The Logic of Australia's Commercial Media
Written By: Giacomo Bianchino
On July 30th, the Courier Mail newspaper ran an article on a breach of border movement policy during COVID-19 restrictions. The front-page story was entitled “Enemies of the State” and told the story of three Melbourne teens who went to Brisbane in order to sell stolen goods. What made it remarkable was the fact that it named the three perpetrators and provided photos of them. A masthead with huge circulation, it exposed the girls to an outpouring of racial hatred online. Things were so bad that the mother of one of the girls complained of losing all community support during the trying times. “She is my daughter,” the mother told the ABC; “she is not an animal.”
The Courier Mail’s decision to provide these details attracted widespread censure. Journalists pointed to the problematic “doxing” behaviour of the newspaper, exposing people to public ridicule during an investigation. They also, however, pointed to the double standards with which the publication treated other breaches of COVID restrictions. Before this story, a couple in Aspen had broken quarantine, there had been a party in Noosa with fifty-plus attendees and security guards breaching social distancing at Melbourne hotels. None of these perpetrators received the same treatment as the girls in question.
This prompts us to ask: what distinguishes the cases? It would shock certain conservative commentators and red-faced suburban dads to claim that in fact, the problem is racism.
But this is not an ideologically motivated claim from a left-wing CCP puppet who wants Australians to give up their toothbrushes to the Stasi. In fact, the racialized reporting on issues in the commercial media is a recognisable and objective phenomenon. In 2017, report the University of Technology Sydney and All Together Now entitled conducted a report entitled “Who Watches the Media”. It revealed that racist reporting was a statistically-notable trend among certain media outlets. The main culprit was Newscorp, the media company that owns the Courier Mail. Of 35 race-related articles in the Daily Telegraph during the first half of that year, 24 were negative, seven were neutral and four were positive. When the agency repeated its survey in 2019, it found that in the course of a year, 52 articles in the Daily Telegraph negatively portrayed marginalised races. The most regularly victimised was the Muslim community, but between 2017 and 2019 there was also an increased focus on the African community.
But this isn’t a repeatable phenomenon across all news agencies. According to the report, Channel 9 only aired ten negative stories about race in 2019, and Channel 7 only ran four. Admittedly, both stations showed more negative than positive stories, but the difference is tangible. ABC predictably aired very few racially-charged stories, and when it did the tone was neutral or “inclusive”.
In fact, the media landscape in Australia is far more complicated than a critic might hope, publications may share certain interests, but they often oppose one another or contradict themselves”
This leaves us with an interesting statistical spread. On the one hand, we should expect that commercial media will naturally tend towards more conservative social views, given the fact that it is the organ of the bourgeoisie. One could also expect a public broadcaster to defend state intervention and social progress, based as they are on the public service model and reliant as they are on public money. There are, however, anomalies here. How can one account for the big statistical gap between the Daily Telegraph and Channel 9, when both are corporate-owned media?
In fact, the media landscape in Australia is far more complicated than a critic might hope. Bourgeois publications may share certain interests and pursue these through their channels of influence. But they often oppose one another or contradict themselves. This can make it feel as if there really is no meta-narrative to a given publication. With the right tools of critique, however, we can identify the orientation of the different publications operating in Australia today.
As Lenin taught all the way back in 1916, the period of imperialism is that of the political victory of the bourgeoisie. He understood that the media was an important arm of this struggle, and believed that counter-propaganda was the most important task of the Russian communists during their period of illegal organisation. He also understood, however, that while the bourgeoisie do have the power to act as a class, often the individual owner of a media company will use it to pursue their own ideological ends. There could be wide divergences in the perspectives adopted by individual bourgeois publications.
This is important to remember as we analyse the relationship between Australian media ownership and editorial content. Firstly, Australian media is concentrated in the hands of a very small group of corporations. The basic point to keep in mind here, however, is that not all commercial media organisations operate in the same way. In Australia, there are outlets whose ownership model prevents them from becoming overtly ideological. While their presentation of facts has capitalist values as a given, these are generally more scattergun in their portrayal of events, and sometimes difficult to pin down. On the other hand, there are publications with a discrete ideological bias in their editorial. These are generally owned or chaired by individuals with a certain view of the world, who use their platforms for propaganda.
Let’s look at the first group, keeping race as our frame of analysis. Firstly, we can take a glance at the commercially owned Sydney Morning Herald, under the control of Nine Media Co. since their takeover of Fairfax in 2018. In 2019, their coverage of race-related content was minimal, and heavily skewed towards positive portrayals. If we then look across the other Nine Entertainment publications and news broadcasts, however, the story is not the same. On TV, the same media company broadcasts more negative than positive stories about race. Channel 9’s A Current Affair was one of the major culprits for racist reporting in 2017, for instance, broadcasting nine negative stories and only one positive story in the first half of that year.
