To this Leibniz Media Lunch Talk we welcome Dr. Katharina Esau from the QUT Digital Media Research Center at Queensland University of Technology. She will talk about her research on measuring polarization in Australian news media. The event will be in English language.
Moderator: Dr. Lisa Merten
Time
12 noon to 1 p.m.
About the Lecture
Polarisation is one of the defining challenges of our time, yet we know little about how it plays out in news coverage. This talk introduces a new approach to measuring news media polarisation beyond the usual left–right divide, distinguishing between ideological, affective, and value-based dimensions. The framework is illustrated with findings from Australia’s 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The results are set against the concept of destructive polarisation, raising the question: do we see genuine polarisation or simply viewpoint diversity? The talk also outlines how manual content analysis can be scaled through large language model–assisted coding, with current applications to climate change coverage offering systematic comparisons across issues and countries.
About the Speaker
Dr. Katharina Esau is a Senior Research Associate at QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre, leading the News Media Polarisation stream in the Australian Laureate Fellowship Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate. Her work develops innovative mixed-methods approaches to study social and political polarisation across media, issues, platforms, and countries, with a particular focus on how democratic opinion formation can remain resilient amid online mis- and disinformation.
