In Australia, we see a rapid rate of change towards digital and mobile news. For the first time, Australians’ use of online news has surpassed traditional offline news sources. Interestingly, the majority of Australians still see television news services as the most trusted source of news.

The Whitlam Oration has become a respected platform for prominent Australians to provide serious commentary on the contemporary relevance of the Whitlam Legacy and to contribute to public debate. This Oration continues this great tradition.

The Centre for Media Transition commissioned this bibliography to assess the current state of knowledge on public trust in journalism – including audience expectations and the role of journalists, platforms, social media and other online news sources – in Australia and throughout the world.

Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of a news media industry caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology.

This report is an ethnographic account drawn directly from Dr. Francesca Tripodi’s research within upper-middle class conservative Christian communities in Virginia in 2017. Tripodi uses Christian practices of Biblical interpretation as a lens for understanding the relationship between so-called 'fake news' sources and contemporary conservative political thought.