On 13 October 2014, Penny O’Donnell woke to find herself on the front page of The Australian’s Higher Education section. “Uni degrees in indoctrination”, read the headline. The article accused O’Donnell, along with a media professor at the University of Technology Sydney, of “indoctrinating students, not educating them”. The Australian’s media editor, Sharri Markson, claimed they were unfairly influencing students to be biased against News Corporation Ltd, owned by Rupert Murdoch.1

O’Donnell had given a lecture that asked students of MECO1002: Media and Communications Landscapes to consider the inordinate power News Corp wields and questioned whether this power was in the public interest. Unbeknownst to her, Markson had attended her lecture “undercover”, posing as a student, and recorded the class.

“It was potentially a job losing moment,” O’Donnell says.

But that was not the end of the story for the journalism lecturer or her students.

“What ended up happening,” O’Donnell remembers, “was that there was a big sort of Twitter storm around it.”

O’Donnell’s students, in their first year of media studies, pushed back against the narrative on social media and in op-eds.

Students poked fun at the idea of Markson going undercover in their classes. Nick Stoll tweeted: “Have put in a request for Markson to do my essays for me as an ‘undercover’ student. You know, because I’m brainwashed.”

They also pointed out the hypocrisy in accusing the University of bias. Alex McKinnon tweeted: “Looking for some media bias? Here’s the Premier of New South Wales starring in an ad for The Daily Telegraph”. Lane Sainty also wrote an op-ed in Honi Soit titled “Bit rich for The Oz to cry indoctrination”.

Students were offended at being characterised as brainwashed and unable to think for themselves about how the media worked.

“Within three days,” says O’Donnell, “the whole issue was totally transformed from the University of Sydney brainwashing its students to the pushback of the media students saying ‘what you’re talking about is rubbish. We know what we want in the media and we are going to do it.’”

While O’Donnell doesn’t believe her students’ pushback changed Markson’s mind, she knows it had an extraordinary impact on the students’ learning.

“You’re probably not going to remember that lecture we had in five years’ time,” she told her students, “but what you will remember is that when the newspaper attacked you for being brainwashed, you turned around and said, ‘No, that’s not true.’ And you set about creating a new narrative about your own position as future media contributors. That’s something that’ll stay with you for the rest of your lives.”

This wasn’t a planned part of the curriculum, but O’Donnell couldn’t have designed anything that captures the degree’s tenets more elegantly. Ironically, given Markson’s intention, the stunt showcased that MECO undergraduate students are learning to be critical, independent thinkers. They are learning through a combination of theory and practice. They are learning within a program that has a deep connection to industry. And they are learning to be active participants in the media ecosystem. All of this has been true since the degree’s inception more than 20 years ago, and it remains so today.

Catharine Lumby points out a further irony: that Markson had herself been a MECO student at the University of Sydney in 2002 and 2003. Lumby remembers her as a highly engaged and extremely capable student.

For Lumby, the claims that Media and Communications degrees are largely taught by Marxist-leaning academics who teach students to be hostile to the profession date back to a campaign in the late 90s by conservative media commentator Keith Windschuttle who launched multiple attacks on the teaching of journalism along the same lines. “It is one strand in the long running so-called culture wars. But in my experience, it is a total or at least very dated fantasy to imagine that the vast majority of Media and Communications scholars are interested in ‘brainwashing’ their students. In my experience it is difficult to get undergraduate students to do anything except challenge their lecturers’ ideas. And that’s exactly as it should be.”

Lumby notes that the whole ethos of MECO is grounded in valuing professional skills along with critical thinking skills and that the first two academics who designed the four-year degree, herself and Anne Dunn, were both people with long and successful careers as print and broadcast journalists. Proof of that focus, Lumby says, is a 1999 article in The Australian on her appointment to launch the new degree. It is headlined “Industry Link Stressed” and it quotes her as saying, “I want it to be the mission of this program to forge meaningful links with industry, to involve industry on advising on units of study, and to make the program responsive to training and retraining needs in the industry.”

Lumby is also quoted as saying that, “In this degree, almost 50 percent of the media studies component – leaving aside the second arts major – is certainly oriented at teaching them professional skills. But those skills are always taught against a background of critical theory and a history of ideas. I think those two things have to work together.”

Indeed, prospective students reading the 2000 Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Handbook found an “interdisciplinary degree which offers students professional training in media and communications and an advanced education in the history and theory of the field”. The “professional training” element spans the fields of “print, radio, television, online media, and media relations” and students “explore these areas through a diverse array of disciplinary perspectives and relevant critical theories”. Units of study focus on “media production and consumption, the structure of the media and communications industry, the media’s role in culture and politics, the regulation of the media, and legal and public policy issues in the field”. Over the four years, students would complete a Media and Communications major, an Arts or Economics second major, electives in the humanities (that could lead to a third major), a unit on textual analysis (cross-listed with English) and an internship in the media industry.

The degree remained under Lumby’s leadership for its first six years. During this time, a teaching and researching team grew around her: Dunn, Geraint Evans, Kate Crawford, Richard Stanton, Marc Brennan, Fiona Giles and Steven Maras. Together, in addition to establishing the department’s first postgraduate offerings, they expanded the undergraduate units of study, from two in 2000 to more than ten by 2007. In 2004, they began to offer the degree at both pass and honours levels. They also tweaked the degree nomenclature and structure: the Media and Communications element was no longer called a “major” – it was the essence of the degree; the internship moved from third to fourth year; and students could choose a major from a wider pool of areas, no longer limited to Arts or Economics.

