The power of the media

Vested interests have long recognised that the media is instrumental in shaping people’s opinions and determining how they think and how they vote. So it was not surprising when Gina Rinehart decided to buy up some media interests early in 2012. Clues to the origin of the idea could be found in the video released by the grassroots campaigning organisation GetUp! not long after. If anyone was in any doubt that the world is run by corporations whose aim is to maintain “business as usual” regardless of the environmental and/or social consequences, one needed to look no further than the this video.

It shows a secretly filmed meeting that took place in July 2011 between “Lord” Monckton and mining industry representatives, with the former explaining the importance of buying up the media in order to spread the desired message: “Whatever you do at street level, which is what you’re talking about here, is not going to have much impact compared with capturing an entire news media…

“Look at the effect Andrew Bolt has had since he was rocketed to fame… and that is the way to do it. You have to capture the high ground of what are still the major media and … will remain for quite some time. And until we crack that one both in the UK and Australia we’re going to suffer from a disadvantage… against the more libertarian minded right-wing people in the United States who have got Fox News and have therefore got things like a Tea-Party and therefore at last have put some lead into the pencil of the Republican Party.

“It seems to me that devoting some time and effort into encouraging those we know who are super rich to invest in even establishing a new satellite TV channel is not an expensive thing, and then get a few Jo Novas and Andrew Bolts to go on and do the commentating every day…

“I’d like to suggest a modest free market solution for the problem we’ve identified (which is that we don’t have a TV channel of our own). I’d be very happy to work with people like Jo Nova, Andrew Bolt etc to put together a business plan for such a thing, if that idea were to be generally supported, and then we’ll see if we can get someone to be an angel funder. “

Enter Gina Rinehart?

In his speech to the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) 70th birthday dinner on April 4, 2013, Tony Abbott said “John Howard has said that Rupert Murdoch has been by far Australia’s most influential international businessman; but I would like to go a little further. Along with Sir John Monash, the Commander of the First AIF which saved Paris and helped to win the First World War, and Lord Florey a one-time provost of my old Oxford College, the co-inventor of penicillin that literally saved millions of lives, Rupert Murdoch is probably the Australian who has most shaped the world through the 45 million newspapers that News Corp sells each week and the one billion subscribers to News-linked programming.

“Rupert Murdoch has sometimes changed his political allegiance but he’s never changed his fundamental principles. At least since the mid-70’s, those have been greater personal responsibility, smaller government, fewer regulations and support for open societies that don’t build walls against the world.

“For our guest of honour, as for anyone deeply steeped in reporting, experience trumps theory and facts trump speculation. His publications have borne his ideals but never his fingerprints. They’ve been skeptical, stoical, curious, adventurous, opinionated yet broad minded. He’s influenced them, but he’s never dictated to them.

“…Rupert Murdoch is a corporate citizen of many countries, but above all else, he’s one of us. Most especially, tonight, he’s a long-serving director of the IPA, as was his distinguished and celebrated father, Sir Keith.”

It is hard to know whether Abbott was being disingenuous or naïve when he suggested that  Murdoch’s  publications “have borne his ideals but never his fingerprints” and that he has “influenced them, but he’s never dictated to them”, especially when seconds before he exclaimed that “Rupert Murdoch is probably the Australian who has most shaped the world through the 45 million newspapers that News Corp sells each week and the one billion subscribers to News-linked programming.”

To some extent he may be right. Maybe Murdoch, who owns 70% of Australia’s media, hasn’t had to because he employs the people whom he knows will do it for him.

“This country is sailing forth. It is a wonderful land of opportunity, with the right leadership, the right governments, the right bureaucrats and so on… Whatever you do, don’t let the bloody Greens mess it up.”

This is a direct quote from Rupert Murdoch as it appeared in Tom Dusevic’s report This is a land of opportunity, says Rupert Murdoch in The Australian on October 29, 20102. Like most Greens, Bob Brown, then still in the Senate, was fed up with the constant portrayal of The Greens as dangerous, loony ratbags, mainly by the Murdoch media. So Bob, who has always been an ideas person, decided to put out a booklet with some of the positive media that has appeared over recent times. Murdoch’s quote appears on the front cover of the booklet. On the back is this one from Miranda Devine’s January 12, 2012 blog post Bob’s heroes should catch next whale home:

“If the Greens say it’s a good idea, it’s not.”

Bob says with typical good cheer in his brief but to to-the-point introduction inside the front cover “We’re sick of the Murdoch media’s anti-Greens bias; we want a little balance. We make no apology for the happy selectivity of the extracts of enclosed commentary on the Greens; our aim is to leave you smiling as we enter 2012.”

Some of the quotes used in the booklet provide a clue as to why there is such a bias towards the Greens by the mainstream media, reflected and reiterated by the ALP and the Coalition, and vice versa. As George Megalogenis says¹, “…Privately, the main parties concede that the Greens represent a structural risk to their respective bases because they have so many young people already on board. If they are not thinking Labor or Coalition in their twenties and thirties, what could make them change in their middle age?”

