Pearls and Irritations

The Murdoch media is a grievance factory importing foreign concepts of mistrust and outrage that have never previously had a place in Australia’s political lexicon.

If the tangled muddle of an emissions policy that Australia presented to the world in Glasgow late in 2021 didn’t convince our political leaders that they had been backed up a policy dry gully by the Murdoch media empire, I’m not sure what will.

For more than two decades, the Murdoch outlets have editorialised that global warming was a beat up by radical environmentalists, claimed that a price on carbon would wreck the economy (until even the Business Council of Australia broke ranks), directed a stream of invective against the Gillard and Rudd governments for attempting a workable trading scheme and offered a platform to commentators such as Ian Plimer and Maurice Newman to broadcast anti-science bile.

Having marched to the intemperate drumbeat of The Australian and its sister tabloids from long before they were elected to office in 2013, the conservative political parties now find themselves in a policy morass, with no feasible path to the emerging future, snubbed by major energy companies as they plan for that future and obliged to manage renegade climate denialists within their own ranks who have been lobbing media grenades.

Along the way the conservative parties have trashed Australia’s international reputation as an upstanding member of the community of nations.

Victimhood central to the Murdoch agenda

Any attempt to nail down the idiosyncratic Murdoch worldview must be carefully qualified, partly because the various outlets do employ some excellent journalists and publish some excellent journalism, partly because its journalists and commentators don’t necessarily represent the official voice of the papers and partly because the outlets are not all identical in the ferocity of their campaigning.

We can piece together a News Corporation worldview from its editorials and various indirect parallels. From the date of The Australian’s editorial of 9 July 2010, expressing its wish that the Greens be destroyed at the ballot box, it should have been indelibly branded as a partisan agent and not a disinterested source of news.

When politicians complain about green extremism, bias by the public broadcaster, crime out-of-control and political correctness gone mad, one can discern a Murdoch provenance, as these themes appear repeatedly in their outlets as political weapons lacking a basis in rational analysis of the affairs of the day.

Green extremism? Had our political leaders taken more notice of the environmental movement’s blueprint Seeds for change: creatively confronting the energy crisis published by the Conservation Council of Victoria in 1978, the nation would not have wasted countable decades and uncountable billions of dollars in pursuing energy dead ends since then.

Political correctness? The narratives of conservative grievance in the USA and Australia are too similar to be coincidental; more plausibly they are evidence of the malign influence of the Murdoch media in Australian public affairs. Australians have long been pragmatic people, not given to overblown enthusiasms and it is unlikely that claims by Christian fundamentalists of persecution, pressure for voter identification laws, attacks on the humanities in academe, portrayal of vaccination as an assault on freedom and wails about silencing of conservative opinion have arisen spontaneously from an Australian domestic source. There aren’t many candidates other than the Murdoch editors for the role of conduit between the two nations of the sour victimhood that underlies these campaigns.

Victimhood is conspicuously missing from the palette of values that have long characterised Australian culture. Australians have always been self-reliant, a trait that sustained the First Peoples for uncounted millennia before colonisation and then became embedded in the worldview of the sons and daughters of the convicts as they built a very different society out of the wilderness. Australians also lack the entrenched fear of government that cripples US policy. Importation of victimhood into Australian public affairs carries with it division, hostility and mistrust where there either was none or need be none.

Leading politicians into dead ends

There are several reasons why a government should regard News Corporation’s newspaper editorials and commentators’ opinions as simply sectoral lobbying and not policy positions to adopt. One is that public policy is complex and the simplistic solutions that the Murdoch editors and columnists advocate – against unions, against environmentalists, against the ABC, against Muslims, against public spending, against refugees – are no substitute for thoughtful, consultative analysis.

The Murdoch outlets specialise in fabricating enemies out of constituents. As Malcolm Turnbull has volunteered, the people in charge of the Liberal Party regard the right-wing media outlets, not the voters, as the base of the party. Another reason is that responding to the Murdoch crusades chews up political capital, parliamentary time and policy capacity. Consider the impairment to progress wrought by the months of politicians’ time invested in the religious freedom legislation or, earlier, section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act or overturning the Medevac legislation, all squeezing out a raft of other pressing issues from the policy agenda.

Ministers and staffers who preference News Corporation over other media outlets with leaks and ‘drops’ imagine that they are procuring friendly coverage, which may be true – at least until an editor decides otherwise (and public interest is then not obviously one of the criteria); for the corporation is a fair-weather friend. But it is at least as credible that by this pernicious practice, the firm is co-opting the political party to their cause, promising favourable coverage if the government sticks to the firm’s script.

Ironically, the perpetual Murdoch campaign is arguably at least a threat to the conservative parties of government than to the progressive parties, because conservatives are more vulnerable to being gulled by the empire’s pro-business, anti-environmental, anti-union propaganda. This same can hardly be expressed better than Antony Green’s reported observation that “those caught by surprise by the wave of progressive independents have usually erred in viewing the climate emergency as an issue of the left, rather than one that concerns voters on all sides.” This is the consequence of polarising policy debates along partisan terms, the lead weight that the Murdoch press has imposed into the conservative parties’ saddlebags.

What can be done?

With this company, we can rule out an appeal to corporate ethics. We can also rule out legislation to counter media bias because of the conceptual difficulty of differentiating bias from legitimate commentary as well as the political difficulty that the corporation would ignite a firestorm of opposition in the name of free speech. We’ve seen that before. Perhaps the strongest remedy would be an appeal to competition.

It’s remarkable that governments of both major persuasions have forced competition down the throats of Australians in fields as diverse as employment services, vocational education, NDIS and electricity retailing. Yet they have yielded to the Murdoch empire’s repeated requests to amend or interpret regulation to widen its monopoly, such as to allow it to purchase then close down regional newspapers.

So let’s build competition in media. It would be ridiculously easy; it simply requires government to fund the ABC adequately. The ABC links Australians throughout the continent to disparate sources of information in religion, science, policy, the arts, business and local affairs. It is custodian of historical knowledge and nourishes talent in the craft of reportage necessary to fulfil these vital roles. It is a knowledge factory. By contrast, the Murdoch media is a grievance factory importing foreign concepts of mistrust and outrage that have never previously had a place in Australia’s political lexicon. Now which outlet should our government encourage?

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