The 24-hour collapse of Dutton’s cunning nuclear news cycle — from Friday’s front-page banner, through the ABC same-day number-crunching, to its great vanishing on the weekend — will be reinforcing the government’s confidence that it’s got Dutton’s number. But what about Labor’s far more dangerous foe, the Murdochs?
Next year, Australia will have its first election with Lachlan heading News Corp — and the first election in the global news ecosystem remade by Elon Musk’s X. Maybe Albo can beat Dutton. But can he beat Lachlan at the same time?
Gamers will recognise what News Corp is up to. It’s the Zerg rush, the tactic originated in the 1990s StarCraft franchise of overwhelming your opponent by sheer force of numbers. So it is with the prime minister, day after day, as the company’s Zerg units (okay, political pundits) charge over the top towards Albanese’s front lines, popping away at culture wars, the economy and his own personal property dealings.
Take just about any story in the ideologically shoutiest of the company’s mastheads, The Australian, this past weekend. “Epic failures” on antisemitism, according to Janet Albrechtsen. “Garbled ideological mission creep of alt-morality and the gaslighting of any dissent” pontificates Chris Uhlmann on Indigenous flags. “Gambled with the cash bounty like a bachelor living rent-free in a harbourside mansion — and it hasn’t paid off,” per Tom Dusevic on the federal budget. “‘University-level’ politics is tearing apart the nation,” mocks Gemma Tognini about… just about everything.
All signs of just how increasingly strident News Corp has become since Lachlan replaced his father as chair of the US-based company late last year.
It’s got so bad that last week saw that rarest of things float around the Canberra press gallery: a leak out of the notoriously tight Albanese cabinet with not one, but four, sources telling the Nine mastheads that the PM had warned his colleagues that News Corp is now openly “working hand in glove” with the Liberals.
The Nine story came neatly sandwiched between Albanese’s drop-in at Lachlan’s Christmas party at Bellevue Hill the previous Thursday (with the surprise guest appearance of Murdoch family patriarch Rupert, along with wife number five).
It coincided with The New York Times‘ revelation that the Nevada court had dropped a lump of coal into father and son’s Christmas stockings, rejecting the proposed “Project Harmony” post-Rupert disenfranchising of Lachlan’s siblings on the family trust that holds a controlling interest in Fox and News Corp. With the decision meaning Lachlan’s control is unlikely to long outlast his father, News Corp will head into Australia’s election year distracted by its own paralysing uncertainties.
And it was followed on by last Wednesday’s announcement that the government had snuggled a gift-wrapped box of chocolates under legacy media’s tree, with a more legally defensible plan to force the tech platforms to keep paying off the old corporations.
News Corp expects to be the big winner out of the government’s plan – as it was out of the Morrison government’s news bargaining code. (“I will be contacting Meta immediately,” thundered the family’s local satrap Michael Miller.)
The announcement came with a strong rhetorical commitment to “a diverse and sustainable news sector“ from Communications Minister Michelle Rowlands. But if the scheme works anything like ScoMo’s, the payments to Nine and News Corp will come untethered from any obligations to spend it on actual news gathering — making them little more than transfers from tech titans to media moguls, smoothing the rise of one and easing the decline of the other.
Putting this past fortnight’s events together, it seems Albanese sees the Murdochs as a problem — but one to be managed, not confronted. He’d be aware, too, that media moguls are distrusted and disliked by voters, and will be hoping that that distrust can be painted onto the features of their political puppets.
He’ll also be half-hoping that the leak will encourage the rest of Australia’s news media to recognise that they risk being reduced to bit players in the Murdochs’ Punch-and-Judy show as they sane-wash News Corp’s culture war framing of what makes news by dressing it up as “accountability” and “telling both sides”.
The success of the US company’s outrage model to drive its right-wing framing has reshaped Anglophone legacy news media with a dull same-ness. It’s also justified the bad-news bias of social media algorithms (with significant amplification on YouTube, X, and from Moscow’s troll and bot farms).
In the US, once alternate models like The Washington Post and The LA Times are bending the knee to the new media orthodoxy, repositioning themselves with nods to objectivity to shake off any signs of woke diversity. In the UK, Murdoch outrage has been rendered even more extreme by the Daily Mail, while London’s once staid Telegraph has trotted down the path carved out by The Australian.
Even progressives (like Australia’s Greens) have embraced over-heated “not-good-enough” rhetoric designed for the social media hit in order to criticise steady-as-she-goes centre-left governments including Biden in the US and Starmer in the UK.
Now it’s about the global vibe of ambient news. As Nathan Heller wrote in the New Yorker last month: “The goal is for voters to meet ideas coming and going so often that those notions seem like common sense.”
It’s challenging incumbent governments — particularly centre-left incumbents whose diverse base makes them vulnerable to “common sense” culture war attacks from the right.
The result? We’re in a deeply polluted media environment this election (again!) where News Corp’s replicating of Zerg units won’t be rebuffed by better early-century style “messaging” (as so many of Canberra’s commentariat are urging).
The first step to cleaning up the journalistic shit? Recognise that the News Corp outrage is the problem, not the model to be adopted…
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