For Labor, there is no point in getting into a fight you will never win. The Murdoch myrmidons will always be their enemy, and since they have become invulnerable – like the banks, they are too big to fail — they have to be accommodated.
The news that some 350,000 Australians have signed a petition to set up a royal commission into the media is encouraging – not because their concerns are ever likely to be delivered, but simply because those concerns have have been expressed publicly and with passion.
There is a widespread belief that we have just about given up on the mainstream media, that it has been superseded by the irresponsible and unreliable twitterers of the internet.
Press, radio and free-to-air television are regarded as old fashioned, unsuited to the instant gratifications afforded by the social media. And if they are to survive at all. it has to be on their own terms; no intervention from government and definitely no taxpayer money.
So from that perspective, a royal commission – indeed any form of inquiry – is simply as waste of time and effort.
And in one important, if cynical, sense that perspective is quite right, because even if ten times as many signatories could be found, no prime minister in office or ever likely to be would consider seriously investigating the corporate giants, far less reforming them.
The last who gave it a try was Paul Keating, who unraveled the cross-media regime with his stricture that the moguls could be princes of print or queens of the screen, but not both. His targets were the Packer and Fairfax conglomerates,and ironically in hindsight he provided aid and comfort to the competing Murdochracy.
And now the current government has reversed Keating’s changes, so the Nine network has respread its tentacles across what remains of the media landscape and the Murdoch empire, with its effective control of the Fox cable TV network, is now seen as the arch monopolist, the one in the gun from its most fervent antagonist, another Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.
And as we have seen, impressive numbers have followed. But neither Scott Morrison nor Anthony Albanese is among them. It may be – and I think should be – argued that the influence of the media on public opinion has always been greatly overrated even in its best days, which these are most definitely not. But even in their diluted dotage, the proprietors have the politicians well and truly spooked.
And this has become a bipartisan position, For Labor, there is no point in getting into a fight you will never win. The Murdoch myrmidons will always be their enemy, and since they have become invulnerable – like the banks, they are too big to fail — they have to be accommodated. They cannot be placated, but being conciliatory may perhaps limit their malevolence.
And for the Coalition, it is a no brainer. Rudd calls News Corps not a media organization but a propaganda vehicle to promote the Tories and denigrate their opponents. This may be an exaggeration, but it is not a big one. The Libs and the Nats know perfectly well just who’s in this together.
Which may be a reason, incidentally, why they are so ferocious in their attacks on the ABC. For Murdoch the national broadcaster is not just an ideological foe, it is a commercial rival. And in theory at least, it is accountable to the government, which appoints its board and provides the vast bulk of its funding.
So bashing Aunty is so much easier than responding to a petition from fractious. citizens. Sorry, all you petitioners – your pleas go straight to the shredder, But thanks for your concern. It’s good to know you’re thinking of us.
Mungo MacCallum is a veteran political journalist and commentator. His books include Run Johnny Run, Poll Dancing, and Punch and Judy.
mungomccallum@staging-johnmenadue.kinsta.cloud
Comments
22 responses to “We have just about given up on the mainstream media.”
History shows that even when faced with the most oppressive regimes, the underground devises ways to communicate. The best way we can beat Murdoch is to educate people and “switch him off”. Probably happening already. ?
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For Labor, there is no point in getting into a fight you will never win”. OK, but who can convince me that Labor wants a fight with anyone other than its rank and file which, in fact, it simply ignores. On the ABC, it is not much of a rival for Murdoch with its Russiagating, Putin demonising, Venezuela and Syria simplifying White Helmet drivel. ABC does identity politics beautifully but its economics is neoliberal. Murdoch doesn’t really go near these issues other than in a cartoon fashion.
We have to go to the ABC to get our US foreign policy for an Australian audience or economics for dummies who think they are smart. Leigh Sales and her team will skewer Labor again coming up to the next election with her, “Where will the money come from?” This is despite the fact we have just seen where it comes from and without Government spending our economy would be in an even bigger hole than it is.
Mungo, you are right. I have given up on mainstream media. This blog is one of the places I go to learn. thegrayzone.com is another useful option. There are plenty of people doing good work – people like Julian Assange – but our political parties don’t want anything to do with them and would be prefer we knew nothing about them either.
“the ABC does identity politics beautifully but its economics is neoliberal” same as The Guardian.
You have no quarrel with me. Both have turned their backs on Assange.
