Justine Lloyd
Macquarie University New Staff Grant 2010

This project aims to consolidate research on media and listening. I propose to conduct a series of focus groups that will provide participants with an opportunity to rewrite current news stories. Participants will be selected from community media projects in Sydney. This project seeks to develop an analysis of the role of mediated listening and to uncover the ways in which media forms and individual moments of reception are linked to wider social conflicts and collective beliefs. This approach follows on from a recent body of research on ‘framing’ as a key category of media analysis. This burgeoning tradition focuses on how powerful tropes permeate media coverage and shape reception in often unconscious and invisible ways. It brings together critical media studies exemplified by the work of the Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG) and the cognitive linguistic analysis of Lakoff (1980, 2002), both of which have significantly developed the microsociological and communicative action framework of Goffman in relation to media (1974).

As part of its ongoing research into media structures and audience beliefs, the GUMG’s ‘News Game’ has been used to examine the relationship between media influence in a more nuanced and complex manner, specifically in a way which captures “what people already ‘knew’ [about ‘public knowledge issues’] and to show the process by which they had arrived at their own beliefs” (Philo 1993: 258).

This data will provide a better understanding of listening dynamics along a spectrum of sites and engagements, which range from highly routinised to unpremeditated moments of media reception, and which are difficult to access as a research problem even in a traditional ethnographic manner (Downing & Husband 2005; Husband 1996, 2008).

News Game focus group flyer May [pdf]