This article addresses how mainstream media are conceptualised as a site for mediated recognition in the city of Sydney, Australia. Utilising the notion of political listening, the analysis investigates how participants position certain media outlets as misrecognising the value of diverse voices. Through in-depth interviews, the article explores how audiences discuss perceived issues of significance to society in their recall of news coverage spanning politics, migration, international conflict and local crime. First, the article clarifies how participants construct specific racialised notions of Otherness by situating their use of mainstream media discourses in the context of their everyday communicative interactions. Second, it examines how racialised frameworks are mobilised by participants to evaluate certain news media as spaces of exclusion. This article posits that the participants’ discussions of these media spaces as being integral in fostering inclusion endows the media outlets with a capacity for enhancing everyday mechanisms of mediated recognition.
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