No one really remembers The Sun News-Pictorial much, which is a pity. It wasn’t a bad newspaper in its heyday, when it sold 700,000 copies a morning in a city of 3 million people. Sure, it was right-shifted, but it was also a city newspaper. If a pizza joint was held up in Thomastown or an FJ hit a milk float in Clarinda, the Sun had the story, and maybe even a photo.
But it was also pretty good on something else: industrial coverage, i.e. unions, strikes and negotiations. It had good reporters and it played a pretty straight bat. Why? Because it had no choice. Half its readership was in these unions or knew someone who was. If the coverage of an industrial dispute was just propaganda, the readership would know.
The Sun News-Pictorial died when it was rolled into Rupert’s Herald Sun which, after a brief period as a four-edition city paper, was transformed into the propaganda model that Murdoch’s News Corp was pursuing globally.
Fox News was started in 1996. The Herald Sun became a shameless propaganda rag around 1998. “Is that true or did you read it in the Herald Sun?” a sticker ’round town read. The crowning glory was when it plucked an undistinguished reporter named Andrew Bolt — a failed poet and ex-fiancé of a belly dancer — to write a column in the new right culture-war style that News Corp was importing holus-bolus.
There were about 10, maybe 15, years where the propaganda model of the Herald Sun worked a treat. It was the transitional period when people still believed that a newspaper made an effort to give a truthful account of events. Providing a distorted version, it could thus really shape people’s worldview. But that was subject to the law of diminishing returns as media changed and people came to understand just how manufactured these versions of reality were.
The Hun and other such outlets would cleave back to something resembling truth only when their preferred version of reality was so at odds with the world out there that everyone would have noticed.
Following that rule, it would have played an even hand in the recent Victorian state election, and let whatever happened, happen. As history records, it didn’t.
As a consequence, the Herald Sun died on Saturday night. Absolutely ended. Is over. There’s still a paper coming out every morning but it’s simply a ghost of what was. Matter of fact, it’s been pretty pathetic for some time, devoid of volume and impact. It has the flimsy air of a freesheet, with the TV guide, the horoscopes, death notices, sad classifieds. And Bolt, always Bolt. Having thrown everything at Dan Andrews for months, the Hun didn’t leave a mark on him. Even when it self-parodically found “the steps” that had, and ran them as a front-page feature. Or was that a dream?
Really, that’s the end of it. The content of the paper is vacuous, the sales are small. It sits in the back corner of 7-Elevens, and on café tables, unremarked upon. People riffle through it for the half-dozen stories it actually reports, the two pages of celeb PR releases it faithfully reproduces, and filler wire copy you could get anywhere. They glance at Bolt, but clearly not with any intention of taking him seriously or being influenced by him. Bolt’s kept on cos he’s got a core audience — where he used to have a mass one — and the Hun needs every audience it can get. But Bolt’s readership is now like the Little Chef factory in its heyday: it’s cookers, all cookers, as far as the eye can see.
Could the Hun have salvaged itself by playing down the middle, acknowledging that Labor still had basic community support? Well, not really. News Corp only does that when it has brought Labor leaders to heel, and supported them in turning on the left of the party. In however complex a fashion, Dan is of the left, and went leftwards during the election. For the Hun to have been equivocal would have been to bare its throat to Labor, and admit that its day had passed.
But its day has passed, now. It is pages blowing in the street, talking to itself, the paper ephemera of a vanished world. If those of us of the newspaper era have a certain sadness at the sudden irrelevance of what was once a big 120-page black-and-white groaner, wrapping a whole city, a whole world, then it is tempered by the fact that now, after 20 years, its poison has been milked dry, its fangs shattered.
It’s a good thing the funeral notices still run — the Herald Sun can look itself up in the paper and see if it’s dead.
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