Old media caps off annus horribilis 2020 with its traditional horrible week. Michael West, standing in for Michael Tanner, looks at the fall of Fairfax, PR masquerading as journalism, who guards the Guardian, Seven News’ calls for war with China and how Scott Morrison’s media team has the game sown up.
Independent. Always.
Ahem …
How about Independent. Sometimes.
As annus horribilis 2020 shudders to its Covid-ridden close, the once venerable Australian media properties, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, have spruced up their advertising.
We refer not to their advertising for the Liberal Party, or even the heavy editorial influence of their beloved corporate sponsors, but rather the advertising of their own unseemly decline.
The shining example of the week was this Op-ed piece penned by a Liberal Party PR person and lobbyist Parnell Palme McGuinness.
Your humble essayist was once, long ago, a cadet at Fairfax – now Nine Entertainment. Reading this slavering panegyric to Gladys Berejiklian, which kicked off with a gratuitous swipe at Jacinda Adern, approximated the feeling one gets when scraping one’s fingernails across a blackboard.
It wasn’t just the tacky story. More the creepy incursion of political PR people into what purports to be independent journalism.
Since when is it de rigueur for a media organisation to run propaganda clickbait by Liberal lobbyists who benefit from limited-tender contracts from the Liberal Government? Answer: since Fairfax (now Nine newspapers) installed Liberal editorial management.
To be fair, the decline has been afoot for more than a decade – well before the Nine Entertainment takeover. And many fine journalists remain there – albeit cowed and interfered with – and feeble management and the global decline of a business model are largely to blame. Still …
Two days later, The Age sallied forth with a piece by a sociology professor who writes for The Australian and Quadrant claiming Dan Andrews was “heading the most incompetent Australian administration in living memory”.
Putting Betoota Advocate to the sword
This bloke must have a very short living memory. Incompetence is endemic to government and there are plenty worse than Dan Andrews.
Mainstream media train wreck
If the basic task of a media organisation is to hold both sides of politics to account, particularly the side in government, most of the mainstream media in this country has failed miserably.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp gave it up long ago. The Australian, the state tabloids and Sky News are little more than agitprop – their daily daggy a capellas to government merely the thing of a propaganda machine to further the power and financial interests of a US billionaire.
And although still insisting forlornly it is independent, still touting the “Independent. Always.” slogan on its mastheads, replete with emphatic full stops, Fairfax has now joined the choir; the shrill descants of the News Corp sopranos ringing above the melodic Fairfax bass, all perfectly complemented by the altos of talk-back radio and the reliable tenors of commercial TV – together as one – singing the praises of the most corrupt government in Australian history.
Independent. Always.? What a clear breach this is of Trade Practices law; truth in advertising, if anybody could be bothered to prosecute the case.
Forced molting
The ACCC recently fined an egg producer $300,000, finding it had falsely labelled eggs as free range. “The Federal Court agreed with the ACCC, finding as a matter of fact not all chickens were free to roam.”
Are News chairman Rupert Murdoch and Nine chairman Peter Costello’s chickens free to roam? Not on your nelly. They are well and truly caged, their raison d’etre is to give birth to government propaganda and, in so doing, to attract financial favours from the gamekeepers of the Morrison poultry farm.
And they do it with precision. Cluck, cluck.
So it is that the ACCC is busy kowtowing to the Government, fruitlessly compelling Google and Facebook to make “content” payments to News and Nine (when the digital giants actually provide free advertising already, drawing eyeballs to the paywalls of The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald so consumers can subscribe to read the propaganda. And OK, to be fair, some journalism too, nicely arranged to suit the broader corporate and political agendas.
So it is that the chooks cluck and the favours are dispensed: licence free relief, reprieve from network transmission costs, government intervention against Google and Facebook, regulatory inertia, bullying the ABC into submission and self-censorship, untendered and unexplained cash payments to Foxtel, the large rural newspaper subsidy schemes followed by the closure and sale of same newspapers, laws changed to allow Nine to take out Fairfax and further concentrate the shallow pool that is Australian media.
