More than 176,000 citizens have signed former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s petition for a Royal Commission into the domination of Australia’s media by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. No media organisation can feel comfortable about such a protest.
Australia has a more concentrated media ownership than any other comparable country. You don’t have to dislike the way Murdoch runs his newspapers and television station to think this is a bad and dangerous thing. Depending on how you count, he controls about 60 per cent of newspaper circulation, as well as owning SkyNews.
Throughout his career Murdoch has used his media outlets to intervene in politics. We now have two former Prime Ministers – Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull – who have gone public about the effect of that on our democracy.
This is not the first time someone has suggested an inquiry into Murdoch’s operations. Then Prime Minister Julia Gillard famously said that News Corporation “had questions to answer” during the telephone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom. This was in the context of Greens leader Bob Brown calling for an inquiry into media regulations.
And there was an inquiry, held by Judge Ray Finkelstein. The recommendations were largely ignored, but then communications minister Stephen Conroy responded by trying to make it effectively compulsory for media organisations to sign up to a code of conduct with real penalties for breaches. It failed, and the vehement campaign against his moves by all media organisations was part of the story of the downfall of the Gillard Government.
There have been other inquiries by the federal parliament every time a change to media ownership legislation has been proposed. Recommendations from these inquiries have typically highlighted the concerning nature of the concentration of media ownership. They have been routinely ignored.
Highlights, or lowlights, have included Kerry Packer’s appearance before the parliamentary print media inquiry in 1997, in which he was questioned on his ambitions to take over the then Fairfax newspapers.
That attempt brought together two foes – former Prime Ministers Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam – to campaign for The Age to remain independent.
In other words, the issue is not new. The political will to tackle it has never been high. When the will has been there – as with Gillard – the political capital has been lacking.
But in the meantime, the way in which Murdoch’s power works has changed. At the same time, the bias has ramped up to the point where good reporters, and Murdoch’s own son James, have left the organisation.
Take Rick Morton, now working for The Saturday Paper (and Inkl Originals). He left The Australian in 2019 after an address he gave to students at the University of Technology Sydney in which he said “the craziness has been dialled up” in the previous six months, with copy changed without reporters’ knowledge and headlines spun to reflect a particular view.
Meanwhile SkyNews, once a solid news service, has increasingly become a local version of FoxNews in the USA.
The Murdoch agenda has varied over his career, but consistent threads have been a suspicion of government intervention, and a right-wing libertarian agenda.
In recent years this has meant hostility to government action on climate change – and even climate change denial. In recent weeks, it has meant opposition to government attempts to halt the spread of Covid. This is most visible in the campaign against Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.
So how does this power work? What difference does it make?
There is now consistent evidence across something like seven different elections in Australia – state and federal – to suggest that the power of News Corporation doesn’t sway public opinion and votes in a simple, direct fashion.
This began with the state elections in Victoria and Queensland in 2017. News Corporation tabloids went flat out against Labor in both states – but Labor won. There are other examples.
Murdoch’s readership has dropped in recent years. For example, in Melbourne, The Age, owned by Nine, has more readers – in print and hard copy combined - than the Murdoch tabloid The Herald Sun. The most read newspaper in Australia is the Nine-owned Sydney Morning Herald.
Several surveys suggest that even those who read the Murdoch outlets don’t trust them. In fact, the only Australian news media outlet that consistently rates highly on measures of public trust is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
I don’t mean to suggest News Corporation’s power has dissipated. Rather, its power works in two ways. First, by articulating and informing the agenda of the current federal government, or a faction within it.
Second, by influencing the parameters of public debate – what is sayable, what views are regarded as respectable, and what is on the agenda.
There is a good reason to believe that the Murdoch owned Fox News’ amplification of the Trump agenda aided his victory in 2016. In the United Kingdom, Murdoch bolstered the Brexit campaign and Boris Johnson’s election battle.
Would people in Australian political life still proudly express climate change scepticism if the Murdoch press didn’t so regularly endorse this view?
In all these cases, Murdoch’s editors took existing deep tides of discontent and amplified them. He put into the mainstream things that were previously muttered in private. He used his megaphone to alter the content of public debate and to drown out other agendas.
There is a lesson here for citizens.
To the extent that News Corporation’s critics focus their fury on the organisation’s excesses, they mould themselves in its reverse image. They become reactive. That increases the nature of News Corporation’s agenda-setting power even if people are opposing the Murdoch views.
The challenge is to formulate an independent agenda. That’s difficult when the Murdoch press is so dominant. We would undoubtedly worry about Murdoch less if there were a dozen media owners with equal audience share in Australia, all pushing different views.
It is not easy to ignore a person with a megaphone, but nevertheless we must try to find quiet places to talk, outside its reach.
In that less shouty space, we need to work out what we think about the issues raised by our lived experience and our own priorities.
In the meantime, I don’t expect there to be a Royal Commission into Murdoch press. But perhaps Kevin Rudd’s petition will mean that as we approach the upcoming state and federal elections, people will have News Corporations’ biases at the front of their awareness and draw their own conclusions about its reporting.
Perhaps they will seek that quiet space.
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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