The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics

Jenny M. Lewis (ed.), Anne Tiernan (ed.)

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198805465.001.0001
Published: 2020 Online ISBN: 9780191843532 Print ISBN: 9780198805465

CHAPTER

20 Disrupting Media and Politics: When the Old Rules Break,

How Can the Public Interest be Served? 
Julianne Schultz

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198805465.013.21 Pages 356–376

Published: 13 January 2021

Abstract
This chapter explores how, as the traditional media has become weaker due to digital disruption,
falling pro tability, and audience fragmentation, the political ecosystem in Australia has also eroded.
Signi cant job losses have reduced the scale of public interest journalism, and the frantic attention-
seeking of the 24-hour news cycle has contributed to a perception of chaos in politics. This is manifest
in frequent changes of prime minister outside the electoral cycle, and in polarization of opinion and
comment online and in traditional media designed to increase impact. Commercial media has long
embraced a quasi-institutional role and been happy to use this stature, but has resisted external
regulation. Self-regulation of the press and institutional oversight of broadcasting self-regulation are
relatively weak; social media and online platforms are not regulated; and the implied right to freedom
of political speech, the bedrock of the media’s unique political role, was only ‘found’ by the High Court
in 1997. This chapter argues that e ective regulation, which addresses the needs of citizens as well as
consumers, and other interventions including strengthening public broadcasting and securing
legislative (even constitutional) recognition of the democratic value of media freedom are required to
invigorate a robust political ecosystem.

Keywords: media, ownership, disruption, regulation, public interest journalism, fourth estate, Murdoch
Subject: Regional Political Studies, Politics
Series: Oxford Handbooks

MALCOLM Turnbull was remarkably composed when for the last time, on 24 August 2018, he took the
podium in the Prime Minister’s Courtyard at Parliament House. He spoke with passion, but without the
display of emotion that had been etched into the national consciousness when, over the previous decade,
three serving prime ministers found themselves exiting the rapidly revolving door of Australian political
leadership. Turnbull talked with pride about his government’s achievements and described the events that
had led to his demise as ‘madness’. It was, he declared, the result of a ‘determined insurgency in the party
room, backed by powerful voices in the media’ (Turnbull 2018: n.p.).
 Politicians often grumble about the media, but they generally do so in the privacy of their o ces,
sometimes directly admonishing journalists to do better, or occasionally in menacing phone calls to their
editors. For the leader of the conservative Coalition to publicly criticize sections of the media and to hold
them accountable for his downfall was particularly notable. In the forty-seven years since 1949 that the
Liberal–National Coalition has governed Australia, it has overwhelmingly done so with the explicit editorial
support of the major newspaper groups and the tacit support of the commercial broadcasters (Young 2019).
The handful of occasions when these newspapers have recommended that readers vote for the ALP were
themselves newsworthy. Yet here was a Liberal prime minister blaming ‘powerful voices in the media’ and
linking them to a ‘deliberate and disloyal insurgency…determined to bring down my prime ministership’
(Turnbull 2018: n.p.). The journalists in the parliamentary press gallery were not in his sights; his ire was
focused on the newspapers published by, the commentators employed by, and the cable news service owned
p. 357 by News Corp Australia, and the radio shock jocks broadcast by the (then) Fairfax-owned Macquarie
Radio Network. Over the three years of Turnbull’s prime ministership, these professionally angry,
ideologically motivated commentators—including Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, and Peta Credlin—had become
increasingly hostile and outspoken in their opposition.

History does not repeat itself, but there are sometimes eerie echoes. In the 1940 election campaign, the
Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph campaigned against Robert Menzies’ wartime restrictions on the
press, which they argued impacted on their commercial viability and limited their ‘power’. Although the
papers formally supported Menzies’ conservative United Australia Party (UAP) in the election campaign, the
following year the Sydney Morning Herald increased its agitation against Menzies, destabilizing the
leadership of the UAP. He eventually felt forced to resign, and subsequently, at a joint meeting of the
Coalition parties on 28 August 1941, Country Party leader Arthur Fadden was nominated to succeed to the
prime ministership. Menzies complained that the press had been out to ‘kill’ him. Seventy-eight years later,
almost to the day, a similar fate befell Turnbull (Young 2019).

Malcolm Turnbull’s cool and focused attack in August 2018 was a sign that the symbiotic relationship
between parliament, party politics, and the media, which had operated since the post-war years and had
adapted to accommodate the introduction of television and the later mediatization of politics, had broken.
This break was a response to the changes wrought by technology, which shifted the primary focus from
mass audiences to niche ones, from reporting to commentary. The era of the mass media, which also
provided an organizing principle for the two-party political system, and which similarly gathered a wide
range of perspectives under one umbrella, was changing, and with it the old norms were under assault.

Turnbull, who before becoming a politician had had a distinguished career as a banker, lawyer, and
journalist, was always ready to robustly defend himself. He told a hectoring Alan Jones, a year before he was
elected leader, ‘I will not take dictation from you’ (cited in Yaxley 2014), in an exchange which signalled that
the most prominent conservative radio presenter and Turnbull were never likely to be close. But naming and
blaming ‘powerful voices in the media’ for undermining his authority, and that of his government, pointed
to a step change in an institutional relationship between parliament, political parties, the public, and the
media that had been evolving for some time. The parameters of the relationship, always marked by the
competing and di erent interests of media owners, journalists, politicians, and regulators was further
complicated by the existential threat to the viability of the commercial media caused by digital disruption.

