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Home , Chris Kenny, James Murdoch, Journalism in Australia, Media Watch (TV program), The Australian, The News (Adelaide)

A submission to The Environment and Communications References Committee Inquiry into Media Diversity in

from The Centre for Advancing The University of

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 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 . 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 Broadcasting Corporation. It is not coincidental that both of these case studies demonstrate the impact of the high concentration of metropolitan daily ownership by , 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 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 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 (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 had ‘more in common than divides us’ (George, 2018). This initiative is credited with laying the foundation for the Local News Partnerships project, a public service journalism collaboration between the BBC and more than 90 local news providers. The initiative has generated jobs for 128 local democracy reporters and established a Shared Data Unit, in which BBC specialists collaborate with and train reporters from local news providers (https://www.bbc.co.uk/lnp/sdu).

Public interest journalism in the regions

Public interest journalism may be defined as that class of journalism that provides citizens with a bedrock of reliable information that enables them to participate in political, economic and social life. Its most important constituents are those which are concerned with the exercise of power, with the functioning of parliament, executive government, the judiciary and local authorities, and with the revelation of matters which otherwise would remain undisclosed, what is called investigative journalism.

The capacity of the Australian media to provide public interest journalism has been severely weakened over the past 15 years or so. In 2005 the giant global social media platforms, in particular Facebook and Google, began to draw off a significant portion of the advertising

4 which financed all journalism but particularly public interest journalism since it was a class of content that was expensive to produce and independent of commercial influence.

In 2015, researchers from the University of Melbourne conducted a research project focused on the effects of this development in three regional areas: Moree, Byron Bay and Newcastle. (Carson, A and others 2016). They found significant deficits in the provision of public interest journalism in all three locations: cuts in newsroom staff; employment of unqualified staff as journalists; thinned-out coverage of local centres of power such local councils and courts; uncritical regurgitation of media releases from government and commercial sources as “news”; highly partisan local interest groups dominating coverage of controversial issues without independent journalistic scrutiny; more story syndication and consequently less local content.

It was true that social media enabled legacy outlets to do things not previously possible, or easy to achieve, such as reaching audiences beyond their geographical boundaries, connecting with new audiences through third-party hyperlinks and below-the-line comments, and crowd-sourcing information. However, these advantages were not addressing the effects of the fundamental deficits, in particular the dilution of journalistic scrutiny of people in power.

The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically worsened this already parlous situation.

By May 2020 the Public Interest Journalism Initiative’s Newsroom Mapping Project reported that 157 newsrooms had closed temporarily or permanently since January 2019. While some of these closures had occurred before the pandemic struck Australia, that fact alone demonstrates the dire straits in which regional newspapers find themselves. More specifically, as the pandemic paralysed commerce with a consequent cessation of advertising, a large number of regional newspapers either closed for good, suspended operations or abandoned print editions in favour of online distribution.

Australian Community Media, which publishes 160 regional newspapers announced in April that many of its non-daily community newspapers would go online at least temporarily. Many resumed printing in June 2020. Also in April announced it would cease print editions of 60 local newspapers, relying instead on online distribution. In May News Corp shifted about 100 former regional and local newspapers to online-only, leading to the loss of an estimated 500 jobs.

In March the two main shareholders in Australian Associated Press, News Corp and , announced they were shutting it down. The AAP newswire is a crucial element in provision of news to regional Australia, allowing local papers and radio stations to cover stories outside their local area economically and to a high editorial standard.

News Corp, having been party to this decision, then sought to exploit it by setting up its own inhouse newswire service, prompting the chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to fire a warning shot over News Corp’s bows about anti-competitive behaviour in the provision of a news service.

