A petition launched by former prime minister Kevin Rudd calling for a royal commission into the Murdoch media empire was tabled in parliament Monday with a historic 501,876 signatures.
It’s the most signed e-petition in Australian history, overtaking a 2019 petition calling for the government to declare a climate emergency which gained 404,538 signatures.
So many people logged on to the parliamentary website hosting the petition that it triggered the site’s cyber defences, flagging genuine users as bots.
But what effect — if any — will it have?
A lesson from history
University of Sydney senior lecturer in socio-legal studies Dr Karen O’Brien told Crikey Australia has a long history of petitioning for change.
“Petitions are an ancient tradition which can have an influence, historically made by the powerless to the powerful,” she says.
Some of the first Australian petitions were presented in NSW in the early 1800s. A notable petition in Australia’s history includes the 1972 Larrakia petition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights, paving the way for future legislation.
“We can take some lead from Indigenous people who managed to organise themselves among very difficult circumstances,” O’Brien says.
We’re not the only country to take action against Murdoch media either. In Liverpool in the UK there’s been a longstanding boycott against Murdoch-owned newspaper The Sun following the paper’s coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which stadium overcrowding led to 96 people being crushed to death. The paper ran false accusations that Liverpool fans caused the crush, beat up assisting police officers and pickpocketed the dead.
An inquest cleared fans of wrongdoing and major retailers including Tesco stopped selling the paper.
“There’s a similar power here … There’s certainly enough potential here to do something similar,” O’Brien says.
Why is this petition different?
Lecturer in internet communications at Curtin University Dr Sky Croeser told Crikey timing of the petition had been a key factor in its success.
“We’re at an interesting political movement with the US election, the rise of the right-wing in both the US and Australia … combined with the ongoing inaction on climate change,” she says.
She added the previous climate petition, along with the support from former prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Rudd, had helped boost the petition’s notoriety.
“People are becoming aware the blame has been put on social media, but the mainstream media is just as much at fault,” she says.
But a petition alone isn’t going to achieve anything: “It’s contributed to the conversation, and petitions are useful now as the jumping-off point for a broader campaign.”
We’ve reached a tipping point
GetUp’s national director Paul Oosting told Crikey the petition had served as a tipping point.
“The encouraging thing right now is people are taking action in a range of ways,” he says.
Activists for global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion have protested against Murdoch media’s climate coverage, dumping manure outside New Corp’s Brisbane and Sydney offices. In 2013 a Brisbane cafe banned News Corp newspapers.
More recently, #BoycottWoolworths started trending after the supermarket chain partnered with News Corp to recognise people who “stepped up to help in 2020″, including those involved in the bushfire response.
Murdoch media was criticised for running misleading stories blaming arsonists for the bushfires and ignoring the effect of climate change.
GetUp is analysing 10,000 News Corp articles to look at its coverage of climate change and its effect on policy.
“Petitions are a really good indication that those in power are out of step with the public. It’s a very strong signal,” Oosting says.
But the only people who can put a royal commission in place are those who more often than not benefit from News Corp’s coverage — the Coalition government.
“Scott Morrison may seek to ignore moves for a royal commission … but he would be doing it at his own peril,” he says.
“People have had enough.”
Turnbull’s tour de force on Paul Kelly is the killer key here. Forget about Rupert, forget about Lachlan, forget about high-falutin’ big picture strategic conspiracy theorisin’…you just get up and in the face of the good workaday News journalists – just like Turnbull did to Kelly. You go for the weakest/strongest point-of-resistance: the workaday content producers. The ones who write the banal words that tell the banal lies, that fudge the truth. Tap tap tap goes the banal little fellow at his banal little keyboard – no more learned, wise, important or significant than me here, right now, tapping on mine. Until the groaning, creaking over-amplifying apparatus of News Corps swings into aging gear, and Makes Those Tiny Banal Words Into ‘The News'[. It’s just a stupid bloody trick of mass meeja epistemology, the whole Keith Rupert Murdoch power- mirage machinery…and Turnbull’s real time troll-roasting of the fragile little banal cog Paul Kelly showed it up for the ridiculous, wizard-behind-the-curtain fiction it’s always been. What a sad bullying jerk Murdoch is. Like Trump, a flailing turtle on its back, in the sun. Look how quickly the big huffing puffing Col Allen of the big tough NY Post i lickspittle running away from the schoolyard bully, now that the schoolyard bully has no power.