The pro tability of traditional media companies had eroded rapidly over the previous decade, during which
advertising and audiences moved to the new digital platforms that were able to target audiences with
content—both advertising and news. News organizations responded to the loss of revenue by dramatically
reducing the number of journalists and amount of public interest journalism (Commonwealth of Australia
p. 358 2018; Zion et al. 2016). As a consequence, a relationship that had served the owners of the media, elected
o cials, and the public reasonably well for decades began to erode: the companies were weaker, audiences
smaller, and a shared sense of public interest more contested. The challenge to institutional authority was
 the by-product of these commercial and technological changes, and the ideologically framed output of
many Murdoch outlets, which had become increasingly comfortable with an overtly partisan approach to
political commentary. This approach was re ned by News Corp in the US, where Fox News achieved
commercial success and political in uence by cultivating a disgruntled audience (Sherman 2014).

The nexus between Australia’s (essentially) two-party political system and its mass media had been broken,
and both were struggling to nd a way to rede ne purpose in a sustainable way (Walter and Ghazarian
2018). The careful tiptoeing around responsibilities and checks and balances that had positioned the media
as a commercial activity, but ‘not just another business’ (Schultz 1994: n.p.), and as an important part of the
political system (albeit without constitutional authority) was challenged by a more fragmented, partisan,
globalized, and always-on media ecosystem. The new order had been built on chasing the attention of
audiences who were bombarded by information—often unaware of the ways they were being targeted—
every minute of the day.

The accepted norms of a socially responsible framework (Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm 1974) which
articulated a professionally dispassionate, objective, public interest role for the media that was free of
o cial censorship but buttressed by regulation, and which had prevailed for decades, had waned. At its best
that framework was marked by shared goals and values, a commitment to truth, fairness, accuracy, and
representativeness with information presented comprehensively and in context and a forum for civil
exchange, comment, and criticism (Bray 1965). When it worked it provided a steadying in uence on both
media and political authority. An increasingly assertive generation of journalists and editors demanded that
the role expand from reporting prevailing established viewpoints. As they challenged objectivity and sought
to undertake more investigative reporting and news analysis, the limits of the model were thrown into
sharper relief (Schultz 1998). In another domain, this coincided with greater deregulation of the media
industry.

By the early years of the twenty- rst century, the ‘social responsibility’ principles were no longer so
robustly shared. This gave rise to criticism of the so-called ‘political class’ of insiders who allegedly shared
more with each other than the broader public they were supposed to serve (Murphy 2018). This ‘inside the
bubble’ perception was a product of the increasing professionalization of political communications and
journalism, the declining number of political reporters, and increased reliance on commentary—each part
of the response to changing economic and social circumstances of the news business. At the same time, the
pro tability of traditional media shrivelled as new digital modes of distribution ourished and attracted the
bulk of advertising, the number of journalists fell by a quarter, public perception of the trustworthiness of
the media plummeted, audiences were fragmented and targeted, and public debate became more polarized.
As a result, the media’s standing as a quasi-institution—privately run, but with accepted public
responsibilities—was less assured.

p. 359 This challenge to the media’s standing as the fourth estate—as the ‘feedback mechanism of democratic
system management’ (Kunczik 1989; Schultz 2015) for public life and a robust political domain—is
considerable. While it emerges from the changing fortunes of a handful of companies, the impact on the
broader political ecosystem is much greater, resulting in instability and a lack of clarity of institutional
focus. The increasing sense of chaos in the media, which Guardian Australia political editor Katharine
Murphy characterizes as ‘a febrile, super cial, shouty, shallow, pugnacious cacophony of content, where
sensation regularly trumps insight’ (Murphy 2018: 55), mirrors the frantic attention-seeking of the internet
and the perception of chaos in politics, embodied by the frequent changes of prime minister outside the
electoral cycle, polarization of opinion, and falling membership of political parties. The impact of
unregulated social media on the robustness of democratic systems—allowing ‘fake news’ to ourish,
removing professional checks on information that reaches a diverse mass audience, and reinforcing already
held views—is generating international concern (Schultz 2019). This begs the question of whether the
collapse of a shared acceptance of a socially responsible model of media practice, enforced by robust
 regulation, helped create a debased public sphere which allowed unregulated ‘digital gangsters’ of social
media, regarded as platforms not publishers, to reshape the industry.

A Changing Environment

In the last minutes of Prime Minister Turnbull’s nal address, he singled out journalists from whom he
sought questions: ‘Murpharoo’, ‘La Tingle’, ‘Chris Uhlmann where are you?’. Like all successful politicians,
he had worked hard to cultivate productive relationships with press gallery leaders, and by inviting several
by name to help make sense of the week’s extraordinary events highlighted those he most respected. In
doing this, he made clear who he considered the responsible, traditionally professional journalists to be (as
opposed to those he had previously attacked). In the factionally in amed political environment, this rather
perversely became further evidence for some commentators of what they considered to be the awed
professionalism of ABC, Guardian, and Fairfax journalists. In reality, it was a sign of the ascendency of a new
approach to journalism, in which these commentators exercised disproportionate in uence and opinion,
rather than reporting, shaped the terrain. Attacks became particularly strident as ideologically motivated
commentators sought to emulate the angry partisanship that had helped Fox News to ourish in the US.

Questioning the professional practice of journalists has been a part of the toolkit of political debate over
many years. As the operating consensus changed, and opinion became more important in the news
environment, conservative politicians and commentators have increasingly targeted journalists who they
do not regard as fellow travellers—journalists who are most likely to be associated with organizations that
p. 360 have a more traditionally liberal, socially responsible view of the media’s role in the political ecosystem.
When the most politically certain suggest that others are biased, it often says more about those making the
accusation. Research on the political preferences of journalists demonstrates that they are most likely to
re ect the cohort from which they are drawn (educated, urban, young), yet continue to hold a commitment
to being non-partisan (Schultz 1998: 118). In the twenty- rst century, attacks on the professionalism of
journalists have become routine political currency even as the number of journalists has fallen. This was
demonstrated most spectacularly by US President Donald Trump, who routinely calls journalists enemies of
the people. But it is a time-worn tool: in Australia, Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen described
journalists as ‘chooks’ whom he fed, and Victorian Premier Je Kennett refused to be interviewed by critical
journalists.

