Mixed media: how Australia’s newspapers became locked in a war of left versus right
Australia has very little diversity in its traditional media sector, argues Denis Muller in this cross-posting from The Conversation, and this is only being made worse by the increased polarisation of the country’s two main newspaper companies, News Corp and Fairfax Media.
We are living through a period of fragmentation and polarisation in public discourse on a scale mankind has not before experienced. By far the greatest fragmenting and polarising force is social media.
An increasing proportion of the population, especially those under 40, get their news from social media, overwhelmingly from Facebook. The algorithms that tailor what Facebook prioritises for each individual allow users to choose only those topics or opinions that they want to hear. This has led to the formation of echo chambers or information cocoons.
So we have the paradox of the internet: the technology that provides a global village square also provides the means by which people in the square can block their ears and shut their eyes to things they don’t want to hear or see.
You really need to worry about anyone who argues that The Guardian is to the center of anything.
‘Right’. ‘Left’. This is a major problem. Human’s being herded into one category or another. Correct Murdoch and the suits at Fairfax have both taken opposing views. (They know that the readership is roughly 50/50, so they get an audience share each, right..?) Money talks and money is what drives Murdoch and the current Fairfax board.
Money however does not drive The Guardian, nor other reputable sources, who want to pursue the truth and let the truth be told. Murdoch has worked bl00dy hard to smear anyone who reports the truth and to type cast them as being ‘lefties’, or ‘commies’. He has worked very hard to make people think that a Green Party member is some sort of activist nut job. We are now seeing the decline in his publications and other businesses as the educated take immense offense to his seemingly and often called out anti social rhetoric.
We shall see what path’s are carved out into the future. Many advertisers are beginning to swerve Murdoch’s publications. The #stopfundinghate campaign has been effective here.
Right / left? If only more people were educated about how to understand primary and secondary evidence and learn to understand a reliable source verses a skewed report. We would all be better off for it.
So in short: people, it would seem, are so, so brain washed and institutionalised that they still take headlines as oath. Madness!? Utter madness. Then again though an ex PM wanted to (or did he actually do it) put chaplains in schools? Talk about being anti facts / science. (Dumb them down at an early age and they will do whatever we ask in the future…) Indoctrinated = newspapers will sell rubbish to morons.
It’s even more concerning that the author of this is a university academic. To blindly position News as “right” while pretending that Fairfax practises a “charter of independence” would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious an error. Blind Freddy can see that’s wrong.
Fairfax is considered by everyone as significantly left of centre, squabbling for position with the Guardian and its polemical views on faddish issues. Its ‘Left-ness” is key to understanding its plummeting performance, with the Guardian and Fairfax mastheads in financial peril. Being out of sync with broad public opinion and values is a dangerous path to tread when you’re running a business. But if you’re in academia, that’s another matter.
‘Fairfax is considered by everyone as significantly left of centre’ — how nice of you to speak for ‘everyone’, Michael. What tosh. Fairfax is centrist, centre-left at most.
And you want to talk about financial peril? The Australian loses tens of millions of dollars every year. News Corp’s poor performing Australian newspaper division (including the tabloids) is a key drag on company profits. How do these facts gel with your thesis?
“Centrist/Centre-left”? What planet are you living on? Pro refugee, climate change and every other left wing hobby horse…..and besotted with Trump going by the number of anti-Trump stories dominating their website. They have clearly taken the approach of being the opposite of News Corp….and vice versa.
To label Fairfax as left wing is like labeling a goldfish as a canine. It is nonsensical. Stop believing the headlines, the smearing and the hate and burrow into some detail before commenting again please Stephen.
I suspect you believe that Rudd and Gillard are left wing right? Well you would be wrong. Again, please get an education.
Left, right. Doesn’t matter when no one reads them.
Probably points to a major (and often under-emphasised) cause of declining readership. Its cliché to hear the “The internet has killed the business model” argument. Its correct but…..I can’t help but think the model would have been a teeny bit more resilient if the audience had had its trust abused by bias over the years.
Its easy to argue that the left/right divide in chasing advertisers was inevitable, but of course this was short term gain for long term (fatal) pain.
I think it’s fair to say that the biggest single change was when Hawke and Keating handed the old HWT grouping to Murdoch. The Sun in Melbourne was a respectable popular paper. The old Melbourne Herald was dying as an afternoon conservative read. The Queensland and Adelaide papers both were curious but very local and the Tisrr in particular was much better than today’s ranting. Murdoch made them all one way or another into tabloids in the style he had developed in Sydney.
The Age peaked in the early 80s and began to slide when its best editor was booted for an old hack. The SMH was probably at its best under John Alexander, who was shafted politically by the team now in control at Fairfax.
My impression is that most of the sloppy indulgence that sometimes looks like ideology is nothing more than laziness. Editors don’t enforce news priority and standards and there is a big population of minor celebs. Here and there you have these infantile gangs who modest people over trivial agendas. But the core problem is that too many are living off PR and soft contacts.
You’ve only got to see the swagger of spivs like Markson or Cato to get the picture.