About Victoria Fielding

Dr Victoria Fielding is a commentator, researcher and activist.

My parents report that I have been obsessed with ‘fairness’ from a very young age. This keen sense that unfairness needed to be uncovered and fixed grew into lifelong quest for social justice – political, industrial, feminist, social, environmental and media justice.

What is media justice? Media justice is when the mainstream marketplace of ideas delivers audiences fair and balanced representation of a diverse range of interests and perspectives. When this fairness is not delivered – because of media bias – the result is media inequality. Media inequality degrades democracy because it widens political, industrial, gendered, social and environmental inequality. Media inequality influences who has a voice in public debates and who gains and maintains power.

This blog is a place where I write about media inequality. I originally started this blog as an angry 20-something – under my maiden name Victoria Rollison – because I needed an outlet to write (and yes sometimes rant) about the state of Australian politics, and in particular the media’s representation of it. Through this writing, I fell in love with research because I just wanted to understand what was going on, rather than just poking holes in it.

My professional background is in marketing and communication, and this expertise led me to want to understand the influence that communication has on media narratives. I started my academic journey through an honours project studying the influence of Liberal and Labor mining tax narratives on mainstream news media. After finding that the Liberal mining tax narrative dominated media reports about the mining tax in 76% of newspaper coverage, I wanted to know why this dominance existed.

The prevailing wisdom in professional comms and academia is that the better communicator is able to mould news coverage to suit their story. To test this theory, I undertook a PhD to investigate the media representation of industrial disputes by tracing the influence of competing industrial narratives on news narratives. Through this study, I developed a theory of media inequality which explains structural media bias in news reporting of industrial, political and social contestation.

As well as researching communication, media and journalism, I teach in these disciplines at the University of Adelaide. I have now spent more than a decade commentating about politics and media on social and independent media – follow me at @DrVicFielding and subscribe to this blog to keep up to date with my commentary.

Apart from being pretty busy with all of the above, I have a busy home life with my husband and two young daughters – we live in Adelaide – the best city in the world. In summer, you’ll find us at the beach, and in winter, we’re at the Adelaide Oval cheering for Port Adelaide.