The blatant bias shown by News Corp during the current election campaign is an example of a news media organisation taking an editorial decision to support one side of politics over another, instead of providing an objective and balanced coverage for their audience. The consequence of this decision, given that News Corp Australia titles account for 59% of the sales of all daily newspapers, is that articles covering the election have the intention of persuading the reader rather than informing them and allowing them to come to their own decision based on facts. When the lines between opinion, comment and reporting become blurred, the nation suffers as a result, and this format of news production goes against the essence of the fourth estate’s mandate.
Jones (2011, p.64) tells us that ‘the sense of social responsibility that has long existed at traditional news organisations is in retreat,’ and that in the United States, traditional news companies often have profit as their main objective. It would be hoped that Australia never sees anything as scandalous as the phone hacking affairs in the UK, yet as globalisation has allowed media moguls to expand their empires across borders, one needs to ponder the possibility that such an event could easily occur here.
Newspapers should also serve as a forum through which Habermas’ idea of the public sphere, whereby people from all social demographics can come together to discuss events in a free manner, should prosper. It is clear, however, that News Corp editors, at least for now, have rid themselves of this duty in order to better serve the interests of their boss.
Reference List
Jones, A 2011, ‘Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy,’ in Graber, D, Media Power in Politics, 6th edn, CQ Press, Washington, pp. 57 – 66
Lachie you raise some great points in this post and the News Corp election campaign was indeed extraordinarily strong and sustained and one-sided, particularly in the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun. The trouble with your high-minded ideal of the Fourth Estate is that unless a media outlet is funded and/or structured to be independent such as the BBC or the ABC or the Guardian or Fairfax, it is always owned by somebody wealthy who has every right to make their point known and has as much right and much more power than anyone else to influence the world in their own favour. What I worry about is that Murdoch's extracted some kind of promise from the incoming Abbott government in return for all the cooperation. As an ex-journalist who used to work on both the Telegraph and the Hun - and I might add, the Guardian too - I feel that partly the election campaign was about the survival of Australian newspapers as well as the revival of the conservatives in Australia. Murdoch's papers tend to sniff the wind and go with the side likely to win, so they look popular and so they look to be reflecting what most people want. What I'm saying is that although their journalism is offensively biased and professionally compromised, the Murdoch papers are fighting for attention as their circulation figures slip, and front pages like this gave them a lot of attention and probably boosted sales partly just due to their controversial nature. And also, if Labor had run the country better and not kept swapping leaders and squabbling amongst themselves, they would have been more popular among people and Murdoch's papers would have reflected that. I don't think they shaped the election but they certainly were aggressive in characterising it. Still, even you and I can publish our opinions these days, and as Rupert Murdoch might say, if you don't like it don't read it. In fact, you can tweet him these days. It says a lot about his menacing power, however, that even though I never want to work for his company again, I can't be sure that I won't one day need to in the future, so I don't ever allow myself to tweet at him what I really want to in case it comes back to haunt me!
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