The Sky after dark positioning in the outrage-economy took a tumble late last week, when newly appointed CEO Paul “Boris” Whittaker sacked Outsiders co-host Ross Cameron over on-air comments depicting Chinese people in racist caricatures.
It was Whittaker’s first major decision since he was appointed CEO last month and may indicate that News Corp is reassessing the financial limits of outrage — particularly racialised outrage.
It’s also a sign that the regulatory rules for Sky have changed now that it’s broadcast on free-to-air through the regional WIN network. It’s subject to the supervision of the Australian Communications and Media Authority like any other broadcaster.
The sacking followed reports out of the US that boycotts led by activist groups like Sleeping Giants and Media Matters are continuing to hurt advertising on the Fox network. The controversial Laura Ingraham was targeted after she mocked a school-shooting survivor, and Fox has confirmed that ad take on the program she hosts remains down.
In Australia, Sky advertisers were targeted by the Australian arm of Sleeping Giants after its now-notorious interview with right-wing fascist Blair Cottrell in August: A “commercial terrorist campaign”, outgoing CEO Angelos Frangopoulos, told Sky’s sister paper, The Australian, in an exclusive interview.
Politicians were also targeted after independent data site ausgov.info published a list of those MPs receiving free Foxtel subscriptions (revealing inter alia how Sky after dark parleys its small audience into political influence).
Hunting a name, The Australian “outed” consultant Denise Shrivell as one of the activists, following that exclusive with a further exclusive report of similar attacks on Sleeping Giants and Shrivell in a speech to Parliament by Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells.
Sky is right to be concerned. The US Sleeping Giants campaign against Breitbart News cost the right wing site about 90% of its (largely programmatic) advertising. Breitbart is now threatening to sue Sleeping Giants for “unfair, fraudulent, and deceptive practices intended to cause Breitbart economic harm”.
But for the outrage artisans in the media workshops, it can still be tricky to understand just where the line should be drawn. Whittaker said Cameron’s offending Outsiders segment had been taken off all platforms. However, News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt — outraged by the outrage — printed the transcript of the discussion on Saturday in his Herald Sun blog, saying Cameron’s spiel was, in fact, pro-Chinese.
Meanwhile, on the day of the Cameron sacking, Whittaker’s old paper, The Daily Telegraph, bannered a Friday exclusive “SCIENCE KOORICULUM”, with the kicker, “Outrage over Indigenous school scheme”. It was a story about proposals to integrate aspects of Indigenous learning into school science, apparently as “a silly distraction to appease the PC crowd”. (You can read Luke Pearson on what the proposal was actually about here.)
It came with the appallingly obligatory editorial cartoon mocking Indigenous learning.
Of course, hierarchies of race have always been at the heart of racism and it may still be that, in the outrage economy, racist remarks about Chinese people is seen as bad while racist coverage of Australia’s Indigenous community remains less impacting. Or it’s possible that the Telegraph is simply slower to respond to the shift in the outrage economy.
The action by Sky suggests a dawning recognition of the real economic constraints on outrage. Macquarie Media came to the same view after its star broadcaster, Alan Jones, was forced to apologise for his bullying interview of Opera House CEO Louise Herron.
The old rules of the outrage economy no longer apply. Sure, outrage (and racism) still brings in passionate and engaged readers and listeners. Read the Bolt comments (where Whittaker is apparently a Walkley Award-winning lefty). Once, that sort of audience was enough for advertisers to quietly tag along. But now advertisers have to be confident that their values align with the values of the content their ads are supporting.
As media pivots to reader revenues, outrage can put a strong floor under sales. That’s been the News Corp strategy in its tabloids, both here and in the UK. But it also locks in a hard ceiling. That can still work for Fox in the US market, particularly when it’s aligned with the president’s supporter base.
It’s a lot more challenging for a monopoly cable player like Foxtel, in a much smaller market like Australia.
Aww, the Free Market Fundamentalists/Free Speech Fundamentalists sure do change their tune when their own systems are used against them. Nobody forces advertisers with withdraw their ads from fascist broadcasts.
I think these boycott campaigns are an excellent development. After all it’s not as if the likes of Jones and the rest of the right-wing commentariat are doing what they do selflessly in the public interest – their role is clearly to stir up angry hysteria in order to make big profits. Nothing wrong with trying to draw attention to the extremism behind their arguments, and it’ll be good for the health of our public debate in the long run.
I prefer Sky’s evening presenters not to be toned down &, instead, to appear in their unfettered state as frothing extremists. Give them enough rope…
Too true Zut. With the exception of the Richo program (and even that’s been testing me a bit lately), I avoid Sky News after dark like the plague, but quite by accident I happened on to it late one night about a week ago and found Cameron spouting a diatribe about how he was 100% certain that the person who sent the pipe bombs to Trumps enemies would have been a Democrat agent provocateur. It was only a day or two later that the would-be bomber was of course revealed as a card-carrying Trump-loving nutcase, but somehow I must have missed hearing Cameron’s apology for his error earlier in the week.
I don’t know why people keep calling the remarks racist.
They were offensive remarks.
But they were not racist as they are factual and true remarks.
If you describe someone with black skin as black skinned, is that racist.
If you describe someone with round eyes is that racist when they have round eyes?
If you describe someone with slant eyes and they have slant eyes is that racist?
It is OFFENSIVE, because they are in the minority?
Will you please get your terms right?
Margaret it’s offensive, ignorant and insensitive because it portrays a bigoted stereotype.
In particular, note that the geography of China encompasses a complex ethnic demography of over a hundred indigenous languages. Would Ross Cameron have recognised a sweeping characterisation of a demography comparably complex if it included his own ethnicity — for example, that of Western Europe? Quasi-factual though it may be, would he have said ‘Big-nosed beef-eaters’ to describe an audience of European descent, for example?
Only the woman in the Aldi ad has round eyes.
Chinese people have yellow skin?
Bruce “”the Boss [FFS!]” Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” certainly thought so.
MM shows an enquiring mind and refusal to assimilate, Borg-like, the meme du jour.
Ruv, below, indulges, as too often, in rabble soothing – not, necessarily incorrect, but disingenuous in extremis.
… not, necessarily, incorrect…
AR, my comment was sincere. Margaret rightly made a point similar to one I’ve also made in the past: bigotry isn’t the same as racism. You can be a nativist xenophobe without necessarily believing that your ethnicity is superior.
Where we disagree is why the comment is obnoxious. Describing a minority physically isn’t intrinsically offensive. However, describing any ethnicity by ignorant stereotypes is obnoxious.
Due to their climate and specific farming history, people of European descent have generally raised more cattle per person than peoples of East Asia. People in Europe also have more prominent noses than many people in East Asia. So ‘big-nosed beef-eaters’ is quasi-factual: more true than false, if you view Europeans from an East Asian perspective.
Yet I can’t imagine many Europeans accepting it as a prescription for ‘how to recognise a European’. Neither does one need to say what a European looks like in the first place: anyone with European citizenship and language is generally recognised as European. Reducing the demographic to the physiological at all conflates citizenship with ethnicity; racialises the discussion, creates sneers and caricatures.
It’s not necessarily racist — there may or may not be a racial hierarchy implicit in doing so — but it is unquestionably bigoted, ignorant, insensitive and offensive; and for someone working in communications in a multicultural society not to realise in advance that it is, is professional negligence.
I used to be a The Australian subscriber, but I haven’t been in years, because they stopped following my values. I subscribe to a lot of other media outlets (like Crikey) now.