This article considers the ways in which national and international institutional alliances and professional organizations form the basis of a collaborative approach to the resourcing, production, and distribution of fact-checks through a case study of CoronaCheck, the COVID-19 fact-checking project of Australia’s RMIT ABC Fact Check. In doing so, it builds on a theorization that conceives of journalism as a “community of practice.” Two themes emerge from attention to the conceptual framework, content analysis of CoronaCheck newsletters and interviews with fact-checkers and journalists. The first relates to the nexus between fact-checking communities of practice and the productive and collaborative networks that underpin their operation. The second builds on this to consider the structures, resources, and approaches that facilitate experimentation within the community. Taken together, the findings suggest that understanding the practices of international and inter-institutional collaboration in fact-checking efforts such as CoronaCheck is key to shedding light on how a subcommunity of journalism practice broadens its remit and reorients the concerns of the domain in response to change.
In a moment where public and media discussion in some Western democracies is concerned with labelling particular political parties, movements and ideas as ‘populist’, this article seeks to understand what is signified by the act of labelling. It undertakes an analysis of political and media discussions of populism during and following the 2016 Australian federal election and United States Presidential election. The article first conducts a discourse analysis of print and online news coverage in the two election cycles, analysing who and what is labelled populist in political journalism in these spaces. It then turns to an analysis of why: what is it about the current political moment that inspires the application of this label? The article explores how populism operates as shorthand for the identification of – and often, dismay about – the importation of the discourses, logics and technologies of cultural populism into the realm of ‘serious’ politics. It argues that the label masks a deeper conversation which diagnoses and delegitimises specific politicians and those who support them, as part of a broader project to explain the complexities of the present.
The way political reporters understand their own role in election campaigns is changing, signalling a deeper shift in journalistic self-conception. In traditional discourses of journalistic identity, campaign reporters are positioned as playing a unique democratic role enabling citizens to make informed voting decisions. This article asks, ‘How do campaign reporters understand and construct their own value and that of their work in an increasingly fragmented and crowded news environment?’ It offers new empirical insight through a two-country study that both considers journalist perspectives and situates these within relevant theoretical debates. It analyses interviews with political reporters in the United States and Australia in 2017, guided by two conceptual frameworks that consider the ways journalists actively construct their own identity and authority: interpretive communities and metajournalistic discourse. This allows insight into the way political reporters reconsider the need to cover campaigns from ‘on the bus’ and defend the enduring value of being there.
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