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Introduction A submission to The Environment and Communications References Committee Inquiry into Media Diversity in Australia from The Centre for Advancing Journalism The University of Melbourne Authors: Denis Muller, Andrew Dodd, Jo Chandler, Louisa Lim, Brad Buller Introduction We thank the Environment and Communications References Committee for the opportunity to make a submission to this inquiry into media diversity in Australia. It is a topic of great importance to every citizen of Australia and one that is central to the mission of the Centre for Advancing Journalism. Media diversity both reflects and engenders a healthy democracy. Without pluralism in ownership and content, both the media and the society it serves are diminished. This submission addresses several of the terms of reference of the inquiry, namely the two closely connected themes of media diversity and independence, and their impacts on both public interest journalism and democracy. It also specifically addresses the following aims: (a) the current state of public interest journalism in Australia and any barriers to Australian voters’ ability to access reliable, accurate and independent news; (b) the effect of media concentration on democracy in Australia; (c) the impact of Australia’s media ownership laws on media concentration in Australia; (d) the impact of significant changes to media business models since the advent of online news and the barriers to viability and profitability of public interest news services; (e) the impact of online global platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter on the media industry and sharing of news in Australia; (f) the barriers faced by small, independent and community news outlets in Australia; (g) the role that a newswire service plays in supporting diverse public interest journalism in Australia; (h) the state of local, regional and rural media outlets in Australia; (i) the role of government in supporting a viable and diverse public interest journalism sector in Australia; and 1 (j) any other related matters. About the Centre for Advancing Journalism The Centre for Advancing Journalism was established in 2009 within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. We exist to foster and encourage journalism that is useful and informs and engages citizens. We are the home of the Master of Journalism and the Master International Journalism programs. We’re also a hub for thinking, conversation and creativity around journalism and its role in democratic societies. Introduction This submission has two overarching themes: The impact of the digital revolution and Covid-19 on professional mass media and its consequences for media diversity. The cumulative effect of changes to media regulation in Australia which have without exception led to an increase in media ownership concentration. The consequences of this increased concentration are illustrated by two case studies, one concerning climate change, the other the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It is not coincidental that both of these case studies demonstrate the impact of the high concentration of metropolitan daily newspaper ownership by News Corporation, as well as its ownership of Sky News. The submission begins with a brief discussion of the importance of media diversity to the functioning of democracy. This is followed by a description of the impact of the digital revolution and Covid-19, with a sub-section on public-interest journalism in regional areas. There is then a review of how Australia’s media ownership became so concentrated. This is followed by the case studies, and a brief description of how the Government of China has achieved effective control of a large proportion of Chinese-language newspapers in Australia. In the present climate, this is an important but easily overlooked aspect of media diversity. Media diversity and the functioning of democracy The issue of media diversity as it affects the functioning of democracy goes much further than the historic disruptions brought about by digital technology. It goes to questions of 2 power and fundamental democratic values such as egalitarianism, the rights to speak and be heard, and the breadth of information available to citizens on which to base their participation in political, economic and social life. In 2006 the American media scholar C. Edwin Baker set out his case for opposing ownership concentration, stating that democracy was at a crossroads. A more democratic distribution of communicative power was needed, consistent with normative theories of democracy that said people had an equal right to participate in collective self-determination. This egalitarian principle was supported by the concept of one vote, one value, and as a principle it applied not only to elections but to media as the means by which a self-governing people acquired the capacity to form public opinion and have it influence and ultimately control public will-formation. The media constituted what Baker called “a crucial sluice between public opinion formation and state will-formation”. The media mediated between the public and the government. For this reason, a country was democratic only to the extent that the media, as well as elections, were structurally egalitarian and politically salient. Applied to media ownership, this principle could be plausibly interpreted as requiring a maximum dispersal of media ownership. Moreover, he argued, no democracy should risk the danger that an individual decision- maker be in a position to exercise enormous, unequal and hence undemocratic, largely unchecked, potentially irresponsible power. That precisely sums up the present position of Rupert Murdoch in the Australian democracy. The belief that the internet would enable everyone to go out and “blog and do our thing” and put an end to corporate media interest struck him as impossible. Whatever the importance of micro-actions might be – and his Free Press movement had been one of them – good journalism required resources, specialised skills, and institutional support to stand up against powerful political, economic and social forces. He observed what has since become a commonplace: that the marriage of the internet to profit-seeking would do nothing to improve journalism and, if anything, would set it back. Similarly with the hope that the internet would democratise the news media. Despite Rupert Murdoch’s disingenuous claim that “power is moving away” from the likes of him and his organisation, the fact is that television remains the primary source of news, as shown by a series of authoritative research studies, including by Ofcom (2014). Moreover, the established media companies were quick to colonise online news with their own news websites, giving them a leading position in online news, as research by Curran et al (2013) showed. The impact of the digital revolution During the past 20 years, news media industries in Western countries have experienced a series of interrelated economic disruptions triggered by the expansion and uptake of digital technologies. In the first decade of this century, classified advertising steadily migrated online. Declines in newspaper circulation have also savaged revenue, with digital subscriptions failing to arrest the fall in newspaper sales. Meanwhile, attempts by media companies to build online advertising revenue have also been thwarted in recent years by 3 the increasing dominance of Google and Facebook in Australia (Letts, 2016) and in the US, where it is estimated that even in the smallest markets, as much as 75 percent of the digital advertising dollars are flowing to these enterprises (Abernathy, 2018). Consequently, as in the US and UK (Nel & Journalism.co.uk, 2010), Australia’s legacy newsrooms have been drastically downsized, with the loss of around 3000 journalist jobs - about a quarter of the workforce - since 2011 (Zion et al., 2018). While there was initial optimism that the extent of job losses in metropolitan newsrooms might be avoided in regional Australia, large regional titles have not been spared (Newcastle Herald cuts hit hard - ABC Media Watch, 2015) (Wangman, 2015). Internationally, however, a growing body of research has quantified the extent and impact of the loss of local news, and map and evaluate measures evolving to fill the void. The University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media’s landmark 2018 report, The Expanding News Desert, comprehensively mapped this phenomenon in the US. It also exposed the ‘ghosting’ of mastheads that still publish, albeit less frequently and with reduced local content (Abernathy, 2018). It found 1300 communities had lost news coverage (Stites, 2018); there was no sustainable replacement model; and that no ‘one size fits all’ response is likely to suffice. The international crisis eroding local journalism has inspired a range of innovative interventions aimed at rebuilding, re-energising and re-tooling diminished newsrooms, or - where local journalism has vanished entirely - equipping communities with tools and skills they might enlist to fill the void. Broadly speaking, these interventions have been generated in industry, community and academic realms independently and sometimes collaboratively. A game-changing industry response occurred in northern England in 2018 when rival regional news organisations joined forces to report the national rail crisis (Rawlinson, 2018). This collaboration was driven by the realisation by editors and journalists on competing mastheads that, in the words of one of them, they
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