“You’ve got absolutely zero influence”
The Australian media, without knowing it, could be the greatest agent for change
The recent Victorian election result was never in doubt in the hearts of the Victorian voting public. After the most ineffective period of Liberal opposition leadership in recent memory, held up by a former unsuccessful opposition leader, the party never looked a chance in the polling and electoral analysis. The definitive result reflected another evident repudiation of the political movement, but you wouldn’t have known it in the commercial press.
On the Channel Seven panel after the election result was called, two former premiers locked horns. After a long campaign of broken and subjective analysis that failed in every way to influence the result gave way to a comprehensive loss, Jeff Kennett was fidgeting like a schoolkid on the panel, smirking words incoherent, and blustering akin to Sam Newman. Meanwhile, Steve Bracks spoke soberly of the “150 negative stories on the Labor Party by the Herald Sun”, before turning and looking directly into the camera, “I tell you what Herald Sun. You’ve got absolutely zero influence”.
The media was meant to provide pertinent information, perhaps dishing warm bowls of food for thought. But in the case of Victoria, as in all of Australia and throughout the Murdoch controlled Anglosphere, the press has only been firing cannons. For every negative round shot out of the big guns of the multinational press giants, another cohort of consumers becomes alerted to their malpractice, everyone questioning why they are shooting at them and not feeding them like they say they do, and people begin to view the entire industry as a belligerent.
After resorting to alchemy to defy the political constants of voters, it may be that this latest election in Victoria may spell the beginning of the end of the Murdoch legacy in the state, and the country forever. But NewsCorp is not alone. Since divining the stars to deliver Morrison to a federal election victory in 2019 with the full court press of NewsCorp, Seven and a freshly Nined-up Fairfax, the triarchy of corporate press in Australia has struggled mightily to see past its own agenda when attempting to manipulate elections in the years since.
The poor condition of the Australian media landscape we see today is also related to the editorial reconfiguration of the Fairfax suite after its assimilation into Nine, and its tutelage under former Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello. Without an objective counterbalance in the commercial print space, the delicate balance of the sparsely populated mainstream media landscape in Australia shifted away from the center. Instead of playing an editorial tug of war over a pragmatic voting population, they both went off and sat with the LNP and helped them to lose the last 4 out of 5 elections.
The first signs of the subjective pivot were evident in the 2019 federal election campaign, but became a constant as the pandemic hit the country in early 2020, when it was clear that the Sydney Morning Herald thought drastically differently to how The Age back in Melbourne thought of their pandemic Premiers. As the ‘Woman who saved Australia’ got a helping hand all the way to ICAC, “Victoria’s premier [copped] a pounding” from Nine until the polls closed.
After a national shift towards a politics that runs against the objectives of foreign owned NewsCorp and the Costellofied Nine apparatus, the counter attacks have become messy, the analysis bitter and vitriolic, and viewed by a more robust Australian population as unnecessary and irrelevant. The population is spartan, tempered by pandemics, the costs of living, and the need to fend for oneself learned in the vacuum of leadership and sound information, and Aussies don’t like turkeys carrying on.
For all the noise squeezed out of the Murdoch propaganda towers, the crackly static voice on the other side is sounding fatigued, and Australians are getting on overwhelming sense that the information may not be so reliable. Murdoch’s opponents may now want to see less of a Royal Commission, and more of James Morrow, Rita Panahi and Peta Credlin acting like turkeys. The urgent change that press obstructs in the tiny media landscape of Australia is far too real for tabloid journalists to contain any longer, and far too serious for people to read the Herald Sun to be informed about it.
The decoupling of the mainstream media from the population is well and truly underway. The way the Murdoch led corporate press opposes existential issues like climate change, how it supports entities like the mega-corpos taking the first tickets in line, its war against living wages and its damnation at those living on the poverty line, juxtapose with the collective vision of a society looking for solutions from their leaders and truth from its media.
Open campaigning, subjectivity and turning black into white are the roles of politicians. Not the role of the press. The shameless political shill of a repurposed media, looking to exert influence over everyday lives for commercial outcomes, is not appreciated by its consumers. And most Victorians thought so at least.
Now, after getting so much wrong, and knowing that they were probably going to do so, with the NSW and Queensland elections cycling closer, what do the Daily Telegraph and the Courier Mail do in the light of this organisational, top-down abrogation? Does it feel like its message may be better received in the rugby states? Will it continue to double down with a fringe-line narrative it has slapped together somewhere in a lane-way between a dilapidated Trump Casino and a hyper-evangelical mega church? Perhaps the foreign owners of the country’s largest private media empire are disrespecting their Australian audiences by retrofitting foreign narratives on local issues. It could even be insulting to the point it is having exactly the opposite effect.
The buildings that containing the citadels of the Murdoch media are like musty old houses, with analysts peeping through dank curtains at our population, paranoid and isolated in their small, self-centered worlds and unable to understand who we are on the outside. Rowan Dean howls at the moon on an evening Sky program that somehow is allowed to have a rural free-to-air broadcasting license, people like Joe Hildebrand publish analysis that is embarrassing (every week!), and Peta Credlin can make feature length JFK-like documentaries about the inconsistencies surrounding the underfoot structures that led to Dan Andrews’ terrible accident.
But it's just not working any more. Following failure after failure after failure of the media to influence elections towards a subjective agenda, and open campaigns of misinformation and slander coupled with reckless attacks on the unity of this country, it will take more than a change of course by Murdoch and the corporate press to regain the influence they once had. They took it for granted for too long, they squandered it, now they’ve got zero credibility with an Australian audience in a country that is demanding truthful journalism.
Love this
Great read as usual. I wonder if it's worth investigating the free-to-air rural license thing that Sky has got going. I've just moved from a rural area and there is no doubt Sky has influence because of that. I was in a National Party stronghold.
Other thought I've had is I wonder if the howling at the moon types are not just actors for hire doing the bidding of Murdoch. Egos, celebrity, click bait, outrage. Have they gone too far?