5 In the event, AAP was saved at the last minute when a consortium of investors and philanthropists bought it, and although the staff was reduced from about 200 to 85 it at least kept alive a reliable and politically neutral news service and a viable competitor to the News Corp venture. It was, in this way, a small victory for diversity. As was noted by economist Richard Dennis at the University of Melbourne’s recent AN Smith Lecture on Journalism, if it were not for the actions of a few philanthropists, the national newswire service could have become monopolised by the same company that owns 70 per cent of the circulation of Australia’s metropolitan newspapers. This is so because wire services fall outside the scope of media ownership regulation and, quite frankly, nobody imagined that the broad consortium that owned the wholesale newswire service would be dissolved in favour of one singly owned by the dominant retailer. One can only guess at the implications of News Corp owning a sole national news service as well as all of the other media assets it controls. If that were to occur, it could provide copy for nearly every other commercial publication in the country, further spreading its influence. And it would be doing so with little or no regulatory restraint.

At a more local level, in March 2020 the Elliott Group announced the closure of the Sunraysia Daily in and two other newspapers, at Kerang and Swan Hill. At about the same time in Gippsland, the Yarram Standard and the Great Southern Star, which had been publishing for 145 and 130 years respectively, stopped their presses.

How Australia’s media ownership became so concentrated

The history of media ownership in Australia is a history of decreased diversity of voice and increased concentration of ownership. Throughout the twentieth century, press ownership in Australia became concentrated to the point where in no other Western democracy did such a small number of media owners build up such dominant media companies ( Young, 2019). With this concentration of ownership came concentration of political power. In the 1930s, when the large newspaper companies were moving into the new and powerful medium of radio, as Attorney-General was asked if the Government was ever going to do something to curtail their power. He replied: “We haven’t the guts.” (Young, 2019, 3).

At that time, Australia had five dominant media companies: Associated Newspapers, and Weekly Times (HWT), John Fairfax & Sons, News Limited (later News Corporation), and Australian Consolidated Press. Today Australia has two dominant media companies, News Corporation and Nine Entertainment. If the politicians of the 1930s “hadn’t the guts” to take on five proprietors in the public interest, it is three times more likely that they would not have the guts today.

There were five critical public-policy decisions that brought Australia to this point. The first was the decision in 1924 to create so-called “B class”, or commercial, radio licences into which newspaper companies could buy interests, including controlling interests. The second, in 1953, was the decision to grant commercial television licences to established newspaper companies.

6 These two decisions cumulatively resulted in the largest newspaper companies becoming print, radio and television conglomerates, dramatically shrinking the diversity of voices. To illustrate the point, reporters on The Morning Herald wrote their copy on what was called eight-ply: a top copy and seven carbon copies. Copies were supplied to the Fairfax company’s television channel ATN7, to the Fairfax company’s Sydney radio station 2GB, and to the “interstate room” where it was shared on a reciprocal basis with Herald & Weekly Times representatives from the Melbourne Herald and Sun-Pictorial (as it then was), the Advertiser, the Courier-Mail in , in and in .

The reciprocal arrangement meant that two media companies -- HWT and Fairfax -- had a dominant multimedia reach across Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Hobart.

The third significant public policy decision was taken in 1987 by the Hawke-Keating Government. These changes to media ownership broke up the multimedia conglomerates. In Keating’s well-remembered phrase, media owners could be queens of screen or princes of print but not both.

The most far-reaching consequence of the change was that it allowed Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited to purchase the HWT newspapers, at a stroke giving him a large presence in the Sydney and Melbourne markets and eventually a daily newspaper monopoly in Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart.

The fourth of these significant policy changes occurred in 2007 when the scrapped the one-out--of-three rule, which had restricted media ownership to one out of the three traditional media platforms in any one market.

In July 2007, a major media merger demonstrated how greater concentration of ownership was the inevitable result of this weakening of regulation. In a three-way deal, Macquarie Bank purchased Southern Cross’s radio and TV stations and on-sold Southern Cross’s influential metropolitan radio stations to Fairfax. So, suddenly Melbourne’s fiercely independent commercial talk station 3AW was owned by the same owners of its rival, the broadsheet Age newspaper.

The fifth major policy change occurred in late 2017 when the scrapped the by-then two-out-of-three rule. In July 2018 former Coalition treasurer, , as chairman of the , rang Nick Falloon, his counterpart at Fairfax and suggested a merger of the two companies. What transpired was more like a takeover, with Nine shareholders ending up with 51 percent control of the merged entity. The Fairfax brand was dispensed with after 177 years, and soon Melbourne’s three dominant non-News Corp media outlets, , 3AW and the Nine network, were all owned and controlled by the same company.

