Can anything be done to improve the Australian news media? That’s the question to be considered, for the umpteenth time, by the new Senate inquiry into media diversity in Australia.
The inquiry will consider “any barriers to Australian voters’ ability to access reliable, accurate and independent news”. It could hardly be more important. Such access is one of the things that keeps our country governable.
Centuries ago, before the invention of the printing press, myth and fact merged.
Rumours flew around pre-newspaper Europe. Town criers talked in one breath of a local wedding, and in the next of headless invaders from the North, and of how the latest wave of the plague was caused by Jews. The world outside one’s immediate circle was mysterious, frightening and unknowable.
The printing press, and eventually the invention of newspapers, pushed back myth.
Access to reliable information made both modern capitalism and democracy possible. Even the idea of “the public” – meaning people who don’t know each other but who share common interests – did not really exist before the printing press.
Yet in our own time we seem to be going backwards. A world in which anyone can publish is worryingly similar to a world in which there is no publication. Everyone’s experience, everyone’s fear, everyone’s conspiracy theory, become equal.
Consider the USA, where social media has led to what once would have been fringe movements growing to the point where almost half the population is in the thrall of falsehood. Verifiable facts, such as the place of Barack Obama’s birth, or who won an election, are not believed. Add to that the partisan role played by News Corporation’s Fox News, which both feeds on and nourishes the dark side of social media.
So the inquiry by our Senate is important, and yet it makes me feel weary.
There have been more than 30 inquiries into aspects of media health and regulation conducted by Australian governments and parliaments over the last twenty years. I have made submissions to and appeared before many of them.
The current inquiry is the predictably anaemic outcome to Kevin Rudd’s record-breaking petition to parliament calling for a Royal Commission into News Corporation. It collected more than 500,000 signatures. The inquiry will be a rapid fire affair, with submissions closing on 11 December and a final report on 31 March.
Thankfully, the decades of previous inquiries mean that there isn’t much we don’t know about what’s wrong with news media. We even know some of the things that might be done about it.
Most previous inquiries have done serious work and issued serious recommendations, only to be comprehensively ignored by governments. It is many decades now since Australia had a media policy worthy of the name. Instead, we have had a series of moves to remove admittedly outdated regulations, and some horse trading around the edges as part of that process.
Highlights (or lowlights, depending on your point of view) of the last couple of decades include the Convergence Review in 2012, the Finkelstein report into news media regulation, also in 2012, a brace of reports by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and more recently the Senate Committee into the Future of Public Interest Journalism – which was something of a zombie before it had reported because its prime movers (Nick Xenophon, Sam Dastyari and Scott Ludlam) had trouble staying in parliament.
This latter inquiry, nevertheless, together with Xenophon playing hardball in the Senate, resulted in the regional and small publishers innovation fund – which was a sop government gave to publishers in the wake of removing restrictions on concentration of ownership. This grants scheme has since been broadened and improved, including in the wake of Covid 19 which saw many local publications fall over a cliff. The inquiry was also one of the prods for the subsequent ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry, which was reported last year and is one of the best analyses of the sustainability crisis facing news media.
The ACCC report contained alarming data on the shift of advertising revenue from print media to online, and the resulting loss of journalistic capacity.
Revenue from journalism began to fall in 2001 as classified advertisements became unbundled from the physical artefact of the newspaper. That transformation was completed more than a decade ago, but news media revenue has continued to decline, dropping off a cliff when Google, Facebook and YouTube began their journey to dominance in about 2014.
Data provided to the ACCC by media companies showed that there were 20 percent fewer journalists employed in what were once newspapers and are now print and online news media companies than there were in 2014. That, the ACCC noted, had happened when the country’s population and economy had both grown strongly.
Not surprisingly, the ACCC also chronicled a drop in various categories of journalism, including stories on science and health.
It is worth reflecting that the Covid 19 reporting in our own time would probably better serve the needs of the audience if more of it was done by health reporters. As it is, political reporting dominates, because a thinned-out parliamentary press gallery is one of the few things we have left. The specialist rounds reporting – health, science, the arts – has been gutted.
While the new web-based entrants to news media – such as the Guardian in Australia – have made important contributions to diversity, they have not gone close to offsetting what has been lost. The ACCC said six of the larger “digital natives”, with a combined audience of close to five million, collectively employed fewer than 250 full-time editorial staff. As well, none of them reported local news. They concentrated on the national and international.
