Mixed media: how Australia’s newspapers became locked in a war of left versus right
Australia has very little diversity in its traditional media sector, argues Denis Muller in this cross-posting from The Conversation, and this is only being made worse by the increased polarisation of the country’s two main newspaper companies, News Corp and Fairfax Media.
We are living through a period of fragmentation and polarisation in public discourse on a scale mankind has not before experienced. By far the greatest fragmenting and polarising force is social media.
An increasing proportion of the population, especially those under 40, get their news from social media, overwhelmingly from Facebook. The algorithms that tailor what Facebook prioritises for each individual allow users to choose only those topics or opinions that they want to hear. This has led to the formation of echo chambers or information cocoons.
So we have the paradox of the internet: the technology that provides a global village square also provides the means by which people in the square can block their ears and shut their eyes to things they don’t want to hear or see.
This places great strain on democracy. In the words of William Butler Yeats, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.
In Australia, the effects of this phenomenon are made worse by the increased polarisation of the country’s two main newspaper companies, News Corporation and Fairfax Media.
Australia has very little diversity in its traditional media sector, especially its newspapers. News Corp controls roughly 70% of daily circulation and Fairfax roughly 20%. And for all their cutbacks in journalistic capacity, it is still the newspapers that inject the most new material into the 24/7 news cycle.
So when these two companies become polarised to the extent they have, there is a void at the centre. Notably, this is where The Guardian Australia has positioned itself (in reporting, at least – its opinions still lean to the left).
Sharp differences in political outlook among newspapers are nothing new, of course.
In Melbourne, The Argus was conservative, the paper of the squattocracy and the merchant class. It opposed land reform and favoured free trade, while The Age was progressive, supportive of the miners at Eureka, in favour of land reform and a crusader for protectionist trade policy.
In Sydney, The Sydney Morning Herald was profoundly conservative. The paper was opposed to democracy (which it called mobocracy) and supportive of a property franchise for the New South Wales Parliament. By contrast, The Empire, founded and edited by Henry Parkes, was guided by the principle that, in a colonial society, the working classes were the nucleus and makers of a democratic nation.
So there has never been a golden age when newspapers were heroically detached from interests and ideologies.
However, in the post-war period, the ideal of impartiality in news coverage gained a strong hold on the journalistic mind. American newspapers were the exemplars of this ideal. They were heavily influenced by the 1947 report of the US Commission on the Freedom of the Press, which had been set up to try to rebuild public confidence in the media after a period of corrosive sensationalism and propagandising in the early 20th century.
Appointed and paid for by the media itself, the commission consisted of intelligent and high-minded people from the media, government and academia. Its intellectual leader was a Harvard philosopher, William Ernest Hocking.
The commission’s report laid a solemn duty on the media to render a reliable account of the events of the day: factual, impartial and accurate. Comment was to play no part in news reporting, and was to be confined to pages set aside for it.
Generations of journalists in Western democracies – including me – were trained in this ideal.
Over time, however, it reduced news stories to a desiccated collection of unexplained facts, devoid of context and analysis. And anyway, the idea of a completely impartial and detached reporter came to be seen as fanciful, not to say fraudulent.
Gradually, news stories became more analytical, which introduced an overt element of subjectivity. Comment began to infiltrate news pages, so that now we have reached a point where news reportage, analysis and comment are commonly woven together.
Alongside these developments, ideological fissures were opening up in Australian society. The period of post-war social unity around a white Australia, opposition to communism, and other components of the Australian Settlement, such as wage arbitration and industry protection, began to crack.
Newspaper ownership also became more concentrated. In 1983, the Syme family sold The Age to Fairfax. In 1987, changes to media ownership laws introduced by Paul Keating enabled Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to swallow up the huge but ailing Herald and Weekly Times.
Meanwhile, in Britain, Murdoch was getting a taste of what it was like to wield power over governments. Margaret Thatcher in particular was in thrall to him, as scholars such as David McKnight and Rod Tiffen have shown in their biographies of Murdoch.
His stable of newspapers in Britain included populist tabloids appealing to conservative blue-collar voters and influential broadsheets such as The Times and Sunday Times. These became increasingly conservative under his control, as the distinguished editor of those papers, Harold Evans, pointed out in his memoirs.
It seems Murdoch wanted to replicate this model in Australia. He had already started out with populist tabloids, yet his national broadsheet, The Australian, had begun life in 1964 as a vibrant small-l liberal newspaper.
However, as Murdoch’s vehicle for exerting influence on policymakers, it became increasingly conservative. By 1975 it had become so biased to the right in its political coverage that its own journalists went on strike in protest.
Murdoch makes no bones about his right to control what goes in his papers, and his editorial staff have to accommodate themselves to this – or exercise the privilege of resignation.
At Fairfax, the internal culture has been entirely different. In 1988, journalists at The Age persuaded Fairfax management to sign a charter of editorial independence guaranteeing no improper interference in editorial decision-making. Over the following three or four years, the company’s other titles adopted this charter.
These contrasting cultures are reflected in the editorial values of the companies’ newspapers. As the News Corp papers have become more stridently conservative, the Fairfax journalists seem to have taken it on themselves to provide at least some ideological counterweight.
It can be seen any day in the choice of stories given prominence and in the contrasting angles taken on political stories.
