ANALYSING NEWS POLARISATION: FROM PRODUCTION TO ENGAGEMENT AND BEYOND
Authors: Bruns Axel , Esau Katharina , Vodden Laura , Riedlinger Michelle , Vilkins Samantha , Lefevre Laura , Lubicz-Zaorski Carly , Srinivas Arjun , Obeid Abdul , Meese James , Angus Daniel , Graham, Timothy , Burgess Jean , Münch Felix , Gaisbauer Felix , Pournaki Armin , Ohme Jakob , Watt Ned , Montaña-Niño Silvia 
Published: February 2025

Political polarisation – at the level of individual issues or broader ideologies, and expressed through differences of opinion on policies, divergent affective attachments, contrary interpretations of available information, or distinct patterns of interaction with other partisans – is necessarily always closely related to the information that individuals and groups engage with as they form and reinforce their own opinions about a given issue or topic, and contest the views of others. News in all its forms, from legacy to emerging, and mainstream to fringe media, continues to play a particularly important role in such information diets, but news coverage can itself be polarised and polarising.

This panel addresses polarisation in and by the news through a series of papers that examine the various stages of the news production and engagement process. Drawing on innovative methods and novel datasets, these five papers offer new perspectives on the patterns and dynamics that affect news quality, news distribution, news engagement, and news fact-checking in digital and social media environments. In combination, they offer a new and comprehensive overview of how we might further investigate news polarisation in contemporary contexts.

Paper 1 assesses polarisation in news coverage. Centred on the issue of climate change, it investigates patterns of news coverage across the media landscape in Australia – a country which has been particularly severely affected by extreme climate events in recent years. The paper highlights the challenges in accessing full-text news content at scale, and utilises a novel combination of manual and computational content coding techniques to investigate the patterns of news polarisation across four dimensions.

Paper 2 investigates what sources of news are frequently recommended to users of prominent search engine Google News. Drawing on a long-term data donation project in Australia, the paper reviews the range of sources recommended for a variety of political and controversial search queries, and assesses the breadth of the political spectrum that these prominent recommendations represent. It also examines whether such patterns differ across individual queries or broader topic categories.

Paper 3 shifts our attention to the sharing of news content on social media platforms. Drawing on long-term, large-scale datasets from Facebook and Twitter, it analyses the sharing of links to Australian news sources during 2022, and thereby reveals patterns of interactional and interpretive polarisation. These may be related to the political alignment of users and outlets, but also to news quality and other factors.

Paper 4 takes a network approach to the study of news sharing on Twitter in Germany. Assessing the topical content of links to German news shared during one month in 2023, and the political affinities of the users sharing these links, the study finds marked differences between the sharing practices and patterns of left-leaning, conservative, and far-right users, as well as between sharing practices on different topics.

Finally, Paper 5 closes the loop by examining the role perceptions of political fact-checkers, and their potential to contribute polarisation or depolarisation. Drawing on a series of interviews with staff in Australian fact-checking organisations, it provides a deep insight into their self-understanding, especially with respect to the extent and limitations of their impact on polarised debates in society.

In combination, then, these five papers address questions of news polarisation throughout the stages of the journalistic process from news production to distribution and engagement all the way to the critical scrutiny of political statements reported in the news. Overall, they make substantial new conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions to the study of news polarisation. Extended abstracts for all five papers are included in the submission.