In New Matilda², Ben Eltham wrote “Tony Abbott will no doubt continue to argue that Bob Brown is really in charge and the the Greens represent dangerous, extreme and radical policy perspectives, an argument which is sure to find support in many sections of the Murdoch press.

“All this talk of what Bob Brown should do should Tony Abbott win the next election is just a little bit premature. Quite apart from the hypothetical nature of the discussion, it’s not even guaranteed that the Greens would retain the balance of power in the next Senate. The Coalition controlled it as recently as 2004-07 and could quite conceivably pick up a senator in Western Australia and Queensland to win back the Senate in 2013.”

Premature it may have been, but clearly Abbott’s strategy is part of the ongoing practice of scaring people away from voting for The Greens so The Greens no longer have balance of power. It’s handy to have friends like Murdoch.

Ex-Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, who will not be recontesting the Victorian seat of Batman, is quoted by Peter Martin in his April 2011 Herald article³ as saying ‘(the Greens) want to sit under the tree and weave baskets with no jobs.’ Leaving aside the poor unemployed baskets, Peter Martin says that “the views of Greens supporters are not outside the mainstream. They are likely to be more in touch with orthodox economics than the mainstream.

“Greens voters are far more likely than either Labor or the Coalition to support higher taxes on mining profits, a view in line with the International Monetary Fund, the Henry Review and the Treasury.

“They are far more accepting of the mainstream scientific position on climate change – that it is happening and caused by human activity. And they believe market mechanisms rather than regulations are the best way to get emissions down.

“(The Greens’) tax policies echo those of the Henry Tax Review. Tax breaks for high income earners would go, fringe benefits tax concessions that encourage the needless driving of cars would be scrapped and capital gains would not be tax-preferred over other returns from saving. All income received in whatever form would be taxed at the standard rate and the scales would be rejigged to remove high effective rates faced by those trying to get off welfare.

“…This isn’t an argument in favour of the Greens policies, although as it happens I find them attractive. They fit within the economic mainstream. They are coherent, readily available on the web and far more than a grab-bag from a ‘party of protest’ that sits ‘under the tree and weave(s) baskets with no jobs.’

“If the Greens have got it wrong on economics then so have the text-books they have read and so has Ken Henry.”

Fergus Green in his report on the online political journal Inside Story⁴said “until the Greens took the balance of power in both the House of Representatives (along with some green-minded independents) and the Senate (in their own right), the battle for Australia’s future was a one-sided bloodbath. Labor, the Coalition and Australia’s business and policy elite have long shared a basic commitment to the rapid and far-reaching expansion of fossil fuel consumption and production – for domestic use and for export – in Australia.

“The key difference this time is that the Greens were on the battlefield fighting for a different vision: a genuine clean energy future for Australia.
“…(They) have peeled back the coal industry’s fig leaf and tipped the balance of low-emissions technology development in favour of renewables.”

It has become quite normal for media commentators and other political parties to make alarmist generalisations about the Greens, highlighted by Guy Rundle’s Crikey article of August 2011⁵. “Since the carbon tax is effectively a mechanism that reshapes the relationship between environment, economy and society (albeit in a fairly modest way initially), its introduction is really a keystone of a transformed political process.”

Rundle points to the skew in reportage on The Greens:

“…Thus the Greens are a fearsome Stalinist force but they’re a bunch of woolly, mung bean eaters but they’re blinkered ideologues, and on it goes round and round. To the casual observer it’s obvious that there is far more strategic and parliamentary talent concentrated in the Greens than there is in the headquarters of either major party.

“Indeed, so frantic have the Right become about the Greens that they’ve recently concocted a new narrative?—?that the Greens have had an easy run because they’ve never been subject to proper scrutiny. This was the actual subject of an editorial in the Oz, inviting the obvious response, shit yeah, if only one had a national newspaper to do that.

“The ‘Greens have never been properly scrutinised’ line has some hilarious aspects?—?in the mid-2000s, the Herald Sun picked apart the Greens policies on drugs, line by line. Sadly they then misassembled the items in question in their news stories, obliging the Hun to run a full-page notice from the Press Council damning the report. When one of the journalists charged with performing the hatchet job was threatened with jail for non-disclosure of sources (on a later, unrelated story) Bob Brown spoke up in his defence, something you can be damn sure you won’t see from the other major parties.

“The latest twist to this?—?’The Greens?—?behind the secretive party we’ve written 8000 articles on’ approach is the non-gotcha gotcha, something at which Glenn Milne appears to be a dab hand.
It goes like this: journo approaches Bob Brown or Christine Milne and says ‘aha?—?you say you want to reduce carbon emissions, but won’t that spell death for the coal industry?’ and they respond ‘well yes we are going to have to phase out coal pretty rapidly’ at which point the journo goes ‘aha?—?so you admit it’, ‘well?—?yes, we’ve put out several releases saying that …’ and on it goes, often for 700-800 words.

