Digital naivety dooms the Finkelstein Inquiry
When I met Matthew Ricketson, he did not strike me as someone who was on top of the latest digital developments.
In March 2010 he moderated a PR Institute of Australia panel I was a speaker on. When we were introduced, it was clear he had never heard of Mumbrella. Which is fair enough, unless you’re a professor of journalism in which case there are few enough outlets that write about media that I’d argue you probably should know about them all.
So when Ricketson was named as the journalistic voice to sit alongside Ray Finkelstein on the Independent Media Inquiry, I was not massively optimistic that online media would be well understood. Having now read all 500 or so pages of the newly published inquiry report, I was right to be pessimistic.
First though, the positives.
This is one of the best explorations of the history of Australian media, changing consumer habits and the issues around regulation I’ve read. It’s well researched and thorough, as you would hope, based on the costs of the inquiry. It’s a great backgrounder for an media studies student.
But I’m left with the impression that so much resource has been put into identifying the problems, that a lot less time went into exploring the praciticalities of the proposed solutions.
I agree, by the way, about the key problems that the inquiry identifies – the Australian Press Council is indeed an underfunded, virtually toothless tiger. It is ridiculous that broadcast complaints are dealt with – painfully slowly – by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, while the print press do it through the APC. It is indeed iniquitous that online media has a freer run than traditional media.
But the answers to these problems feel like they’ve been plucked form the air.
Most importantly, the principle of replacing the APC with a government-funded body is a threat to a free press. Even with suggestions on how to make the appointments arms-length, the possibility of a government being able to influence the makeup of such a body is bad news all round.
There are other non-solution solutions. The idea of taking adjudications on broadcast news and current affairs off ACMA does sound deeply tempting. The creakingly long process of dealing with a complaint is ridiculous. I expect it will be months yet before they finally express a view on the Kyle Sandilands attack on Alison Stephenson for instance. But most ACMA inquiries look at other types of breaches of the code of practice outside of news and current affairs. Having identified a problem with ACMA, and suggested the News Media Council take on the news issues, there is no solution offered around the wider ACMA problem of its complaint process not being fit for purpose.
But as I wrote on Friday afternoon, the biggest indicator of digital naivety remains to me this paragraph:
“There are many newsletter publishers and bloggers, although no longer part of the ‘lonely pamphleteer’ tradition, who offer up-to-date reflections on current affairs. Quite a number have a very small audience. There are practical reasons for excluding from the definition of ‘news media’ publishers who do not have a sufficiently large audience. If a publisher distributes more than 3000 copies of print per issue or a news internet site has a minimum of 15 000 hits per annum it should be subject to the
jurisdiction of the News Media Council, but not otherwise. These numbers are arbitrary, but a line must be drawn somewhere.”
There are a number of problems. First, as I said, I suspect they don’t mean “hits”. A page consists of more than one file, with each call to the server a separate hit. Hits are the language of either charlatans trying to make their audience sound larger, or people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
But let’s assume they mean page views. 15000 page views a year equates to 41 a day. That’s nothing. A hell of a lot of sites, and blogs, will get that sort of traffic.
And let’s assume they manage to find a legally watertight definition of which sites are “news media” and which are not. (My Banana Watch example shows why I think they’ll struggle with that. And I can think of plenty of bloggers who publish lists and other types of research that are exactly the sort of thing that newspapers do.)
Are we talking about 15000 page views in total? Or only from Australian IP addresses? How about page views generated by search engines and the like? Our Google Analytics numbers are generally higher than our audited numbers partly for that very reason.
And how will the News Media Council tell if somebody has 15000 hits or not? Will there be legislation requiring everybody to have their sites audited? Or declare it when they hit that milestone?
Because there are plenty of biggish sites that do not currently audit. In my space, even the likes of B&T, Marketing and AdNews don’t submit to audit. While I think their advertisers are complete fucking idiots for not demanding it, it’s probably a step too far to compel them to do so.
The question of course will now be one of what next for the inquiry’s recommendations?
A key question now will be how much does media minister Stephen Conroy wants to shaft his enemies in the press. If he’s up for it, there’s probably just time to get some legislation rolling on replacing the APC with a statutory body before Labor loses office in the election.
