The response to Labor’s appointment of a (gasp) woman as governor-general is a case study demonstrating how the right’s supply chain of nasty noise is targeting an audience of “angry young men”. And it’s forcing an increasingly blokey Liberal Party to follow along.
News Corp is the agenda-setting opposition. Talking points generated by the commentariat, nurtured deep in News Corp’s Sky social media feedback loop, are being backed up by the company’s mastheads (and Nine’s radio network), and amplified by the ABC’s foolish embrace of a clickbait “both-sides” sensibility.
All those worthy Liberal and National MPs and senators? They have to reconcile themselves to the more humble role of content creators in the right-wing noise machine — or get out.
More than a few of them see this as an opportunity, not a threat. A rising generation, particularly those whose elections depend on a diminishing pool of party activists, is embracing the trade-off, happy to abandon building broad political coalitions for the benefit of their profile — and the pay that comes with it.
Liberal preselections are reshaped into hunts for content-maker talent: in Western Australia, reality TV star and bang-bang war novelist Mark Wales has been tapped for the must-win seat of Tangney; in the southern Sydney seat of Cook, Tony Abbott — Lachlan Murdoch’s personal choice as a $500,000-remunerated Fox board member — helped deliver preselection to once-was McKinsey ideologist, er, “consultant”, Simon Kennedy; while in “don’t call it Radelaide” last month, the Liberals Senate preselection delivered top spot to “conservative firebrand” and Sky favourite Alex Antic.
In the United States, the market for right-wing noise is large enough for wannabe agenda-setters to build their own machines. Last week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz found himself on the front pages of the state’s newspapers with reports that his “free” work fronting a tri-weekly podcast was being rewarded with about A$1 million in ad revenues, paid into his political action committee. Good money, considering that an American senator’s annual salary, frozen since 2009, is US$174,000 (A$265,000).
In the much smaller Australian media market, right-wing content distribution depends on the old-media infrastructure of News Corp (with audio support from Nine), relying on downstream amplification from traditional media to reach potential new audiences outside the right-wing bubble.
Take Samantha Mostyn’s appointment as governor-general: Peter Dutton’s low-key commentary seemed almost written to be ignored. Mostyn, he said, was “somebody who’s been involved in business and sport for a long period of time and obviously is well known to many people within the government over a long period of time.”
Crank up the noise machine: “the worst of modern woke Australia,” fulminated Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian; “proof that affirmative action helps mostly a highly political class of women,” thundered Andrew Bolt in his column, networked across the US company’s poorly read local tabloids.
With that, the News Corp commentariat became the “other side”. By Sunday, the shrieks of “woke!” had all too predictably morphed into the big question to be concernedly chewed over on the ABC’s flagship Insiders — particularly by the male panellists.
It’s the Australianisation of a debate that Fox News has been inflating in the United States, as it translates anti-diversity rhetoric from social media (particularly Musk’s X) into the daily round of Fox programming.
“The right-wing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives,” wrote Media Matters last week, are “claims that DEI policies pose a risk to society by allowing high-level positions to be given to supposedly undeserving candidates who ‘Didn’t Earn It’”. (Remind me: how did the younger Murdoch “earn” his CEO gig?)
While the “special treatment” trope (as in last year’s Indigenous Voice to Parliament vote here in Australia) has been traditionally used to dog-whistle racism, the News Corp right has always leant into painting targets on women.
Blame it on demographics. The cohort of largely pre-boomer “grumpy old men”, who responded with enthusiasm to the Howard-era racist provocations, is dying off, shifting the once reliably conservative over-65s into a more progressive voting bloc. For right-wing media, survival depends on a pivot to “angry young men” infuriated by the opportunities they are eager to be convinced have been denied them by women.
For the political impact of this shift, start with South Korea, the first democratic country where elections — and media consumption — are dividing on gender, with appeals to young men mixing the rhetoric of meritocracy with the power of misogyny.
In the US, right-wing media voices like Trump-whisperer Steve Bannon are urging the Republicans down the same track, saying: “Don’t chase the marginal Karen in a suburb … when we have tens of millions of men that have punched out of the system because of the way immigration and all the society is stacked against them”.
Looks like News Corp has taken the lesson to heart. Expect their increasingly blokey political allies to fall into line — if they want the profile only the company can deliver.
The constant banging on by the usual suspects for ‘meritocracy’ to trump everything requires some understanding of how merit is measured. In practice it seems to resemble getting the 100 points required to migrate to Australia, where your age may be worth some number of points, your academic qualifications and work experience some more points, and so on; but the starting point with measuring ‘merit’ is you get at least 50 points for having a p—nis.
99 points for the funny handshake?
