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Submission on Senate Enquiry Into Media Diversity in Australia The Submission on Senate enquiry into media diversity in Australia The state of media diversity, independence and reliability in Australia and the impact that this has on public interest journalism and democracy. DATE: 6TH DECEMBER 2020 MY BACKGROUND I am a retired business professional who has worked in the information technology and information industry all my working life. My roles have included technical, management, account management, regional sales management and worldwide product marketing. I have taken an interest is current affairs all of my life and am very cognisant of the technical capabilities of the internet and social media. MY SUBMISSION The greatest change to the media landscape in Australia over recent years is the influence of the internet and online media and advertising and the commensurate fall in advertising revenue in the traditional masthead newspapers. The arrival of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media has changed the way users explore news, current affairs and other content of interest. The operational model of social media is to fund their business through advertising which extracts large sources of revenue from traditional media. This results in the need for commercial media to cut costs, change their business model, introduce paywalls requiring subscription to access media content, and merge into larger conglomerates. The other major media providers in Australia are the publicly funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and SBS. The internet and social media has not affected their funding source and has in fact increased their reach. The ABC receives over $1 Billion annually and is forever complaining about cuts, be they cuts in real terms or simply through a lack of inflation indexed cost increases. Recently ABC staff received 2% pay increases whilst many in the commercial media lost jobs through belt tightening by their owners due to the further fall off in advertising revenue due to Covid-19. Voters have extensive sources to reach out to for information and journalistic content through the combination of the public funded media and the commercial media. The challenge is whether each media organisation presents various views within their organisation. The introduction of social media and search engines enables these social media organisations to milk for free the content written by paid journalists across the Australian media landscape. The second consequence of these new platforms is the propensity of the reader using these sources to be fed content that the platform algorithms feed to them that is what they have already consumed. The result is the information bubble. Non-discerning readers will be fed what they like to read based upon previous searches and likes. The Marxist will probably see primarily content that they agree with, the environmentalist will only be fed like-minded commentary as will the right-wing person. The reason for this is the advertising dollars that the media giants receive through viewed content. This is a massive change to the way media is presented. Before this new media revolution newspapers had various views presented in their broadsheet or tabloid papers and advertisers paid regardless of who the readers were. Page 1 Submission to Senate Committee – Media Diversity in Australia The ABC is often accused of left wing bias. I could refer to countless examples on e.g. Q&A and the Drum where there is a panel of clear left wing biased people and the token outsider but I won’t. I could refer to Paul Barry of Media Watch and his weekly diatribe against the Murdoch media but I’ll leave that debate to others. I’ll instead refer to the research done in 2013 by Folker Hanusch when he was at the University of the Sunshine Coast who highlighted in his survey that 41.2% of ABC respondents voted Green and the number voting ALP approximately equated to that received across Australia during Federal Elections. https://web.archive.org/web/20150903210303/http://research.usc.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repositor y/usc:10859?queryType=vitalDismax&sort=ss_dateNormalized%5C&query=Folker+Hanusch+2013&f0=sm_cr eator%3A%22Hanusch%2C+F%22 https://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/so-who-skews-news-bias-australian-media- revealed/1875830/ This research has been challenged by the ABC but I’ll respond with the fact that Folker Hanusch is now Professor of Journalism at the University of Vienna, clearly a credible academic. In the Australian and in Sky News, whilst many consider them to be centre right they do employ and have opinion writers across the political spectrum. For example Philip Adams, Graeme Richardson, Warren Mundine regularly write for The Australian. On Sky News which is classified as of the Right they have regular contributors, Graham Richardson, Stephen Conroy and Bruce Hawker, who are hardly right wing. My point is that these media outlets have contributors from across the political spectrum. Similarly so does the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. I refer the Senate Committee to the most comprehensive media bias resource there is that I have discovered called the Media Bias/Fact Check. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/. Some of their bias analyses are: ABC News Left-Centre https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/abc-news-australia/ The Australian Right-Centre https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-australian/ SM Herald Left-Centre https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-sydney-morning-herald/ The Age Left https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-age-australia/ Sky News Australia Right https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/sky-news-australia/ The Guardian Left-Centre https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ Independent Australia Left-Centre https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/independent-australia/ Green Left Weekly Left https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/green-left-weekly/ SBS Left-Centre https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/special-broadcasting-service-sbs/ 9News Australia Slight-Right https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/9-news-australia/ As you can see we have various and diverse bias across our media. To claim that commercial media is biased in one direction is clearly false when examining this resource. The same cannot be said about publicly funded media in Australia. The ABC often cites the fact that they measure balance across their news and current affairs programs by balancing the time they spend with each side of politics. This is a totally flawed measure. Bias probably cannot be measured objectively. By measuring the time allocated to each political party takes no account of the story selection, partisan position of the interviewer, approach of the interview and how friendly or otherwise they are to the person being interviewed and the use of pejorative adjectives. Bias can be measured by criteria such as: bias by omission, bias by labelling, bias by placement, bias by selection of sources, bias by spin, bias by story selection, confirmation bias, connotation, denotation and the use of purr words or snarl words. For further details on this methodology I refer to Media Bias/Fact Check at https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/. Page 2 Submission to Senate Committee – Media Diversity in Australia This Senate Committee should take account of media bias and the reason for this inquiry through independent professional analysis of all Australian media before drawing any conclusions as to whether any private media organisation undermines our democracy or not. I greatly support the initiative by the Federal Government to force the social media giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to pay for content produced by all Australian media regardless of whether they are privately or publically funded. This will assist the commercial media to survive and therefore facilitate increased media outlets and their ability to fund more journalistic content. For the ABC and SBS this additional revenue will be a financial windfall. To counter this windfall which could increase their dominance to the detriment of commercial and other independent media, I propose that any income from the compensation they receive from the social media giants be taken from the amount they receive from the Australian Government, which is Australian taxpayers. This would retain the balance between public and commercial media outlets in Australia and not unduly favour public broadcasters. Yours respectfully Page 3 Submission to Senate Committee – Media Diversity in Australia .
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