Pandemic media narratives
23 March 2022
Timezones
8pm to 9:30pm, Melbourne, Australia
11am to 12:30pm, Johannesburg, South Africa
9am to 10:30am, London, England
The zoomlink will be sent prior to the event.
From suppression to ‘Living with COVID’: The narrative turn
Monique Lewis, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University
Video: https://youtu.be/ZZw5GNZ8rks
Media narratives that evolve and proliferate during pandemics can be very powerful at a number of levels: they can influence our health beliefs and behaviours, they can engender or dismantle trust, summon a sense of solidarity or fragmentation, and they can legitimise and delegitimise pandemic responses. They can have a highly political function, activated and articulated in government public communications. This presentation will explore COVID narratives and frames that played out in Australia during government press conferences, which became highly mediatised ritual events that not only captured the attention of journalists, but of citizens as well. Of particular interest in this study is how the narrative from the Australian Prime Minister’s press conferences throughout 2021 gradually shifted from ideals of suppression and ‘zero COVID’ in the community to ‘living with COVID’ (or what some critics labelled #letitrip). Based on a research project with my colleagues at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, in this presentation I will identify and unravel some key moments in the press conference discourse that signalled this narrative turn, the main actors involved, the processes that led to the embracing (and resistance) of the new ‘living with COVID’ narrative, and the consequences of this new narrative.
Bio: Monique is a communication and sociology scholar at Griffith University, with a particular interest in exploring the framing of health news. Her research has focused on news media representations of COVID-19, medicinal cannabis, complementary medicine, and public health campaigns, and she is co-editor of 'Communicating COVID-19: Interdisciplinary Perspectives' (Palgrave).
Mainstreaming Melbourne: How media violence cultivated covid in Australia.
Andy Ruddock, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University
Video: https://youtu.be/sdwjI4j3JNM
In September 2021, violent protests against Victorian Covid restrictions and a social media entrepreneur called Avi Yemini turned Australia’s pandemic crisis into a media branding exercise. This transition represented ‘digital mainstreaming’. Cultivation analysis developed the mainstreaming concept to explain the political effects of TV violence. According to this concept, screen violence narrows the parameters of public discourse and normalises right of centre dispositions. TV coverage of Melburnian street violence exemplified this effect by placing an alt-right media personality in the middle of a battle between the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Sky News Australia over the future of national TV journalism. By examining the Yemini case study, this paper argues that mainstreaming connects histories of politicised mob violence with theories of convergence and mediatisation. A revised mainstreaming concept explains how battles for votes and viewers annexed Australia’s Covid crisis.
Bio: Andy's work focusses on new ways to conceive how media make social reality. Andy is author of Exploring Media Research (2017), Youth and Media (2013) Investigating Audiences (2007) and Understanding Audiences (2001). His new book, Digital Influence, explores the histories of phenomena such as representations of gender in film and reality TV, violence in political memes, the mainstreaming of populism, gun-control activism and public criticisms of media education.