In the weeks following Malcolm Turnbull’s removal as leader of the Liberal Party, more esh was put on the
bones of the ‘insurgency’ and the ‘powerful voices in media’, who saw themselves as players rather than
observers. Most notable of these were Andrew Probyn, the ABC’s political editor, and the Australian Financial
Review’s gossip columnist Joe Aston, who was known for his closeness to the network of company directors
who reside in Point Piper, the wealthiest suburb in Australia and Turnbull’s home for decades. Probyn and
Aston suggested that the two most signi cant media owners in Australia—Rupert Murdoch, executive
chairman of News Corp, publisher of 70 per cent of the nation’s newspapers and the owner of Sky News, and
Kerry Stokes, chairman of Seven West, publisher of the West Australian, and owner of the Seven Network—
were complicit, and possibly also participants in, the events that led to Scott Morrison becoming the
thirtieth Australian prime minister (Aston 2018; Probyn 2018). Probyn wrote: ‘Malcom Turnbull’s demise as
Australia’s twenty-ninth prime minister was unusual for many reasons, and truly unique for one: his was
the rst known prime ministership to be the subject of a billionaires’ tug of war between the nation’s most
powerful media moguls’ (Probyn 2018: n.p.).

Stokes forcefully denied that he had had any involvement with the Liberal leadership spill:
 Absolutely nothing, full stop. The ABC’s headline asked what did I have to do with the Liberal
leadership spill…. The ABC was wrong in asserting that the West Australian backed Scott Morrison at
my direction. That is not the way I operate. Furthermore, the characterisation and supposed details
of the private conversations assigned to me are wrong.

(quoted in Crowe 2018; see also, Savva 2019)

At core, this exchange resonated with a deeply held public perception, grounded in observed experience over
many decades, that media owners in Australia are willing to use the power that the ownership of the mass
media grants them to in uence political outcomes and advance their own interests (Young 2019). The fact
that Murdoch had been in the country prior to Turnbull’s demise, that News Corp Australia’s Daily Telegraph
had published a front-page story the week before—‘MPs hit the panic Dutton’— agging that the extremely
conservative Home A airs Minister Peter Dutton would challenge for the leadership, and that Turnbull and
p. 361 Murdoch had spoken after the rst vote all suggested his ngerprints were visible. Lachlan Murdoch, co-
chairman of News Corp, subsequently denied any direct involvement by himself or his father in the change
of leadership, while acknowledging that they had over some years cultivated and supported Tony Abbott,
Turnbull’s aggrieved predecessor (Williams 2019).

The truth and the practical consequences of this perception are a matter of debate, but the fact that for most
of the post-war period Australia has had a level of concentrated media ownership that put it near the top of
the list for media consolidation in liberal democracies has added fuel to the re. For many years, Australian
media had been owned by a handful of very wealthy, well-connected families, who were always determined
to protect their interests and were not di dent about using their media power to do so (Chadwick 1989;
Young 2019). By the early twenty- rst century, the family ownership model still operated but was no longer
the norm. With mass circulation, the advertising-based business model that had generated extraordinary
pro ts faced an existential threat from the FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Net ix, Google) companies,
which had grown as they mastered the tools to capture and sell their users’ data and to target advertising.

Concern about the power and in uence of the media owners has been a recurring issue for decades, and
regular large public meetings have taken place to protest takeovers that increased concentration of
ownership or cuts to the funding of the ABC (Chadwick 1989). In 1988 journalists employed by The Age
newspaper secured agreement from the Fairfax board to a charter of editorial independence, which asserted
a social responsibility framework and separation between commercial and editorial interests, and which, by
1991, had been adopted by all the Fairfax newspapers (Fairfax Media 2012). When the Nine network acquired
Fairfax in 2018, it agreed to abide by the charter, giving editors full responsibility for their newspapers
(McDuling 2018).

Media ownership may not have been a rst-order political issue for the Australian public, but for many
years it registered as a matter of concern (Gardiner-Garden and Chowns 2006); however, its continuing
potency in the rapidly changing digital environment is uncertain, even as concern about the long-term
viability of public interest journalism and the enabling of ‘fake news’ (propaganda) preoccupy
parliamentary committees in Australia and many other countries. Historically, disquiet about concentrated
media ownership pivoted on the impact this could have on the public sphere and political decision-making,
with a supplementary concern that the owners of the companies would use this in uence to advance their
interests. In 1963, early in his career, before he built one of the world’s largest and most in uential media
companies, Rupert Murdoch argued for a return to fourth estate principles, saying: ‘[W]hat right have we to
speak in the public interest when all too often we are motivated by personal gain’ (Mayer 1964; Schultz
1998).

Most of the time, the power of media owners is exercised behind closed doors in lobbying for legislative
changes that will advance commercial interests. Sometimes, it becomes manifest; for instance, when,
 during the 1991 parliamentary inquiry into media ownership and its consequences (called ‘News and Fair
Facts’) when the then owner of the Nine Network and Consolidated Press, Kerry Packer, thumped the table
p. 362 in a furious display of frustrated authority. Or years earlier, in 1975, when journalists at The Australian
went on strike over editorial direction from Rupert Murdoch, the paper’s owner and founder, to actively
support the Liberal Party in their reporting of the election campaign that had been called after Governor
General Sir John Kerr dismissed Gough Whitlam as prime minister.