Murdoch was not always the crazy old tycoon we see today. I loved Bob Duffield’s stories of anxious waits at the airport in the early days of The Australian. Max Gillies on TV impersonated Bob Hawke dropping his golf club in the office and racing to the phone to answer “Rupert, Mate!” It was the treachery of Labor’s faction leaders on the mining tax in 2010 that destroyed Rudd’s government, not Rupert. Kevin’s bedside manner might have had something to do with it, too.
I agree there is little chance of a royal commission, but that is not really the point of the petition. The petition succeeds precisely by creating a context in which people’s ‘concerns have have been expressed publicly and with passion’. Like the Emperor’s New Clothes, the con depends at least in part by nobody talking about it. The petition puts the spotlight on what they are doing, and in naming it, reduces it’s diminishing influence further.
Mass circulation print and MSM continue to have some effect if only on the lowest common denominator of electoral decision makers. The talking points put forth are dutifully picked up each morning and throughout the day by the depleted resources feeding infotainment to the ABC and other radio/TV outlets. These days in Sydney, the Daily Telegraph is distributed free of charge through newsagents, IGA checkouts; presumably some people actually use it for something other then wrapping. The constant repetition of the themes of money power through those sources, the associated disregard of counter factual material must be acknowledged as having some effect, if only in reinforcing conditioned responses. It is pitiful for my generation to have to watch or listen to so many ABC presenters stumbling around day after day in simulations of a Punch and Judy show “balancing” so poorly the take from the list of talking points and infotainment: Ita has given Scotty-from-marketing what he wanted.
I agree with Mungo that there is not much that can be done about the ascendancy of those propagandistic centres; even if there were a Royal Commission. What can be done is to support, financially and by dissemination, publications like this one and others getting out more balanced reportage and analysis. Also, look to the survival and hopefully the eventual resuscitation of the ABC as something more than a pale shadow of a once formidable, diverse source of information and enlightening influence across a broad spectrum of Australian society and socio-political issues.
Above all, at electorate level, there is need for presence and presentations that build local recognition, and engage in coalition formation related to the main policy themes that resonate at household levels. Webinars and Zoom meetings have changed the communications landscape but I doubt that they affect more than a few elite sectors. Face to face availability seems essential. My impression is that the better performing MPs are working hard to engage and increase supporter interest through use of social media, but I have not heard or seen any analysis of the relative effectiveness of that resource demanding approach.
“What can be done is to support, financially and by dissemination, publications like this one and others getting out more balanced reportage and analysis”. Exactly!
Not sure if you have ever read this publisher, as Shane Dowling focuses more on corruption of our jurisprudence system: https://kangaroocourtofaustralia.com/2020/10/24/federal-mp-peter-dutton-covers-up-39-million-fraud-and-theft-at-the-australian-border-force/ which will be self explanatory.
You can reverse the logic easily. You have nothing to lose by taking Murdoch on. If Labor had done that twenty years ago we, and they, might not be in such a sorry state.
As for the media not having much influence – where to begin? The whole neoliberal world view has been rammed down reluctant throats for forty years, it was never popular. Only by ignoring much of the real news and many sensible analyses can the present tissue of myths and lies about ourselves, our society and the world be maintained. You ought to step out of the bubble occasionally Mungo.
I agree with both your points.
The argument as put my Mungo only leads to the question, what more can Murdoch do to you than he’s already done, and inevitably going to do again before the next election? Albanese should know he’s going to get cartoon and photoshopped parodies on the front page of the Tele and the Hun, even if he kowtows. He has indeed nothing to lose by facing up to Murdoch’s minions. At the same time, this logical conclusion is worth nothing if he doesn’t actually have the courage to offer real alternative policies on vital issues.
The influence of the MSM is amorphous but real; it lies chiefly in determining what forms of discussion, about which issues, are possible in Australian politics, even society in general. The whole ‘Overton Window’ has shifted measurably towards the right or neoliberal end of the spectrum. The biggest and best example of this is in the impossibility of discussing, without being shouted down or ignored, the raising of taxes on the wealthy. Such idiotic notions as ‘incentivising’ people to work harder if they pay less tax have become an orthodoxy; at the other end of the wealth ladder, paying welfare recipients or ‘dole bludgers’ too much, thus ‘disincentivising’ them to seek work has also become an orthodoxy. So it’s not just party politics that is influenced enormously by the mainstream media.