By changing the law to allow Nine to take over Fairfax, former Minister for Communications Mitch Fifield did a big favour for his government, as well as News, Nine and Fairfax.
Now “Mitchell Peter Fifield is the Permanent Representative of Australia to the United Nations”. Thanks Mitch, job well done – for the Coalition, which relies on an obsequious and beaten Fourth Estate to stay in power.
It is a symbiotic relationship to be sure; a marriage counsellor would call it co-dependent. So tightly in the clutches of Murdoch is Mitch’s successor, Paul Fletcher, that he and his office can’t, or wont’, answer questions about where Rupert Murdoch has taken control of Foxtel.
Neither can his regulator ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Undaunted, ACMA pinged Four Corners earlier this month for its investigation into the dodgy Murray Darling Basin Authority because government refused to be interviewed – and because they refused to be interviewed, the show was not balanced, according to ACMA.
Elsewhere, Fletcher was busy harassing anybody at ABC who would listen, even browbeating chairman Ita Buttrose over the Four Corners episode, which exposed a couple of ministers for engaging in the act of extra-marital canoodling.
All this punctilious intervention and regulatory fussing over nothing while Rupert, the world’s dominant media mogul, took his government grants and scurried off to Delaware with Foxtel. To the sound of crickets from Fletcher and ACMA.
Where will it all go this year? What will the Government do to protect its machinery of public relations? If the trend is any indication, mainstream media will get even closer to governments and their corporate sponsors. It will get worse.
The formula is simple: you tickle my feathers, I’ll tickle yours.
Who guards the Guardian?
The atrophy in editorial standards at Nine is not new. It was well under way 10 years ago, and made worse by strategic incompetence.
As they careened – like drunks at the country dance – from left to lefter then right, left again, then further right, Fairfax management handed an entire market to the Guardian. On a platter.
Guardian Australia, which started with little more than the backing of a $2 billion UK trust and a local billionaire, had a simple formula: do journalism.
So it poached a few top journos from Fairfax and, with a fraction of the staff, denuded the bumbling Fairfax of its large, wealthy and intelligent customer base, rusted-on over a century.
Doing journalism was an old-fashioned formula that seemed to take Fairfax by surprise. As its new, even more hopeless and sycophantic, editorial leadership under Nine tripped over themselves firing journalists such as Michael Pascoe, Peter Martin and yours truly and replacing them with pro-business toadies from News Corp, devising new ways to kowtow to governments and corporations, the biggest winner has been The Guardian.
How could Fairfax management have possibly thought it was a good idea to jerk back to the right ideologically, leave its progressive readership to be devoured by the Guardian, and compete against the right-wing might of News Corp? There is only one logical explanation, and we are merely surmising here (incompetence and ideology are contenders), and that is they did it to solicit the attentions of the conservative government and the advertising revenues from its large corporate donors, sponsors and – as the Financial Review literally, we kid you not, calls it … “Team Australia”.
In any case, the Guardian had its hiccup this week on social media. It was nothing in the league of Seven News, whose 6pm bulletin warned we were going to be attacked by China. Not only did they cite Jim Molan as an “expert source” but also some guy from ASPI; that’s the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an outfit funded by US weapons manufacturers, and the US and Australian governments. (It would be good to see the gun-shy ABC disclose ASPI’s massive conflicts of interest, too, given that it quotes ASPI so often.)
“Some experts” = Jim Molan
But to the Guardian and its maturing. Success has its own pitfalls and the rise of Guardian Australia has brought much praise and, lately, some condemnation from the left. It boiled over on Twitter this week when political correspondent Katharine Murphy ran a simple news item quoting in-house polling.