The patterns of reporting and relationships between journalists, editors, and politicians have changed over
time. The cosiness that characterized these relations during the post-war years under prime ministers
Curtin and Menzies became something more robust as journalists asserted greater professional authority in
the 1970s (Lloyd 1988). Yet, as former Prime Minister Paul Keating told the Sydney Institute in June 2000:

The media world is still one of warring baronies, trying to operate within a nineteenth century
craft-based industry structure…In the decade and a half of reform in Australia through to the
middle nineties, it is clear that most sectors of the economy, and indeed society, were subject to
substantial and often fundamental change. But I am sure it is fair to say, that the estate of Australia
that has changed least, that has obdurately clung to the old ways, that has been the most resistant
to cultural adaptation, is the fourth estate: the media…At the ownership and management level
there is, I believe, an enormous chasm between it and the world as it really is outside the
boardroom. At its upper reaches, proprietors and boards could scarcely be less representative of
the contemporary Australian public.

(Keating 2000: n.p.)

Disruption, Adaptation, and Deals

The complacency described in the previous section has been displaced. Digital platforms, particularly
Facebook and Google, have taken the bulk of the advertising that once went to the mass-media companies.
Between 2014 and 2017, nearly 90 per cent of the total market increase in advertising (excluding classi eds)
went to Google and Facebook, and newspaper classi ed advertising income fell from $2 billion a year in
2001 to $200 million a year in 2016 (ACCC 2018). Nonetheless, the concentration of media ownership in
Australia remains the highest in the democratic world, with the four largest companies reaching most of the
population and accounting for 90 per cent of revenue in 2015–2016 (Dwyer and Mueller 2016).

During the period of structural change that Keating described in his address to the Sydney Institute, the
process of media management also became more professionally sophisticated and pervasive, with
increasing numbers of political and communications sta employed to ensure that the preferred message
was framed and communicated. Politics became professionalized in a new way, with communications
strategies and management at its core, leading to an increased focus on leaders, dependence on polls, and
an incremental process of mediatization. A senior member of the press gallery described the change over
her career:

p. 363 In the press gallery during the Hawke and Keating years they would brief us until our ears bled.
Explaining the policy, explaining why it had to be done, going into detail, providing background
and brie ngs. Then when Howard was elected it all changed. Instead his advisers used to prowl the
gallery and ask, ‘what have you got, what are you working on’, and then they would go and try to
close it down, or divert attention with something else. And it has just [become] worse and worse
ever since. The connection between reporting policy and reporting politics has broken.

(quoted in Schultz 2015)

 During this period, the reporting of federal parliament became increasingly attached to the drama of the
day, with angry grabs from question time lling the news bulletins and reporting of tactics taking
precedence over reporting of policy.

In the always-on digital environment, this has escalated. Even as the number of journalists fell, the demand
for content increased. This was addressed in two ways: by reliance on commentators whose opinions were
cheap and unencumbered by time-consuming reporting, fact checking, or quests for fairness, and by ‘ lling
the news hole’ with the uncontextualized minutiae of rolling news. Sean Kelly, a former media adviser to
Labor prime ministers Rudd and Gillard, had direct personal experience of the need to feed the voracious
media machine:

There were two simple ways of providing content. Opinions, as the saying goes, are like arseholes
—everybody’s got one. So procuring opinions was not hard…The second simple way…was breaking
‘news’…the threshold for actual news and breaking news is very, very di erent. For something to
be news it must be important, have some bearing on our lives or our understanding of the world.
For something to be breaking news it merely needs to have just happened. And once it’s happened,
and been reported, and had the gloss of faux-importance applied, it’s time to call in the
opinionistas to ll some space.

(Kelly 2015: n.p.)

For the diminishing number of reporters seeking actual news, the pressure of time was unrelenting. As
Katharine Murphy notes:

News is led when it happens, not hours after the fact. The internet allows a plethora of live
coverage and audiences ock to it. In digital this means live blogs and constantly updated news
stories…on television this means rolling news channels. Bit by bit we sped up. We began ling all
the time.

(Murphy 2018: 45)

In this rapidly changing and speedy environment, the competition to be rst with the news is more
pronounced than ever, increasing the value of exclusive stories. As was shown in the UK’s 2011–2012
Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practices, and Ethics of the Press, which investigated illegal telephone
tapping by British journalists and led to the closure of Murdoch’s News of the World, sometimes this quest to
be rst means laws are broken. More often, the relationship between journalists and sources is an elaborate
form of co-dependence in which the needs of both are met.

p. 364 One of the most striking examples is captured in the pattern of behaviour that evolved over some decades in
Sydney between the Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph and Macquarie Street, where the Parliament of New
South Wales is located. In a newspaper market divided by geography and class, the robustly tabloid Daily
Telegraph has long prided itself on ‘owning’ the western suburbs, with the Sydney Morning Herald drawing
most of its audience from the harbourside suburbs to the east and north of the city. The political potency of
the growing western suburbs electorates gave the Daily Telegraph power and in uence. Often, this informal
arrangement meant that Telegraph journalists would be favoured with exclusive stories from Macquarie
Street. In the days of the mass media, when newspapers shaped the news agenda for radio and television,
this relationship was in the interests of the politicians, the media company, and the journalists (although
whether it served the interests of the public was a more complex question). As newspapers began to lose
their spot at the top of the news food chain, and faced challenges from new digital and social media
platforms, this in uence waned. As Imre Salusinsky, who had worked as The Australian’s state political
reporter and was alert to the fact that he was regularly scooped by his sister paper, recalled: ‘Most
afternoons a senior Labor media sta er would go past my desk to the Tele with the next day’s policy
 announcement and they would gratefully take what was given to them’ (quoted in Davies 2018b: n.p.). When
he became media director for former Liberal Premier Mike Baird, Salusinsky gained new insight into the
informal arrangement that had operated for decades.

