As Australia rolled through the past four years of state and federal elections, the once powerful News Corp slowed, its outrage engine spluttering. Now, with the Aston byelection, it seems it has run out of fuel. Famous for picking winners, the company now can’t even pick the Liberals in Aston, a seat the party has held for more than 30 years.
Not so long ago, News Corp’s twin goals — make money, wield power — were aligned. Now, those goals pull against one another, leaving the company bowing to the demands of its increasingly fringe audience. It can still make (some) money by following the lead of its loyal subscribers, sequestered as they are behind the hardest of paywalls, but there will never be enough of them to deliver the political clout the organisation once enjoyed.
It has left the company — here in Australia, like its Fox sibling in the US — less of a media company and more a cane-wielding disciplinarian keeping the right’s parliamentarians in the culture war trenches.
News Corp once spoke out for the mainstream — or close enough to it to shift votes and win elections. As recently as 2007, it could pivot quickly enough to get behind a Labor government that seemed set to win anyway.
Now, it has to deliver its aging, rusted-on, conservative fringe the “news” they want to hear — or else. Just last week in the US, its audience dragged Fox back to Trump after a brief dalliance with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, rewarding the broadcaster by boosting viewers by 20%.
In Australia, it’s shaping responses to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament: News Corp’s commenters will drive the company into backing the No campaign. The company, in turn, will bully the Libs and the Nats to follow along behind.
COVID hurried the News Corp vanishing, as the company closed most of its regional and community papers while its big-city tabloids disappeared from street newsstands and local cafes. Now if you want the outrage, you have to go looking for it.
Over the past month, News Corp Australia’s boss Michael Miller has been out and about, trying to talk up the company’s power, bragging about subscription numbers above a million. Sure, that’s a nice little business. But they’re not numbers that can sustain the political clout News Corp once enjoyed.
That’s 1 million subscriptions, not subscribers. According to News Corp’s most recent quarterly report to its US regulator, 924,000 of those are for its news mastheads, with the other 100,000-odd being for the company’s various legacy magazines.
And according to its more detailed annual 10-K report last August, about a third of its news subscriptions are for The Australian and about two-thirds for its diminished city tabloids like the Herald Sun. Figuring in overlap and institutional subscribers leaves about 4000 News Corp subscribers in each of Australia’s 114,000-voter-strong federal electorates.
Demographics determine the media’s digital destiny, too. Suburban electorates like Aston skew young and diverse, leaving only a smattering of News Corp subscribers among the voters. No wonder so few of us are listening to what News Corp wants to say.
The media organisation tries to change the subject, pointing to the millions who access up to a handful of stories each month, usually through the free-to-read, ad-supported (and more moderate) news.com.au or on social media (particularly Facebook — or for Sky after dark, YouTube).
In Queensland, Miller said last month, company stories (including from the state’s monopoly masthead The Courier-Mail) were read by 3.7 million people — or 85% of the state’s population. Impressive, although what we know about online consumption suggests that plenty of it would be cooking recipes, celebrity clickbait and sport.
The kind of clout that entrenches opinions and even shifts votes depends on the pounding power of repetition and amplification — the “bigot spigot”, as Australia’s own Sarah Snook says in character as Siobhan “Shiv” Roy in season three of Succession.
But the more the spigot gushes outrage, washing the Liberal and National parties to the unelectable right, the fewer the voters who are listening.
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