The resignation of Alex Lavelle, editor of The Age, comes as a mild shock but no great surprise. A week after management and staff of that once great newspaper protested about both de facto control from Sydney over content, and directions to slant news in a rightwards direction, Lavelle has gone. Ahead of being pushed? Because there was no movement on management’s part? We’ll find out, I guess, but it amounts to the same thing.
Both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are being pushed in a rightward political direction, after the abolition of Fairfax by Greg Hywood, and the folding of the papers into an outfit founded by Frank Packer and currently chaired by Peter Costello.
The sole aim of this process is to destroy a base of left-liberal, or even liberal-centrist, thought, for political purposes. This process was underway in the final decades of Fairfax. It was steered by no commercial decision.
There was a huge audience base for a pluralist centre-left daily publication in both cities — and especially in Melbourne, Stockholm-on-the-Yarra. The papers were steered towards a centre-right perspective precisely to destroy the power of that social-political formation.
The destruction of The Age, once rated as one of the 10 great newspapers of the world, is a testament to the nihilism of capitalism, and the deep and complacent intellectual mediocrity of many of the people who led Fairfax in past decades, and who lead Nine now.
Well, look, save what can be saved, and support the staff in their struggle, but as a base for a left-liberal perspective, The Age is gone. It’s simply over. We have to be clear-eyed about this and admit that the entire spectrum of daily newspapers/news sites is controlled by the right.
Those who want a left-liberal daily news centre are going to have to establish one. And realistically, the only body with the clout, cash and audience to do that is the union movement.
Yes, the ACTU needs to establish a daily newspaper. This is something the union movement should have done many decades ago, but the need now is urgent. They need to put very serious money into a daily that has both an online publication, and a tabloid paper publication.
They need to create a paper/site that can be read by anyone with an average high school education, that has good comprehensive coverage of news, sport, celeb stuff, without being dominated by it, but with a core section on politics, economics and social and global affairs that gives a range of left and centre-left views on the issues of that day.
We need a large-scale, hugely backed paper/site that can attack head on the de facto right-wing way in which all industrial relations is discussed currently — as to how much union “power” should be restrained — the bias towards privatisation, market solutions, an export culture which has seen us destroy our national manufacturing plant as a sacrifice to the gods of ideology, and much much more.
Would there be difficulties with this? You bet. The stab at a daily backed by super funds, The New Daily, appears to have lost some of its leftist zeal. But this is once again a case of the wider movement not seeing how much needs to be sunk in to such a thing, and how essential it has now become (something quite different to, and complementary of, the mission of this excellent publication, I should add).
How is it that a movement with millions of members and billions under command in super funds, is content to have no large-scale media of its own? That has a long history. For decades the union movement could rely on its role as a quasi-state apparatus to maintain its power, and the close communal relations of the working-class to form networks of political transmission. City-based tabloids weren’t right-wing pamphlets, because they had a left-wing working-class audience they didn’t want to alienate. Indeed, until the 1960s, the main enemies were The Age and the SMH, the Liberal party’s ideological wing.
That all switched pretty fast, as society changed its composition. From the ’60s onwards both broadsheets became reliably left-liberal, and even if the middle-class more than the working-class read them, they were a crucial place to argue left political and economic policies toe-to-toe with the right. That reliance encouraged complacency, and now, here we are.
So, if we can’t get an alternative voice, and I don’t see who else can provide its core (even if a few liberal multimilli/billionaires are added on the top), then we’re finished. Presumably, with today’s announcement on higher education, that point becomes obvious. It’s going to be onslaught after onslaught from here on, with no large-scale base from which to mount a sustained alternative argument to a broad audience.
This country is then just Alabama on the Pacific, in which the left, even the centre-left, is a permanent oppositional presence, nothing more, and quietly abandons any notion of winning power, or even setting an agenda, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The leadership of the union movement needs to shake itself out of its modest expectations, its long-learnt petitioning, protesting role, its cultivated lack of audacity, its narcissistic pursuit of internal divisions, and acquire the ambition to set the agenda, and become a full countervailing force to what is now a large-scale right totality.
Like many people raised on The Age, I’ll still glance at it in the morning. It still does great stuff investigation-wise. I still trust its core journos and editors to stand up to undisguised political heavying. But if management wants to go a certain way, it will eventually get its way. As something that it was, The Age and the SMH are gone. Mourn them and move on. Or stick around for the next funeral, which is ours.
The Guardian? Not particularly right wing.
Teh Grauniad doesn’t have any wings at all. Just a lot of pretty, flapping rainbow-coloured feathers.
Yes. The Guardian actually carries more real news that The Age
And not particularly Australian.
Good alternative to the rubbish we get served up in Australia, but a small presence and not guaranteed to remain if their financial circumstances change. And their base is English upper middle-class progressives, as their stance makes clear any time real change is on the agenda.
Did you mean the bunch of pissants which did more than anything else to destroy Corbyn?
Its elder writers/readers despair.
The Gruan… don’t forget the hatchet job they did on Assange..
For the next decade a paper needs a physical distribution for clout, the Guardian won’t in Australia.
Also, the Guardian, for all of its good stories, irritates me with its left culture wars. The right culture wars irritate me badly enough, but I feel the left culture warriors should know better, lol.
I think that’s agreed!
Not the Guardian.
Murdoch, Costello and (Scotty From Marketing’s) Rosebutt – an Unholy Triumvirate?
Never heard of “The New Daily”?
And aren’t the usual LNP suspects screaming blue murder about that. not to mention the mudslinging at the Industry Funds who finance it.
I suspect many of the remaining paper Age readers (elderly, and still given to reading from paper) look at the crosswords, sports pages, the death notices and the comics with an occasional rueful glance at the editorial pages.
The attempts at alternative papers in the past have not gone well… Nation Review, National Times..
The New Daily as a paper might be a goer if they could raise the money.
I would love to see The New Daily, or even Guardian Australia, grow into some kind of semblance of the old National Times…..I really miss that publication.
The unions and industry super funds could perhaps combine on such a venture, and offer really cheap subscriptions for the masses – it needs a model that does not rely on advertising, as that seems to invariably dumb the whole show down. But it should offer clear advice and education to ordinary Australians on how to avoid voting for the kleptocracy that definitely does not have their best interests in mind.
Most savvy superannuation investors are in it for the long haul, so have a strong vested interest not to wreck the joint for short term gain.
As good as the National Times was, it wasn’t a mass appeal publication – and I’m not suggesting mass appeal means dumbed-down. Pilger has often talked about the range of working-class left tabloids that used to exist before Murdoch and friends bought them up and turned them into the rags they now are.
I think Rundle’s right – we need publications that the mass of people can relate to and contribute to. Surveys and social behaviour has consistently shown the Australian population to be well to the left of the media and political class, so I don’t think there’s any reason to be pessimistic that such an undertaking wouldn’t be successful.
There’s so much lateral thinking you could do, going after the tabloid market. Combine page three girls with basic economic education, step by step. Union and industrial relations history columns, from celebs. Tips for working women, child care features, women’s sport, popular explanations of key policy stuff like franked divvies, negative gearing, SMSF’s…you can have so much fun taking it up to Murdoch’s boofs on their terms. Ditch the po-faced new-wowser stuff, embrace sex, sport, rollies, punting and put the Murdocracy-LNP plutocracy back in the ‘elitist’ gunsites on the front page every day in an unapolegetic but good-humoured class war.
What would we need to raise! $10 million?
It’s difficult to have any confidence in the ACTU embracing this idea. Who else could fill the void given they’re too busy getting Van Badham to ghost-write tosh for them?