Online political commentary website The Conversation posted an article in May 2013, which also appeared elsewhere, enticingly titled Whose views skew the news? Media chiefs ready to vote out Labor, while reporters lean left.
It began as follows:

Most Australian journalists describe themselves as left-wing, yet amongst those who wield the real power in the country’s newsrooms, the Coalition holds a winning lead.

But while the media’s political leanings will no doubt be debated in the lead-up to September’s federal election, our study has also found other largely unscrutinised biases remain – particularly whose views disproportionately shape the news.

Conducted between May 2012 and March this year, the University of the Sunshine Coast’s representative survey of 605 journalists around Australia found that more than half (51.0%) describe themselves as holding left-of-centre political views, compared with only 12.9% who consider themselves right-of-centre.

It is the first study of its kind in more than 20 years to involve such a large number of journalists, and follows on from the work of John Henningham in the early 1990s.

Our survey was conducted by telephone with carefully selected journalists from newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, online news sites and news agency AAP, as a sample of the 8000 to 10,000 journalists in Australia today.

When asked about their voting intentions, less than two-thirds of the journalists we surveyed revealed their voting intention. Of those 372 people, 43.0% said they would give their first preference vote to Labor; 30.2% would vote for the Coalition; and 19.4% said they would choose the Greens – about twice the Australian average.

Eric Abetz, Liberal Senator from Tasmania, cottoned onto this when questioning the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott in the Senate Committee hearing into the ABC on Wednesday May 29, 2013. He said “Mr Scott, do you have any sense of a recent survey which found that 41% of ABC journalists said they would vote for the Greens, 32% for Labor and 15% for the Coalition generally reflects ABC journalists political leanings?”

Mark Scott’s reply hints at the reality of the survey findings, facts with which Abetz was perhaps hoping Scott was unacquainted. Scott said “No. There are about 1000 journalists who work across the ABC in news, radio, rural divisions and others…. We have 1000 journalists and 34 were contacted… Do I believe it is an overwhelming problem? No I do not.”

Even The Conversation failed to include the number of ABC journalists who were contacted. Telling small parts of a much larger story as highlighted by Guy Rundle in his article quoted above can be an effective way of sensationalising something with the intent of scaring people off and is common  practice among journalists and politicians alike. Eric Abetz was no doubt secretly pleased by the other findings of the Sunshine Coast University survey which revealed the following (again, quoted from the same article posted in The Conversation.)

Media bosses more in sync with voters
Yet, among those who arguably matter most – the journalists in senior editorial ranks who have the most power to decide news agendas – a dramatically different picture emerged.

Among the 83 senior editors who took part in the survey, the Coalition was the party of choice on 43.2%, followed by Labor (34.1%) and the Greens (11.4%).

This suggests that Australia’s media bosses are more in line with the broader electorate, at least according to recent Newspoll results.

It is important to note that there is little research showing that journalists’ personal political biases affect their work.

When asked in this survey about a range of influences on their work, many journalists said their superiors have a much stronger influence than their personal values and beliefs.

“This suggests that Australia’s media bosses are more in line with the broader electorate, at least according to recent Newspoll results,” eh? Well, that’s one way of looking at it.

Is it just a coincidence that senior journalists, that is, those who decide what goes in the news, just happen to be in the same proportion to the number of people who intend to vote for the Coalition? Especially if you pair that with the last statement of the extract above, that “many journalists said their superiors have a much stronger influence than their personal values and beliefs.”

There is another possibility, and that is that the media is instrumental in shaping people’s opinions and determining how they think and how they vote.

As mentioned, sensationalism is a handy tool and one bound to attract some attention, particularly if you are rich and perceived by some to be a little eccentric, and such a person doesn’t always have to own the media or be the mouthpiece for the media owner to get one’s point across. If you can create controversy or confrontation, you are more than likely to grab some media attention. Pauline Hanson was (albeit often unintentionally) an expert, and now that she has announced her intention to stand for the Senate again with the catchcry “the redhead you can trust”, may attract similar levels of media attention in the lead-up to the election.

A blatant and shameless example of media manipulation in the extreme would have to be Clive Palmer’s admission that he only said that Greenpeace and Green Drew Hutton were funded by the CIA to keep negative attention away from Campbell Newman, so Newman could win government in the Queensland State Election. This is from the ABC online report of March 26, 2012:

“Without you [media], without Julia Gillard, without the Treasurer, without the Greens raising these things in the Senate, who knows where the attention might have been in the last weeks coming up to the election?” he said.

“So it’s wonderful that all of you could play a small role in having Campbell Newman elected as Premier of Queensland.

“So well done, you all deserve a round of applause.”

The fact that Clive Palmer set out to manipulate the outcome of an election seems to have been laughed off. The result may well have been identical without his intervention, but imagine the outcry if The Greens tried a similar stunt.

Maybe a stunt is what is needed to capture the attention of senior media management. On the other hand, and bearing in mind the results of the Sunshine Coast University survey, it’s simply not enough to capture their attention. We need them to inject some balance and truth into their coverage of issues of democracy.

 

To be continued…