The Nine/Fairfax deal demonstrated that one owner could now own television and radio stations and newspapers in the same market and that Keating’s 30-year old structure to ensure at least some media diversity had been dismantled.

7 In its judgment on the merger, the ACCC was constrained by the severe limitations of the relevant legislation and regulation. At the time of the decision, ACCC chairman Rod Sims conceded:

“This merger can be seen to reduce the number of companies intensely focusing on Australian news from five to four. Post the merger, only Nine-Fairfax, News/Sky, Seven West Media and the ABC/SBS will employ a large number of journalists focussed on news creation and dissemination.”

Sims pointed to new media entrants as providing “some degree of competitive constraint”, including and the widely discredited Daily Mail. However, he also conceded that “due to the difficulties in monetising journalism online, it is hard to predict the future landscape with any certainty.”

The Turnbull Government also scrapped the 75% reach rule, which had limited any one television owner from reaching more than 75% of the Australian population. The result was that the big metropolitan networks were now able to own or control their regional affiliates. A further consequence has been the centralising of regional television newsrooms locations far distant from the communities they ostensibly serve. To illustrate, in June 2019 WIN closed four regional newsrooms in Orange, Wagga Wagga, Albury and Bundaberg. It has retained local newsrooms in Victorian regional centres such as Ballarat and Bendigo, but its news bulletins are now presented from Wollongong to places as far away as .

Offsetting this diminution of diversity was the formation of the Special Broadcasting Service in 1977. The SBS complemented the well-established Australian Broadcasting Corporation and both added significantly to the diversity of voice in the Australian media. However, the word “significant” should be read in the context of Australia having only three other major national media voices: Seven/West, Nine Entertainment and News Corporation.

The net result of these policy changes is that Australia now has only three national-scale commercial media voices:

1. News Corporation, which controls about two-thirds of metropolitan daily newspaper circulation, including monopolies in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin; regional daily monopolies in a range of cities including Cairns and ; substantial chains of suburban and rural newspapers; the only subscription television news service, Sky News.

2. Nine Entertainment, which owns the Nine television network, and the old Fairfax mastheads The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Financial Review.

3. In one man, Kerry Stokes, holds a controlling interest in Seven West Media Ltd, which controls WA’s only locally edited daily metropolitan newspaper, The West Australian, the State’s only other metropolitan newspaper,

8 , and Community Newspaper Group, which owns 23 local newspapers across Perth, as well as the Seven television network nationally.

This state of affairs demonstrates that Australia’s media ownership laws have undermined the Australian democracy and placed unaccountable power in the hands of a few individuals, two of whom, Murdoch and Stokes, have shown themselves willing to use it to push their own ideological and commercial agendas. Murdoch’s efforts in this regard are demonstrated by the case studies that follow.

One step towards remedying this situation would be to re-introduce a fit-and-proper-person test for broadcast licences.

In 1981 the Broadcasting Act was amended to give the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal power to apply a “fit and proper person” test to applicants for broadcast licences. In 1989 it found Alan Bond to be not a fit and proper person to hold a broadcasting licence, citing five grounds, two of which concerned Bond’s giving what the ABT said was misleading or false evidence to the Tribunal.

In 1992 this test was replaced by a “suitability” test as part of what the Government of the day touted as a streamlined licensing procedure.

In 2011 in the midst of the UK scandal, during which at one point the British MP Tom Watson characterised Rupert Murdoch’s UK arm News International as “ a criminal enterprise”, the question was raised about whether Murdoch was a fit and proper person to own media assets in Australia.

It is submitted that this remains a live question. The and a series of court proceedings in the UK established that the Murdoch organisation there was involved in bribing public officials, conducting unlawful surveillance on individuals and multiple gross invasions of people’s privacy.

