during its peak in Australia. Using English language text data surrounding the coronavirus from the Twitter platform, the most popular themes are identified from April to September 2020. Summative content analysis of the data is accomplished using Voyant-tools software for each month. The main conceptual contexts are then discussed and interpreted in terms of the corpus, mainstream news media analysis and relevant scholarly research findings.

Abstract

Misinformation and poor planning resulted in a failed U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. During a national election year, the Trump administration prioritised the strength of the economy over a response that could have potentially saved thousands of lives. The rhetoric of the administration demonised the guidance of World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). This has circumvented the realities of the pandemic, resulting in divisive rhetoric, politicising the use of basic virus protections of masks and social distancing, positioning PPE as a sign of ‘weakness’ promoted by the media and ‘radical left.’ Such rhetoric has resulted in surging numbers of COVID cases and deaths in the U.S.

Musical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020 range from parodies of existing popular tunes with revised words (Mandell, 2020) covering the early months of lockdown with its home schooling, social distancing, hygiene advice, quarantine and restrictions to movement. Artists responded to these restrictions in a variety of ways: online videoed performances; classical dancers at home dancing to classical music (Asprou, 2020); scientists translating the virus into melody (Reuters Staff, 2020); new popular songs (Fekadu, 2020); and new classical music (ABC, 2020). ‘Time’, one song from a set of four Modern Folksong for unaccompanied solo voice, composed in September 2020 during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, fits into the last response category. No live performance has taken place, and the songs are to be posted online, joining these other musical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

The article explores the ways in which the body of the actor in the sports film can be more fully accentuated through a rethinking of the relationship between their sports performance and the other cinematic elements. This focus on the actor’s body will be achieved at the pre-production stage, through a short rehearsal video which represents an alternative form of scripting, known as ‘scripting with the body’ (Maras, 2009). This serves as an accompaniment to my unproduced screenplay, entitled Game, Set and Murder, in the genre of the sports film. The video carefully choreographs the movements of the actor as tennis player, training them to move in accordance with the camera. As a result of this previsualisation method, the actor’s bodily technique is foregrounded, culminating in the cinematic construction of the heightened sports performance and the delineation of the corporeal, tactile and sensory nature of the character. On another level, scripting with the body provides the screenwriter with a more dynamic role in the filmmaking process, facilitating a more corporeal collaboration between screenwriter, actor, cinematographer, and director that could ultimately translate into an embodied, multisensory viewing experience. To this end, such an alternative scripting methodology could also have significance and practical applicability for the wider screenwriting and filmmaking practices in their attempts to make the character readily translatable from the written page onto the screen, thus suggesting new directions for exploring the relationship between words and images.

Abstract

In order to address the challenges of learning and teaching given the seismic changes in news consumption, production and the surfeit of information, this paper explores the trajectories of learning in journalism in two culturally different academic institutions: Xiamen University in China and Western Sydney University in Australia. This comparative research presents the new and innovative ways news and information gathering is taught while instilling good, ethical practice in future journalists and information gatherers. It explores the challenges facing both institutions and countries, in building a good journalism foundation through ethical research, use of authoritative sources, balance, fairness in reporting, writing and presenting news with accuracy and speed while targeting multimedia platforms for maximum reach to target audiences.

Cultivating storytelling abilities in students using scenarios, simulations, real-life situations, lived experiences, situational and mobile learning, is identified as a common approach to nurturing responsive and responsible journalism in both institutions. The paper outlines the methods that work and explores the opportunities as well as challenges these approaches present in understanding journalism and in delivering news while preparing students for the future of work. The first part of the paper overviews journalism development in China and how the craft is taught at Xiamen University. The second part focuses briefly on Australian journalism history and the pressure and challenges the Fourth Estate faces in fulfilling its public interest role. It then outlines methods of engaged learning activities at Western Sydney University. The paper concludes by discussing the common meeting points of learning in a global and changing world where there will be greater need for journalists to present the truth in news through verification and fact-checking – common perennial foundations of the craft.

Framing statement

The following article was commissioned by Medico International, a German help relief and human rights organisation committed to achieve the human right to health globally. Known for its partisan political campaigns and critical public and educational work, Medico has positioned itself at the forefront of public debate about government responses to COVID-19 in Europe. Their interest in Australia’s pandemic response arose in the context of debates that accompanied the publication of a Zero COVID call signed by many prominent intellectuals and activists. The call advocated that European countries, especially Germany, should aim to eliminate the virus by instituting harder lockdowns, including the closure of schools and workplaces. Apparently, participants in the social media debate that followed publication of this call – frequently mentioned Australia and New Zealand as examples of countries that had taken determined action to end the spread of the virus. Medico’s request for an article that discusses the centrality of border closures to Australia and New Zealand COVID strategies was part of an effort to enrich this Zero COVID debate and focus on the complexity of Corona-politics.

