This week, the News Corp tabloids ran front pages proclaiming the beginning of the “Dark Ages” and insisting Australia “Step On The Gas” in pursuit of rectifying “Australia’s gas shortage”.
On Monday December 2, the News Corp tabloids in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide published front pages promoting increased investment in gas. The Courier-Mail and Herald Sun splashed with “STEP ON THE GAS”, with the Hun even branding it an “exclusive”. Meanwhile The Daily Telegraph and The Advertiser splashed with “DARK AGES: We must step on the gas to keep lights on”, with The Advertiser describing it as a “special report”.
Each newspaper also carried an identical double-page spread which revealed in the top-right corner that the “exclusive” “special report” was in fact “proudly sponsored” by Santos, APA Group, Tamboran Resources and Jemena — all major gas companies. While Santos, APA and Tamboran are all publicly listed, Jemena is majority-owned by the Chinese state grid, with 40% also owned by Singaporean state-owned power company Singapore Power.
As Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor Adam Morton wrote today, this wasn’t news coverage. Rather, it was “an advertorial paid for by a fossil fuel industry”.
Who did the tabloids quote?
The print spread carried two articles from senior reporter John Rolfe (who also pens News Corp’s “Public Defender” column). One was titled “Only gas can save us now”, while the other was titled “Zapped! Cost of energy plan chaos is painful” (the latter also carrying an “exclusive” tag).
In the former piece, Rolfe quoted Woodside Energy CEO Meg O’Neill, APA Group’s managing director Adam Watson, Santos CEO and managing director Kevin Gallagher, and Australian Energy Producers’ chief Samantha McCulloch, with a line from Energy Minister Chris Bowen at the end.
In the latter, Rolfe quotes grocery producers who said gas cost increases had impacted their business.
The spread also carried an article by former foreign minister and high commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer, titled “High power prices, less reliability and fleeing industry: Welcome to our future”, which argued that “if we want to maintain anything close to our current living standards … we’re going to have to continue to use gas”.
Downer’s qualifications are an undergraduate degree in politics and economics . Over the course of 40 years in public life, he never held an energy or environment-related position, barring a four-month stint in 1987 as shadow environment minister. He is also, incidentally, the chairman of a natural hydrogen and helium gas firm called Gold Hydrogen, as the article disclosed.
What do the experts say?
Professor Jeremy Moss is a climate justice researcher at the University of New South Wales and told Crikey that there was “no basis whatsoever to argue for increased investment in natural gas in Australia, and the reason for that is, as many people have pointed out, there is no gas shortage at all in Australia, because we export the vast majority of our gas overseas”.
“So the argument that there’s a shortage, and because of the shortage, we need to invest in opening up more fields, is just completely wrong and mistaken as you might expect from a paid-for advertisement from the [gas] industry.”
“These arguments that are being run by the gas industry are just incredibly misleading and harmful to the debate about climate change, because they misrepresent the role of gas in Australia’s energy mix, and they misrepresent the need to open more gas fields,” Moss continued. “We have an ample supply of gas to meet our needs, except those companies choose to sell it to other countries instead of making it available for domestic consumption.
Dr Pep Canadell, chief research scientist at the CSIRO and executive director of the Global Carbon Project, told Crikey that while a mix of resources as part of an energy mix were needed, “we just need to think about the implications of this … if you have more and more sources of emissions, it means we will have to come up with more and more technology to offset those emissions”.
“And that technology is just so ridiculously expensive, it’s unclear and very unlikely that by 2040 or 2050, when we need [net zero] full on, [that] it will be at any reasonable prices.”
Has News Corp defended it?
Crikey contacted the editors of News Corp’s capital city metropolitan tabloids: Sam Weir in Melbourne, Chris Jones in Brisbane, Ben English in Sydney and Gemma Jones in Adelaide. We asked why none of their papers disclose on the front page that the story leading their splash was sponsored by gas companies, along with lacking disclosures online. We asked whether they felt that practice was sufficiently transparent for their readership and whether they felt it was an ethical model of journalistic practice.
We also asked how much was paid collectively for the sponsored gas coverage and whether any of the papers carried alternate or opposing views.
We did not receive a response.
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