I found myself managing the scheme. And I was the target of wheedling and bullying from the
News Ltd tabloids when I did not provide enough drops. If you give them what they want, you get
soft coverage, but then the TVs smash you up. If you don’t give them what they want, they smash
you up themselves. I started asking myself: ‘Aren’t you in a position of doing special favours for a
commercial enterprise? Aren’t they in a position where they are issuing inducements and threats
to a government employee?’ I sought legal advice about whether I was in breach of the [anti-
corruption] ICAC Act. I was told that I probably was.

(quoted in Davies 2018b: n.p.)

The advice was informal, but Salusinsky felt its ethical burden and wound back the ‘drops’ to the paper.
Premier Baird also began to use Twitter and Facebook for important announcements, bypassing the
Telegraph. The response was swift and dramatic. The paper, which prides itself on its in ammatory
photoshopped images of politicians, ridiculed Baird and presented him as a dictator: ‘Mike Baird has
revealed he wants to emulate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un by becoming the state’s Dear Leader with
a plan to bypass traditional media such as newspapers, TV and radio and speak to his people using Twitter
and Facebook’ (cited in Davies 2018b: n.p.). That political communication could bypass the newspaper cut to
the core of its self-de nition, and represented a multipronged assault on its rationale, impact, and
pro tability.

p. 365 In another example, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recalled the response from a Telegraph editor when
asked why he had pursued a particular politician:

His reply was chillingly straightforward: ‘Because we can.’ Something an aspiring politician never
quite forgets…The Murdoch media, through systematic bullying and intimidation, have
successfully created a culture of fear in Australian public life. People know that if you attack them,
they then set out to destroy you. And it’s worked. That’s why most politicians, corporates,
academics and journalists decide to keep their heads down.

(2018a: n.p.)

As someone who had enjoyed the bene ts of News Corp’s favour, and felt the wrath of its ire, since he left
Australian politics Rudd has been advocating for a royal commission into the company and its in uence,
describing Murdoch as ‘the greatest, most malignant cancer on our Australian democracy’ (Rudd 2018b:
594). He recalled Cabinet conversations (Davies 2018a) in which fear of News Corp’s response shaped
decisions, and argued that the company used its position in the public sphere to advance its own commercial
interests and to become a corrosive in uence on the broader political sphere. He wrote:

A free media is the lifeblood of a democracy. But media freedom in Australia is now under
structural threat from a combination of extreme ideological conservatism, fuelled by rampant
commercial interests. What Murdoch has done through the concentration of media power in
Australia—where he owns 70 per cent of the print media and seeks to expand that in television
further—and the ‘Foxisation’ of Sky News in Australia—is what he’s already done in the United
Kingdom and what he’s done in the United States, which is to create an echo chamber for far-right
politics.

(quoted in Middleton 2017)

 No doubt, this call was informed by his experience of living in the US, where the close ties between
Murdoch’s Fox News Network and President Trump are daily on display.

Rudd was particularly sensitive to the role of News Corp in Australian politics. As a long-term resident of
Brisbane, a city that for three decades had had a monopoly newspaper owned by the company, he had an
acute sense of its capacity to shape debates and exercise power. He developed a close personal relationship
with the editor of the Courier-Mail and later editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, and became
godfather to one of his children. Mitchell later wrote that he had erred by allowing himself to become too
close (Mitchell 2017). When Rudd began calling for a royal commission, his credibility was questioned by
those who had been close to him and observed the way he actively courted support. The counter argument is
that, as a result of this intense personal experience, he was privy to the way power is exercised behind
closed doors.

Whether the media actually in uences political outcomes has been a recurring topic for political scientists
and communications scholars. In the era of mass media—essentially the seventy years after the Second
p. 366 World War—many studies examined this subject. The degree of in uence has varied over time and been
dependent on context, although the ability of the media to set an agenda and frame public conversation has
rarely been contested. It is striking, then, that as the mass media lost the upper hand in setting the agenda,
its in uence on electoral outcomes also waned. Studies of the in uence of the Daily Telegraph on shaping the
outcome of votes in western Sydney and in the in uence of the Courier-Mail in Queensland both point to a
negligible impact (Chen 2013).

As is discussed later, in the digital media age the capacity to in uence and shape debates and political
outcomes has shifted as the new global platforms and the algorithms shape the news and information that
reaches citizens and helps inform their political decisions This has now been the subject of major inquiries
in many countries which provide evidence of a new sophistication in media management makes the
screaming headlines of old look like a crude artefact. As the British House of Commons committee report,
Disinformation and ‘fake news’, found:

People are able to accept and give credence to information that reinforces their views, no matter
how distorted or inaccurate, while dismissing content with which they do not agree as ‘fake news’.
This has a polarising e ect and reduces the common ground on which reasoned debate, based on
objective facts, can take place. Much has been said about the coarsening of public debate, but when
these factors are brought to bear directly in election campaigns then the very fabric of our
democracy is threatened.

(DCMSC 2019: 5)
 Media Reform to Entrench Oligopoly

Malcolm Turnbull prided himself on being a reforming prime minister, although the record is slim.
Nonetheless, under his leadership, far-reaching reforms of the regulatory framework for media ownership
were nally passed in 2017 after years of prevarication. While the owners of the media companies had for
decades succeeded in advancing their corporate interests, the oligopolistic industry was far from
homogeneous: old enmities ran deep, even as the industry faced a potential existential threat from the
digital transformation of the media. The system of regulation had by the twenty- rst century produced a
protected environment, with modest expectations in terms of Australian content, a light touch regulatory
environment, reduced licence fees, and few incentives for innovation. Changing the rules that con ned
established organizations to one sector—print, radio, or TV—remained the goal of the media owners.
Cross-media ownership had been deep in the DNA of the media companies since the days when the
newspaper companies had won television and radio licences, but digitization provided a new rationale to
revert to past ownership patterns, notwithstanding the highly concentrated patterns of ownership.

p. 367 The animosity between the companies, and the competing interests, should not be underestimated. In 2015,
when he was prime minister, Tony Abbott said that until the media owners reached consensus there would
be no reform; the fear of alienating one or other of the companies carried a real political cost. He told the
Guardian:

The trouble with media reform is that all too often it is a question of pitting one business’s
interests against another business’s interests. That’s why I would urge all of those who would like
to see change here to sit down, hammer out something which is good for everyone and once that’s
done, obviously the government is prepared to look at it.

