Denial has been a river running through Australia’s media this past week with News Corp’s Australian boss Michael Miller at the National Press Club denying the US company ever intends to bully high-profile women, and ABC’s news head Justin Stevens denying that the ABC lets itself get cowed by News Corp.
Let’s ask the experts. A marker of bullying, say the people at Health Direct, the national virtual public health information service, is “having a lack of remorse or failing to recognise their behaviour as a problem”.
This past week has seen this marker lit up, Usual Suspects style, with the media’s great bedevil-er, News Corp, attempting its trick of convincing Australia that its power to shape what we see as news doesn’t exist.
Cowed or not, everyone in Australia’s media — and in politics and culture, too — is all too critically aware of the News Corp imp, sitting Looney Tunes-style on the shoulder of the Australian left, threatening, cajoling and, yes, bullying.
It’s dead centre of the right’s global distribution network. From the Murdochs’ media to Elon Musk’s X, editorial news judgements and social media algorithms work together to determine what can (and cannot) be said, and who can (or cannot) say it.
It’s why we shouldn’t dismiss News Corp’s targeting of ABC political reporter Laura Tingle as just the latest pile-on in the Murdochs’ generations-long attack on public broadcasting.
The ABC is just collateral. The real targets are the people on the ABC platforms who have crossed what News Corp has deemed a dangerous red line in the culture wars. They are usually women, First Nations peoples or people of non-British descent. They are people like Larissa Behrendt back in 2010, or Yassmin Abdel-Magied in 2017, or Marcia Langton and Stan Grant in last year’s Voice campaign, and now Antoinette Lattouf.
They don’t have to be on the ABC. Ten’s Lisa Wilkinson has also found herself a News Corp target.
The ABC is a device to feed the assembly line of manufactured reporting and social media outrage around demands that the broadcaster “do something”. When the ABC resists, News Corp can rely on its political representatives in the Senate to keep the stories flowing through Senate estimates, parliamentary speeches and media door stops, with the attacks on freedom of expression and ABC independence justified with handwaving about “taxpayers’ money”.
The targets aren’t chosen at random, or at least, not purely at random. They’re people who’ve suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of an “impartial” both-sides-ing of what George Brandis incautiously called “the right to be a bigot”, for calling out the dog whistle over migration and diversity that has driven the right’s post-Trump ethno-populism.
As that global campaign has cranked up over the last decade (and been embraced by Australia’s right-wing politicians) it’s become ever harder for the ABC to resist — as the resignation of Grant, the dismissal of Lattouf and the “counselling” of Tingle all demonstrate.
The right works to weaponise the tools of journalism against its values, with an insistence that the dog whistle be reported with a flatness — that to unpack its meaning with a serious eye would constitute bias. This comes buttressed with the recently created fiction that the tool of “balance” must trump the core value of “truth”.
The rhetoric leans into a literalness to assert that measures to address racial disadvantage must, themselves, be racist. In New Zealand, the recently elected (and proudly “anti-woke”) conservative government has made silencing of Maori-language use in the public service a key part of its elimination of what it calls “race-based” policies.
The Tingle brouhaha does, however, reveal the truly greatest trick with which News Corp has be-devilled Australian media — the idea that it understands journalism better than anyone else. Asserted with vehemence and amplified through market domination, it too often is allowed to set the news agenda and shape how the industry understands it should act.
The ABC cautiously engages, providing recognition through its radio and television talk programs (hello, Insiders) and, at times, its staff recruitment. Nine, journalistically at least, tries to look the other way. Seven West Media has given up pretending, immersing itself in the News Corp way of looking at the world. “Andrews Honour Outrage” yelled News Corp’s Herald Sun on Monday at the one who got away from them. “King COVID”, loyally echoed Seven’s The Nightly.
Thanks to the audacity of a reporter at the National Press Club last week — from AAP, the news organisation News Corp couldn’t kill — we got what a stumbling ABC could not give us: the suggestion that maybe, finally, there’s a path for Australia’s media to break clear.
