No one really remembers The Sun News-Pictorial much, which is a pity. It wasn’t a bad newspaper in its heyday, when it sold 700,000 copies a morning in a city of 3 million people. Sure, it was right-shifted, but it was also a city newspaper. If a pizza joint was held up in Thomastown or an FJ hit a milk float in Clarinda, the Sun had the story, and maybe even a photo.
But it was also pretty good on something else: industrial coverage, i.e. unions, strikes and negotiations. It had good reporters and it played a pretty straight bat. Why? Because it had no choice. Half its readership was in these unions or knew someone who was. If the coverage of an industrial dispute was just propaganda, the readership would know.
The Sun News-Pictorial died when it was rolled into Rupert’s Herald Sun which, after a brief period as a four-edition city paper, was transformed into the propaganda model that Murdoch’s News Corp was pursuing globally.
Fox News was started in 1996. The Herald Sun became a shameless propaganda rag around 1998. “Is that true or did you read it in the Herald Sun?” a sticker ’round town read. The crowning glory was when it plucked an undistinguished reporter named Andrew Bolt — a failed poet and ex-fiancé of a belly dancer — to write a column in the new right culture-war style that News Corp was importing holus-bolus.
There were about 10, maybe 15, years where the propaganda model of the Herald Sun worked a treat. It was the transitional period when people still believed that a newspaper made an effort to give a truthful account of events. Providing a distorted version, it could thus really shape people’s worldview. But that was subject to the law of diminishing returns as media changed and people came to understand just how manufactured these versions of reality were.
The Hun and other such outlets would cleave back to something resembling truth only when their preferred version of reality was so at odds with the world out there that everyone would have noticed.
Following that rule, it would have played an even hand in the recent Victorian state election, and let whatever happened, happen. As history records, it didn’t.
As a consequence, the Herald Sun died on Saturday night. Absolutely ended. Is over. There’s still a paper coming out every morning but it’s simply a ghost of what was. Matter of fact, it’s been pretty pathetic for some time, devoid of volume and impact. It has the flimsy air of a freesheet, with the TV guide, the horoscopes, death notices, sad classifieds. And Bolt, always Bolt. Having thrown everything at Dan Andrews for months, the Hun didn’t leave a mark on him. Even when it self-parodically found “the steps” that had, and ran them as a front-page feature. Or was that a dream?
Really, that’s the end of it. The content of the paper is vacuous, the sales are small. It sits in the back corner of 7-Elevens, and on café tables, unremarked upon. People riffle through it for the half-dozen stories it actually reports, the two pages of celeb PR releases it faithfully reproduces, and filler wire copy you could get anywhere. They glance at Bolt, but clearly not with any intention of taking him seriously or being influenced by him. Bolt’s kept on cos he’s got a core audience — where he used to have a mass one — and the Hun needs every audience it can get. But Bolt’s readership is now like the Little Chef factory in its heyday: it’s cookers, all cookers, as far as the eye can see.
Could the Hun have salvaged itself by playing down the middle, acknowledging that Labor still had basic community support? Well, not really. News Corp only does that when it has brought Labor leaders to heel, and supported them in turning on the left of the party. In however complex a fashion, Dan is of the left, and went leftwards during the election. For the Hun to have been equivocal would have been to bare its throat to Labor, and admit that its day had passed.
But its day has passed, now. It is pages blowing in the street, talking to itself, the paper ephemera of a vanished world. If those of us of the newspaper era have a certain sadness at the sudden irrelevance of what was once a big 120-page black-and-white groaner, wrapping a whole city, a whole world, then it is tempered by the fact that now, after 20 years, its poison has been milked dry, its fangs shattered.
It’s a good thing the funeral notices still run — the Herald Sun can look itself up in the paper and see if it’s dead.
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“Andrew Bolt — a failed poet and ex-fiancé of a belly dancer “
Ah, so there’s something to be said for him after all.
Maybe the Hun should have published some of Bolt’s poetry (the tongue is in the cheek, here). Does anyone know if they did?
Rita Panahi – ex-sports gossip columnist who had a “What’s Up with Rita?” segment on Melbourne sports radio where she occasionally criticised wokeness. Fast forward two years and – boom – she’s got her own little cult.
Thing is – being a RWNJ media provocateur is a really easy way to make a living.