(quoted in Medhora 2015)

The reforms that eventually passed were essentially ones the industry had been seeking for decades, with
some trade-o s and sweeteners to keep the peace between them. The changes were pursued with a renewed
sense of urgency as the dynamics of the industry altered in response to the competitive pressure from the
new digital platforms, which were not constrained by availability of spectrum, local content rules, or
regulatory oversight. This urgency was particularly heightened by the fact that these digital platforms,
principally Facebook and Google, captured almost all the new advertising income between 2011 and 2015
(ACCC 2018).

The reforms were ostensibly designed to allow mergers between media companies operating in di erent
mediums. The previous regulations prohibited a person or corporation controlling a commercial television
licence, radio licence, and a newspaper in the same market, and a single owner could not control
commercial television licences reaching more than three-quarters of the Australian population. The
argument was that in an era of digital distribution it made little di erence whether ‘content’ was initially
produced to be read, listened to, or watched: words could be rendered by audio, audio and moving pictures
with a print subtext. The argument was that this meant restrictions on ownership across platforms were
artefacts of the era of analogue mass media.

The traditional owners of the Australian mass media had grown rich as their companies stretched from
newspapers to television and radio as spectrum and highly regulated licenses became available. So for many
years, the Fairfax family empire, which traced its genesis to the 1841 purchase of a Sydney newspaper, also
owned the Seven Network; the Packer family moved from newspapers and magazines to include Nine, the
most pro table television network for many decades; and as Murdoch built a newspaper empire by
acquiring the Herald and Weekly Times and other groups, his company for a time also owned the Ten network
(Commonwealth of Australia 2016).
 This cross-sectoral concentration of ownership was internationally noteworthy. Even three decades after
legislative changes designed to ensure greater diversity, the concentration of media ownership was
remarkably high by international standards, despite the legislative changes that had restricted the reach
and range of the media companies. As in many other comparable jurisdictions, ownership was regulated to
ensure diversity, and in some markets licences were regularly recontested.

p. 368 In November 1986 Treasurer Paul Keating declared, with typical amboyance, that in future the owners of
the media could choose to be ‘princes of print or queens of screen’, and within months the industry was
reshaped, although the existing arrangements were ‘grandfathered’ and there were no forced divestments.
Within a month, News Limited acquired the Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group, the largest portfolio
of newspapers, which Keith Murdoch had once managed. In August 1987, following his father’s death,
Warwick Fairfax Jnr privatized the publicly listed Fairfax company, triggering its demise and the beginning
of the end of the family-owner model of media ownership in Australia. At the time, there was no
requirement to sell, but the policy change produced a urry of ownership changes, brought new companies
into the media sector, made fortunes for some, and destroyed dynasties. The intention to reduce
concentration of ownership became muddied by the swift action of News Limited and led to accusations that
the government was trying to buy the favour of the media owners. Twenty- ve years later, when the
Cabinet papers were released, the ‘coincidence’ of the policy change and the Murdoch takeover was actively
discussed (Chadwick 2014).

Within a decade of the 1986 reforms, where once three companies dominated the entire industry there was
greater competition, with two major newspaper companies, three commercial television networks, and four
radio networks. The media transitioned from a sector that was primarily family-run to a corporate and later
a venture capital model of ownership with a wider range of shareholders. It could be argued that the
unintended consequence of this policy change was to end the era of family-owned media enterprises where
the commitment to a public purpose was hardwired—if sometimes self-interested—to a shorter-term
commercial model in which the journalism was commodi ed.

The legislative changes introduced during Prime Minister Turnbull’s administration three decades later
consolidated this commercial model, with concessions to ensure that there was something for everyone:
reducing the cost of television licence fees, reviewing local content quotas, maintaining a light touch
regulatory model, and commissioning an inquiry into the impact of the new digital platforms, principally
Google and Facebook, on the pro tability of the media companies and the capacity for public interest
journalism. Although the industry had been arguing for years that the restrictions which prohibited mergers
between companies operating in di erent sectors had been rendered irrelevant by digital distribution, when
the legislation eventually passed on 14 September 2017 there was a strange sense of anticlimax. News Corp
had been positioning to reacquire the insolvent Ten Network and link it more closely to Sky News Australia,
but a fortnight before the legislation was passed a series of missteps meant that the ownership transferred
to the American broadcaster CBS, which was also the network’s largest creditor.

Then, in July 2018, the troubled Fairfax company and the Nine network announced that, subject to
regulatory approval, they would merge. The once feuding Packer and Fairfax families had long since taken
their pro ts and left the share registries of each company, so the merger was predicated on purely
commercial terms—on maximizing audience and revenue and realizing economies of scale to increase
p. 369 pro tability. Within days of the merger in early December 2018, the jobs of 144 journalists were lost.
Journalism, which had once been the raison d’être of Fairfax, had become, as market analysts’ reports
noted, a cost on the business, which drew its pro ts primarily from the Domain real estate business, a
reality that was re ected in the share price.

