Monica Attard speaks with Dr Siobhan McHugh, a leading podcast studies scholar and a multi award winning narrative podcast producer, and Dr Sarah Gilbert who leads the UTS Impact Studio, translating the scholarly work of academics into digestible podcasts. 

Does e-Safety do enough?

In this episode, Professor Derek Wilding is speaking with Dr Noelle Martin, an expert on image-based abuse, and survivor-turned-activist.

Noelle shares her research on image-based sexual abuse, particularly deepfake abuse, which disproportionately affects women globally.  

Link below to Noelle's article 'Online safety regulation of deepfake abuse: a case study on Australia’s eSafety Commissioner':

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10383441.2025.2504791

Michael Davis talks to Robin Mansell, Professor Emerita at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Scientific Director of the International Observatory on Information and Democracy. They discuss how a broader ecosystem based approach to problems of information integrity is needed.

Reporting on matters of national security is high stakes, and few know that better than Cameron Stewart, Chief International Correspondent at The Australian newspaper, and one of Australia’s most experienced national security journalists.

It’s widely accepted that if journalists don't have safe and lawful means to report on matters of national security, democracy is undermined. But government has a mission too – to protect Australians.  

Susanne Lloyd-Jones, Lecturer at UTS Law, asks whether a voluntary, ‘media-led’ governance mechanism co-designed to build trust between the media and government could work. 

We know that people are increasingly getting their news from social media content creators: for people aged 25-34, the go-to platform for news is YouTube. But can content on these platforms be considered news and its creators' journalists? Where are the crossovers harmful or useful?  To help us explore this issue from a content creator’s perspective, our PhD student Chris Hall speaks with Konrad Benjamin, also known as Punter’s Politics.

Chris’ PhD research looks into the social and legal impacts of youtubers producing journalism. You can find his article 'Platform Journalism on YouTube' here:

https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/ajr_00178_7 

We dive into the complex and timely topic of populism—its roots, its rise, and its ripple effects across politics and media. CMT Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Alena Radina and Dr Jay Daniel Thompson, a freelance journalist and Senior Lecturer of Professional Communication at RMIT University, distinguish between left- and right-wing populism in the context of President Trump and the recent Australian Federal Election.

This episode, we are looking at how Europe deals with content moderation, specifically when a digital platform makes a decision about content that someone wants to dispute.  CMT Researcher Kieran Lindsay speaks with digital policy expert Ruairi Harrison.

No one who follows the news, can be in any doubt that since the inauguration of Donald J Trump as US President earlier this year, life as anyone knows it, isn’t the same. And one of the casualties of his short reign so far is the news media in the United States.  So is a push back possible? 

Liz Spayd is our guest – she was the first woman named managing editor at the Washington Post, and the 6th public editor at the New York Times. She joins us from Washington where she is currently an adjunct fellow at Georgetown University teaching ethics in media.

Derek Wilding speaks with an expert panel on alternatives to the News Media Bargaining Code at a time when it's becoming increasingly difficult to get platforms to the table.

Privacy and media ethics specialist Sacha Molitorisz chats with the ACMA’s former Deputy Chair Creina Chapman and ABC's former Media Watch host Paul Barry on the state of news media in Australia and who should regulate it - their answers might surprise you!