The news media environment has shifted. It is increasingly shifting onto the web. Reporting facts, especially political facts, has shifted towards opinion. In a new series of articles, The Sniper will take aim at some of these opinions, sometimes providing alternative opinions, for balance, and sometimes providing facts that have been overlooked, or left out.
I begin with an article written by Simon Cowan, research director of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS,”a classical liberal think tank”), and published in The Canberra Times. My remarks appear in italic, between the original paragraphs. Only the first half of the article has been reproduced for this critical analysis.
What’s really behind Rudd’s call for a Murdoch royal commission?
24 OCTOBER 2020 | CANBERRA TIMES
More than 350,000 people have now signed a petition launched by Kevin Rudd calling for a royal commission into media ownership.
Ownership is one of several concerns listed in the petition’s preamble. Possible disruption to ownership, predominantly Murdoch’s, is a concern to Conservatives, who benefit from the imbalance & political bias.
The preamble also expresses concern for the future viability of news media.
Of course there are many petitions every year – 80 are open at the moment – and most are not, and should not be, taken seriously.
Petitioning is a basic right afforded by democracies. It the business of the parliamentary Petitions Committee to decide if petitions conform to requirements and whether or not they should be taken seriously (that is, tabled in parliament and forwarded to the relevant minister for comment, which is optional). This decision is not the province of a conservative “think tank”, such as the Centre for Independent Studies.
However, not all are launched by a former prime minister, nor given extensive, positive coverage on the ABC’s Media Watch. That puts Rudd’s petition on a different scale to, say, the call to ban Omegle (which currently has 64 signatures).
“Scale” has nothing to do with the coverage by Media Watch. The program deals with media matters and, even so, cannot deal with every media issue in a weekly program of 20 minutes or so. The number of signatures when the petition closed on November 4 (501,876) is a better measure of the “scale” of the issue, the level of public concern, which was limited to people who use social media. Cowan does not tell us how many of those 80 open petitions concerned media matters.
Although the petition is far more restrained in its language, in his video launching the petition, Rudd singles out News Corporation, saying that “Murdoch has become a cancer … on our democracy.”
Is there an implication here that Rudd’s language in the petition’s preamble and in the video should be identical? How can that be? His language in his ABC Q&A appearance on November 9 was stronger still. Rudd has been describing Murdoch’s media influence as “a cancer on our democracy” for the past three years. The missing words represented by Cowan’s ellipses are “an arrogant cancer”.
Rudd outlined four separate reasons for his royal commission call, but it largely boils down this: News Corporation has a high concentration of print ownership, this allegedly gives them/Murdoch significant political power, and that power is allegedly used against Labor and other ideological opponents.
Rudd has not boiled down his petition as Cowan suggests. That is Cowan’s doing. His concern (the concern of the LNP Coalition and Libertarians alike) is the possible reduction of Murdoch’s ability to influence elections. As stated before, Rudd is concerned with the future viability and health of news media, not only Murdoch’s dominance of print media.
Not only should this argument be challenged on the facts, it should be rejected on policy grounds as well.
Rudd has provided facts, and Cowan would have been aware of them when he wrote the above sentence. Rudd has stated that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp papers have supported the Liberal party in the past 18 elections. Facts, when they are available, should be provided, not ignored in order to make a point.
I don’t know what Cowan is referring to when he says “it should be rejected on policy grounds as well”.
Lamentable though it may be, the importance of the print media may be at its lowest point in 100 years. A survey from February indicated that while more than 60 per cent of people got news from television, just 25 per cent reported using print sources for news in the last week.
Printed news media has been dying since the advent of commercial and secure websites, at the beginning of the 1990s. Companies have been advertising on their own websites and increasingly on television and on social media platforms. Things change. One might as well lament the passing of the horse and buggy or coal-fired steam engines.
Another reason for the demise of newspapers is the shift in their content, with a new focus, by some, on fiction, sleaze, scandal, political assassination – anything to appeal to a mass audience in order to survive.
Of course print media still plays an outsized role in policy debates, but news has moved away from print towards social media, television and digital publications.
“Outsized” in relation to what? How can debate can take place in print media when the bulk of it is oriented towards Conservative, Liberal policies? Socialist oriented policies are generally howled down by our Press. “… but news has moved away from print …”. Is it still relevant or not? “Outsized” or not? It’s gibberish and doesn’t tell us anything we are not already aware of.
But the digital news space has nowhere near the same level of dominance for News Corporation. The latest Nielsen ratings show that the news website with the largest digital circulation is actually the ABC, with News Corporation owning just two of the top 10 websites (news.com.au and The Australian).
In the first sentence above (and in the preceding paragraph), Cowan doesn’t mention the extent of News Corp’s print domination (60-70 per cent), he switches the focus to the ABC. He must know that in June News Corp closed more than 100 suburban and regional newspapers and moved some of them onto the web. What will that do to the Nielsen figures, to dominance? He also makes no mention of the LNP federal government’s $50 million support package for regional newspapers announced last April.
The remainder of the paragraph is an artifice that Cowan often uses; he takes two different things and runs them together as if one is proof of the other. This is the work of a creative accountant rather than a researcher. The research of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and published results is always biased towards the Libertarian viewpoint, the very reason for its existence.
Meanwhile, the largest regional digital news publication is actually the Australian Community Media Network (which publishes this paper).
The network referred to is not a publication. Perhaps Cowan meant publisher.
I could continue in the same vein, providing facts, revealing alternative or hidden meanings, illustrating that the author has chosen details that suit his argument. This is not the work of a researcher who has thoroughly examined the situation and presented a balanced picture.
I’ll leave the rest of the article for readers to judge for themselves. Most of it deals with earlier media inquiries, with the age-old battle between Left and Right and today’s media realities. The headline, possibly written by a sub-editor, suggests an exposé. The article is not an exposé. It is a crafted defence of the status quo. The last line is the give-away:
And we should be very careful about listening to those who want to change the rules primarily because it makes it easier for their team to win government.
Cowan has read the petition’s preamble. He refers to its four concerns above. He knows it is not about making it easier for one team to win government.
Ends
TruthInNewsMedia 
In this day and age, analysis of many articles is vitally important, if only to fill in important facts that may, or may not, have been deliberately omitted.
I have one suggestion which I feel would improve the readability of articles here, and that is to also use Colour for your comments in Italics.
Thank you Michele. I will do as you suggest next time, for a comparison.