6th December 2020 (Amended 25th July 2021 to remove ‘adverse comment’)
Please accept this submission to the Senate Inquiry into Media diversity in Australia, particularly in relation to the terms of reference b): the effect of media concentration on democracy in Australia.
PUBLIC SUBMISSION FOR THE SENATE INQUIRY INTO MEDIA DIVERSITY IN AUSTRALIA
Given how highly concentrated media ownership is in Australia (1), I am deeply concerned at the dominance by News Corp, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man who became a US citizen in 1985 and, in so doing, swore an oath to “entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity” to Australia (2).
Estimates suggest News Corp owns close to 60% of news market share in Australia (3) and 65% to 70% of news readership (4). It owns virtual monopolies in many of Australia’s newspaper markets, including in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin.
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GLOBAL REACH News Corp also has a substantial footprint in the UK and US, where its media outlets such as The Sun and Fox News campaigned aggressively (and successfully) in support of Brexit and Donald Trump.
Having been largely supported by Murdoch’s Fox News, Donald Trump spent his four years as US President seeking to discredit the free- press, the institutions of law, and the democratic process itself. And, despite failing to overcome US democracy at the 2020 election, did succeed in discrediting the democratic process in the eyes of a large number of his supporters, with recent reports suggesting 77% of Trump voters believe ‘fraud’ was to blame for Trump’s loss to Biden (5).
In March 2019, The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan called Murdoch’s Fox News: “a shameless propaganda outfit, which makes billions of dollars a year as it chips away at the core democratic values we ought to hold dear: truth, accountability and the rule of law” (6).
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In the UK, almost 10 years ago, News Corp (News Limited as it was known then) was subject to an inquiry into systemic, illegal phone- hacking (7).
The Leveson unearthed evidence suggesting collusion between News Corp, politicians and the police to cover up wrongdoing, as well as “practices tantamount to blackmail” that were used by News Corp staff as part of its ‘news’ gathering efforts (8).
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LOCAL INFLUENCE In Australia, a market in which News Corp’s market share is greater than it is in the US and UK, the nexus between the Murdoch-owned media and Australia’s political parties is deeply concerning.
Former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has called News Corp “a vehicle of political propaganda, a political operation”, and accused it of engaging in vendettas, encouraging conspiracy theories, covering up the “misdeeds of their friends in politics” and hammering “vindictively, those who they regard as their enemies” (9).
Another former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has made similar accusations, and said the Murdoch-owned media “with around two- thirds of daily newspaper readership” uses its power to routinely “attack opponents in business and politics by blending editorial opinion with news reporting.” The effects, Rudd writes, are that “Australians who hold contrary views have felt intimidated into silence. These facts chill free speech and undermine public debate.” (10).
Rudd’s concerns are reflected in the fact that a petition he recently launched calling for a Royal Commission to ensure a strong diverse Australian news media (11) received an unprecedented 500,000 plus signatures.
The crux of Turnbull and Rudd’s concerns are that a dominant media organisation has become a political player and uses its power to bully and intimidate others into silence.
The following example may illustrate the point:
In May 2016, on the ABC show, Q&A, a question was directed to the then Assistant-Treasurer, Kelly O’Dwyer:
“I've got a disability and a low education - that means I've spent my whole life working off a minimum wage. You're gonna lift the tax-free threshold for rich people. If you lift my tax-free threshold, that changes my life. That means that I get to say to my little girls, 'Daddy's not broke this weekend, we can go to the pictures.' Rich people don't even notice their tax-free threshold lift. Why don't I get it? Why do they get it?” (12).
A fair question, and one answered to varying degrees by the assembled panellists. All quite standard in a free democracy, just part of a conversation.
What happened next, though, goes to the heart of Turnbull and Rudd’s critique of News Corp.
The member of the public who asked that question, Duncan Storrar, was, over the following weeks, subjected to what appeared to be a campaign by News Corp titles (The Herald Sun and The Australian) concerned not so much in addressing the issues and arguments raised by Storrar’s question, but attacking Storrar’s character by exposing him to an “onslaught of personal investigations, attacks, intrusion into his privacy [and] family, and ridicule” (13).
Who could possibly argue that Rudd was wrong to state that “Australians who hold contrary views have felt intimidated into silence” when the punishment for Storrar was to have his past dredged up, his criminal record published on the front-pages, and estranged family members interviewed for the purpose of publicly shaming him?
What did Storrar do to deserve the treatement he received? He directed a question to a member of a political party that, six weeks’ later, would receive the editorial endorsement of every one of News Corp’s national and state-based newspapers prior to the federal election.
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Duncan Storrar isn’t the only one subjected to what many have seen as News Corp vendettas (14). There have been many public figures (a few of which I’ve listed below) subjected to similar treatment.
Robert Manne (15). Professor Gillian Triggs (16). Margot Kingston (17). Dr Margaret Simons (18). Larissa Behrendt (19). Christine Nixon (20). Tim Flannery (21).
Appearing on a recent episode of the ABC’s Q&A, journalist Jan Fran highlighted yet another: “Just look at what the Murdoch press did to Yassmin Abdel-Magied . . . 100,000 words, in one year, were written about that woman. 100,000 words. They hounded her out of the country.” (22).
And in the UK, Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris, solicitors for the victims of phone-hacking, found themselves and their children being followed around by a private investigator working for Rupert Murdoch’s News of The World (23).
Our democracy depends for its health on an informed electorate, and an electorate not cowed into silence by fear of being publicly shamed, stalked, or driven out of the country by a dominant media group.
