Maxwell Modell
(he/him)

Teams and roles for Maxwell Modell

Research Associate
School of Journalism, Media and Culture

My research focuses on the interplay between journalism and politics, with a specific focus on the way news media is reimagining itself in response to digital technologies and narratives of declining trust in journalism.

I am a Research Associate working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Enhancing the Impartiality of Political News’ led by Professor Stephen Cushion and Dr Matt Walsh. The project critically assesses how different broadcasters implement impartiality and how audiences perceive impartiality. It examines the production, content and reception of broadcast, online and social media in the UK and internationally. The aim is to provide new empirical evidence to inform professional and public discussions about enhancing the impartiality of political news.

My PhD project ‘Reinventing the News? The Discourse of UK News Podcasts’, examined the rise of news podcasts in the UK and their role in reimagining journalism, focusing on evolving norms of news presentation and how they are discursively legitimated. The project was motivated by a desire to understand how legacy and digital-native news producers are using podcasts as a medium to repackage broadcast practices for a rapidly changing digital media landscape and as a way to better engage audiences.

My research has been published in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, the edited collection Pandering to Populism, and The Conversation.

Date
Type

2025

Modell, M. 2025. From the political to the personal: Constructing politicians’ biographies in the Nick Robinson podcast ‘Political Thinking’. Journalism 26 (3), pp.581-599. (10.1177/14648849241255208)
Modell, M. 2025. Reinventing the news? The discourse of UK news podcasts. PhD Thesis , Cardiff University.

I am a research associate on AHRC ‘Enhancing Impartiality’ project. Our project investigates the impartiality of broadcast and online media through large-scale analysis of news output, nationwide surveys and focus groups, and in-depth interviews with leading editors and journalists. Overall, we aim to assess how different broadcasters apply impartiality and how audiences understand it over the coming years. In turn, our research provides systematic evidence to inform the interpretation of impartiality and help nuance hotly contested public debates around media bias, which often lack a strong evidential basis.

You can read our latest research on our website - https://www.enhancingimpartiality.com/

My other research interests include podcast studies, political interviews, and broadcast talk. For example, I am currently working on a project exploring politicians appearing on celebrity podcasts and how the norms of the political interview are being reconfigured around the Chumcast format. The analysis examines how podcasters and politicians are interactionally managing these interviews and reflections on the impact this has on the future of accountability journalism.