1. Footnote

1.1 A study doing what I plan(ned?) to do

I read a paper that on its face seemed to be accomplishing exactly what I was hoping to achieve in my PhD: a study of environmental water coverage across the Murray-Darling Basin. Kosovac et al. 2024 is a content analysis using framing theory of print newspaper articles from 2001-2021, assessing the quantity of coverage, primary actors in that coverage, how environmental water is framed by those actors, and the sentiment. Similar to work that I did at the Centre for Media Transition in my time at UTS, they found that irrigators and their representative groups, the government and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority were the primary actors in coverage, and that economic concerns were the primary focus in most coverage.

An interesting element in the study is tracking volume and sentiment of coverage against water inflows, and finding that when inflows drop, negative sentiment about environmental water rises.

I’m left with a few questions about the corpus assembly.

The authors describe their search process as being limited to the identified owner entities McPherson Media, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Fairfax Media and News Corp Australia. After being absorbed by Nine in 2018 (which is acknowledged in the article), the regional papers were spun off as a new company, Australian Community Media, in 2019 (which is not acknowledged). Did these newspapers – the Daily Liberal, Area News, The Irrigator, etc – continue in the corpus under their new ownership, or did they drop out after the owner entity changed? It’s not clear, and I’d like for it to be.

The authors say they entirely assembled their corpus using Factiva and ProQuest databases; my own experience with those databases was that there was no content for McPherson Media Group titles pre-2012. I had to pull print copies of the Deniliquin Pastoral Times from the State Library of Victoria archives.

Within this set of publishers, the next step was to look for articles with the term ‘environmental water’ in the lead. They justify this approach as reflective of the ‘inverted pyramid’ structure of media articles, where information is ordered from most important to least, meaning that an article that is primarily about environmental water will have that in the first paragraph. That is a reasonable assumption to make. However, I wonder whether ‘environmental water’ was in wide enough non-specialist use for the whole period for that to be valid, and also whether, as a technical term, it wouldn’t be more likely to appear in pars after a descriptive lead, as in ‘Kings Billabong will be filled for the first time in four years under a federal government plan. // The release of environmental water, planned for September, was announced …’.

I’d be particularly alive to this possibility given the small number of articles that their method identified. The study only includes 303 articles, across 40 identified newspapers and a 20-year-period. That seems unworkably low to me – an average of 0.4 articles per paper, per year. In my study at UTS I coded 320 articles just across two three-month periods and seven newspapers. I’m fully aware of the diminishing returns of assessing a larger corpus in content analysis but at that size I can’t imagine this study was approaching that limitation.

I also wonder whether inflows across the entire system is actually the right metric to use, particularly when assessing more localised coverage in the regional outlets in the sample. Flooding in Queensland feeding the Darling may contribute high inflows but mean little to a newspaper serving an audience upstream on the Murrumbidgee in Wagga.

I don’t think these are disqualifying, they just impact the available analysis. There’s no real opportunity for inter-publication comparison, for example, nor really between the different ownership groups they identify, and certainly not any longitudinal trends identified within the publications themselves. By not gathering non-environmental water Murray-Darling Basin coverage they also can’t assess whether, for example, peaks in environmental water coverage occur proportionately to peaks of coverage of other water issues.

In some of that, I think the study leaves questions unanswered for me, though it may not make sense to go down this same methodological path to answer them.

1.2 How much should my PhD respond to the moment?

I’ve also started wondering whether I should try to reframe my work around the rise of One Nation and what seems like a new offensive in the water wars. The party has already won Murray-Darling Basin seats, including the federal Division of Farrer representing the southern Riverina and the South Australian state divisions of Hammond, representing the Murraylands, and MacKillop, which includes the Coorong. Current projections are that they will significantly increase their presence in regional Australia at the upcoming Victorian and New South Wales elections as well.

One Nation’s water policy platform explicitly opposes the sustainable diversion limit, seeks to impose much lower caps on environmental water, increase the water available for primary industries, and introduce restrictions on when water buybacks can occur.

We’re also about to enter a significant El Niño event, likely meaning a period of hotter, drier weather, lower inflows and, based on the Kosovac results, more negative sentiment around environmental water.

With that in mind, an ongoing ‘live’ assessment of coverage of water issues around identified inflection points (elections and, based on the outcome of these, parliamentary activity; potentially disaster declarations) with some scaffolding to elevate it into a PhD-level study is really appealing. I really enjoy ongoing data-capture and making results available as quickly as possible – that was the ethos behind data collection and analysis at PIJI and the presentation of PIPI – in order to identify and address issues in real time. I have to present a thesis at the end of the degree but the more that I can do ahead of that, the more impact I think I’ll have and, for sure, the more I’ll enjoy the whole process.

1.3 Recently

Fahy D. 2017. Objectivity, false balance, and advocacy in news coverage of climate change. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science.

Kosovac A., Shermon A., O’Donnell E., Horne A. and Mesikammen E. 2024. Water courses and discourses: a content analysis of environmental water reporting in Australia. Environmental Science and Policy 154(3).

Mocatta G. and Hawley E. 2020. Uncovering a climate catastrophe? Media coverage of Australia’s Black Summer bushfires and the revelatory extent of the climate blame frame. M/A Journal 23(4).

Park S., McGuinness K., Lee J. Y., Fulton J., Fujita M., Nolan D., Fisher C. and Nardi G. 2026. Digital News Report: Australia 2026. Canberra: News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra.

Wei J., Wei Y., Western A., Skinnner D. and Lyle C. 2015. Evolution of newspaper coverage of water issues in Australia during 1843-2011. Ambio 44(4):319-331.