The ACCC report was the start of the move to make Google and Facebook pay for news media content – resulting in draft legislation currently out for consultation.
In this generally gloomy landscape, the state of local journalism – rural, regional and suburban – is particularly dire.
This is where we find the news deserts. Research by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative shows that many local governments across the country are not reported at all (declaration: I am on the board, and was involved in this research). Lack of local news deprives communities of agency and voice, and is associated with a decline in other measures of civic health.
Most of the problems of our nation play out on the urban fringe. I am told ASIO and other security services are worried that recently arrived migrants and their children have no access to the kind of local news that might help to bind them to their communities, and give them a stake in their adopted country.
Deprived of news relevant to their lives, young people turn to social media, with its potential for radicalisation.
In a move little noticed in the cities, the SkyNews right wing news service is now available for free through WIN Television in Australia’s regions – meaning that rural and regional viewers are likely to have a very different media diet to those in the cities, potentially deepening the rural-city divide.
Will we end up with a USA-style society, where we can’t even agree on the facts and the issues?
The main antidote to that possibility – and an important difference between Australia and the USA - is the ABC is also available for free across the country, and provides local as well as national news. But the ABC is in a funding crisis.
So what can be done?
Everyone knows that fury against News Corporation was the spur for this new Senate inquiry. Some will want to force Murdoch to divest, or to somehow behave better.
Any such moves will fail – and so they should.
Forcing News to sell media outlets probably isn’t possible under Australian law, and government interference in what media organisations can publish is both extremely dangerous to democracy, and probably unconstitutional.
Rather, I think, tackling Australia’s horribly concentrated media landscape should involve positive moves to encourage investment and start-ups, rather than negative action against an already fading News Corporation.
Here are some of the ideas that have been pitched at previous inquiries, and that remain relevant.
The ACCC considered – but dismissed – the idea of a tax incentive for investment in public interest journalism. Since then, more work has been done on this idea by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (declaration: I am on the board, and was involved in this research).
The scheme PIJI has investigated would be similar to the existing Research and Development Tax Incentive, in which businesses can claim a rebate for relevant expenditure. It makes it cheaper to hire and support journalists. Such a scheme could be targeted at small media, local media or to any other sector, or made universal.
Another move could be the same kind of tax incentive that used to apply in the 1970s for investment in the film industry. That saw money flow from mum and dad investors. Many fine films (and many very bad ones) were made as a result.
The benefits live on, with most of those currently working in film and television in Australia having begun their careers on the back of the tax incentive enabled boom.
Either of these moves could, I think transform the health of Australian news media.
The strength of tax incentives is that while they are a kind of public funding, they are out of the reach of political interference – unlike the government grants to news media, which have already been politicised with the Guardian being “stiffed” in the first version of the scheme.
Another move recommended by the ACCC and the last Senate inquiry was for philanthropic donations to public interest journalism enterprises to be made tax deductible – as is already the case in the USA and some other countries. In the USA, this has led to outlets such as ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity pioneering big and important investigative projects.
In Australia, some charitable foundations have given money to The Conversation, and to The Guardian. In both cases, due to arrangements involving universities, these are tax deductible.
But if a rural philanthropist wanted to give money to her local news service, she would have to do so without any tax benefit.
Then there are the public broadcasters. Here are some ideas that might appeal even to the current government.
There could be tied funding for edge-of-urban correspondent in every large city. These positions could be shared between the ABC and SBS, since they would speak to both their charters
The ABC could also be funded for its vital role as an emergency broadcaster – as recommended by the recent Royal Commission into the bushfires.
Lastly - and this one is ambitious – the ABC and SBS could be funded on a ten-year cycle, rather than the current three years.
This would take funding issues out of the heat of any particular controversy, and out of the political cycle.
Finally, you could fix the level of funding to a stable indicator - such as the number of enrolled voters, or total government expenditure.
I will fight off my weariness at the idea of yet another inquiry into the news media.
The fact that the issue keeps coming before the parliament is evidence that the condition of news media in Australia is a pervasive and persistent problem, deserving of continuous public attention.
An investment in its health is also an investment in our democracy, our knowledge of our fellow citizens, and our ability to move forward together.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.
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