‘Downright dangerous’: Citizen reactions to media diversity issues in public submissions

Abstract

Despite its prominence in societal and scholarly discourse, a consistent definition and scope for media diversity remains elusive. This leaves ambiguous its characteristics, concerns, and impacts and complicates efforts to achieve its benefits. This study sought a new approach to identifying its role that leverages lived experiences of the public interacting with their media ecosystem. Public submissions to the Media diversity in Australia inquiry presented a unique opportunity to pursue this goal. The 5068 texts were dominated by citizens perspectives that went beyond reframing and redefining media diversity to explain how they saw it affecting their daily lives, families, and communities. Using multi-stage thematic analysis, this study worked to consolidate these diverse and grounded views into the shared themes that confronted citizens, finding concerns about the diminishing reliability of media functions, with losses in media diversity leading to unsatisfactory media performance, media avoidance, and harms for communities and individuals.