How News Corp’s ‘best of both worlds’ status is normalised by the media

There are a couple of narratives being peddled about News Corp’s purported conversion to accepting climate science: one an amusingly blatant lie, and one that distracts from something far more sinister about the Murdochs’ 180-degree change of course.

The blatant lie, unsurprisingly, is from News Corp itself: its narrative is that it is rescuing climate policy from “extremism” on both sides and that the lack of climate action in Australia for so long is because of a failure across all parties, from the Greens through the major parties to One Nation. This narrative very obviously excludes or obscures that the two biggest perpetrators of the climate wars and the resulting policy mess are News Corp and the Coalition.

The other one is more interesting and to be found among “centrist” commentators and media observers. One veteran media observer claimed the shift showed the limits of News Corp’s power and that “it’s something to watch”. A veteran press gallery journalist (and former News Corp senior journalist) echoed the line that News Corp had been forced to change and declared it “a political development. It will have a political impact.”

Both ignored that the News Corp campaign — like Scott Morrison’s distraction of a 2050 net zero target — is actually about propping up fossil fuel usage as much as possible, as is the Business Council’s purported climate reversal.

But what’s more interesting is the view that both share, and which is shared across the media but left unexplored: News Corp is a political entity, one whose interests must be incorporated into policymaking in a similar way to those of elected politicians and political parties.

It took Malcolm Turnbull to call this out in April when he described News Corp as the most powerful political actor in the country — “but with just one member, or one family of members and that is an absolute threat to our democracy”.

The trick, of course, is that News Corp isn’t regulated like a political party, or made to subject itself to the democratic tests that a political party must regularly face, nor is it held to account like a political party.

It is regulated as a company, and as a media outlet. It has the best of both worlds — the power and influence of a political party, the freedom and lack of accountability of a media corporation. It can send its “journalists” — more accurately described as political operatives — along to media conferences under the guise of being independent reporters.

The perfect example: the constant yelling at Bill Shorten by News Corp operatives during media conferences in the 2019 election campaign about the cost of his climate policies, as part of a wider campaign to prevent a Labor victory that would have established climate targets the company now purports to support.

The ease with which that is accepted, even by rival media outlets, and not questioned, is part of the way that status quo is perpetuated. Other outlets, including the ABC, treat even the most partisan of News Corp operatives as legitimate independent commentators and journalists.

Even Labor politicians, to a degree, cooperate in its perpetuation. Despite News Corp becoming even more stridently partisan in recent years — to the extent of its most senior commentator believing it was appropriate to openly state that the company supports right-wing political parties — its lies, distortions and anti-Labor campaigning are accepted with a shrug: that’s just to be expected from the Murdochs.

Rare now is a Labor MP prepared to do what Stephen Conroy was happy to do in 2011 and call out News Corp’s campaign of “regime change” against Labor while he was still in office — indeed, it was rare at the time.

The reluctance of other outlets to point out that News Corp is not a legitimate media organisation but a political entity that refuses to subject itself to political accountability partly reflects that they, too, play a double game.

Australia’s mainstream media outlets like to pretend that they are the fearless watchdogs of public life and speak truth to power, but they are also one of its most influential industries and routinely secure the regulatory and fiscal outcomes that they demand of government — and have done so for generations. If anything, the major television networks have as much influence as News Corp during an election campaign.

They are also reluctant to draw attention to how News Corp accumulated its power — via Australia’s poor media ownership regulation and lack of effective competition laws, which have delivered us one of the least competitive media markets in the world. They too have benefited, and expect to continue to benefit, from that lack of regulation to further enhance their own market power, even if News Corp remains dominant.

Nor do they have much interest in advocating for the kinds of reforms that would materially diminish News Corp’s influence — stronger competition laws to force the company’s break-up, or much stronger content regulation that would end the capacity of a supposed news channel like Sky News After Dark to peddle propaganda, or to prevent the broadcast of extremist content. Nine itself generates considerable revenue from a radio broadcaster skewed to the right — and often to the far right — in 2GB.

The result is the normalisation of what, to an independent observer, would be an extraordinary, even absurd situation: the dominant media company in a democracy acting entirely like a major political party but without any democratic checks and balances, and without even the kind of basic scrutiny a political party receives from traditional media outlets.