In focusing on internal and external border closures, the article does not engage with theme of mediating the pandemic in the sense of examining the role of information and communication technologies in governmental, public or everyday responses to the spread of the virus. However, the piece forms part of a larger body of work that approaches borders not only as devices of exclusion, but also as complex sets of mediating techniques and technologies that filter the passage of people and things. As such, the focus is not only on international borders but on the multiplication of borders both internal and external, geographical and social, that has accompanied processes of globalisation. Part of the purpose of this work is to show that the violence that crystallises at the border is manifest in processes of differential inclusion, as much as in those of exclusion. Hopefully, this aim shines through the article’s attempt to capture the resonances of colonialism and sovereign border control that inflect the experience of living in Australia in the time of COVID-19.

Abstract

Along with a backgrounding summary of certain key events referencing critical media analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic through Sydney 2020/2021, this essay muses on the unanticipated appeal of the NSW Health, Sydney Vaccination Hub, Olympic Park, Homebush, Sydney. Lived experience can change minds, encourage articulation of observation made extensive and shared culturally rather than insight resigned to quiescent, solitary intuition. Valuable lessons can be learnt from our Australian response to the current pandemic crisis. Observing the Olympic site hub in action, its smooth, good-humoured public service efficiency, altruistic organisational skills and the uniquely Australian brilliance of a special multicultural blend of sufficient qualified staff servicing a multicultural diaspora is uplifting, optimistic and positive.

Masks erase expression, arrange disguise, interrupt communication also keep safe, protect and defend throughout the lockdown they litter the crowd. We don’t know when they go, but they will remain symbolic of how they reshaped our lives alone and between each other.

Abstract

COVID-19 demanded a reconsideration of a popular practice: mediated sport viewing.  This article reflects on the history of the relationship between sport and media before turning to the crisis created by the most recent pandemic, in particular the cancellation of live sport events and the denial of entry to co-present spectators.  It examines the role of streamed sports documentaries and the techniques used to simulate crucial physical sport crowd attendance, including the introduction of virtual fans. Such practices, it is noted, invoked the postmodern theory of Jean Baudrillard, as concepts like simulacrum and hyperreality infiltrated the news media. The use of processed crowd sounds deriving from sport video games in live sport broadcasts accelerated the developing linkage between e-sport and physical sport in paradoxical attempts to salvage the mediated experience of the ‘real’.  The article concludes that Covid-19 stimulated an urgent reflection on the relationship between sport, media and cultural citizenship, in particular on capacities for re-setting the course of the relationship between sport fandom, spectatorship and representation. The pandemic, it is argued, had an important bearing on the enduring problematic in mediated sport: who controls the gaze and what are the consequences for the watcher and the watched?

This interview was conducted in October 2020 with the pandemic having moved its first wave and beginning second wave in northern hemisphere. The various codes had moved through a season of disruptions with the AFL Grand Final being played in Brisbane. As indicated in the exchange, this was thought to be unthinkable given the history of the code and its contract with the MCG. This piece reflects both the sense of that historical moment with the impact of the pandemic on sport in Australia and on what David Rowe has called, ‘the media sports cultural complex’.

The effects of the pandemic continue to be felt in sport at all levels. These include periodic lockdowns impeding community sport activity, and rescheduling and relocating major national sport events, such as the first rugby league State of Origin match in 2021 being played in Townsville, North Queensland rather than Melbourne after another COVID-19 outbreak. At the global level, the determination by the International Olympic Committee to hold the pandemic-postponed 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics and Paralympics in July-August 2021 in the face of a fourth COVID wave and widespread local opposition caused considerable controversy. Australia, a nation with some of the world’s strictest inward and outward border controls on grounds of protecting its population from COVID-19, was nonetheless committed to sending a contingent of athletes to a country struggling to contain the virus. As debate about whether the Tokyo Games should be cancelled raged, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics came into view as, perhaps, the first post-pandemic Games, although one that might be subject to diplomatic boycotts on grounds of human rights. The pandemic has also hovered over successive rounds of media sport rights negotiations, as sport organisations with depleted funds seek financial restoration and broadcasters try to repair their COVID-afflicted balance sheets, while new players, especially providers of Over-the-Top (OTT) services, make inroads into mediated sport.

In 2020, former ABC technology reporter Ariel Bogle took a significant look at the misinformation surrounding COVID-19. In a series for Radio National’s ‘Science Friction’, Ariel, along with producers Jane Lee, Carl Smith and show host Natasha Mitchell, developed a three-part series, titled, ‘Click-Sick’. The first episode explored issues of unintentional misleading information on the part of those sharing false ideas about the pandemic. It then looked at the political forces pushing pandemic conspiracy theories and ended with an examination of the wellness industry and the false prophets that sometimes inhabit that space. The following interview took place after Ariel presented her work at a media literacy symposium hosted by Western Sydney University in April 2021.

Abstract

This study examined the sentiment of articles published in The Australian newspaper in its coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. A total of 213 articles published over a span of six weeks (July 25-September 7, 2008) were content analysed. Firstly, the findings showed that Australian media negatively framed the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games with approximately twice as much negative as positive coverage. Secondly, the frequent topic of Australian media coverage related to the Chinese government and these articles too were mostly framed in a negative light. The research hypothesises that this may be due to Australian journalists’ limited knowledge of essential Chinese historical and political issues. However, this study also found that Australian media affirmed the Beijing Olympics’ success via many positive stories about the Beijing Olympic Organisation Committee.