As Australian media reels from the dismantling of its regional newspaper business, can I dare to suggest that perhaps it is not all Rupert Murdoch’s fault.
I’m not saying News Corp’s decision was anything but its own, or that the company didn’t make mistakes. I’m simply saying that it is not alone. Nor even first. Just the biggest.
After all, Nine offloaded its Australian Community Media (ACM) before the merger ink with Fairfax was barely dry last year.
New owner and former Domain exec Antony Catalano was then going to be the saviour of the News Corp regional papers until that deal broke down only two weeks ago.
This led to News announcing the closure of its print titles this week while Catalano, who has also shuttered most of the ACM papers during the pandemic, refused to say when or if they would reopen.
And let’s not forget that Nine is as complicit as News in the current efforts to kill Australian Associated Press.
Nor is the problem confined to Australia where the Murdoch media certainly has an unhealthy dominance. The US has been heading down this path for many years, but 2020 began with the sound of the death knell for local papers ringing louder.
The great investment guru Warren Buffett was the harbinger of bad news in January when his Berkshire Hathaway company announced it had sold off its entire newspaper stable.
It was significant not just because the Oracle of Omaha so rarely admits defeat, but because in the space of a few short years he had gone from being a self-declared newspaper “addict” to dismissing the industry as “toast”.
The depressing terms “news deserts” and “ghost papers” we see being used this week in Australia come from the American experience.
Only last December the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism reported that over the past 15 years one in five newspapers in the US have closed.
Not only have some 2000 papers disappeared, but so too have a quarter of all journalists’ jobs.
Australia would now be rivalling them for devastation. Our only salvation is we have a fine public broadcaster which is now even more vital for regional news despite the attacks of columnists in The Australian suffering ABC derangement syndrome.
The US’ handling of the same crisis doesn’t provide much in the way of encouragement.
Private equity buyouts have been as disastrous as everything else they touch. Headlines talk of the hedge fund newspaper rescue model “buy, slash, sell the buildings”.
Being America, philanthropists are being seen as the saviour of last resort.
Though as they learned with Buffett, no matter how rich the owner, these are businesses underneath.
One group trying a different model is The American Journalism Project which bills itself as “a new venture philanthropy organisation dedicated to local news” by providing investment and support to local civic news organisations.
The rare cases of media philanthropy in Australia such as the Judith Neilson Institute have not been as targeted. And who can forget the eminently forgettable The Global Mail online newspaper which philanthropist Graeme Wood exited after only two years.
Some US examples who have gone the full not-for-profit route warn the downside can be that trying to appease rich donors can result in a product that is just, well, boring.
Not that Australian media is unfamiliar with the experience of appeasing rich owners, from Big Kerry Packer to Little Kerry Stokes and of course the biggest of them all in Rupert Murdoch.
We’ve seen how that story ends. If they haven’t bailed out or gone broke, it’s usually only a matter of time.
To be fair to News Corp, they’ve been hanging in there longer than most.
Agreed, it’s not all Rupert Murdoch’s fault.
Responsibility for any media organisation dominating across one platform belongs to a succession of compliant, gutless governments who permitted it to happen. And let’s not forget Malcolm Turnbull overseeing the elimination of the two-out-of-three ownership controls in 2017.
Murdoch was simply a wolf let loose among a flock of fearful dopey sheep (aka politicians).
News corpse is like a dying snake, in its death throes but still able to bite and poison, we, the intelligent members of society can afford to wait and watch the snake slowly stop wriggling, the icing on the cake will be Murdoch’s funeral notice and the sound of wailing from 2GB.
Excellent points Janine… However this story is unlikely to be read as much, and certainly not commented on, by Crikey’s usual army of Murdoch haters… It presents an uncomfortable truth, one they simply cannot face: IT’S NOT ALL HIS FAULT!
Sorry to yell, but that’s mild compared to the abuse, expletives and outpourings of pure spite that usually feature in the comments threads of Crikey’s media stories about News Corp. Now I’m not going to defend the man or his positions, and I don’t align myself with his flagship publications’ conservative politics. But I’ve never quite understood the utter waste emotional energy that so many Crikey readers (and many other members of my inner city friends and colleagues) pour into their utter loathing for this one man – and by extension anyone who has ever been employed by him.
That’s not me. In a lengthy career in the media, he was never my boss (I had a couple of narrow escapes, quitting just before a takeover in one case). But in terms of his supposed influence and power, here’s the thing: It’s overrated.
Just one example (space reasons, but there are plenty more). Sydney’s Daily Tele sells most of its copies in western and south Western Sydney electorates that traditionally vote Labor, and overwhelmingly still do. That is – its readers either don’t care what Bolt and Devine say, or are intelligent enough to think for themselves, ignoring the papers editorial bias. I prefer the latter explanation, though both are correct. Anyone who claims otherwise, who suggests that those Western Sydney residents will be “brainwashed” into installing a government they don’t approve of, should really take stock of their own attitudes.
All they are doing is displaying their own incredible snobbishness.