Not merely music to the ears of the Teals- a beautiful symphony as Newscorp leads its Coalition children further from Hamelin.
Too true Old Curmudgeon. The Liberals have done nothing to win back the Teal seats and plenty (like nuclear-power fantasies and gender imbalanced preselections) to further alienate them. The mathematics of this doesn’t add up. Risking alienating half the population to try to win over some young men looks like an electoral death wish. The only young men who are vulnerable haven’t grown up to be reconstructed. Of those, you’re chasing the one’s who excuse their own mediocrity by blaming positive discrimination/gender quotas.
Sure, jerks like this certainly exist, but is there enough of them to counter the female backlash that the misogyny and anti gender equality rhetoric is going to generate? I don’t think so.
And as an aside – no wonder the birthrate in South Korea is down to 0.78 and the graphs resemble a threatened species’ extinction trajectory. A fair maids hand was never won by a sooky male-privileged heart.
The problem with the decrepit oldies of News Corp trying to appeal to young misogynists is that they can really only do so on one or two levels (generally focusing on misogynists and rev-heads). Even then, said young misogynists may not even care that some old lady that they’ve never heard of is G-G. They have more important things to worry about, unlike members of the Murdoch commentariat.
If that’s their continuity plan, they’re screwed. Their interminable evangelism for the Catholic Church and against global warming are too boring and repetitive for all but the most dedicated followers. And how anybody who doesn’t have the advantage of being retired could find the time to read a Greg Sheridan or (shudder) Paul Kelly diatribe…
I have the advantage of being long retired and I cannot even imagine myself wanting to find the time to read a Greg Sheridan diatribe. I used to shudder when he occasionally turned up as a panellist on The Drum. I usually enjoyed The Drum but that occasional exposure to GS was more than enough to convince me that The Australian remained a paper I would not want to read – ever.
I used to read GS just to be shocked and horrified. Sort of like reading enemy Intel reports but more disturbing. He wears brown suits as well which kind of makes sense. I remember I agreed with him once. Those days are behind me. Now I studiously avoid giving time or money to Murdoch.
I agree. I do have access to the weekend Australian but steer clear of reading anything but the headlines of articles by the above mentioned and several other propagandists.
He seems to be really churning out the content (same as Abbott & Downer turning up or being published everywhere), but much of it seems to be curated for a RW Anglosphere social media audience i.e. blame Biden-Dems for everything or claim ‘weak’ on responses inc. Netanyahu’s Hamas invasion and vice versa.
The latter with Hamas terror attack on 7 Oct. was well timed as it also split the US/UK ideological left who had mostly been behind Ukraine and Biden….
I agree with you and all the comments below (MJM, MS and Drew).
I, too, have been retired for a number of years. While fortunately I don’t read anything that Sheridan writes, I did hear him spruik his book on the Religion & Ethics Report on RN in 2021. I can’t remember the title, but it felt like is should have been ‘Make Christianity Great Again’. It did prompt me to write a 2-page response to the programme.
And, in response to his comments about women and Christianity, I wrote:
“To assert that Christianity, in a sense, liberated women is somewhat contestable. Was it not the Church that demonised Mary Magdalene as a prostitute for centuries? I understand that, rather quietly, Pope Paul VI had the wording changed to remove the stigma, effectively a half-hearted attempt to restore her reputation. Of course, the Church still refuses to admit women to the ‘ordained’ leadership. Other denominations are admitting women to leadership roles, although that is only in relatively recent years. For many centuries, women were used to cement political alliances, a sort of commodity to trade as the men saw fit.”
For all the millennia of observation, experience and education, there are still these institutions who are aggressively continually trying to impose dogma rather than the values they preach – exerting power and control for the benefit of the few.
It is an amazing phenomenon. I have often wondered when the realisation by the LNP and the increasingly right wing press that women spend money and are therefore of interest to their advertisers; and that women in Australia have had the vote for over 120 years. There may have been some truth that once women voted on the same lines as their husbands, however those days are long gone. The letters to the editor page in the local Murdochacry are full of the same righ wing blokes decrying whatever is happening in the Labor sphere but their preferred alternative are short on facts and long on incoherent rage. Meantime the women amongst themselves are making up their own minds and most young men, keen to have a meaningful relationship with young women, are not following in the raging footsteps that Incels choose.
The confusion in the Murdochracy is in clear evidence where a horrifying story of sexist behaviour in schools is followed by a right wing politician decrying sex education in schools which deals with matters frequently covered on the internet, and then another about the incredible harm of Meta. Meantime their audience diminishes daily.
How must it feel for actual conservatives who are not crazy and reactionary to have the embarrassment that is the right-wing media in this country representing you?
Feign ignorance, change the subject or claim conspiracy theory….