Murdoch’s Sky News subscription television service in Australia requires a licence to operate. At the time of writing (early December 2020) this channel was engaged in outright lying about the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election. Two of its presenters, Rowan Dean and Alan Jones, continued to propagate the lie that the election was rigged or stolen, the same lies as those being inflicted on the American people through Murdoch’s .

There are no constraints on this crude abuse of media power or dissemination of disinformation.

The reintroduction of a “fit and proper person” test in the Broadcasting Services Act would open Murdoch’s holding of this licence to public scrutiny over conduct such as this. Equally it would open to public scrutiny all other applications for broadcast licences in the newly deregulated media ownership environment. This would insert an opportunity for public- interest considerations to be weighed as factors in decisions whether to grant a broadcasting licence.

9

Case studies of media coverage in a concentrated media market

Case 1: Climate change reporting in Murdoch media: A story of denialism, disinformation, disinterest and the denigration of science

‘The Australian was once like The Economist; conservative and honest. Now it's not. And it continues to argue against taking meaningful action against climate change despite claims to the contrary from staff and columnists.’ - Dr Leigh Dayton, science writer for The Australian 2002-2012 (ABC RN The Science Show, 1 February 2020[JC1]

The role of the dominant Murdoch media over many years in fomenting public confusion and distrust in climate science, thereby delaying effective policy responses, must be considered one of the most damaging, indeed catastrophic, abuses of media power in Australian history. As journalism scholars, climate scientists, and industry observers have documented time and again, reporters, editors and commentators across News Corp’s national and international stable have consistently, stridently and loudly cherry picked, ignored, distorted, misrepresented and denigrated climate science.

Back in 2007, Associate Professor David McKnight published an analysis of News Corporation’s editorials, columns and commentary on climate change over the previous decade which concluded that they “largely denied the science of climate change and dismissed those who were concerned about it”, and that “its corporate view framed the issue as one of political correctness rather than science”.

That same year News Corporation announced that it would become carbon neutral following Rupert Murdoch’s declared conversion from climate scepticism to advocating that “the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt”. And in November 2020 he assured shareholders: “We do not deny climate change. We are not deniers.” But the scholarly and published archive tells a profoundly contrary story.

In 2010, Professor Robert Manne () conducted an analysis of all reported and opinion articles on climate change published by The Australian between January 2004 and April 2011. After excluding neutral items, he identified 880 articles on climate change, of which about 700 were unfavourable to climate action and 180 favourable – around four to one. Drilling deeper, Professor Manne found opinion pieces overwhelmingly opposed climate action, with scores of them written by people “who claimed to know that the consensual view of the climate scientists was entirely bogus but who have not passed even a first-year university examination in one of the relevant disciplines”.

“Democracy relies on an understanding of the difference between those questions that involve the judgement of citizens and those where citizens have no alternative but to place their trust in those with expertise,” Manne observed in his 2011 Quarterly Essay Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation. “By refusing to acknowledge this

10 distinction, in its coverage of climate change, The Australian not only waged “war on science” … but also threatened the always vulnerable place of reason in public life”.

The anti-climate science agenda was even stronger in other News Corp publications. A 2011 analysis led by Professor Wendy Bacon (University of Technology Sydney) looking at the treatment of climate change – through the prism of reporting on carbon price policy – across the Murdoch stable found negative coverage (82%) far outweighed positive (18%). Coverage by the two biggest New Ltd tabloids – The and The Daily ” was so biased “that it is fair to say they campaigned against the policy rather than covered it”.

In 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists published an analysis of climate science reporting across Murdoch’s leading US enterprises – Fox News and – over a six month period which found that both heavily distorted the facts in its reporting. Fox and WSJ reports were found to be misleading 93% and 81% of the time respectively. Much of the coverage denigrated climate science by either promoting distrust in scientists and scientific institutions or placing acceptance of climate change in an ideological rather than fact-based context. Scientists wrote to Murdoch and his Fox and WSJ executives appealing to them to improve their reporting: “Unfortunately, public and policymaker opinion regarding the reality of human-induced climate change has been for far too long polarized and based on ideology rather than facts.”

