Desley Deacon

Biographic Data

ID202500
NAMEDesley Deacon
GIVEN NAMESDesley
FAMILY NAMEDeacon
SIGNATUREDEACON D
AFFILIATIONSLoughborough University
ORCID0000-0002-4185-0883
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS76
TOTAL CITATIONS349
AUTHOR COUNT73
EDITOR COUNT3
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1976
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX10

  • My Grandfather’s Clock: Four Centuries of a British–Australian Family

    Desley DeaconARTICLEAustralian Historical Studies2024

  • Why mainstream news media still matter

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David Smith et al.ARTICLEMedia Culture & Society2024Cited by: 12References: 5

    It is frequently claimed that mainstream news organisations are in crisis and becoming ever more marginalised in the contemporary high-choice media environment. Such claims frequently conflate different challenges facing the industry, resulting in over-generalised claims about the prospects for established news brands. In this article, we identify four related crises: reach, resource, reputation and relevance. Through the analysis of each, we sho…

  • ‘Another Version of the Truth’: The politics of affect and the externalization of threat in Trent Reznor’s Year Zero

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David DeaconARTICLEMetal Music Studies2021

    This article explores Nine Inch Nails’ album Year Zero (2007) with reference to what Brian Massumi calls the ‘politics of affect’ in the post 9/11 era. The sociopolitical discourse of managed threat both contextualizes and shapes the album’s conceptual basis, but also its lyricism, live manifestation and marketing. I propose a trajectory in Trent Reznor’s lyricism from an early introspective and confessional style to defensive and anxious tropes,…

  • Media diversity and the analysis of qualitative variation

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, James StanyerARTICLECommunication and the Public2021Cited by: 1References: 13

    Diversity is recognised as a significant criterion for appraising the democratic performance of media systems. This article begins by considering key conceptual debates that help differentiate types and levels of diversity. It then addresses a core methodological challenge in measuring diversity: how do we model statistical variation and difference when many measures of source and content diversity only attain the nominal level of measurement? We…

  • Inside out: The UK press, Brexit and strategic populist ventriloquism

    Open AccessDavid Smith, David M Smith et al.ARTICLEEuropean Journal of Communication2021References: 20

    This article examines how and when populist discourses were mobilised within the 2016 UK European Union (EU) Referendum campaign, by examining the specific temporal conjunctions between the changing strategy of the official ‘Vote Leave’ campaign, British national newspaper reporting of the Referendum and shifts in public opinion. Our analysis shows that Vote Leave only started to utilise anti-elitist and exclusionary populist rhetoric at the mid-…

  • The present in retrospect: Press reporting of UK General Elections, 1918–2015

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David Deacon et al.ARTICLEJournalism2019Cited by: 6References: 16

    This article provides a unique content analysis of 100 years of national press coverage of UK General Elections and tests four claims about historical trends in election news reporting in democratic systems: (1) that coverage is becoming more focussed on political leaders at the expense of other political sources; (2) that reporting of the personalities and personal lives of politicians has expanded; (3) that editorial treatment of politicians ha…

  • Immigration and the British news media: Continuity or change

    Open AccessDavid Smith, Desley DeaconARTICLESociology Compass2018Cited by: 2References: 30

    This article examines research carried out over the last 40 years in the area of media and migration in the British context. This thematic review of more than 60 empirical studies explores how U.K. media attention to the immigration issue has fluctuated over time, but has displayed consistent negativity in its terms of reference, exclusionary features, and significant interpretative limitations, not least in the conflation of distinct types of mi…

  • The Media Campaign: The Issues and Personalities Who Defined the Election

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David Deacon et al.CHAPTERPolitical Communication in Britain2017

  • From ‘Wild Jill’ to Stella Miles Franklin

    Desley DeaconARTICLEHistory Australia2017

    Simone de Beauvoir noted that you don’t often make new friends after age 60. But Jill and I enjoyed what you could call a late friendship. Jill came to the ANU as a visitor after she retired in 200

  • Some Unholy Alloy: Neoliberalism, Digital Modernity, and the Mechanics of Globalized Capital in Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David DeaconARTICLEEuropean Journal of American…2017References: 8

    This article proposes a reading of The Counselor (2013) as an extrapolation of the frontier ethic animating much of Cormac McCarthy’s earlier writing. I will propose that echoes of Blood Meridian (1985), which presented the duality of barbarism and capital, are audible and perpetuated under digital capitalism, a condition encompassing the expansion of increasingly impersonal and anonymized capital under neoliberal socio-economics, empowered by di…

  • Still Life in the Old Attack Dogs: The Press

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David Deacon et al.CHAPTERBritish General Election Of 20152016

    During the 2015 campaign there was considerable negativity and partiality in much press reporting; it was not difficult to find examples of where robust political partisanship descended into personal vilification. Some of this was the kind of journalism that had been repeatedly highlighted and criticized only a few years before, most notably in the House of Commons following the 2011 hacking scandal and subsequently during the ensuing year-long L…

  • The UK Independence Party, populism and the British news media: Competition, collaboration or containment

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, Dominic WringARTICLEEuropean Journal of Communication2016Cited by: 6References: 11

    This article examines the rise of the UK Independence Party in Britain, and how this ‘revolution’ has been reported by mainstream news organisations. As a case study of the media and populism, UK Independence Party’s rise tends to confound rather than confirm some of the patterns and trends found in previous studies. There is little evidence that ‘media logic’ has worked to the party’s advantage and the recent increase in the intensity of media c…

