The Fake Left just loves to blame the messenger. Kevin Rudd today at Domainfax:
So what should be done about the rolling crises washing over what remains of the Australian media? Rupert Murdoch has been up to his neck in the elevation and removal of Australia prime ministers for the better part of a decade. The ABC has seen the conservatives politicise its board, demolish its funding and pressure its management to get rid of troublesome journalists. And now we face the prospect of the disappearance of Australia’s longest, independent print masthead (Fairfax) as it is consumed by a television company (Nine) which is chaired by Peter Costello.
If ever there was a case for a full royal commission into the abuse of media power in Australia, it is now. A free media is the lifeblood of a democracy. But media freedom in Australia is now under structural threat from a combination of extreme ideological conservatism, fuelled by rampant commercial interests.
Yeh, well, the major media drivers of the Turnbull downfall were Ray Hadley and Alan Jones on Domainfax radio. The Murdoch print press played a smaller role and didn’t appear all that toxic to me (and I hate it!). Nobody even watches Sky News.
It is true that Murdoch played a substantial role in the mining coup that killed Kevin Rudd. But, again, the leaders of that event were elsewhere in the ‘independent’ Business Spectator.
Rudd himself was the key player in the very effective destabilisation media campaign against the Gillard Government via the Fake Left media.
Probably the most Murdoch-centric killing was Turnbull’s use of Newspoll to oust Abbott.
In short, Rudd’s whinge is partly true at best, distorts the real drivers of change, and misses the point that the ideological extremity of Leftist media is increasingly at fault as well.
The real driver of media change isn’t politics at all. It is the internet which has slaughtered mass media business models. It began with newspapers. It’s moved into magazines. Next up it will be free-to-air TV. After that it will probably be Pay TV as well.
The simple fact is that information and media is now freely available in a limitless range of online global choices with more and more new business models. Some are pushing back to the future in subscription funding, some are discovering how to extract advertising from the Google and Facebook destroyers. Others are doing original stuff like the MB Fund.
The response of the old media to these trends has been to aggressively fragment their mass market journalism into niches. It is true that Murdoch Media led this trend by swinging to the Fake Right (favouring corporate interests over markets, social conservatism and anti-science). This has given it an identity-driven business model and captured audience to monetise.
At the same time, Domainfax has swung to the Fake Left (favouring identity politics, globalism and property) for the same reasons.
Undoubtedly, politics has also begun to ape these trends as it seeks safety in supportive media and eschews the critical. In that sense Rudd is right because as that happens the fragmentation has prevented national interest policy-making and exacerbated the economic challenges of the post-mining and housing boom period. Thus, as living standards fall further than they would have otherwise the polity’s anger grows, and pollies fall.
The coup de grace is that these dynamics are made worse again by the areas of agreement between the two sides of the false media binary. With the economy steadily hollowed out by the failure of ideas, both sides have reverted to ever more perverse policy answers that specifically favour their business models. This is the mass immigration and urbanisation economic model that drives their realty businesses but also household debt, falling wages, hollowing out and rising wealth imbalances.
This entire system is pretty close to exhaustion with some kind of economic clean-out looming. Exactly who rises to take advantage of that in the context of fragmentation is anybody’s guess.
It’s possible that we have not yet seen the worst.