Almost a decade down the track, despite increasing global temperatures and emissions; escalating extreme events linked to global warming; a 5th Assessment Report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2014) reflecting ever-strengthening scientific understanding and consensus and an interim Special Report (2018) warning of the urgency of global action to avoid catastrophic +1.5C rise this century, concerns around misrepresentation of the science across the News Corporation enterprise remain acute: Recent notable developments include:

- In January 2020, then News Corp director and his wife Kathryn released a joint statement criticising News Ltd outlets for “ongoing denial” of the climate crisis even as bushfires continued to ravage Australia. James Murdoch later resigned from the News Corp board due to disagreements “over certain editorial content published by the company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions”. - In the wake of Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, the ABC’s Media Watch program ran a feature documenting “how News Corp’s loudest voices denied or downplayed the role of climate change” (February 3, 2020). Noting advice from the Australian Academy of Science that the scale of the fires was “unprecedented anywhere in ”, it highlighted the consistent rejection of this science by News commentators. - Accusations that The Australian overplayed the role of arson in the 2019-2020 bushfires, in particular a story picked up by US Fox News and the Sun: Bushfires: Firebugs fuelling crisis as national arson toll hits 183 (January 15, 2020). Independent fact checks in Australia and the US exposed deficiencies in the interpretation of research cited in the story, notably a failure to distinguish between vegetation fires and bushfires, while the ABC’s Media Watch revealed that the 183 arrests were not all for arson, and 43 predated the 2019/20 season. A report by the

11 ABC (January 11, 2020) found about 1% of land burnt in NSW during the 2019/20 bushfire season was attributed to arson, while the figure for Victoria was less[JC2] . - Meanwhile the narrative that “greenies” and failures around fuel reduction programs, rather than climate change, were a significant contributor to devastating modern bushfires was playing loudly across Australia’s Murdoch-dominated conservative media, as observed in an analysis in (January 8, 2020). This argument was investigated and substantially rejected by the Royal Commission into the National Natural Disaster Arrangements Final Report (November 2020), which concluded: “The weight of research into the effects of fuel reduction on the propagation of extreme bushfires indicates that as conditions deteriorate, fuel reduction is of diminishing effectiveness’; further, that 'In extreme bushfires, fuel loads do not appear to have a material impact on fire behaviour.” - Complaints by highly regarded climate scientists that their work and comments have been misrepresented by News Corp reporters, among them Professor Andy Pitman, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at UNSW and Emeritus Professor of Science Technology and Society Ian Lowe of .

The consequences of News Corp’s distorted coverage of climate science on politics, policy and public apprehension of the emergency cannot be overestimated. Campaigning by Murdoch columnists over many years, and editorial decisions in reporting that have misrepresented, obscured or downplayed the scientific consensus on the climate emergency, have resonated powerfully in delaying or derailing effective responses. “It’s really reckless and extremely harmful,” Dr Joëlle Gergis, an IPCC author and leading climate scientist told The New York Times. “It’s insidious because it grows. Once you plant those seeds of doubt, it stops an important conversation from taking place.” As the Australian Science Media Centre has told Media Watch, trumpeting influential voices which do not reflect the science: “creates confusion, uncertainty and apathy among the public, even when the science is clear”.

Case 2: Coverage of the ABC

How one media outlet covers the operations and activities of another is a good indicator of its editorial values. News Corp’s coverage of the ABC is disproportionately negative and seems to reflect both a deep distrust of the organisation and an ideological disdain for the role of public broadcasting. Likewise, the way a media outlet fosters, or reacts to, negative coverage about itself reflects its commitment to the accountability functions of journalism. There is a stark contrast between the way the ABC and News Corp report on themselves and the way they accept criticism from others.

The national broadcaster has demonstrated since the creation of ABC TV’s Media Watch in 1989 that it is prepared to accept criticism from within and grant protections to staff who exercise that function. Several programming examples demonstrate that the ABC understands that self-criticism is important and healthy and that outlets that claim a fourth estate mandate to criticise others, should themselves be accountable to their audiences.