  • Furphies and Whizz-Bangs: Anzac Slang from the Great War, by Amanda Laugesen

    Desley DeaconARTICLEAustralian Historical Studies2015

  • Mediatization and ’ or ‘Mediatization of ’? A response to Hepp et al

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David Deacon et al.ARTICLEMedia Culture & Society2015Cited by: 13References: 1

    This item was submitted for publication in the journal, Media, Culture and Society [SAGE Publications Ltd / © The Author(s)]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443715580761

  • Mediatization: Key Concept or Conceptual Bandwagon

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David Deacon et al.ARTICLEMedia Culture & Society2014Cited by: 84References: 18

    Mediatization is emerging as an influential new concept that places the media at the centre of all kinds of important cultural, political and social developments. However, it has so far attracted little critical evaluation. In this article the authors identify three areas of concern, namely, how causal processes are thought about, how historical change is understood, and how concepts are designed. It is hoped this article will generate critical d…

  • Every-bit-as-good-as-gay’: Restyling Heterosexuality in 1940s New York

    Desley DeaconARTICLEHistory Australia2013

    The relationship of novelist Mary McCarthy and her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, is an example of the rise and fall of a particular kind of heterosexuality in 1940s and 1950s urban America: the ‘nongay, every-bit-as-good-as-gay’ male partner. This article describes the course of this marriage and links its unusual aspects to a resistant culture that developed at Harvard during the 1940s, inspired by the life and work of the British novelist R…

  • Hello to All That: ‘Credit Crunches’, ‘Great Depressions’ and Journalistic Retrojection

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David DeaconCHAPTERTime, Media and Modernity2012

    One of the standout tracks of Bob Dylan’s 2006 album ‘Modern Times’ is ‘Working Man’s Blues #2’. 1 On first listening, the elegiac melody and lyrics describing the desperation and hunger of an unemployed man facing an itinerant future and the loss of his family evoke powerful associations with the Great Depression of the 1930s. This historical connection is partly conjured by references in the lyrics to humming rails, lost dimes, burned barns and…

  • A Quietening Effect’: The BBC and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

    Desley DeaconARTICLEMedia History2012Cited by: 2References: 8

    This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Media History on 08/03/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13688804.2012.663866

  • Celebrity Sexuality: Judith Anderson, Mrs Danvers, Sexuality and ‘Truthfulness’ in Biography

    Desley DeaconARTICLEAustralian Historical Studies2012

    Australian-born actress Judith Anderson's portrayal of the housekeeper Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's 1940 film Rebecca has made her the poster girl for scholarly analyses of lesbian sexuality on film; and the plethora of books in the last few years about gays in Hollywood—scholarly and sensational—assume that Anderson was a lesbian. Yet evidence about her sexuality is highly ambiguous. This article uses Anderson's case to examine the biographer's pr…

  • Quantitative Audience Research: Embracing the Poor Relation

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David Deacon et al.OTHERThe Handbook of Media Audiences2011

    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Twin Pillars The Early Years of Quantitative Audience Research The Partial Death of the Dominant Paradigm A Strange Twist ... Conclusion: The Compatibility Thesis References

  • Reporting the 2010 General Election: Old Media, New Media — Old Politics, New Politics

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, David Deacon et al.CHAPTERPolitical Communication in Britain2011

    To say that the media are central to modern election campaigning may be axiomatic, but there are specific reasons why the media are particularly significant in British general elections. Britain still has a very unitary political system, only partially tempered by political devolution. It also has centralised and nationally orientated news media whose dominance is arguably increasing, as pressures on regional news broadcasting intensify and cost-…

  • Exploring historical thinking and agency with undergraduate history students

    Adele Nye, Marnie Hughes‐warrington et al.ARTICLEStudies in Higher Education2011References: 21

    Recent research on historical thinking has instigated important disciplinary conversations and changes in pedagogical practice. They have, however, largely focused on the primary and secondary school sector, highlighting the gap in corresponding research into tertiary education. It is important to look at the experiences of history students at tertiary level, to assess the impact of perceptions and practices on graduate employment outcomes and tr…

  • Patterns of press partisanship in the 2010 General Election

    Open AccessDominic Wring, Desley Deacon et al.ARTICLEBritish Politics2010

  • Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present

    Open AccessDesley Deacon, Penny Russell et al.BOOKTransnational Lives2010

    In the mid-eighteenth century, the son of an Odawa woman and a French man allied himself with Indians and the French in the North American Great Lakes area to combat British power. Later — according to the multiple legends of his life — he defended the British, combated rebellious American colonists, raised Indian warriors to fight against the expanding American republic and then settled in Wisconsin, where he and his family are known as the firs…

  • Historical Thinking in Higher Education: Staff and Student Perceptions of the Nature Of Historical Thinking

    Adele Nye, Marnie Hughes‐warrington et al.ARTICLEHistory Australia2009Cited by: 2References: 4

    This article provides an introduction to the results of a nationwide scoping study of student and staff perceptions of the nature and roles of historical thinking. In 2008–09, over 1400 students and 50 staff from 12 universities around Australia completed interviews and questionnaires. This research report examines student and staff responses to the second questionnaire item, asking for an assessment of the connection between particular activitie…