“But for mine, the real miracle happened in 2020, during one of the most difficult years that many of us have experienced. That miracle was the return of trust to Australia’s political system,” wrote Murphy of the latest Essential poll. It was a straight story, a boring report about a quintessentially unessential poll that presumably reported the findings in good faith.
Yet she was hammered on Twitter. It may well be the case that there was some polling uptick in trust compared with some previously nebulous metric dreamed up by a pollster. The fact is, however, that government has never been so corrupt in Australia, corrupted by corporate money. And the level of accountability of our elected representatives has never been so low.
The pandemic has accelerated inequality and corporate domination, the federal government has accelerated its control of the media, and Guardian Australia, now making profits, is very much in the mainstream, very much on Scott Morrison’s “drops” list – the exclusive Canberra Bubble Club of mainstream media correspondents who are briefed in advance on government announcements … before all the facts, with little time to write, think or call.
This is tricky turf now for the Guardian.
Do they tell the PM’s office, no, please don’t give us the scoop; we prefer to report it independently the next day – fully apprised of the detail of the latest policy? Or do they tread the tightrope? Behind the scenes there are personal and business factors: assorted political relationships, political and corporate advertising to consider, perhaps an application for charitable status that has to navigate a Liberal-led ACNC charities commission.
Comments
18 responses to “Tamed Estate: News’ and Nine’s PR and the plight of the (Liberals’?) media”
The problem with the Guardian is that it drew its most of its senior staff- writers and editor from Murdoch and Fairfax. It was inevitable that they would bring bad habits and retain or renew connections and attutudes from those publications with them.
And this is what we’ve increasingly been seeing. Call it regression to the mean, or perhaps, some sort of job insurance should they want back in, but outside of environmental reporting and a few economic pieces by the likes of Greg Jericho their LNP lean- through promotion and apologia, has become obvious. At least to anyone other Peter Dutton.
So, while Katharine Murphy’s rah rah over a
cheap media pollEssential’s “we trust government snapshot” was eye rolling, it was not surprising.As Michael notes: “…government has never been so corrupt in Australia, corrupted by corporate money. And the level of accountability of our elected representatives has never been so low.”
Indeed. And this is reflected in valid and reliable academic research at ANU, which shows a disturbing trendline over the past decade- with “trust in government {reaching} its lowest level on record, with just one-in-four Australians saying they had confidence in their political leaders and institutions.”
One would like to think that the Guardian would take its own advice, rather than march in unison down the primros path- knowing here it leads. Though that hasn’t often been the case.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/01/disinformation-us-election-covid-pandemic-trump-biden
Got to luv Scott from marketing’s chook feeding in Nine Entertainment’s SMH today. While I respect the view of indigenous Australians that the words in the national anthem are wrong in terms of how long this country has been populated by humans of the First Australians type, Scott’s popped in for a fair bit of kudos on this.
He changed one word so now it says “we are one”.
This from the most divisive prime minister and government in history.
Maybe he should be now called the “father of reconciliation” from one of Nine Entertainment’s sycophant journalists like Jacqueline Maley, when she claimed he was “father of the nation” over his response to Covid-19.
I’m certain that this miracle of the magic wand will eliminate indigenous deaths in custody, mining companies destroying sacred sites (when the same Liberal government under Abbott changed the rules allowing them to do it), high infant mortality, racist treatment from cops, and bring about removal of the Indue welfare card after he gets it that every report has said it is useless. Why Woolies might even give up on the giant Dan Murphy’s being built next to an indigenous alcohol free zone.
Forget having a voice in parliament, or amendments of acknowledgement of indigenous Australians in the Australian constitution. Heaven forbid a treaty of any sort. Most of us do not have the kind of genius to see that changing one word would be the silver bullet in healing the rift caused by 233 years of white colonisation.
And while he was at it, why didn’t he just remove another section as well:
“For those who’ve across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share
With courage let us all combine
To advance Australia fair”
Except for those queue jumping refugees. For Scott the genius, also stopped those boats (without people on them on his award), locked them up like the Biloela family to rot, kept them out of sight and mind, and that’s obviously how god wanted it to be.
