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Denis Muller

Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne

Denis Muller was born in New Zealand in 1948 and emigrated to Australia in 1969. He was educated at Rosmini College, Auckland, and at the University of Melbourne.

After three years on suburban newspapers in Auckland, he joined The Sydney Morning Herald as a sub-editor in 1969. In 1978 he joined The Times, London, also as a sub-editor, before returning to take up the position of Chief Sub-editor of the Herald in 1980.

He subsequently held the positions of Night Editor, News Editor and Assistant Editor (Investigations) at that newspaper, until joining The Age, Melbourne, as Associate Editor in 1986.

At both newspapers, his responsibilities including representing the papers as an advocate before the Australian Press Council.

From 1984 until he left newspapers in 1993, he worked closely with Irving Saulwick, one of Australia's leading public opinion pollsters, in the management and writing of the Saulwick Poll which was published in The Age as AgePoll and in the Herald as HeraldSurvey.

In 1990 he was accepted as a mature-age student into the Public Policy program at the University of Melbourne. He completed a Postgraduate Diploma in 1992 and a Master's degree in 1994.

In 1993 he left The Age to take up a position as Group Manager, Communications, at the Board of Studies, Victoria.

In 1995 he established the research consultancy Denis Muller & Associates, and was appointed a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Public Policy at the University of Melbourne.

In 2006 he completed a doctoral thesis on media ethics and accountability, and was appointed a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Public Policy, where he has taught in the Public Policy program since 1997.

He has also taught research methodology at RMIT University, and teaches defamation law to practising journalists through the Communication Law Centre.

At a time when journalism needs to be at its strongest, an open letter on the Israel/Hamas war has left the profession diminished

Nov 28, 2023 23:15 pm UTC| Insights & Views

The journalists who signed an open letter to Australian media organisations last week calling for ethical reporting on the war in Gaza have succeeded in intensifying the dispute over whether the coverage has been fair. At...

ABC chief is right: impartiality is paramount when reporting the Israel-Gaza war

Nov 21, 2023 04:05 am UTC| Insights & Views

On November 17, the ABCs editor-in-chief and managing director, David Anderson, was interviewed on Radio 774, the ABCs local station in Melbourne, about criticisms of the national broadcasters coverage of the Israel-Gaza...

How did the media perform on the Voice referendum? Let's talk about truth-telling and impartiality

Oct 16, 2023 09:10 am UTC| Politics

The rules by which politics are conducted have changed dramatically, especially since the rise of Trumpism. Yet the professional mass media continue to cover politics in ways that are no longer fit for purpose. This has...

A reciprocating engine of money, power and influence: how Australia's 'media monsters' used journalism to cement their empires

Jun 19, 2023 06:20 am UTC| Insights & Views Business

Carl Sagan said that in order to understand the present, its necessary to know the past. Nowhere does this apply with greater force than to the Australian media and its place in the nations power structure. Media...

Journalists reporting on the Voice to Parliament do voters a disservice with 'he said, she said' approach

May 02, 2023 15:21 pm UTC| Politics

For much of the past two decades, polarisation and hyper-partisanship have weakened Western democracies, most notably in the United States and Britain. Australia has not escaped, although the consequences here have been...

News Corp's job cuts cast a shadow over the future of its newspapers

Feb 14, 2023 13:14 pm UTC| Business

News Corporation is cutting its staff by 5% globally, including in Australia, after its news media division recorded a second-quarter earnings decline of 47%. The decision inevitably reopens questions about the future of...

Alarmist reporting on COVID-19 will only heighten people's anxieties and drive vaccine hesitancy

May 23, 2021 03:32 am UTC| Health

From an ethics perspective, it has been a bad couple of weeks for media coverage of COVID-19. First, there was a highly questionable story in The Australian about China allegedly weaponising coronavirus, with the...

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Economy

Governments have been able to overrule the Reserve Bank for 80 years. Why stop now?

Pay close enough attention to parliament these next few days, and youre likely to witness something truly remarkable: politicians from both sides of politics uniting to remove the power of politicians to overrule the...

Western Pharma Shifts Focus from China to India Amid Rising Geopolitical Tensions

Western drugmakers are increasingly turning to alternative sources for drug production and clinical trials, shifting their attention away from Chinese contractors. According to industry experts and executives, this...

