Analysing Australian news media reporting about the role of digital technologies in children’s lives
A Digital Child Working Paper from our ‘Discussion’ series
Children’s relationship with media technologies has long been an area of significant news interest. News coverage in this area is often perceived as focusing on negative elements, perhaps even constituting a ‘media panic’ (Buckingham & Strandgaard Jensen, 2012). The ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child is and always has been, sensitive to the perceived or assumed orientation of media to the value and impact of digital media during childhood. Many researchers perhaps feel as though Australian news media is more often than not negative about children’s use of digital technologies, yet it is difficult to point to evidence of such trends.
This paper thus attempts to assess prominent Australian news media’s portrayal of children and digital technologies. It does so by specifically by assessing articles from mainstream print newspapers [1], particularly their headlines. As such, this working paper itself acts as a ‘headline’ of the topic, identifying high level trends that future research could investigate.
This working paper asks: what is the tone and subject of Australian media coverage of issues relating to children and digital technologies? To address this question, we first provide an explanation of the concept of ‘news values’ and its role in our analysis. We then outline our methods, which involved collecting and analysing articles published in 14 Australian newspapers between 2000 and 2022. This is followed by our findings which indicate an overall tendency toward negative reporting, with an increase in negativity over recent years.
Volume/Number: 2024-03
Date published: 21 August 2024
Series type: Discussion
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26187/xc49-e574
Suggested citation: Duffy, G., Fordyce, R., & Mannell, K. 2024 Digital Child Working Paper 2024-03, Analysing Australian news media reporting about the role of digital technologies in children’s lives. ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, Brisbane, Australia.