Paul Keating scathingly described the removal of cross-media ownership laws as ‘an exceptionally bad
development’:
 The kind of merger announced today between Channel Nine and Fairfax was bound to happen the
moment the cross-media legislation introduced by the Hawke government 30 years ago was
suspended. The so-called cross-media rule gave Australia 30 years of media diversity, especially
between Australia’s major television networks and its capital city print. Those barriers in the
wholesaling of news, underwrote diversity of opinion, guaranteeing an altogether better informed
and livelier public debate. The absence of those legislative barriers…[will] result in an e ective and
dramatic close down in diversity and, with it, opinion.

(quoted in Long 2018: n.p.)

The tensions between the commercial and the public roles of the media were addressed in this legislation
with a series of amendments designed to ensure regional diversity and some support for public interest
journalism. In December 2017, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) was directed
to inquire ‘into the e ect that digital search engines, social media platforms and other digital content
aggregation platforms have on competition in media and advertising services markets’ (ACCC 2018: 1). The
inquiry, which was commissioned as a result of the negotiations that preceded the legislative changes, was
directed to assess ‘the impact of digital platforms on the supply of news and journalistic content and the
implications of this for media content creators, advertisers and consumers’ (ACCC 2018: 1).

Public Interest Journalism

Despite increasing distrust of the media and the political system, politicians have an acute sense of the
institutional importance of the media that goes beyond self-interest, as these debates over many decades
have demonstrated. The symbiotic relationship between the political system and the mass media was
entrenched even as an ‘audience-orientated media logic took over the political logic of policy’ (Walter and
Ghazarian 2018). The perfect storm that hit the Australian media in the second decade of the twenty- rst
century meant that not only did traditional news organizations contract, pro tability fall, jobs disappear,
and audiences fragment, but also that social media became the source of news for most (Newman et al.
2018; ACCC 2018). This raised concerns about how a society that recognizes the importance of public access
to accurate, fair, and comprehensive information would function in its absence, as the public sphere became
what the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas described a ‘debased’ attention-seeking machine
p. 370 (Hermoso 2018). The growing evidence of the way information can be manipulated by social media
platforms to reinforce, echo, and amplify pre-existing perspectives without regard for accuracy is raising
concerns around the world, with a wide range of regulatory and supervisory responses. Similar inquiries
into the future of public interest journalism were also conducted in Britain, Canada, and the US, and all
concluded that the collapse of the business model of journalism based on advertising and mass audiences
was likely to curtail public interest journalism (Benton 2019). As Professor Emily Bell of the Tow Centre at
the Columbia University School of Journalism wrote: ‘the shift of distribution and advertising revenues to
large technology platforms have [sic] damaged some parts of journalism to a point where the market cannot
repair them’ (Bell 2019: n.p.).

In Australia the inquiry into the state of ‘public interest journalism’ and how it might be maintained and
fostered in a hostile commercial environment was conducted in a partisan context. In May 2017, as the
parliament debated the proposed legislative changes to media ownership laws, a Senate Select Committee,
chaired by an Opposition senator, invited submissions to consider the state of a airs and what government
might be able to do to ensure a ‘viable, independent and diverse service; the adequacy of current
competition and consumer laws; the impact of social media and search engines; the role of public and
community broadcasters and the impact of fake news and propaganda’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2018).
In framing the inquiry, it became sharply apparent just how di erent the contemporary media environment
 was to the one that preceded it: even the de nition of public interest journalism was not universally shared.
Dr Denis Muller, a fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, presented the
most comprehensive view, which drew on the work of the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press,
which reported in the US in 1947 and provided the template for a commercial, socially responsible media
committed to truth, comprehensiveness, context, and representativeness.

The regulatory device that put the steel into the backbone of US media social responsibility was the 1949
Fairness Doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission, which required impartial,
objective reporting as a condition of ownership of a broadcasting licence (Ruane 2011). After a concerted
campaign during the Reagan presidency, it was abolished in August 1987. It had provided the architecture,
which acknowledged the power of information, the importance of truth, and the need to present competing
views and to provide a platform for increasing professionalism in journalism. Importantly, it withstood
legal challenges, infuriating its opponents when the US Supreme Court found the doctrine did not
contravene the First Amendment or impede freedom of speech. But it was abolished at the behest of media
owners with a libertarian bent—and now, when it is more needed than ever, and despite attempts to revive
it, is a dead letter.

Its abolition was a real turning point. The next year, Rush Limbaugh took to the American airwaves with
unmoderated, raging commentary, and the era of shock jocks was born. It triggered the cascade of media in
many countries. Money was always in the ascendency, but after these changes it really took over and
freedom of speech became a commercial commodity. The public sphere became contestable, more than ever
p. 371 a place to buy attention, distract, entertain, and chase niche markets rather than serve a society—
something detached from notions of fairness and fact. Attempts to re-establish a regulatory regime in the
US that serves purposes similar to that which was abolished in 1987 have been considered over the years,
but in a media environment no longer constrained by spectrum scarcity it became an artefact of another age.
Nearly a decade later, the US Congress passed the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 of the
Act e ectively enabled social media companies to become platforms that could not ‘be held liable to user
posts on their sites’ (Wong 2016: n.p.) rather than publishers who could be. The legislation was designed to
prevent ‘lawsuits from crushing new platforms for commerce, education and speech’ (cited in Wong 2016:
n.p.), but in the process fundamentally undermined a long-standing industry.

As Australia does not have constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech, but an interpreted acceptance of
freedom of political communication, the system of social responsibility in media was shaped for the
electronic media by a system of licence renewal, which was e ectively a form of external regulation. At the
time the US Fairness Doctrine was revoked, Australia also moved towards self-regulation as the preferred
mode of oversight. Codes of practice were adopted, self-regulatory bodies assumed more authority, and the
formal process of licence review lapsed. Libertarians would argue that this was appropriate, that
government should have no role in the media; but without the ability to hold owners to account for the
content they disseminate, the broadcast media became detached from public accountability.

