Rupert Murdoch doesn’t back losers. The News Corp papers have a legacy of supporting election victors, such as Scott Morrison, to dropping failures, like Donald Trump.
But it appears in Australia, Murdoch is getting stressed his papers have been backing the wrong horse. In desperation, News Corp has deviated from its run-of-the-mill positive spin for the Coalition to embrace “exclusive” puff piece advertorials, with Coalition candidates in contested seats given full front-page spreads across Murdoch papers.
This morning, Liberal candidate Katherine Deves scored a front-page spot — as well as a double-page spread — in the Daily Telegraph with the headline “They are all with me”. Deves claims the “majority of Aussies back [her] stance” on barring transgender women from competing in sports — again, these are the “silent” majority. Deves is running against independent Zali Steggall in Warringah.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg got the royal treatment in the Sunday edition of the Herald Sun in a full three-page advertisement — sorry, interview — explaining why punters should vote for him. The interview was published the same day his campaign was launched in his seat of Kooyong. The subtle headline reads “Why you need to vote for me”.
The article, peppered with Hallmark-esque photos of Frydenberg buttering toast and playing sport with his two kids, is labelled “full and frank”. Simon Holmes à Court, climate campaigner and backer of Frydenberg’s opponent, independent candidate Monique Ryan, is labelled “strange” by Frydenberg no fewer than four times, while infographics on the page compare how much parties have spent and the latest pledges. A poll asked readers who they thought would manage cost-of-living pressures better, with 84% voting Liberal.
A softball interview is also the perfect way to get in Frydenberg’s good books should Morrison lose the election. Frydenberg is likely the next in line to lead the Liberal Party — aside from overseeing JobKeeper rorts, he’s generally controversy-free and popular. A three-page spread practically guarantees access to the potential leader.
It’s worth noting this coverage shouldn’t be cheap: in 2020, a full-page advertisement in The Australian or the Sydney Morning Herald costs about $51,000. Last financial year, the Morrison government spent a whopping $145.3 million on advertising campaigns.
Labor is ahead in the polls following its Perth campaign launch, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at The Australian, which has slammed the launch as being light on policies. Both leaders’ approval ratings have increased.
With 19 days until the election, the Murdoch empire is getting desperate, though it’s still holding on to hope the Coalition’s campaign will be successful against the rise of independents.
“Last Financial year the Morrison government spent a whopping $143.5 million on advertising campaigns”.
Thanks Amber for highlighting this disgrace.
And to think that the money could have gone somewhere it was sorely needed…. perhaps toward bushfire recovery and/or floods?
No, that would be too much to hope for.
And it will be almost certainly worse this financial year, as that includes their pre-election propaganda. Like their Positive Energy misinformation campaign, where faced with the majority of Australians thinking that they’re doing a crap job on cutting carbon emissions, they decided to spend $31 million of public money, attempting to convince the public that they got got it wrong.
That Frydo is ‘relatively controversy free’ is yet anotherh indictment of our press gallery. Once only have to read Anthony Klan’s stories or even the story about the pressure on the AGL CEO to get him to leave. Imo they are big deals, but not a peep from our esteemed gallery.
Yep. He is in effect the 2IC of the parliamentary libs, so is responsible for total inaction on climate; for all the rorts; for Phase 3 tax cuts for the wealthy but not a cracker for JobSeeker; for the subs fiasco; for $40 billion wastage on Jobkeeper.
And on it goes.
Yet were meant to believe he’s a popular “moderate” who’ll be a loss to the parliamentary. His departure will be a win for Kooyong and for the nation.
And his economic inspiration comes from the Deadly Duo of Reagan and Thatcher, from a 2020 National Press Club address…
“It is important to go to the supply side. Thatcher, Reagan, that’s an inspiration. Supply side can actually help create and strengthen the economy and that is what we are determined to do, provide boost to aggregate demand, where appropriate, but to encourage supply-side reform because that will be important to the recovery.”
Reagan: Reaganomics…aka Voodoo Economics…that less than amusing combination of The Trickle Down Effect. The Laffer aka The Laughable Curve aka The Back of The Napkin Math…which started the USA on the slippery slope from creditor to debtor nation.
And has led now to the US going down the rabbit hole of The Trump Cult.
Thatcher : Thatcherism with its systematic, decisive rejection and reversal of the post-war consensus, whereby the major political parties largely agreed on the central themes of Keynesianism, the welfare state, nationalised industry and close regulation of the British economy.
In similar fashion the UK has now gone down the rabbit hole of BoJo and the Brexit Cult
Even when he was supposed Minister for (sic) the Environment, he was just the bland face of purported action behind which the Coalition carried on business as usual.