If not, then I suspect we’ll be right back where we began. Conroy’s shadow Malcolm Turnbull has sent a strong signal that he wants none of Finkelstein’s plan, writing “His recommendation to set up a new government funded super regulator, a News Media Council, with statutory powers to take over the role of the Press Council, the media regulation role of ACMA and have jurisdiction over the online world is not one which would appeal to the Coalition, believing as we do in a free press – free in particular to hold governments to account.”
Right now it feels like we all agree on the problem. But noone’s got a solution.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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So what about my .com blog hosted on servers in another country which mentions Australian politicians?
Will they block it?
Australia plummets in press freedom index – again!
https://mumbrella.com.au/australia-plummets-in-press-freedom-index-72393
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Tim, I don’t see why small readerships should protect blogs from social norms. Our defamation laws apply where the audience is a single other person. What’s so special about blogs?
Also, bear in mind that posts on obscure blogs can be linked from high traffic sites, dramatically expanding the readership for a particular post.
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Hi Tony,
I think you’re making my point for me. Of course they’re already covered by defamation laws.
But if they are going to be covered by a news regulator, then there needs to be a practical way of identifying those that come within that – both in definition and in audience size. The inquiry has failed to come up with a sensible means of doing so.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
This whole campaign is suss. A Government that doesn`t like criticism shouldn`t be ablke to launch a witch hunt like this. Just because the Green`s leader and our PM can`t handle something called ‘accountability’, we are to lose what so many people have fought so hard for.
When the Coalition was in power, the same papers/press ownership group that the ALP/Greens object to was in the habit of piling derision upon the Howard/Costello government. I mean, the Port action with Peter Reith at the helm was severely criticised,with The Oz breaking news of strike breaking teams receiving training o/s and deep probes into Patrick`s history and modus operandi.
And who could forget the Australian Wheat Board exclusive, a result of a long-running campaign by, guess who?, The Oz, once more. Then there was the coverage of the Tampa/Kids Overboard affairs, followed mercilessly by,oh,surely not?, the Murdoch press again!
These are just a few examples of extremely damaging newspaper criticism of the previous Federal Government at the hands of the ‘powers of evil’. Accusations of distorting the true progress of democracy were strangely absent when the ALP/Greens were in opposition……
Then as now, we need a free media, including all those mad/idealogically driven bloggers, to allow those in the voting population who are remotely interested in the goings-on of the political class a wide variety of views to discern what we may.Anything but the current level of freedom is verging on the fascist/communist absolutes that were buried in the `90s.
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Well it’s not as though the solution ain’t just sitting there, quietly eating away at the foundations. Yep: it;s that dang age old problem: commerce. From where I’m sitting the ad revenue of newspapers looks to have fallen well beyond any recent forecasts and way worse than the recession would explain. Chase Carey won friends in the US when he slipped the vote catcher idea of cutting the print part of News adrift. (In the past he’d have been floating past Rupert’s Morning Glory by now, full of holes…). Over at Fairfax their December numbers seem to say that the big name titles are seriously under water and they curiously sucked the otherwise healthy business titles into that rotting cluster of hulks, leaving the little local prints as the only source of real print money (and of course these geniuses have also not only sold a chunk of TradeMe, but have bought an expensive bunch of suburban print titles!)
So there is no problem: the News and Fairfax titles are dying. (And may I say, can we push smh.com.au under just a little faster; it’s a shocker.)
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This is pretty limp.\ If you look at it without tub-thumping polemic, Finkelstein has come up with a surprisingly plausible model.
Ok – you can pick some holes and point out some digital naivete. That might make you feel smart or smug, but it’s a fairly small win. The basic principle is that some sites should fall within those considered news media, and some don’t. He’s suggested a first draft idea about where to look for a threshold. The basic idea that part of the threshold test might be that only sites with a bigger audience would be considered news media seems plausible. Your contribution would be more interesting if you suggested ways that a person who isn’t naive might judge audience size.
The other commenters are examples of much of what’s wrong with Australian public debate.
– “Will they block it?”
-Fascist/communist absolutes?
Such obvious readiness to comment without bothering even to read let alone to consider soberly what’s been written is very sad.
In fact, Finkelstein’s recommendation would probably reduce the burden on broadcasters, and might well increase the standards of accuracy and fairness of news media without imposing any additional constraints on freedom of expression.
And the problem with that is…?
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Nice pick-up on some of the points from my comment on your last article Tim.
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