A good example was the treatment given to the controversy last year and early this year over the Australian Human Rights Commission. The Australian was campaigning vigorously to have the commission president, Professor Gillian Triggs, removed. The Fairfax newspapers focused on sustaining her position, particularly in respect of refugees and asylum seekers.
Similarly, with climate change, deniers get a prominence in News Corp papers that they never get in Fairfax.
This polarisation also reflects the deep divisions in the composition of the federal parliament, which in turn reflect deep divisions in the community over issues such as climate change and asylum seekers.
The fragmentation of political discourse brought about by social media only serves to heighten these divisions.
In these circumstances, the body politic would benefit from a renewed commitment by journalists to the qualities that underpinned the ideal of impartiality: accuracy, fairness, open-mindedness and above all balance, which follows the weight of evidence, not the bias of ideology.
Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
You really need to worry about anyone who argues that The Guardian is to the center of anything.
User ID not verified.
‘Right’. ‘Left’. This is a major problem. Human’s being herded into one category or another. Correct Murdoch and the suits at Fairfax have both taken opposing views. (They know that the readership is roughly 50/50, so they get an audience share each, right..?) Money talks and money is what drives Murdoch and the current Fairfax board.
Money however does not drive The Guardian, nor other reputable sources, who want to pursue the truth and let the truth be told. Murdoch has worked bl00dy hard to smear anyone who reports the truth and to type cast them as being ‘lefties’, or ‘commies’. He has worked very hard to make people think that a Green Party member is some sort of activist nut job. We are now seeing the decline in his publications and other businesses as the educated take immense offense to his seemingly and often called out anti social rhetoric.
We shall see what path’s are carved out into the future. Many advertisers are beginning to swerve Murdoch’s publications. The #stopfundinghate campaign has been effective here.
Right / left? If only more people were educated about how to understand primary and secondary evidence and learn to understand a reliable source verses a skewed report. We would all be better off for it.
So in short: people, it would seem, are so, so brain washed and institutionalised that they still take headlines as oath. Madness!? Utter madness. Then again though an ex PM wanted to (or did he actually do it) put chaplains in schools? Talk about being anti facts / science. (Dumb them down at an early age and they will do whatever we ask in the future…) Indoctrinated = newspapers will sell rubbish to morons.
User ID not verified.
It’s even more concerning that the author of this is a university academic. To blindly position News as “right” while pretending that Fairfax practises a “charter of independence” would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious an error. Blind Freddy can see that’s wrong.
Fairfax is considered by everyone as significantly left of centre, squabbling for position with the Guardian and its polemical views on faddish issues. Its ‘Left-ness” is key to understanding its plummeting performance, with the Guardian and Fairfax mastheads in financial peril. Being out of sync with broad public opinion and values is a dangerous path to tread when you’re running a business. But if you’re in academia, that’s another matter.
User ID not verified.
Left, right. Doesn’t matter when no one reads them.
Probably points to a major (and often under-emphasised) cause of declining readership. Its cliché to hear the “The internet has killed the business model” argument. Its correct but…..I can’t help but think the model would have been a teeny bit more resilient if the audience had had its trust abused by bias over the years.
Its easy to argue that the left/right divide in chasing advertisers was inevitable, but of course this was short term gain for long term (fatal) pain.
User ID not verified.
I think it’s fair to say that the biggest single change was when Hawke and Keating handed the old HWT grouping to Murdoch. The Sun in Melbourne was a respectable popular paper. The old Melbourne Herald was dying as an afternoon conservative read. The Queensland and Adelaide papers both were curious but very local and the Tisrr in particular was much better than today’s ranting. Murdoch made them all one way or another into tabloids in the style he had developed in Sydney.
The Age peaked in the early 80s and began to slide when its best editor was booted for an old hack. The SMH was probably at its best under John Alexander, who was shafted politically by the team now in control at Fairfax.
My impression is that most of the sloppy indulgence that sometimes looks like ideology is nothing more than laziness. Editors don’t enforce news priority and standards and there is a big population of minor celebs. Here and there you have these infantile gangs who modest people over trivial agendas. But the core problem is that too many are living off PR and soft contacts.
You’ve only got to see the swagger of spivs like Markson or Cato to get the picture.
User ID not verified.
‘Fairfax is considered by everyone as significantly left of centre’ — how nice of you to speak for ‘everyone’, Michael. What tosh. Fairfax is centrist, centre-left at most.
And you want to talk about financial peril? The Australian loses tens of millions of dollars every year. News Corp’s poor performing Australian newspaper division (including the tabloids) is a key drag on company profits. How do these facts gel with your thesis?
User ID not verified.
“Centrist/Centre-left”? What planet are you living on? Pro refugee, climate change and every other left wing hobby horse…..and besotted with Trump going by the number of anti-Trump stories dominating their website. They have clearly taken the approach of being the opposite of News Corp….and vice versa.
User ID not verified.
To label Fairfax as left wing is like labeling a goldfish as a canine. It is nonsensical. Stop believing the headlines, the smearing and the hate and burrow into some detail before commenting again please Stephen.
I suspect you believe that Rudd and Gillard are left wing right? Well you would be wrong. Again, please get an education.
User ID not verified.