Fiona Martin joined the undergraduate team in 2008, the same year that Lumby departed for UNSW. This was also the year MECO formalised its relationship with the Faculty of Law – present from the outset because its UAI was comparable to Law’s – by implementing a combined specialist degree: BA (Media & Communications) and Bachelor of Laws.

Martin was undergraduate degree director from 2020 to 2021. When we ask her to compare the degree in 2008 to the degree in 2021, she tells us, “The degree hasn’t changed enormously. The fundamentals of theory and practice are still there. And the cross talk between them.” But the team, Martin continues, has adapted these fundamentals to an evolving media landscape. True to Lumby’s word, the program has very much been responsive to industry needs.

Martin explains that the most significant drivers of change have been the digitisation of media content; the growth of the internet, web and mobile media; and the growth of social media and online communication platforms. In 2008, students following the original undergraduate degree trajectory did not learn much about internet theory or online media production until a third year MECO3602: Online Media unit. Now, however, digital media skills are embedded across the degree, rendering that unit obsolete. To some extent, all MECO units are now online media units. The department discontinued Online Media in 2018 and integrated some of its unique concepts into first and second year, including two new core units: MECO1004: Introduction to Media Production and a data journalism unit, MECO2604: Telling Stories with Data.

Media convergence also has meant that the department has increased the scope of what it teaches. From 2000, the handbook advertised a degree that spanned the fields of print, radio, television, online media and media relations; now, this has become “written news and feature journalism, audio, video, social media and public relations”. These subtle changes represent a huge expansion of content across diverse platforms. “Audio”, for example, adds podcasting to radio; and “video” extends beyond television to augmented reality and TikTok. “Social media” did not exist when the degree began. When Martin arrived in 2008, Twitter was in its infancy; by 2014, students were using it to turn around Markson’s narrative. O’Donnell and another MECO academic, Jonathon Hutchinson, studied the Twitter traffic after Markson’s article and coined the term “pushback journalism” to describe how the students created original news content on social media to make their voices heard in the debate, exemplifying the “fifth estate” role of social media in holding mainstream media accountable.

The department has adapted its curriculum to ensure students are learning to dissect these new technologies and produce within them. At the same time, they have seen the need to ensure students understand what working within such an innovative, digitalised industry entails. In 2011, they introduced the core unit MECO1002: Digital Media and Communications Landscapes (since renamed Media 4.0: Work and Policy). Martin explains that this unit teaches students to look at the nature of media industries from a critical perspective. They need to explore questions that MECO students were not asking in the first decade of the degree, such as: How do you organise yourself to succeed as a creative worker in the era of precarious labour? What do platform analytics mean for you as a media practitioner? How do you counter mistrust and disinformation online? How do you interact safely and productively with audiences online?

Students are asking these questions in the context of careers that few – if any – of their earlier counterparts considered. Martin has noticed a decline in the number of graduates who are pursuing journalism and an increase in those working in communications and native content development. Many, for example, are working in agencies on social media campaigns, in trade industry newsrooms, as media liaisons, or as social media editors and community managers. Martin explains that MECO never was a J-school, but journalism did once have a more substantial share of the program’s attention. Over the years, MECO’s focus has become “more pluralised” as its academics “are seeing new fields of media and communications and digital cultures that our students can traverse”.

Apart from the digital disruptions, the other major source of change for MECO undergraduates came from within the University. In 2016, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) Pip Pattison presided over a University-wide restructure of undergraduate degrees. Sydney adopted the Melbourne Model, which favoured generalist, four-year undergraduate degrees and specialist, career-oriented postgraduate degrees. For most undergraduate degrees, which had been three years, this meant adding a year of Open Learning Environment and interdisciplinary units. For MECO, however, which was one of the few programs across the University that already had a four-year bachelor’s degree, this meant losing units to make way for the new requirements.

Elizabeth Connor, the school administration manager, recalls there was “considerable argument against the change” at the time. Some four-year degrees that had “a professional bent” were allowed to retain their structure. Given this caveat, and MECO’s established brand, the department argued strongly that it should be excluded from the change, but that was not to be. Under Annamarie Jagose, head of school at the time, MECO’s undergraduate degree was altered to fit the new model.

Margaret Van Heekeren is the current undergraduate coordinator. When we ask her about the future of the degree, she echoes Martin’s view, and Lumby’s before her, that the essence of the degree will remain intact even as its edges are constantly in motion. “Our students,” she observes, “learn not just ‘how to’ but also ‘why’,” and they are led by a team of academics who ensure the curriculum “stays abreast of industry trends. This combination of a theory/practice base and responsive curriculum has served it well for the past two decades of massive media transformation and will continue to do so in the future.”

In Markson’s 2014 article, a News Corp executive shares his “suspicion that journalism as it is taught and journalism as it is practised are two different things”. He seems to intend this as a disparagement but, given the trajectory and values of the undergraduate MECO degree at the University of Sydney, we can take it as a commendation. Since Lumby started the degree, its caretakers have ensured students learn journalistic and other media industry practices. But it has never confined itself to vocational training. Alongside the practice, undergraduate students have been learning to question, to innovate … and to push back.

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