Believe it or not, there are some things going on in Parliament House that are not lewd acts and trauma associated with the awful behaviour of its denizens.
Almost ignored by the mainstream media, the Senate Inquiry into Media Diversity is grinding away, having held two public hearings so far and received 628 submissions from organisations and individuals.
In one way, the lack of attention is not surprising. There have been so many inquiries over so many years about the state of the media in Australia. The dominant position of News Corporation has formed the underlying concern for most of them. There is little to show for all these inquiries, and nobody has any great expectations about this one.
On the other hand this one is a little different. It got off the ground thanks to more than 500,000 Australians signing a petition started by Kevin Rudd calling for a Royal Commission into News Corporation and the health of Australian news media more generally. That was a record for a petition to parliament. It is reasonable to think that at least some of those signatories would be interested in knowing what is going on.
The answer is, not a great deal. Various players have rehearsed well-worn arguments. There have been a couple of witnesses who have given shocking evidence about toxic cultures at News Corporation. If you are interested in that, see this link because that is not my focus here.
On the issue of whether a royal commission is needed, and more broadly whether government should have any role in creating a more diverse media ecosystem, the arguments coalesce around two assertions. One the one hand, that News Corporation poisons everything and is unacceptably dominant, and on the other hand that its power has been much exaggerated and that the organisation is much misunderstood.
News Corporation executives appearing before the inquiry asserted that this is the best of times and the worst of times. They described a veritable flowering of diversity online with audiences having never-before-seen riches of choice in their media diet.
Nine was slightly less fevered about this, but largely agreed. Our biggest private media organisations say that the issue is sustainability, not diversity. The media, said the executive chairman of News Corp, Michael Miller, “has never been more diverse and it has never been more challenged.”
So how dominant is News Corporation? In an amusing display of coyness, Miller claimed not to know.
Labor’s Senator Kim Carr asked him to nominate News Corporation’s share of the news media market. Most academic commentators suggest this is in the region of 70 per cent – a figure the Chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, also quoted.
But Miller was less sure, leading to this exchange.
“Mr Miller: A figure that is often used is 70 per cent. I'm not sure that is current.
Senator KIM CARR: But that is a figure you would recognise?
Mr Miller: It's a figure of a few years ago. I use the Sydney market as an example where my guesstimate—again, not an estimate—would be it is 60-40. I think Mr Rudd made that comment in his submission.
Senator KIM CARR: I am talking about nationally.
Mr Miller: We don't have any publications in WA.
Senator KIM CARR: I would like your view. What's your view of what the percentage share of the newspaper market by circulation is controlled by News Corp?
Mr Miller: I'm going to say about 60 per cent.
Senator KIM CARR: 60?
Mr Miller: That's an estimate.”
Carr went on to ask what the market share was by revenue. Advertising revenue or subscription revenue, Miller asked? Carr was understandably impatient.
“Mr Miller: I'm just trying to clarify the definition of 'revenue'.
Senator KIM CARR: I'm not here to play technical games with you. I would like your assessment of News Corp's share of the market in Australia.”
Miller finally settled on 30 per cent for newspapers, but he seemed most unsure, which is comical. What do they pay him for?
But on the other side of the argument, figures for revenue and readership don’t tell the whole story. What matters is the way the Murdoch press distorts the public debate.
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd asserted that “everyone is frightened of Murdoch; they really are. There's a culture of fear across the country, and the fear is rationally based. They've seen many cases of individual political leaders and others who have had their characters assassinated through a systematic campaign by the Murdoch media. In other words, what the Murdoch mob are after is compliant politicians who won't rock the boat.”
Also interesting was Rudd’s broad brushstroke description of the political orientation of the media – which I think is largely accurate in as much as left-right labels are any use these days.
Rudd described the Nine newspapers – The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review as being “centre right”. The Murdoch media he described as “hard Right”, and The Guardian as “between Centre and Centre Left”.
On the issue of diversity, Carr drew attention to the fact that the Nine newspapers, once run by their own editors, now all answer to the same group executive editor, James Chessell. The Canberra press gallery offices for the two mastheads were once separate, but are now combined into one office, serving both newspapers.
Thankfully, given all the obfuscation and special pleading, the Senate Inquiry has been given some independent and authoritative data on media consumption
The University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre submission reports on the results of a national annual online survey of more than 2,000 adult Australians about their news consumption.
The results tell a more complex and illuminating story than the self-interested and politically partisan witnesses. First, most Australians – 60 per cent – describe themselves as either extremely or very interested in news.
Not surprisingly, there is a huge disjunct between young and old in how they access news. Among people born between 1995 and 2010, (Generation Z), 48 per cent say social media is their main source of news, compared to just 9 per cent of baby boomers.
At the other end of the scale, 57 per cent of baby boomers and over 75s source most of their news from television, compared to only 19 per cent of Generation Z.
More surprising, and certainly democratically important, is the diversity of news “brands” audiences are accessing. More than half (51%) of Australia’s news consumers access five or more news brands in a week. The better educated you are, the more likely you are to access multiple news brands.