Follow Turnbull and Rudd’s lead, Crikey. Play the man, not the bull. Target the good News editors, the honest News reporters, the gutsy and decent content provider and producers. Make their daily workaday lives professionally – and personally, morally, vocationally – awkward, uncomfortable, un-tenable for them, so long as they continue to dishonor their own vocation. Target the specific daily lies they abet, the specific fudges they contrive, the adroit self-censorship ballet they dance, as demanded by their own better angels and consciences (lest they go mad with professional self-loathing). Nitpick the bullsh*t they facilitate, line-by-line. Make them own their propaganda, carry it around under their own nose like a turd in a sack around their byline, until they can’t stand their own stink.
I’m talking only about the decent ones here. The pros, the vocationally committed, the talented, the often ferociously gutsy. There’s heaps of brilliant journalists at News. Some of the tabloid reporters are the best, the toughest, the most independent minded on the planet. They’re the ones you even bother with. Appeal to their sense of personal and professional pride. And use it to humiliate them, too, exactly as Turnbull humiliated Kelly…because they bloody well deserve it. How dare we? We DO DARE, you complicit, cowardly, shameful gang. The lies, lies, lies, lies…you lot have collaborated with. Especially since Iraq.
You all know it. Shame on you. Now…stop it. It’s easy. Just stop publishing lies who know are lies. And stop not publishing truths you know are true, and should be published. It’s that simple. And if that gets you sacked?
Well, WTF are you doing working there in the first place. You wanted to be a journalist. Right? So…be one.
As for the goons, the clowns, the pantomime only-pretending-to-be-a-journalist impostors at News? The ones who usually get us most worked up? The SkyAfterDarkers, the Kenny’s, the Deans, the Bolts and Devines and Alan Joneses and Peta Credlins and blah blah yawn you know who they are. Ignore them. This isn’t about them. It’s about journalism.
Turnbull and Rudd deserve our support, thanks and applause. They have tipped a tide that’s been a long time turning. One that’s destroyed a lot of good people – especially politicians and journalists – along the way. Don’t forget them.
I Googled reporting on this petition by Newscorp publications and could find none.
This alone points to the need for an enquiry into the media in Australia : the fact that they can just ignore news items that don’t suit their owner is unacceptable
They also completely ignored James Murdoch’s comments on resigning from Newscorp.
Q.E.D.
The petition didn’t specify Murdoch. It was broader. All media to be investigated. Crikey you are failing the truth and accuracy test.
Do you mean like the Murdoch papers?
There will be no inquiry. They keep the LNP in power
“They keep the LNP in power”
They probably don’t any more, but the LNP still think they do, which is just as good.
The thing that strikes me about Rudd’s moves against Murdoch is that to have become PM in the first place, Kevin must have promised to do a favour for uncle Rupert if he got elected (and most likely he subsequently did that favour). I can’t remember the circumstances of the time, but it was probably something to do with media deregulation. If you look carefully at the circumstances around every federal election for the last couple of decades, I’m sure you could work out exactly what it was the elected PM had to do for their master.
Media deregulation didn’t occur until Turnbull, just for the record.
Ralph Milliband identified such relationships in the UK and Europe fifty years ago and such was what I had in mind when I posted my initial reply to the article.
Most people here will be trying to remember which of the Milliband brothers was Ralph.
For years I had a pic on my dartboard, ripped from a Sunday supplement (ah, them’s was the daze..), which had showed David & Ed at some interminable conflab, lost in whatever passed for cerebration at the time which I’d given a single thought bubble -“which one am I?”.
It was reduced to confetti fairly promptly.
Ralph was the father of the hopeful MPs (and in my opinion their interlectual superior by a country mile).
oohhh, you spoiled the surprise for those, very, few who might have been inclined to google.
What was it the Sun King’s rancid organ called him in 2015, more than 20 years after his death?
Something tasteful & restrained like… “the most dangerous man in Britain!”,