12 News Corp, however, has demonstrated in recent years that it does not have a culture of self criticism and will not readily accept it from others. Over this time it has become increasingly vociferous in its criticism of its rivals, particularly the ABC.

News Corp’s enmity towards public broadcasting can be traced back to Sir in the early years of the ABC (Inglis 1983: 64-5).

But briefly at the turn of this century there was a questioning, rather than hostile approach to covering the ABC. In 1999 News Corp began a dedicated liftout Media section in The Australian newspaper with a mission to create a community of interest for those in the media industry and to provide coverage of a broad range of media trends and issues. It was based on The Guardian’s successful media liftout and began as a respected journal of important happenings in the Australian media. A 2015 study of the Media section’s coverage of the ABC found that the tone changed over time and became highly partisan and negative under the editorial direction of editor in chief Chris Mitchell.

In its early days, the Media section demonstrated that The Australian was capable of even- handed coverage of topics in which the newspaper was itself an interested party, such as negative rulings by the . It was, however, not the publication a reader would turn to find highly critical coverage of News Corp itself, or stories that questioned the concentration of Australia’s media, but on occasion - and in measured ways - the section was able to criticise News personalities and publications. The section’s Diary occasionally managed this, along with rare profile pieces. It also was capable of fairness in its coverage of its rivals, including the ABC. In fact, for a period, several of its key writers championed the ABC and the role of public broadcasting, particularly during the controversial reign of managing director Jonathan Shier.

However, there was a struggle within the paper at that time between those who believed Shier was doing great damage to the public broadcaster and those who conceded he was the wrong person for the job, but insisted he was implementing important reforms. The tension can be seen on the pages of the newspaper the day after Shier was dismissed by the ABC board at the end of October 2001. Alongside news pieces reporting the day’s events was a comment piece by the new Media section editor, Matt Doman, entitled ‘Now let the reforms continue’. While Doman acknowledged that ‘no one undermined Shier more than Shier himself’, he argued, ‘His successor must continue with the goal of building a new culture within the ABC.’ He concluded, ‘It is easy now to say the board made the wrong decision [to employ Shier], but it was right to pursue reform’ (Dodd, Ricketson, 2015)

A shift occurred while Chris Mitchell was editor-in-chief. The Australian’s coverage began to reflect what appeared to be increasing suspicion of the ABC. Commentary and reportage became increasingly vituperative. The ABC was viewed more as a drain on public revenue than as a cultural asset or important unifying national voice. It was characterised as a hothouse of left of centre views and as a competitor unfairly propped up by government subsidy. One insider at the time told the study that:

The Australian has always had fairly ridiculous ideas on how the ABC runs itself. They don’t have a very good grasp of the ABC as an organisation these

13 days. Their view is based on union meetings from the late 1970s; they have this view that there are cabals of communists setting the agenda...They have this view that people go to work, clock on, save their meal breaks, and at the end of the year, they’ve saved enough meal breaks to take three months off. It’s nonsense. (Dodd, Ricketson, 2015)

This is symptomatic of much of News Corp coverage of the ABC. It is seemingly driven by agendas and antipathy to both public broadcasting in general and of public funding for a rival in particular. News Corp routinely criticises the national broadcaster on topics as diverse as staff conditions and salaries, the inappropriateness of government subsidies for what it considers should be exclusively commercial media activities. bias, political correctness, errors, coverage of asylum seekers, reporting on climate change and many others. This overwhelmingly negative coverage is led by several commentators, across print and television. The ABC is faced with the problem of deciding whether, and how often, to respond to these attacks. If it does, it runs the risk giving them legitimacy and oxygen. If it doesn’t it allows sometimes baseless assertions to go unchecked with the resulting damage to its reputation.

Occasionally, the ABC feels it must respond, as was the case in May 2020 after a particularly inaccurate column by Chris Mitchell in The Australian.

The ABC wrote: “ Opinion columnists are entitled to their own opinions, but audiences are entitled to demonstrable facts. Chris Mitchell’s column in The Australian today makes a range of questionable claims, but his contention that the ABC has failed to properly cover issues arising from COVID-19 relating to groups such as teachers, disadvantaged students, tradespeople, retail workers, nurses and so on warrants correction.”

