For many decades Australian media policy has been based on a core principle: the federal government looks after the incumbents.
In particular it protected them from the threat of competition. And at the very top of the food chain were the free-to-air commercial networks, more powerful even than News Corp, because they controlled the 6pm news bulletins that shaped the images voters saw during election campaigns.
Even the Murdochs took second place in 1990s and 2000s when Foxtel was hemmed in by anti-competitive regulation to prevent it from posing a threat to the free-to-airs.
Then high-speed internet — or at least the slower version of it Malcolm Turnbull allowed us to have — arrived. Australians could access content when they wanted and how they wanted, increasingly unencumbered by the arrogance of the major media companies which had long taken the view they would get what they were given, when they were given it, and they’d shut up and like it.
The reaction of the incumbents was the same as always — demanding the government protect them from competition by regulating, censoring and taxing online services.
Now Facebook and Google are being targeted for the same treatment at the behest of media companies. Only they’re disinclined to play along.
Facebook’s market capitalisation is US$840 billion, or about 60% of Australia’s falling GDP. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is worth US$1.1 trillion, or about 80%.
Both have become dominant not merely through innovation but through anti-competitive behaviour. But unlike Australian media companies they haven’t appealed to governments to stop competitors. They’ve simply bought them.
The US companies are far, far bigger, and far uglier, than Australia’s media oligopolists, which could be bought and sold by Facebook and Google for less than the value of a daily share price movement. And they originate from an environment that prefers to ignore regulation and licensing rather than exploit it.
Facebook’s warning yesterday that it would stop sharing news links for Australians predictably prompted a round of hostile articles from the media outlets trying to engineer what would be, if it was successful, a multibillion-dollar heist by legislative fiat.
One, by Stephen Bartholomeusz, stood out as representative of the stupidity of the debate. It was, he claimed, “inarguable to anyone familiar with what has happened to the news media in the past several decades that the platforms — along with other online advertising vehicles — have sucked enormous and destabilising revenue and value away from traditional media”.
Except who owns those “other advertising platforms”? Who owns most of the digital real estate platform REA group, which is substantially bigger than News Corp? News Corp does. Who owns 60% of the real estate platform Domain, which is nearly as big as Nine Media? Nine Media.
Those companies have cannibalised their own real estate ad revenue to the point where their real estate arms are as big, or bigger, than the traditional media arm and they’ve been spun off into separate listings.
The other rich sources of newspaper revenue — car sales and job ads — have flowed to carsales.com and Seek, with whom News Corp has a joint venture.
“There won’t be much news for Google or Facebook to publish or link to if the publishers don’t survive,” Bartholomeusz says, laying bare the real agenda.
This is not about paying for news content, or even about some sort of recompense for successfully undermining the business models of media incumbents. It’s about propping up the uncompetitive detritus of a failing industry.
What kind of company could tell its shareholders it had committed to endlessly keeping companies in another industry on life support?
For a government used to regulating media like a club in which the interests of the members are the only consideration, it’s a rude shock to encounter companies that have no interest in playing by the traditional rules.
It has no alternative but to double down on its plan to steal from Facebook and Google. If it gives in, it will face the wrath of local media outlets that, even in their death throes, can still hurt politicians.
I’m no particular fan of Facebook because of its lax handling of fake news, misinformation peddled by ruthless political operatives and nutters, and violence-inciting hate speech … also sometimes peddled by ruthless political operatives and nutters.
However, I, like billions of others, use it to keep in feel good touch with family and friends and to do a bit of venting to those family and friends from time to time. I also quite regularly scroll through the “feed” it provides which is overwhelmingly posts from FB friends and pages that I have “liked”, and posts by people or organisations the algorithms think fit.
In respect of the latter, FB mostly gets it right these days. I am not bombarded with irrelevant rubbish. So, for example, it is unlikely the algorithms will determine I’d like to see anything Pauline Hanson or her supporters post on their pages. If unwanted stuff does pop up originating from other places, I block it and/or report it.
In respect of pages I “like” or follow so that stuff from these pages definitely makes it into my feed, if I change my mind I can “unlike” or “unfollow” and feed from those pages stops. I’ve done this recently with the FB pages of The Australian, the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph.