That “Ripper Rita” was the last thing I heard before I switched that station off for good. A shame, because they had broadcasters of much better quality at the time, such as Francis Leach.
That’s the thing, many of the stars in the RWNJ firmament in these parts are ex-maoists or ex-trots, or people with a bent toward the arts who ended up avoiding the breadline by finding a sinecure writing for Murdoch or some other RW outfit or in a back room writing speeches and PR for the mining industry or somesuch. How much of their bogey-man persona has been confected and how much they have truely come to believe in, only they know.
I’ve always assumed they’re utterly cynical people who are for some reason emotionally beholden to those in power, and will write anything to help them out without believing a jot of it.
Graham Richardson is one such person ‘Whatever it Takes’.
It’s amazing how neatly pages of bolt’s poems wrap around a toilet roll..
The newspaper industry didn’t have to die. It could have transmogrified the way that many analogue businesses did to survive in the digital age. Sure, it wouldn’t have held the keys to the information kingdom anymore, but it could have continued to fill a niche need.
Instead, an entire industry was murdered by one man, who blocked its evolution and instead diverted it into an ego prop.
I don’t think anything positive can happen until Rupert’s gone to dust. Then I predict we’ll see newspapers returned in a small way, a bit like vinyl records. You’ll be able to walk into your local coffee shop and purchase a complete reprint of the local newspaper as it was published exactly 50 years ago and spend a pleasant hour or so indulging in nostalgia over your morning latte.
Amen.
It still works on some old folks, they probably don’t read Bolt but still get caught up in the general manipulation that is News corpse right wing content. They’re getting older and in some ways dealing with cognitive decline so the general fear campaign of Neoliberalism still has a footing.
For most of their lives newspapers and the news in general made an effort to present some semblance of balance so this is a relatively new and thankfully short experience comparatively.
As someone pointed out to me, that generation was far less educated than younger generations and thus think more with their gut than their head (sorry for the broad generalising, but you get the idea).
How condescending of you
Not to mention ignorant – very uninformed, like Æthelred (of the misunderstood tag).
Really? I’m 82 and stopped reading the Sun when it started the stupidity of thinking all Australians were dumb enough to believe what they wrote. Before Costello became in charge of The Age that was my go to, he changed into a Liberal propaganda papers that became a waste of paper and ink.
You forget that those younger get most of their news via Twitter and Sky/Fox. It also depends rather a lot on what their parents read or contibuted to in their early years that goes towards their thinking.
Well, I think so, You saw what was happening and chose not to support the propaganda anymore, my folks read the Herald during the week and the Age on Saturday, we didn’t get the Sun. I still get the Age on satdy mostly, , I found a couple of articles that were ok, George Meg. etc, I only ever found about 4 good articles back in the late 80’s.
Trump was such a bad player that he sped up the realisation that news is often about being played, I think the more recent generations will learn faster than us . Fox/sky news is so unhinged it is educating people as to what unsophisticated propaganda looks like., ala Trump
Propping up fossil fuels in the face of climate change is a tough gig.
I grew up in a household with two Thatcher – Major Tory voting parents, and I’ve never voted Tory, whether in the U.K. or Australia.
After being encouraged by them to study history and politics, I don’t think they were too impressed with me studying history and politics.
Just hung up from my accountant. He reads the Herald-sun and listens to Neil Mitchell. He is an educated and otherwise intelligent man. He is shocked Dan won. Cannot understand it. He also thought Scomo was going to win. The hun believers are out there.
I bet he can find every tiny tax dodge though.
An otherwise intelligent family member of mine was similarly astounded and heartbroken at Labor’s win. Gets all her news from the Herald Sun and The Australian. The Murdoch press seems to create a consuming alternative reality for its die-hard readership, gradually losing ever more touch with the rest of society.
A paper for the losers – Trump, Brexit, Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Morrison, Guy, midterms etc.
Enjoy .
I know Liz Truss was pretty much a nonentity and her time in office was very short. But she should be included.
Yep – along with the pompous hat-stand also…….the Member for Toppers.
Liz must get points for entertainment value – twas like watching an Evil Knievel stunt … NO she can’t – not 30 buses AND on fire… OH my god she doing it!!!…. ahhhhh …. owww … boy that must have hurt!