The reason that such a wide array of perspectives exists under the Channel 9 banner is their corporate model. Their parent group, Nine Entertainment Co. is a publicly-listed company run by American hedge funds and venture capitalists. At the bottom line, its only duty is to its shareholders. Nine Entertainment pursues, then, whatever will bring in the highest profit margin. As Richard McChesney noted about 1990s America in Rich Media, Poor Democracy, this model leads to a policy of trying to court ratings through sensationalism and commodification. Any viewer of Channel 9 News will recognise the dual programming strategy of persistent infomercials studded with occasional dog-whistling stories and traffic coverage. Nine broadcasts what it believes people want to see. This means that it is not above courting the inner-city liberal demographic with mastheads like the Sydney Morning Herald even when they contradict their other publications.
On the other hand, there are networks with persistent narratives based on the ideological direction of their leading figures. Take, for instance, Channel Seven. Seven is part of the media conglomerate Seven West, 40 percent of which is owned by Australian Capital Equity (ACE). Both Seven West and ACE are chaired by Kerry Stokes. Stokes is a classical liberal with a philanthropic edge, in the style of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. So Channel 7 does often feature feel-good social justice stories. There is, however, a notable absence of stories on 7News about labour issues. In fact, compared to the ABC (which publishes a generally positive union-related story once every couple of days) and even Nine Entertainment (which publishes a lukewarm or negative union-related story once a week), Channel Seven has run one story on unions this year. Even this was a vague piece about the threat of casuals returning to work; more of a coronavirus than a labour narrative. They have run a number dealing with “industrial relations” but only from the perspective of government handouts and other coronavirus anomalies. In 2019, in fact, they went as far as arguing that anyone “ripped off” by their boss should report it to Fair Work, circumventing unions altogether.
“Kerry is not above intervening in politics, nor above using his own outlets to push for his political views”
The dearth of labour coverage in Seven West begins to make sense when one takes a second look at Stokes. Aside from his media holdings, Stokes owns Coates Hire, one of the largest employment agencies in the country. He has campaigned against unions in the past, and even backed up Malcolm Turnbull during the Liberal leadership spill because he was “frightened about the [industrial relations] regime under Shorten.” Kerry is not above intervening in politics, nor above using his own outlets to push for his political views. This separates Seven West from Nine Entertainment insofar as the ownership model lends a certain degree of predictability to their content.
This brings us back full-circle to the problem of the Courier Mail and its parent-company Newscorp. Newscorp is a conglomerate of mostly pay-per-view TV stations and print/online editorials. It is infamously chaired by our own homegrown hellspawn, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is not the soft-and cuddly liberal that Stokes is; he is a virulent and loud cultural conservative with a fascistic view of public order. He has a unique reputation even in American media as a man who would sacrifice monetary value in pursuit of this ideology. He has been known, for instance, to let unprofitable publications continue their life so long as they afforded him some political leverage. This separates him from your run-of-the-mill capitalist shill.
Murdoch does not follow demographics; he tries to create them. He famously used his media leverage to pursue his political vision when his UK publication The Sun led a concerted anti-Labour campaign in England in 1992. After the election, it even went as far as claiming responsibility for the Tory victory. His influence in English and Australian politics has by no means waned. It has been alleged that he has much to do with the leadership spills and subsequent electoral victories that led to the Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison governments.
The determinately ideological focus of Murdoch’s editorials helps to explain why there is such a uniformity of perspective in his papers. The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, Australian and Courier Mail are regular breachers of investigative codes of conduct. They are purveyors of racist ideas and racialising narratives because their editorial policy is shaped by a man that understands the media as a vehicle of class power and uses it to the fullest extent. He shares certain interests with Kerry Stokes, and is beholden to the same profit-based model as Nine Entertainment Co. But he is unique in believing in the power of the media to shape politics and engineer society. It is not that Murdoch thinks Australians are racist and sells them what they want to hear. He actively seeks to create a narrative that is repeated so often it ends up becoming “common sense.”
What makes Murdoch so unique? He is one of the main capitalists who, in the 1990s, adopted what McChesney calls the “politburo practice of censoring ideas it deems unacceptable.” The misleading Soviet analogy, while cringe worthy, is apt. Murdoch is known for having had a bust of Lenin in his dorm room at Oxford. While we might recoil from this revelation, it is a sobering lesson about the importance of Lenin’s teachings on media. Murdoch has adopted the idea that change can be effected through the channels of information, and has used it to advance his ideological interests. This is something that a Communist should sit up and listen to.
When we come across a piece of media in Australia, it is not enough to simply claim that it is “corporate-owned” and therefore predictable in its editorial orientation. Such a position is critically lazy and will not help us to understand the subtle distinctions in narrative. Instead, we have to be clear and consistent in exposing the kinds of ownership and editorial policy that each company is built on. We also, however, should begin learning from those who are already treating the media as an organ of class power. We can rest assured that every advantage we leave to them will be taken up, exploited and used against us. The exposure of the “interests” underlying existing media, and the attempt to provide a consistent counter-narrative, has to be the cornerstone of the left’s propaganda efforts.