Once there was Der Sturmer but now there is Murdoch’s media maggoty muck. The old Packer days have gone, Fairfax is even worse than its pompous North shore stuffiness was, and the ABC has been inflitrated by conservative duds, deviates, dickheads and drongos. A mean, knowall, greedcored spirit runs media, a business aimed at profiting, at corporate dominance, an area free from the constraints of morals, ethics, decency, community interests, the fair go. As surely as boardrooms are now filled with little greedy fuhrers, media in Australia is a plaything of the upper types, proud profiteering poxed oppressors and controllers. Too bad for most of us…
You make the mistake, Mr. MacCallum, of imagining that everyone has an intellect similar to yours: They most definitely do not.
Headlines in the newspapers, radio broadcasts and TV, and in particular those posted in the billboards which newsagents place on the footpath, have a remarkably robust subliminal effect on those for whom time is restricted and/or are simply too preoccupied with their own affairs to actually give serious thought to the state of the Nation’s governance.
Thinking deeply on matters of politics, financial maneouvring and religious manipulation is not something in which your average punters involve themselves.
As George Orwell pointed out there is always a massive cohort of sheep that are willing to bleat: “four legs good, two legs bad,” but they never really understand what it means. And later when the pigs instruct them to say the opposite: “two legs good, four legs bad”, because the pigs are now walking on two feet and living in the farmer’s house, the sheep realise something is a bit odd but continue to repeat the new mantra with indifference.
That’s what main stream media largest audience is in this country. That’s what Murdoch uses to manipulate their minds, and there is always much to exploit. He knows what he is doing too.
I’ve posted this ad nauseam : Marshall McLuhan 1978 Full Debate On Nature And Media at Cambridge University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9fKhsZuKO4
The Medium is the Message https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw
Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2015: Money is the Message – Part Two
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Au8cgfAx4
It’s a series of discussions from a Media Lecturer named Marshall McLuhan (1970’s) who was way ahead of his time.
Thanks for the links. Yes I remember him from many years ago and I would agree he was way ahead for the times. Good to see it again on Youtube. Adding internet and social media now as a medium there is even greater power to influence minds and there are many who seek to exploit the vulnerabilities in mass tribalism and herd behaviour. For some it’s become like a Goebbelian propaganda science used for influencing human beings and forming their opinions for them. Crosby-Textor comes to mind.
One of the neatest propaganda tricks of the last century was the way the British so successfully blamed Goebbels for the propaganda techniques he learned from them.
True, and Goering also pointed out that they (the British) had concentration camps in the Boer War where around 30,000 Boer women and children died through starvation, disease, and utter neglect. There were similar camps for black Africans but we’ll never know how many died in those, they just didn’t count them.
“It may be – and I think should be – argued that …”
FFS, just spit it out already.
the problem I see with newscorpse is better solved by educating consumers rather than regulating producers. Little value in cutting a head off the disinfo hydra; more useful to educate readers to analyse recognise and tune out.
Marx,
I have to agree with you. EDUCATION of the plebs ( I am a retired ‘chalkie’) is the best way to confront the nonsense we call the media.
Just to recall Mungo, that newspapers only became big conveyors of news a couple of hundred years ago, radio a little over a century ago and television about 60 years ago, the internet is really a johnny come lately. Most people are so fed up with fake news that they dont buy/subscribe to newspapers-they are a dying breed.
Sydney Morning Herald is appalling these days since Nine Entertainment took over. It still boasts “Independent Always” but has become filled with ex-Murdoch journalists, massage therapists who make sure people minds never really find out the depth of corruption within the Liberal Party, Nationals and their cronies, while offering a range of diversions and omissions so people will forget some of the most serious corruption issues. I have decided the acronym SMH, now means ‘Scott Morrison’s Helpers’. Is somebody paying them to write so much pro-US negative commentary on China as well? Non stop anti-China news every day.
Given Barilaro’s popularity ratings have tanked (20%), I wonder if it is not through the gutsy work of Friendlyjordies on Youtube. While Gladys was having such a terrible week, she did however find time to give Barilaro everything he wanted in terms of free rein to kill more threatened Koalas and hey presto, now he has no more mental health issues. That was why he got so upset he had to take a break, but Gladys helped out. That’s the lovely Gladys who cares so much about wildlife. She also gave farmers the right to clear more bushland in terms of a 25 metre buffer on each side of every farm fence in NSW. What a sweetie.
Our own version of Cruella de Vil and all those other vile rent seekers!
A Koala fur coat as a gift from the Nationals is in the pipeline.