I wonder if any work has done by independent researchers, on just who reads News Corpse tabloids these days? Would it be almost entirely right wingers, similar to the listenership of 2GB or the viewership of SAD? Or would there still be some swinging voters in there somewhere, who haven’t been turned off by the cartoonish propaganda? Hopefully, they’re now just preaching to an ever decreasing cohort of the converted.
Those that have cauliflower brains.
Cauliflowers don’t process information that well.
speaking of corpses…………
Fear is the main ingredient…that sums it up as the conservative brain, due to enlarged amygdala is much more fearful.
“Individuals with a large amygdala [conservatives] are more sensitive to fear, which, taken together with our findings, might suggest the testable hypothesis that individuals with larger amygdala are more inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief system.”
“Moreover, the amplitude of event-related potentials reflecting neural activity associated with conflict monitoring in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is greater for liberals compared to conservatives . Thus, stronger liberalism is associated with increased sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern and with brain activity in anterior cingulate cortex.”
Conservatives Big on Fear, Brain Study Finds
Are people born conservative?
Peering inside the brain with MRI scans, researchers at University College London found that self-described conservative students had a larger amygdala than liberals.
The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that is active during states of fear and anxiety. Liberals had more gray matter at least in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain that helps people cope with complexity.
Fear and Anxiety Drive Conservatives’ Political Attitudes
Can brain differences explain conservatives’ fear-driven political stances?
Two articles from Psychology Today in 2011 and 2016
Saying that your political enemies are biologically inferior… Maybe that strategy hasn’t always worked out well in the past for everyone?
Nothing there about inferior, just different.
Just more inclined to pessimism and fear it makes sense.
The Universe responds to strong emotion, if fear is their strongest emotion then
that which they fear most is what the Universe will deliver.
Keep the fear growing, folks 😉
That should be – Keep “their” fear growing, folks.
I reckon you’re right there AB. There’d be a stack of younger aussies who’d never think of buying a physical newspaper, or paying for website access, not when there are so many on-line alternatives.
The biggest damage Murdoch and his mates still do though, is they get to set the agenda every morning, for all the breakfast news programs and radio shows who use whatever dross gets served up in his rags as a template for what the news of the day shall be….so much easier than actual doing any of the journalism personally.
In my opinion, it is the lazy journo happy to hitch along for the ride, reneging on their duty to investigate further afield, that does more insidious damage than the shouty faces on Sky After Dark. Everyday they reinforce the Murdoch-decreed talking points a thousand times over, until they are burnt into the minds of the viewer.
And RN Breakfast megaphoning Murdoch every morning. That’s what he’s sustaining all his dud newspapers for I guess.
Used to listen to RN Breakfast religiously but haven’t bothered now for a couple of years.
Yes, and another area where they and their shouty journalists may do a bit of damage, is on the campaign trail. That is, their attitude towards the candidates may affect the perceptions of voters. With Albanese and other Labor spokespeople, they tend to shout over answers, ask more gotcha questions, derail replies into less relevant areas and give the impression that the Labor person is not being upfront. Whereas with Morrison, there’s a lot more dixers, they often let him talk at length, even if he’s being far from honest and generally giving the impression that he’s worth listening to. So, it’s a not too subtle way of influencing people’s feelings about the candidates.
In our local coffee shop there are usually four or five free Herald Suns and one The Age.
When people finished with the Sun offered it to me, I told them, ‘No thanks, if I want to
be lied to, I’ll ask my teenagers what they got up to last night.’
Sadly my coffee shop does not offer the telegraph any more. I used to offer me at least half and hour of fun & games correcting the mistakes and offering advise in a nice blue pen to stand out from the newsprint
When The Parrot was at 2GB his “base” consisted of
…68% are over 50 years of age compared to 37% for the entire population over 14. 35% of Jones’ listeners are over 65 years compared to 15% for the whole population over 14…
…while 37% of Australians over 14 are aged 14-34, only around 7 per cent of Jones’ listeners fall into this group. Jones has virtually no direct impact on younger voters.
…,Jones’ listeners are substantially more likely than the average to identify with the Anglican Church (32%compared to 22% for all those over 14) and the Catholic Church (30%compared to 23%…
…listeners are more likely to go to church or their place of worship on a regular basis than other Australians (26%compared to 18%)….
while 26%of the population over 14 say they have no religious affiliation, only 10%of Jones’ audience says the same.
Who Listens to Alan Jones? – Australia Institute Webpaper June 2006
As for Church attendance following from the 2016 Census… 30.1% of Australians stated “no religion” and a further 9.6% chose not to answer the question. So that is possibly near 40% who evince no interest in religion.
3% of 15- to 29-year-olds identified with a Christian denomination in 2009, down from 60% in 1993.