What followed was a long list of ABC stories addressing the very topics Mitchell claimed were being ignored by the national broadcaster.

It’s not just Chris Mitchell. As one ABC insider noted recently, the conservative commentator Gerard Henderson wouldn’t have a column without the ABC, such is the ubiquity of his criticism of the corporation. , on The Australian and Sky News, too can be relied on for disparaging commentary about the ABC. News Corp is often a conduit for the most critical analysis of the national broadcaster from neo conservative think tanks such as the IPA and is not above championing causes that are detrimental to the ABC but align with its own commercial interests, such as the push for an inquiry on the issue of competitive neutrality.

We assert News Corp’s coverage of the ABC now amounts to a campaign against the national broadcaster and is fuelled mostly by ideological enmity, and to a lesser extent by commercial rivalry. Its intensity would be easier to ignore if it were not for the potential damage of so much negative coverage. We believe it should be of interest to this committee because such coverage undermines the trust in a major media outlet, and therefore further risks the diversity of Australia’s already concentrated media. While we of course accept that commercial media outlets are entitled to express opinions freely, the fact that we have such a concentrated media market means News Corp’s negativity is not sufficiently countered by

14 other voices and therefore has more impact than it otherwise would, and quite frankly deserves. In short, News Corp’s partisan and skewed coverage demonstrates the need for more media diversity.

Chinese-language media in Australia

There is a startling lack of diversity in Sinophone media in Australia, as reported by ASPI’s December 2020 report, The Influence Environment; A Survey of Chinese-Language Media In Australia. This found that the Chinese Communist Party now exerts an influence over all of the Chinese-language news outlets in Australia. The report found that four of 24 Australian media companies show evidence of CCP ownership or financial support, while the others are targeted through acquisitions, advertising, coercion and Wechat. These media are sometimes involved in ‘united front’ activity which resembles political interference, either through political mobilisation or through other means.

These Chinese language outlets often have content-sharing deals with China News Service, Xinhua news agency and other state-run news outlets through which they are funnelled content - often free - which amplifies Beijing’s policy positions. Such content can have an outsized influence on Australia’s ethnic Chinese population, who constitute roughly 5% of the population. In certain electorates, Chinese-language media are playing an increasingly important role at influencing grassroots opinion, for example in electorates like Chisholm and Reid with large Chinese language communities.

To give one example, recently in Perth, Chinese-language newspapers linked to Beijing have lobbied for certain candidates in local elections. On issues where Beijing’s official position differs from the Australian government’s, Chinese-language media can offer plays role in guiding and channeling public opinion, sometimes positioning the Chinese community at odds with mainstream Australian society, as reported in the Australia China Institute’s Chinese-language Media in Australia report.

One company, Global CAMG Media, was 60% owned by state-owned China Radio International through two intermediaries. It was listed as a principal under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, and it used its headquarters in Melbourne as a base for a network of covert radio stations, as reported by Reuters in 2015, which broadcast state-run Chinese propaganda content across Asia and Europe. The radio frequencies it used in Australian cities ran twelve hours a day of state-run Chinese propaganda content, according to the FITS filing. This is one way in which Chinese-language media outlets are being used as a tool of foreign influence.

Conclusion

This submission demonstrates the dire lack of diversity in media in Australia. As the submission makes clear, this weakens the Australian democracy. As international research cited here also shows, the development of social media and global tech platforms such as Facebook and Google does not provide a substitute for locally generated and distributed news or forums of opinion.

15 It is just not true, as the international research also shows, that as Rupert Murdoch would have us think, power is moving away from the likes of him. The major so-called legacy media companies swiftly began tio colise the internet and as a result remain dominant sources of news, whether people access it online or otherwise.

We would welcome the opportunity to make an oral submission to the Committee in order to answer and questions its members may have.

18 December 2020

Bibliography

ABC corporate, 11 May 2020, sighted December 2020 https://about.abc.net.au/statements/some-relevant-information-for-the--chris-mitchell/

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