6. Content Analysis
Themes
In each iteration of The State of the News Print Media in Australia, the Council has commissioned research that analyses the content of the Australian print media. In the 2006 Report, researchers at two universities analyses the content of, and number of sources for, articles in the first five pages of Australian newspapers. This answered important questions about the sort of material that was covered in metropolitan, regional and country newspaper. In the 2007 Supplement, there were detailed analyses of the coverage of two state elections, seeking to answer the often–raised question of whether such coverage is biased. Each analysis reached the same conclusion: no political bias could be found.
In this report there is a different sort of analysis: how do quality newspapers cover an issue of major national importance that runs over several weeks of coverage? Jacqui Ewart and Julie Posetti of Griffith University have analysed the coverage of the arrest and putative charging of the Indian–born doctor Mohamed Haneef, who was accused of complicity in terror attacks in London and Glasgow, before the case against him collapsed and he was released. Using the coverage in a national and a metropolitan daily, the researchers analyse the way in which themes were explored in the coverage and how headlines, in particular, framed the story.
Their choice of a national daily and the Sydney–based metropolitan is interesting. You would expect a greater interest in a Queensland–based story in that state's main daily, but not perhaps in the Sydney daily. Because a greater proportion of its readers would live near where the events were occurring, The Australian had a greater impetus to keep digging into the story. Its use of good investigative journalism, led by Hedley Thomas, exemplified a simple fact about the contemporary media: only newspapers now allocate the resources, and have access to the resources, to carry through the in–depth investigative journalism needed to get at the nub of such a complex yarn, and provide a sensible analysis of it.
The Haneef story was one where the newspaper reporting changed from initial reliance on official sources, often ‘on background’ and unattributable, to journalists using a variety of other sources, including material supplied by representatives of Dr Haneef, and their own investigations. The press's handling of the story is interesting in the way that the tone changed from one that started by concentrating on the dangers of terrorism to one that raised significant questions of fairness before the law and the nature of the society in which we live.
A second, briefer, analysis by Antonio Castillo explores how international events are covered in Australian newspapers, and the extent to which the concentration on events in an Anglophone country was at the expense of stories from other cultures. The writer notes the emphasis on news of the American election to the detriment, in his eyes, of news of major natural disasters in Asia and elsewhere in the Third World. Readers are likely to have different takes on this analysis: given the importance and timing of the American election to Australia, and the array of precedent–breaking candidates, including an African–American and a woman in a fight for pre–selection, a different set of news values applied at the time than might have applied in a year when such a transformative event as the 2008 Presidential election was not dominating the news. Nevertheless the analysis does illustrate how different newspapers assess what is newsworthy for their readers at a particular time.