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Jan 13, 2025 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding
News Corp's political influence is strong enough to sway public opinion and urgently needs scrutiny, particularly in an election year, writes Dr Victoria Fielding. THE IDEA that News Corp is “biased” towards Right-wing politicians, ideas and values is so well known that it has been normalised in Australian discourse. This political and academic orthodoxy has led to a lack of analysis of what this “bias” means for Australian democracy and, indeed, whether bias is all there is to be concerned about.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding
News Corp's unethical support for the fossil fuel industry is propaganda dressed as news and requires some kind of regulation, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
LAST WEEK, News Corp’s newspapers The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier Mail and The Adelaide Advertiser caused controversy by publishing front page “exclusives” and “special reports” alleging that more gas is needed to avoid electricity blackouts in the future.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding
Evangelicals and Christian nationalists played a large role in the re-election of Donald Trump, with equality and the economy taking a backseat to the church, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
U.S. SENATOR Bernie Sanders is wrong when he says the Democrats lost because they do not know how to speak to the working class. The actual reason is far more complex than that.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding
The failure of the media to hold Donald Trump to account for his actions and words helped convince the voting public to re-elect him as President, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
THE RE-ELECTION of Donald Trump – an abomination of a human being – has sent shockwaves around the world. It seems difficult to accept how this could happen. But it’s worth taking stock of exactly how this outcome came about because it was not an aberration.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding
Donald Trump is given unquestioned legitimacy because of his status and privilege — but Kamala Harris must do everything perfectly in order to be deemed legitmate, writes Dr Victoria Fielding. THROUGHOUT THE U.S. ELECTION CAMPAIGN, it has been endlessly frustrating to watch mainstream news outlets give Donald Trump a free pass, while holding Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party to a much higher standard.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding
There is a persistent trope in mainstream media analysis of Donald Trump supporters that distorts reality, legitimises the illegitimate Trump and hides the hateful core of the MAGA movement. By carefully tiptoeing past the MAGA racist and sexist core, such coverage is inherently racist and sexist because it implies that White, male voters matter, and non-White, female voters do not. This trope was established in 2016 in response to Trump’s narrow election victory and has been used ever since.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding
The mainstream media's habit of giving false equivalency to the Left and the Right needs to end as the contrasts between the two are stark, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
NEWS REPORTS about the first and likely only U.S. election debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump regularly fell into lazy false equivalency, both-siding the candidates by calling the debate ‘chaotic’, ‘combative’ and ‘heated’.
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding |Greg Sheridan
If journalists are not going to accurately mediate politics for their audiences, what is the point of journalism?
This question is particularly pertinent when it comes to live-streamed events like the U.S. election debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Why do we need journalists to tell us what happened, when we can watch for ourselves and their analysis often defies what we can see with our own eyes?
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding
Social media content creators are offering political commentary that is more trustworthy than some of the major news outlets, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
DURING THE Democratic National Convention (DNC), there was much discussion from U.S. and Australian journalists about the Democratic Party’s decision to give over space and access that journalists once monopolised to 200 high-profile content creators.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
independentaustralia.net | Victoria Fielding
The failure of mainstream journalists and news organisations to hold the powerful to account hinders a functioning democracy, writes Dr Victoria Fielding. THROUGHOUT THE PAST 20 years of digital disruption, news media has lost its monopolistic claim over the production of news. Web technology and then social media enabled “news” content – a mix of information and entertainment – to be produced by anyone with an internet connection.