I did want to try to keep abreast of the level of heavily partisan mis and disinformation being pumped out daily by these LNP newsletters so I could post critical and corrective comments under stories I regarded as beyond-the-pale-politically-biased, unbalanced, unfair, inaccurate or all of the above, and, in this era of pandemic, so-called news copy and commentary undermining public health messaging and measures, fomenting dissent about those messages and measures and thereby undermining the social cohesion necessary to combat covid19. But because of the sheer volume of copy in those papers that easily fits this criterion, I’ve had to give up and I’ve “unliked” the three of them. The Courier-Mail was cut loose months and months ago.
Unfriending these News Corp mastheads was out of concern for my mental health. (I’m a journalist, I take the Journalism Code of Ethics seriously – did so even while working at News Corp.) So now I don’t receive anything from these mastheads directly to my feed. However, I’m still made aware of the more egregious examples of anti-journalism and partisan mis-reporting by this company from other FB friends who may post links to News Corp copy as attachments to their post. I subscribe to GA and Crikey and New Daily.
But this brings me handily to this point: News Corp’s whinging about FB (and the ABC for that matter) has escalated in direct correlation to its failing business model that, in my view, has little or nothing to do with FB or Google for that matter – noting that News Corp has sat down with Google to achieve higher ranking of its products in Google searches. Because, in fact, FB provides News’s products with extraordinary reach, if the FB figures are to be believed. For example, The Australian’s page has it that more than 900,000 FB users currently “like” its FB page on which it pushes out some of its more inflammatory, anti-Labor, pro-right wing LNP advertorial/commentary to its “likers”. The DT claims 1.2m and the Herald Sun 370,000.
Surely, you say, News, a billion-dollar global company that chose to put its digital content behind paywalls, should have worked out how to monetise its FB pages long before now. That, though, would take specialist digital business expertise. And this is a company whose managerial ranks are stuffed to the gunnels with employees whose most robust qualification is to demonstrate Murdoch loyalty and are not fit for digital purpose.
No, far easier to whinge louder and louder and, as a propaganda arm of a morally compromised government, sit back and wait for reward. $40 million in cash taxpayer money since 2017 and now this legislation. If you needed further proof that these laws are rewards to News (and, eg, the Costello-led Nine) for services rendered to the LNP then you need look no further than the ABC and the SBS’s news services being excluded.
IMO the ACCC has got this badly wrong. It’s not the first time.
Government-favoured commercial media companies which have not been able to adapt to the digital environment need to fail. That is the law of the neoliberal, lord of the flies-model, free market jungle. News Corp and Nine should not be bailed out of their managerial incompetencies with taxpayers’ money (that’s your and my money, not the LNP’s) and/or protective legislation presented to the people’s houses.
Fossil fuel companies and their supporters take note.
Over the last 15 years the Co-alition has continually shielded big commercial incumbents in the coal industry, irrigation, banks, aged care, and health insurance. There are only two big corporate sectors it has gone after aggressively: industry super funds and the online media giants. The first out of ideological hatred of the unions, and the second to make sure they hold on to the sweet editorial treatment they get from their mates and former colleagues at NewsCorp, Nine and Seven.
Oi! Hang on a moment! Don’t go portraying Murdoch as the poor local-boy underdog. It’s every bit as much of a global player as the other two. When it comes to hypocrisy, ethical compromise and general lack of decency then there’s still a lot it could teach to new kids. For heaven’s sake, don’t go setting them up as the innocent victims.
What Murdoch is actually doing, is using Australia and every Australian as lab rats in a commercial experiment.
As for Nine – they’re totally irrelevant to everyone. A local hick mob. No REAL media company would let P Costello anywhere near its board of management.
Let them sink.
The news they provide is basically propoganda for the benefit of the agenda’s of the neo-liberal elites who own and run the world.
On the TV it’s three minutes of headlies, eight minutes of news, eight minutes of sport eight minutes of ads and the rest weather.
In the newpapers it’s a bit better, but not much.
I don’t take much notice of Australian news. It’s what happens in the US which is the precursor to our fate.
You left China out of the equation.
Have zero sympathy for local media companies. Nine/Fairfax could have have had carsales and seek, but the cream of our business establishment at the time were too clueless (and looking at current business leaders, it’s clear nothing much has changed – the story in the SMH the other day by Richard Talbot basically says it all).