What the UK government's back to work plan covers – and why it is unlikely to boost people's job prospects

Ahead of the UK governments latest economic statement, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, and the secretary of state for work and pensions, Mel Stride, unveiled a new employment support package dubbed the back to work...

Matching state pension to the national living wage would help pensioners maintain their dignity

A question that is perennially asked by financial experts is: can the government (in other words, the taxpayer) afford to keep increasing pensions? But in my view, the real question should be: what is the purpose of the...

Every state is about to dole out federal funding for broadband internet – not every state is ready for the task

When the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed in late 2021, it included US$42.5 billion for broadband internet access as part of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program. The program aims to ensure...

Politics

Alleged assassination plots in the U.S. and Canada signal a more assertive Indian foreign policy

A recent indictment from the United States Department of Justice has alleged an Indian security official was involved in attempting to assassinate a U.S. and Canadian citizen in New York. The alleged target, Gurpatwant...

Henry Kissinger was a global – and deeply flawed – foreign policy heavyweight

Declarations of the end of an era are made only in exceptional circumstances. Henry Kissingers death is one of them. Kissinger was born into a Jewish family in Germany, and fled to the US in 1938 after the Nazis seized...

The four challenges faced by Spain's new government

Pedro Sánchez investiture marks the beginning of the third consecutive parliamentary term led by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE). After a fraught period of negotiations, Sánchez now leads a broad...

'Father of Reconciliation' Pat Dodson to quit parliament

Labor senator Pat Dodson, often dubbed the father of reconciliation, is quitting parliament due to ill health. Dodson, 75, told the Labor caucus on Tuesday he would resign as a senator for Western Australia, effective...

South Africa’s immigration proposals are based on false claims and poor logic – experts

The South African government recently issued a long-awaited policy statement called a White Paper outlining proposed changes to the countrys asylum and immigration system. More than 20 years after its first...

Science

Massive planet too big for its own sun pushes astronomers to rethink exoplanet formation

Imagine youre a farmer searching for eggs in the chicken coop but instead of a chicken egg, you find an ostrich egg, much larger than anything a chicken could lay. Thats a little how our team of astronomers felt when...

Do we live in a giant void? It could solve the puzzle of the universe's expansion

One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology is the rate at which the universe is expanding. This can be predicted using the standard model of cosmology, also known as Lambda-cold dark matter (ΛCDM). This model is...

MicroRNA is the master regulator of the genome − researchers are learning how to treat disease by harnessing the way it controls genes

The Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, and life less than a billion years after that. Although life as we know it is dependent on four major macromolecules DNA, RNA, proteins and lipids only one is thought to have been...

How do crystals form?

How do crystals form? Alyssa Marie, age 5, New Mexico Scientifically speaking, the term crystal refers to any solid that has an ordered chemical structure. This means that its parts are arranged in a precisely...

NASA's first successful recovery of asteroid samples may reveal information about the origins of the universe

The OSIRIS-REx mission is NASAs first mission to collect samples from an asteroid in this case 101955 Bennu and return to Earth. OSIRIS-REx is an acronym for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification,...

Technology

AT&T Joins Forces with Ericsson for Open RAN, Ousting Nokia in US Telecom Boost

ATT Inc. is working on further advancing Open and Interoperable Radio Access Networks (RAN) in the United States. The company is planning to do this through its new partnership with Ericsson. The deal between ATT and...

Spotify Trims Workforce by 17%, Shares Surge Following Announcement

Spotify is terminating 17% of its workforce, which is equivalent to 1,500 jobs. This latest layoff is the third to hit the company this year. The Swedish music streaming provider revealed the new round of job cuts after...

Intel Triumphs in US Court: $2.18 Billion VLSI Verdict Overturned

A U.S. appeals court overturned a $2.18 billion patent-infringement award that patent owner VLSI Technology had won against Intel Corp. This ruling marks the reversal of one of the largest verdicts in the history of U.S....

UK's Ofcom Introduces Stricter Online Age Checks for Explicit Content

The new draft guidance from the United Kingdoms Ofcom reveals plans to implement stricter age verification measures for online pornographic content. To prevent children from accessing explicit sites, the watchdog suggests...

Montana's TikTok Ban Reversed: Judge Declares Unconstitutional, Stops January 2024 Enforcement

TikTok has been banned in Montana, and it was the first state in the United States to do so. A federal judge scrapped the order after saying it was an unconstitutional decision. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy...