On February 6th, online blogger Andie Fox posted an article to The Sydney Morning Herald (As a struggling single mother, Centrelink terrorised me over ex-partner’s debt) which detailed her experiences in attempting to resolve a debt claim. Then, on the 26th of February, a columnist for the Canberra Times, Paul Malone, posted an article to The Sydney Morning Herald (Centrelink is an easy target for complaints but there are two sides to every story) which used personal information, released by a Centrelink spokesperson, to dispute the claims made by Fox. This blog post will review and analyze the coverage of the story and discuss the differences in how that coverage was presented across three media sources: The ABC, The Guardian and The Canberra Times.
Andie Fox initially broke the story in the form of a blog post on the 26th (Is this what happens when you criticise government?). The Guardian was then first to break the developing story after the blog post made by Andie Fox, doing so on the 27th of February at 3:26 PM (Centrelink recipient’s data released by department to counter public criticism), which was followed shortly by the ABC publishing their own piece (People who criticise Centrelink’s debt recovery could have personal information released to ‘correct the record’), also posted on the 27th with both the article and an accompanying Facebook post made at 5:11 PM. The following day, The Canberra Times released their own piece (Centrelink ‘smearing’ debt critics, says Labor). That day, both The Guardian and The Canberra Times posted links to their coverage of the matter on their Facebook pages, The Guardian doing so at 3:18 PM and The Canberra Times doing so at 9:29 AM.
In terms of timeliness, while The Guardian was the first to make an online post, the ABC was the first to link their article on Facebook, doing so seemingly at the exact same time as their article appeared on the website, while the story wasn’t linked directly by the ABC News twitter account, links to the news story through other accounts quickly appeared on the same day. The slower reaction by the Canberra Times can be attributed both to their status as a newspaper. One universal factor across the sources was the fact that social media came second in each case. Each outlet needed to publish their story before they could link it via social media, rather than posting or tweeting the story as a news alert.
Each of the three stories took a different angle in approaching the story. The Canberra Times focused more on the political implications of the event, featuring comments from the Labor party in both the headline and in the lead. The story was structured with the comments by the Opposition and the DHS occupying the first two paragraphs before context was placed in the third paragraph. This contrasts with the ABC’s angle, which emphasized the possibility of personal information being released to “correct the record” in the headline with a similar approach taken in the lead. The next two paragraphs of the article recount the event before moving into comments from sources afterwards. The Guardian’s focus is slightly different to the ABC’s, structuring the recount of events as the priority, before moving to political and departmental comments afterwards, alongside a brief consideration of the legal side.
While the general story presents four of the six news values noted by Lamble (2013), each story emphasizes different values. The story carries a similar level of significance across all three articles, as a significant proportion of Australians make use of Centrelink services. Conflict is universally present also, but expressed differently across each story, The Canberra Times concentrates on the political conflict, which was also emphasised in the headline to the accompanying social media post. The Guardian introduces the idea of a conflict with the law through its reference to legislation and through raising the question of legality, though they also include the political conflict in their social media headline. The ABC drew more attention to the conflict between Fox and the government, spending five paragraphs on Fox’s response to the release. Human interest is also somewhat present in each story. The Guardian was the only media source to link to Andie Fox’s blog, where she originally raised the privacy question. Proximity is also present, but only in the broad fashion of it taking place in Australia to a welfare recipient being noted at this point.
Both Facebook links took vastly different approaches in the comprehensiveness of their leading lines. The Canberra Times only provided part of Centrelink’s response, perhaps to try and use curiosity to draw in attention. The Guardian provides a line of context about the controversy before using a quote from the article which helps to sell the seriousness to the reader, they also use the hashtag as a means of linking their article to the wider debate about Centrelink. Each of the news articles fulfil the “five Ws and one H” (What? When? Why? Who? Where? How?). The Canberra Times is the least comprehensive, being both the shortest and drawing from the least sources. The ABC used two links and seven sources of information. The Guardian’s article features five links and five sources. The Guardian’s was the only article that noted the case as having not originating from the automatic debt recovery system.
The fairness and balance of the reporting is generally good across the board, with only a few caveats worthy of note. The ABC draws comment from two Greens Party sources, different from the single comment taken from the DHS and the Labor party. The Canberra Times story seems to try and de-emphasise any role of Fairfax in the controversy, offering only a single paragraph of context in the story. The Guardian lacks the comments made by the Labor party, although this could be a side effect of The Guardian being the first to report on the story.
This case demonstrates the different approaches that can be taken when reporting on a single story, each media source balanced the news values differently to produce a different angle. The role of social media is somewhat muted, seeing as the posts were used to link to the articles, rather than as individual news alerts. Nonetheless, social media still proves an important method of disseminating the news. Dunlop (2016) makes a note of the move away from social media as a personal platform, to the release of more general news content. This consumption of news via social media is made similarly notable in the University of Canberra’s Digital News Report (Watkins et al. 2016) where it’s found that social media was one of the most popular sources of news in the week prior to the report’s survey, sitting at 52.2% popularity. Each story presented was significantly influenced by it’s angle, informing how they prioritised their information and how they presented it to the Australian audience.
Word Count: 1,153
Word Count (Without Links): 1,087
References
Jerry Watkins, Sora Park, R. Warwick Blood, Megan Deas, Michelle Dunne Breen, Caroline Fisher, Glen Fuller, Jee Young Lee, Franco Papandrea, Matthew Ricketson, 2016, Digital news report: Australia 2016, University of Canberra, News and Media Research Centre (UC), <http://dx.doi.org/10.4225/50/5754F7090A5C5>.
Lamble, S. (2016). News as it Happens. Melbourne: OUPANZ.
Dunlop, T. (2016). Success, Trends and Influence of Social Media in Mainstream Media. In H. Sykes & A. Dodd, Media Innovation and Disruption (1st ed.). Future Leaders.
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