There is some evidence to suggest that social media, far from creating echo chambers, is one of the reasons young people access multiple brands – although the submission also notes that young people are also the most likely not to consume news at all.
News consumption also breaks down by political affiliation. Left wingers (61%) and right wingers (59%) are more likely to access multiple news sources than those who describe themselves as being in the centre (46%).
The people who access least news brands are those who don’t know their political orientation – 21 per cent of those surveyed. These disengaged citizens are a potent concern, the submission suggests, and it recommends more research to better understand how they gain information and form their views.
So what brands are people consuming? Is the New Corporation’s dominance real or imagined?
The survey asked people what “brands” they had accessed in the previous week, then broke the results down into offline and online media.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation was the most popular offline news brand, accessed by 41 per cent. It was followed by Channels 7 and 9, each on 38 per cent. The Herald Sun was the first News Corporation brand to show up, accessed by just 12 per cent of people in the week before the survey. Sky News level pegged with it, and the Daily Telegraph came in shortly after that at 10 per cent. The Australian scored 9 per cent, and the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age 8 per cent and 6 per cent respectively.
I added up all the News Corp brands included in the survey, and arrived at 60 per cent – out ranking the ABC.
But, of course, offline is no longer the main game in town.
When it comes to online news, News.com.au and the ABC are equal first, with each having 23 per cent of those surveyed accessing them in the previous week. Then comes nine.com.au (18%) and 7News.com.au (14%) . Ranking equally at 12 per cent are BBC news online, Guardian Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Skynews, the Daily Telegraph and Buzznews are next at 9 per cent each. The Age, the Australian and the Herald Sun each get 8 per cent.
The Saturday Paper and Crikey are each at 2 per cent.
Again, if you add up the figures for all the online News Corporation brands in the survey, you get 67% of people accessing at least one of their brands in the previous week.
In other words, on these figures the 70 per cent figure the academics give for News Corporation dominance would seem to be about right.
However, the University of Canberra research suggests we have yet to reach the extreme political polarisation in media consumption that we have seen in the USA – where people on the right and the left access different brands, and believe different “facts” as a result.
Australia presents a different and healthier picture. For example, 22 per cent of Sky News viewers identify as left wing, and another 26 per cent identify as being in the Centre (what do they make of Sky after dark, I wonder).
Forty per cent of the ABC television news audience describes itself as being left wing, 26 per cent describe themselves as being in the centre, and another 26 per cent are right wing.
(Lest it need to be said, it is those in the centre and the nine per cent with no political orientation, who will decide elections, which is why the ABC matters so much to politicians.)
The same thing is observable in newspapers. Almost one-third of readers of The Australian (“hard right” in the view of Kevin Rudd) identify as left-wing and 47% of those who read The Age (centre right according to Rudd) identify as left wing.
On the other hand, newer online outlets such as The Conversation, Crikey and The Guardian have audiences that lean more strongly to the left.
The University of Canberra researchers note that overall, about one third of news consumers access news that is not associated with their political leaning. “However the majority do not. This points to polarization among news consumers that needs monitoring.”
If you were wondering about social media, Twitter is the most left wing platform, with half of those who use it to access news describing themselves as on the left.
Once again, the numbers surely don’t tell the whole story. I’d assert that the smaller outlets often have more influence because of the nature of their audiences –well educated influencers. It is not only a matter of size.
And nor do the numbers on News Corporation say all there is to say about its power, which these days comes not so much from raw vote-swinging power, but from setting the parameters of the public debate.
Rudd again: “[News Corporation] cripples and constrains the national debate on the big challenges for the future, whether it's climate, whether it's the complexities of our future relationship with China and the huge geopolitical challenges which are unfolding for our country and like-minded democracies around the world, or other things.”
In this vein, the News Corporation executives were quizzed about their organisation’s role in denying the role of climate change in bushfire causation, and about their campaigns against individuals such as writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied and former head of the Human Rights Commission, Gillian Trigg.
The surprise here is that Miller claimed not to know about most of it, which Chair Senator Hanson Young asserted was an “absurd” response.
The executives took the questions on notice. Surprise, surprise, when they provided their written News Corporation reckoned everything it had done was fair enough.
So what can we draw from all this?
Thankfully, there are still plenty of media “places” where left and right meet, and consume similar versions of the facts. In this, the role of the ABC as one of the dominant media brands is key.
On the other hand, the University of Canberra researchers identified a sizable minority of poorly educated Australians who access only a single news brand, or none, and who have low political awareness. “It is important for policy makers and news organisations to understand the information diets of these citizens, why they do not consume news, and how to better respond to their information needs.”
The next hearing of the Senate Inquiry will be on 12 April. The final report is due on 4 August, by which time we will be nearing the election season.
But even if the inquiry agrees that News Corporation is too dominant, what can be done? Most submissions acknowledge that forcing News to divest some of its outlets is probably not legally possible, or even desirable.
Rather, they suggest a range of means by which government might encourage diversity and the smaller players, including start-ups.
That will have to wait for another column.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.
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