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THE AGE OF REASON UNDER SIEGE During the last 30 years or so, the urgency to mitigate the risk of global warming has accelerated as the overwhelming scientific evidence points to the fact that, unless something is done to curb man-made CO2 emissions, we face rapid environmental change, and disruption for tens of millions of people throughout the world, including more severe bushfires and weather events here in Australia.
And it is this issue in particular that we can see how News Corp’s dominance of Australia’s media landscape appears to have adversely impacted good, reason-based public policy-making.
Australian governments, over the past 20 years or so, have been either unable or unwilling to pass sensible, science-based climate policy. And at the same time, News Corp titles have implicitly opposed such policies, promoting discredited contrarians who spread doubt about the science, politicising the issue as part of an ongoing ‘culture war’, and attacking those such as Prime Ministers Rudd, Gillard and Turnbull, who have attempted to implement policies that address climate change.
The facts of this campaign are not in dispute. Robert Manne has documented it in great detail (24), and Rupert Murdoch’s own son, James Murdoch, recently resigned from the News Corp board because, he said, the company legitimised disinformation, especially with regards its coverage of climate change (25).
This legitimisation of disinformation is not unique to Australia or the science of global warming, though. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Murdoch’s Fox News undermined the health response to Covid-19 (26); that Murdoch’s The Times undermined the medical and scientific response to AIDS in the 1990s (27) and, globally, over many years, News Corp titles have undermined public health messaging and health responses around the risk of smoking tobacco (28).
There seems to be a pattern here: a dominant media organisation using its power and influence to discredit science, to silence dissent, to attack perceived ‘enemies’, and to consolidate power even further by co-opting politicians and policy-makers who may share a common interest or ideology or agenda.
And for me, this poses a very real threat to democracy, one that could be addressed by ensuring a more diverse, less concentrated media environment.
But this becomes exponentially more difficult the more the media is concentrated. In Australia, News Corp have run an aggressive and relentless campaign against public broadcasters such as the ABC and SBS. And, perhaps coincidentally, governments that are editorially endorsed by by News Corp have tended to cut funding to News Corp’s competitors (29).
The New Daily, another of News Corp’s competitors, has recently come under attack by a federal government endorsed by every major Murdoch title (barring the NT Times) at the 2019 election. The Morrison government seems intent in passing legislation that would deny (or at least complicate) The New Daily’s funding (30).
But we need more media voices, more media diversity, more media funding models (private, public, charity, industry), not less. Yet our singularly dominant media organisation appears to lobby for less of all of the above and more of only itself.
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I’ve outlined, above, the current situation in Australia with regards media concentration, and my concerns with where that media is currently concentrated and the consequences of that concentration.
The dominant voice in our media does, I believe, diminish many of the things essential to the maintenance of a continuing, robust, open and inclusive democracy.
In conclusion, I call for a Royal Commission (31) into the state of the Australian media, giving particular attention to:
* How News Corp has come to dominate the Australian media landscape. * What the effects of this domination are. * To what extent government policy-making has been shaped or compromised by relations between political parties and News Corp. * Investigating the means of encouraging a more diverse and sustainable media environment.
List of References/Hyperlinks
(1) - https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/22/68437-2016-11-22-media-concentration- and-public-concern-in-australia-Research_- _Media_concentration_and_public_concern_in_Australia.pdf?1518059940
(2) - https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learn-about-citizenship/the-naturalization-interview-and- test/history-of-the-oath-of-allegiance
(3) - https://theconversation.com/factcheck-is-australias-level-of-media-ownership-concentration- one-of-the-highest-in-the-world-68437
(4) - https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/how-much-influence-does-the-murdoch- media-have-in-australia-20201015-p565dk.html
(5) - https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2020/11/18/three-fourths-of-trump-voters-say- biden-only-won-because-of-fraud/
(6) - https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time--high-time--to-take-fox-newss- destructive-role-in-america-seriously/2019/03/07/aeb83282-40cc-11e9-922c- 64d6b7840b82_story.html
(7) - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/leveson-inquiry-report-into-the-culture- practices-and-ethics-of-the-press
(8) - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file /270941/0780_ii.pdf
(9) - https://www.abc.net.au/insiders/former-Prime Ministers-malcolm-turnbull-and- kevin/12861542
(10) - https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/news/12775974
(11) - https://www.aph.gov.au/petition_list?id=EN1938
(12) - https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/tax---rich-vs-poor/10652936
(13) - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/may/20/duncan-storrar-a-line-has-been- crossed-by-media-say-community-leaders
(14) - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/10/australias-murdoch-moment-has-news- corp-finally-gone-too-far
(15) - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-05/manne-diary-of-a-media-madness/3299824
(16) - https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/gillian-triggs-opens-up-about-hamfisted-behaviour-of- abbott-government-20151207-glh8ee.html
(17) - http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3956001.htm
(18) - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-21/holmes-trivial-pursuits-when-the-australian-gets- personal/4438872
(19) - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-19/brull--/2905116
(20) - http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/news-out-to-ruin-me-nixon-20110727-1i0ek.html
(21) - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-06/manne-foi-request-from-the-australian/3871300
(22) - https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/2020-09-11/12840750
(23) - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/07/news-world-investigator-spy-lawyers
(24) - https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2011/09/bad-news
(25) - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/james-murdoch-news-corp-fox-news- disinformation-rupert-nyt-interview-b944316.html
(26) - https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalentertainment/2020/04/10/covid-19-lawsuit-against-fox- news/?sh=7517be255739
(27) - https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/10/world/british-paper-and-science-journal-clash-on- aids.html
(28) - http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1998/09/where-theres-smoke,
(29) - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-24/abc-announces-cuts-to-programming-and-jobs- funding/12384972
(30) - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-29/andrew-bragg-says-he-is-right-on- superannuation-reform/12931660
(31) - https://newsroyalcommission.com