In 1996, 17.9% of Roman Catholics attended Mass on a typical Sunday, falling to 12.2% in 2011. In 2006, the median age of all Catholics aged 15 years and over was 44 years.
In 1996, 27% of Roman Catholics aged 50 to 54 years regularly attended Mass, falling to 15% in 2006. 30% aged 55–59 years regularly attended in 1996, but only 19% in 2006.
From 1996 to 2006 Mass attendance for Roman Catholics aged between 15 and 34 declined by just over 38%, going from 136,000 to 83,760 attendees.
An earlier study in 2011 by the Christian Research Association discovered that the attendance of Uniting churches has declined by 30% over the past 10 years. The association’s president, Philip Hughes, has predicted that the decline in church attendance will continue “at least for the next 20 years”.
The study also found that the average age of people attending Catholic and Anglican churches is around 60 years.
An earlier survey, 2013 by McCrindle Research, just 8% of Christians attend at least once per month. The survey also discovered that 47% of respondents do not go to church because it is “irrelevant to my life”, 26% “don’t accept how it’s taught”, while 19% “don’t believe in the bible”
It will be interesting to see the resuilts of the 2021 Census with data to be released June 2022!
grâce à ABS, Australia Institute, Wikipedia … et al.
Stereotyping. Not everyone over sixty has a frozen brain or votes conservative. Quite a lot are still able to exercise their critical faculties.
This statement is so damned annoying. I am 82 and people I know of similar age do
NOT all belong to grouping you are claiming to be liblovers. I think the problem is
that many of those over 65s have listened to Jones for decades and do so now out
of habit, not out of agreement with his bullsh*t programme.
As for the Sky After Dark Comedy Show, The Moloch’s Australian version of FauxNews, appears to be like some strange US sitcom, carrying on in the same deluded maniacal fashion.
Out here in regional Australia Sky has been inflicted on FTA , in a desperate attempt to increase its dismal ratings, so no need to subscribe to the stupidity it pops up while going through to other channels.
Set in a TV station where the inmates appear to be mendacious, paranoid, scared of the other, black/brown/yellow/aliens of any sort, people who have the temerity to present facts and question them and are all very shouty at such and that even at their own cohort.
The inmates consist of right wing to libertarian current and ex politicians, their enablers, media hacks of no particular worth as well as the odd RWRNJ, the second R being for Religious
Sounds like it has all the key ingredients to be a roaring success in rural Australia. The only thing they are missing is a footy segment.
Unfortunately, some people like to read newspapers and newspapers are mostly owned by Murdoch.
An elderly relative of mine insists on buying The Australian for its Arts coverage and the Sudokos. Even though she’s not traditionally a Coalition voter. Talking her about politics is often like being bombarded by Murdoch talking points.
Murdoch’s success is in marketing to the politically disengaged and then delivering that cohort to right-wing parties.
In the UK, people who bought The Sun for the tits and football (‘Basildon Man’) voted conservative over and over again, not because they liked the Tories or their policies, but because they hated the parties that weren’t the Tories. And this was thanks to the daily dose of hate and demonisation dished up by Murdoch’s tabloids.
Interestingly, when John Major threatened to introduced legislation that would have kept Murdoch in his box, Murdoch’s tabloids bought Tony Blair and spent years trashing the Tories with mostly confected but compelling scandals.
Hadn’t heard that about why exactly Murdoch switched to Blair. Thanks!
I have heard about why Rupert switched off him.
Blair handed the Labour leadership to Gordon Brown, who was a bit more ‘old Labour’ and less in Murdoch’s pocket.
There were also the Tony-Wendi rumours, and whatever information Murdoch received via company’s phone-hacking activities.
the problem is not who reads the papers but they set the agenda of the day and drive the news cyle even on line. This article being a case in point
It would have been nice, if unexpected, for James Campbell to have been asked on Insiders about why the Herald Sun abandons any pretence at impartiality, and sees fir to provide such soft coverage to one candidate.
Would have been equally as surprising if somebody on Insiders asked Speers why Insiders has also abandoned any pretence at impartiality and constantly provides even more air time to Murdoch’s droogs.
I live in Kooyong. There are more front yard signs for the teal independent every day. She is making all the running. I reckon Josh is gone – and I’ve no doubt they have internal polling showing that.
Yeah, that’d put an end to his PM aspirations.
Not to worry, I’m sure the Deutsche bankers would welcome him back.https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/josh-frydenberg-to-the-rescue-20141227-12e7s0
The voters of Kooyong also remember the treasurer’s anti Victorian stance during the pandemic and his role in creating Australia’s trillion dollar debt, with significant amounts of public money given to companies over claiming on Jobkeeper, which the government has not tried to recover.
“with significant amounts of public money given to companies over claiming on Jobkeeper”
Probably there would be quite a few of the people running those companies who would live in Kooyong.