Australian newspaper owners ercely resisted any formal system of regulation when the prospect was rst
raised during the 1970s, and instead created a self-funded Australian Press Council. The 2012 Finklestein
Inquiry into the Media and Media Regulation, established by the Gillard government in response to the
revelations of illegal activities that had prompted the Leveson inquiry in the UK, recommended the creation
of an independent, publicly funded News Media Council to oversee print, online, radio, and television. It was
envisaged that this council would take on the work of both the industry-funded Australian Press Council
and the complaints component of the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and would aim to
make the news media more accountable to those covered in the news in any medium or platform, and to the
public generally. It was ercely resisted by the media companies as a form of government overreach, and
with a change of government the recommendations languished. Had they been accepted and implemented,
 there would have been a mechanism for oversight of the material published on digital media platforms
(Finklestein and Ricketson 2012).

The current forms of regulation of both print and broadcast media, weak though they may be, at least exist.
The digital media platforms and social media content that they transmit are completely unhindered by any
requirements to be truthful, accurate, comprehensive, or fair. This traces back to the US legislation that
deemed ‘providers of interactive computer services’ to be platforms not publishers. The consequences for
the public sphere and political communication have been considerable, as was demonstrated by the
p. 372 Cambridge Analytica scandal in the UK, where electoral laws were circumvented in pursuit of political
outcomes, and in the revelations from the Mueller inquiry into the way social media distorted political
communication in the 2016 US presidential election campaign.

The 2017 parliamentary inquiry into public interest journalism recommended that to maintain robust
journalism in Australia, the public broadcasters needed to be adequately funded, and that consideration
should be given to making public interest journalism eligible for tax-deductible funding support as occurs
elsewhere. Similar recommendations were made by the committees conducting related inquiries in Canada,
where a $600 million public interest journalism fund was created (Benton 2019). It was a sign of the times,
and the short half-life of a political career, that by the time the inquiry presented its report in February
2018, less than a year after it had commenced, three of the founding members were no longer MPs.

Conclusion: Social Contract in the Digital Domain

In December 2018 a far-reaching report from the ACCC presented an interim report to the federal Treasurer.
It included recommendations to address the misuse of market power by Facebook and Google, which have
become integral in the lives of most Australians, and proposed new regulatory oversight, privacy
protections, and greater transparency. The report documented the transfer in advertising revenue from the
traditional print media companies to Google and Facebook, the dependence of these platforms on content
generated by traditional media (50 per cent of Australians get their news from social media or search) and
the invisibility of the algorithms that determine access to information. The demands by the media
companies that the ACCC break up the power of the digital companies and provide compensation sounded
like the self-interested pleas to protect their operations that they had made for decades (Liddington-Cox
2019). The ACCC did not resile from these recommendations in the nal report it submitted to the Treasurer
in late July 2019.

The ACCC report was the result of the eighth inquiry (Simons 2018) into media regulation in as many years.
None of the recommendations of previous inquiries have been implemented. As be ts the brief of the ACCC,
which is a competition-focused organization, the recommendations go to industry structure, rather than
the political and social importance of public interest journalism and the tools to foster it. Its interests are
focused on consumers, not citizens.

Australia’s relatively robust system of public broadcasting provides a counter to the weakening of the
private media. By 2015 the ABC employed more than a quarter of all journalists in Australia, and continued,
despite regular political attacks, to publish and broadcast public interest journalism. This journalism often
triggered direct political responses, including the announcement of a Royal Commission into Aged Care
p. 373 after a particularly excoriating series of reports revealed widespread abuse (Hutchens 2018). The hostile
response by the commercial sector to the resilience of public broadcasting triggered an inquiry into whether
the public broadcasters were taking advantage of their position in the marketplace. The expert panel found
that they were ‘operating in a manner consistent with the general principles of competitive neutrality’
(Australian Government 2018).
Press freedom became an unexpected political issue shortly after the re-election of the Morrison
government in May 2019. Two and a half weeks later, on 5 June, the Australian Federal Police raided the
home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst in an attempt to identify the source of a report she had
written about proposed changes to the role of the Australian Signals Directorate. The following day, the AFP
also raided the ABC in search of information related to stories alleging misconduct by Australian soldiers in
Afghanistan (Lyons 2019). These raids highlighted the limited protections available to journalists and
whistleblowers and triggered an extraordinary response: a joint presentation at the press club on 19 June by
the chief executives of Nine, News Corp, and the ABC arguing for media freedom and greater protection for
journalists and their sources; two parliamentary inquiries, one by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on
Security and Intelligence and another by the Senate Environment and Communications References
Committee; and legal challenges by the media organizations. This activity highlighted the precarious nature
of media freedom in Australia and its legislative erosion in the twenty- rst century.

The range of these inquiries highlights that the model of mass media and mass political parties is in a state
of change, that the relationship between politics, political parties, the public, and the media is in a state of
transition, and that, without constitutional protection of the right to media freedom, the quasi-institutional
relationship between the media and politics depends too heavily on accepted precedent and good will. The
broader interest that may be served by extending constitutional protection to media freedom, thus
strengthening public broadcasters in the pursuit of public interest journalism without commercial
constraint, gained widespread support after the mid-year raids, but has yet to crystallize as a threshold
political issue. The consequences of this for the political process, for the future of journalism, and for public
con dence remain to be seen. But it is clear that, just as the case has been in the past, a new symbiosis
between media and politics will evolve in response to changing technology and changing expectations, and
possibly in response to public demands that the quasi-institutional role of the media as a feedback
mechanism for democratic system management be formally recognized. As is always the case at times of
profound change, the outcomes remain uncertain.
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