Even back when News Corp was a more normal news organisations, its political coverage has always been influenced by two things: the political approach of its owner and the corporate interests of the company.
Over 60 years, the company has evolved its particular campaigning skills so that it now brings the full panoply of its product to the task: integrating the front-page splash, the creation and pursuit of enemies, the dull thud of repetition in news stories (often torn from broader social context), backbench re-writes and headlines, Op-ed commentators, editorial cartoons and a largely interchangeable ideological corpus of columnists.
Within this integrated lattice, flowers of “good” journalism may bloom. Individual papers within the group are empowered to shuffle the component parts to reflect their market needs. So, for example, a Daily Telegraph splash may be page 17 in The Advertiser.
Traditionally, its election papers leaned towards the journalistic zeitgeist of the time — just a fair bit more so. So, it backed Australian Labor in 1972, before flipping to the Liberals in 1975 (provoking a strike by its journalists), before returning to Labor in the 1980s. In the UK, up until the 1992 election, it was “The Sun Wot Won It” for the British conservatives. From 1997, the company’s now Wapping-based papers moved to support Tony Blair’s New Labour.
The specific interests of the company always left room for flexibility. Even in the depths of its support for the Fraser and Howard governments, the Sydney papers backed NSW Labor to advance its local goals.
This political flexibility gave birth to that often false hope of progressives that “Murdoch always backs winners”. But so dominant has News Corp historically been in Australia that it’s hard to tell where the company’s approach ends and the rest of the industry begins.
Reach and the confidence of journalistic certainty mean that News Corp’s papers often set the agenda that the rest of the media follow behind. At a national level, The Australian’s provocative (but not necessarily wrong) front page splashes once lead through the morning ABC news into the day’s political cycle.
Its long term campaigns — such as its fight against the Rudd/Gillard governments’ school hall program — create a craft-wide assumption that may be wholly at odds with the reality. Similarly, at a state level where News’ dailies dominate, the local tabloids actively work to set the city-wide news cycle around a conservative agenda. Think Melbourne and “African gangs”.
Setting the news cycle is a win-win. It advances the agenda, while legitimating the company approach.
The age of social media gives the company a new tool. Its stories become weaponised through likes and shares to promote an agenda. For example, its US sibling Fox News regularly ranks at or near the top of Facebook shares.
Like all good campaigners, News Corp doesn’t leave it to the election to shape attitudes. On key issues — most notoriously, climate change — it sustains inter-election generation of material to support the conservative position. Similarly, as Crikey has regularly reported, it never misses a chance to personalise its politics by creating an enemy for its readers to throw eggs at.
At times, a News Corp paper may seek future deniability by editorialising (safely inside the book) in support of a centre-left party that its long-term campaigns have fatally undermined. For example, the 2007 Telegraph recommended a vote for Rudd Labor. In 2016, The New York Post, caught between its politics and its Democrat-voting readers, declined to recommend either Clinton or Trump.
On rare occasions, finding itself seemingly out of step with its times, News Corp creates a new reality. In the 1979 South Australian election, The Daily News stood almost alone against the reelection of the Corcoran Labor government — and prevailed.
Its coverage was subsequently condemned by the Australian Press Council, leading News Ltd (as it then was) to withdraw from the council, not to return until it took over The Herald and Weekly Times in 1987.
Similarly, in the 1992 UK elections, the 2016 Brexit referendum and the Trump election later that year, the company found that it had backed unlikely winners.
This weekend, they’ll be hoping to find out that they’ve done it again.
At a national level, The Australian’s provocative (but not necessarily wrong) front page splashes once LED (not “lead”) through the morning ABC news into the day’s political cycle.
Actually it was lead – dead weight in the saddle bags of ABC morning radio especially in Brisbane when the ABC had Madonna King who just read (red?) her husband’s Courier-Mail editorial’s out loud.
May the Australian people rise up and reject The Australian and its awful game of we-know-best and you must do as we say rubbish. Vote last, News Ltd’s favourite children
With its heavy lean to the right & slightly loony View of the real world I give the Murdoch Press extremely limited attention. I certainly have no interest in trying to knock on its paywell which , thankfully, is rapidly drying up.
I’ve noticed a little journalistic trick employed by The (Adelaide) Advertiser in almost every news article of significance is to position the pro-Labor balancing comments towards the end of the article (but not the last paragraph), knowing that hardly anybody reads those penultimate paragraphs. That way they can claim they’ve presented both sides of the story, but have positioned one side where it will be read by very few readers. The headline (read by almost all readers) is usually some rabidly right-wing, pro LNP caricature of the content of the article.
Occasionally I find a discarded Terrorgraph in the train and find duty bound to know the enemy so scan the articles.
The strange thing about the political reportage is that it is usually factually correct but presented in so tendentiously mendacious a way as to be always “Labor/Green/progressive ideas BAD”.
As noted above, the words can often be neutral but phrasing & presentation is all.
Do anyone know whether primary schools still teach reading comprehension?
From the quality of what passes for thought/debate in the public sphere I suspect that is another discarded part of education, deemed by our Masters to be too dangerous in the hands of the Great Unwashed.
Like the Civics course in high school in the 60s, vanished by the 80s, which taught about how the electoral system works.
Antony Green on RN was clearly exasperated by the continuing confusion and outright ignorance of how to vote in the Senate and said “It’s not hard, you get to choose YOUR preferences, not the parties. Don’t overthink or complicate what is simple.”
Totally with you AR, and Antony Green. Research showed that THE MAJORITY of people didn’t really understand the instructions for Senate voting.
Slaps forehead.
Hopefully the efforts of Murdoch and his newspapers will result in a Hung Parliament.
If Andrew Wilkie and Julian Burnside are elected and have the casting vote this will be a dream result.
All good legislation will get through and the two major parties will be forced to behave themselves and govern for the good of the country and us all.
Then we can all agree that there is a God and his name is Rupert Murdoch.