George Wendell – spot on!!
Well, “share” and “fair” are the rhyming parts, Scott could just change them to “hoard” and “, Lord”.
I too turned to the Guardian when it first came out. Its news and commentary were light years ahead of the dross of the Australian corporate media scene. However, it didn’t take to long for me to become disenchanted with it as well as it too became just another toady singing the government’s refrain.
Let me explain:
Before the Ukrainian coup took place in 2014 and Yanokovych was still the Ukrainian President, the Guardian was writing some very balanced articles about that situation, doing what journalists and their publishers should do which is to present the various sides to the issues. Even when he was deposed and a pro West government was installed and the ‘revolt’ in the Donbass began the Guardian retained its editorial independence. Most notably, one of their prime journalists/opinionistas was a chap by the name of Seamus Milne, an ex Blairite speech writer who wrote clearly and succinctly to such a degree that in many ways I saw him as a sort of British Mungo McCullum. Shortly after this coup there was an article in most Australian press and the Guardian that the editors of Britain’s major news organisations had been called into the British Intelligence Headquarters, GCHQ for a briefing.
Immediately after this briefing at GCHQ, the next day to be precise, the tenor of the Guardian’s reportage changed to one of complete partisanship for the coup. Seamus Milne was no longer to be seen and when I pointed this out to the Guardian I was blocked.
In other words, they had been nobbled, either willingly or unwillingly as their tune changed completely. From what was once a neutral view on Russia, the Donbass and the coup now became in my opinion is an unbalanced diatribe against all things Russian. Now I for one do not believe that Russia good, West bad but I do believe in trying to attain balance and this is sadly lacking in all our media, including the Guardian.
And as you point out the Seven network is trying to do the same with China. Quite frankly it’s fucking pathetic. And we wonder why the West is in decline. Thank God we have a rising independent news media as evidenced by this blog and Michael West to name just two among many in the Australian landscape.
Agree Robin. That and the anti Corbyn position predicated on growing “anti semitism” in Labour. The Guardian does not have much to sat to me either.
Absolutely agree. I watched closely and saw exactly the same crawling compliance.
Anyone associated with the Guardian is forever condemned by that rag’s major role in the disgraceful stitch up of Julian Assange. One piece of silver, or many, same fate.
Every last one of them is an utter fraud, devoid of any principle, and none of them are ‘burdened’ with a soul.
There is no middle ground, here, particularly if you claim to be a ‘journalist’ – you either speak up, tell the truth, reflect on International Law, or you F*** OFF!!
P.S. And, you quote Nils Melzer, endlessly.
Both The Guardian and The New York Times have been on the edge of financial extinction for some time. That makes them very vulnerable to threats. I suspected at the time that their bosses had been given the quiet word by senior British and US officials, that if they did not abandon and betray Assange, and did not toe the line generally, arrangements would be made to nudge them over the edge into oblivion. That they chose dishonour has been evident ever since.
The Guardian propagating Israels anti-semitic smearing of Corbyn and Labour with other UK media
seemed totally out of coherence with how they started in Australia
recently Guardian in Australia seems to be more biassed against Labor which is sad because they seemed to begin ase some sort of balance to Murdoch and Costello
It would be nice to learn the content of the GCHQ briefing. It would be helpful to understand the reasons for the change in Guardian’s reportage change on Ukraine.
John Pilger
The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News – but beneath a liberal halo.
The more Murdoch and Costello advance to the right, the more irrelevant their media becomes. If you want to know what people really think about government in Australia just go and have a look at Facebook, and other online sources.
As the Soviets used to say about their leading newspapers:
“There is no truth in The News and no news in The Truth.”
I for one am very thankful that we have sites like P&I and Michael West’s to cut through the rubbish we read in the mainstream.