Quote: “Sydney’s Daily Tele sells most of its copies in western and south Western Sydney electorates that traditionally vote Labor, and overwhelmingly still do. That is – its readers either don’t care what Bolt and Devine say, or are intelligent enough to think for themselves” …or is it the sport pages at the back of the Daily Tele?
I’m not quite sure what the relevance of the western Sydney example is. You don’t know how many more people would vote for a non-Coalition party if they were exposed to less biased reporting. And Labor has moved so far to the right these days (partly in response the power of the media bullies) that Murdoch has achieved much of what he wants even when people vote for this Liberal-lite outfit.
If Murdoch’s power is ‘overrated’, you might care to explain why the nation’s political leader (Kevin Rudd) saw it necessary to ring Murdoch and ask him what sort of workplace laws he would accept, or why another PM (Turnbull) had afternoon tea with this foreign citizen a few hours after said foreign citizen arrived in Australia for a rare visit.
Bias in the media is much more subtle than the obvious outrage-confection of clowns like Bolt and Devine. It’s in decisions about what to report and what to ignore, cherry-picking facts that support a particular narrative (eg Liberals are great economic managers, Labor are hopeless bunglers), etc. – unless, like many media people, you are naïve/arrogant enough to think you simply report the news, rather than create what is news and what is not news.
Murdoch and his symbiotes in the Liberal Party have never hesitated to blame others for their own failures. Being nice to them has got us nowhere. Pile on, I say.
Valuing the truth and paying attention to evidence makes me a snob? So I’m a snob.
You are not a snob for valuing truth and the importance of evidence Audioio… Not at all. What I was getting at is clearly represented by the attitudes on display in the comments thread to Guy Rundle’s story on Friday, here:
https://uat.crikey.com.au/2020/05/28/dying-news-media-has-never-been-in-demand/
For some reason, his work attracts this type of response. A few comments from the top one wit describes those who read Sydney’s Tele or Melbourne’s Herald-Sun as “deluded plebs.” There’s no mistaking what he means. A pleb is a low class person, here judged also as easily-led, stupid and contemptible.
Just so that we don’t misunderstand, another paid-up member of the Rundle cheer-squad labels the papers’ readers as “dim witted rednecks” of “low intelligence”. The same person earlier insulted the readers as “brain dead”. Instantly someone has responded, “hear hear, +100 from me.” “110%!” trills another.
Now why do fans of a former Marxist (Rundle) have such a low opinion of the heroic proletariat? But I digress…
A bit further down, another Rundle regular is in a pensive mood. “Most people” are not interested in the news, they “would rather die that think, and regularly do,” he declares. That “baffles” him, he muses rhetorically… But not really, he knows the answer: Most people are idiots.
I hope you get my drift, Audioio. Here are the authentic voices of the aristocracy, convinced beyond doubt that the masses who don’t read the Guardian and Crikey are so far beneath them in intellect and moral virtue as to be barely human. The sad thing is that many of these very same people also regard themselves as left wing.
So two Crikey correspondents are apparently a significant sample. (And I did check the last year of Rundle’s previous stories — found “redneck” once and “brain dead” not at all.)
That a few here (a miniscule proportion compared to the trumped-up outrage of all political persuasions to be found on Facebook or Twitter) express a bit of contempt now and again or make grand claims in support of their positions isn’t surprising. You just did the latter: “That is – its readers either don’t care what Bolt and Devine say, or are intelligent enough to think for themselves, ignoring the papers editorial bias. I prefer the latter explanation, though both are correct.” Done a survey lately, have we?
And you might have had a point about Denmore’s comment if you’d presented correct definitions of “deluded” and “pleb”.
Until recently most decent-sized North American cities had at least one, if not several alt-weeklies – free newspapers that combined entertainment and gig guides with a strong community news focus. They were so successful that for a while they almost replaced the “legacy media” titles with a cover charge in some cities.
The “alt” stood for alternative. Many modelled themselves on NY’s Village Voice (now defunct), and usually combined leftish opinion with a broadly progressive perspective on urban and national issues. Australia never had anything remotely comparable.
None of them were owned by Murdoch (a long time ago, he briefly held some interest in Village Voice, but sold out years ago). Anyway, like the rest of the print media they’ve been struggling for a while (damn, Google and Facebook). The Covid lockdown recession has finally finished them off – like Murdoch’s regional and community papers here, they’ve now pretty well all gone.
Can’t blame Rupert, (damn, he was so convenient too!). Something, online only no doubt, may replace them breifly, while the bright-eyed sorry optimism and parents money of those starts-ups last… But without advertising, they too will die.
Anything that survives doesn’t need that sort of funding and will be there only to push an agenda. Interestingly, while I can no longer pick The Wentworth Courier in my area, most residentially streets and all the shops near me are being selectively saturated with copies of The Epoch Times.
That, I fear, is now the future of the “news”.
Yes, I believe Murdoch does have a role to play. The Company took the profits and ran away to invest in other ventures., rather than appreciating understanding the future of newspapers, and the written word of long-form journalism. The company homogenized and pasteurised to the company to be of little value to readers by the streamline operations to increase efficiency.