Each time News Corp turns its sights on a new target, Twitter campaigners blame an unprecedented “Murdochracy” for the dire state of our political culture.
Yet we need to remember that every significant social movement in Australian history has faced vocal – and sometimes overwhelming – opposition from the mainstream press.
In 1856, when stonemasons working at the University of Melbourne marched through the city demanding the eight-hour day, the Melbourne Herald attacked them as “stupid mischievous blockhead[s]” engaging in “childish and useless perambulations”.
During the campaign against the Vietnam war, the Daily Telegraph urged citizens to avoid the moratorium demonstration like “a plague spot”, warning that anyone who attended took “a share in the mob’s blind recklessness, and that is a needless moral burden which no sane man will care to shoulder”.
After police attacked the first gay liberation Mardi Gras in 1978, the Sydney Morning Herald published the names of all those arrested, more or less guaranteeing their victimisation by employers and landlords.
If you try to change society, you necessarily challenge those invested in the status quo. Almost by definition, you must take on the corporations that benefit from the world-as-it-is – a category that, since at least the last 150 years, has included the various media empires.
That’s why, during most of the 20th century, newspapers, as a matter of course, urged their readers to vote conservative.
“The Australian presses,” writes Nick Economou, “privately owned and, for a large part of their history, subject to the authoritarian style of individual proprietors who saw intervention as the right of proprietorship, had a long record of never endorsing the Australian Labor Party.”
When the Melbourne Herald – the pre-eminent title in the Herald and Weekly Times stable – backed Bob Hawke in 1983, its decision broke a century-long run of anti-Labor editorials.
Back then, newspaper endorsements mattered – or, at least, they mattered considerably more than they do now.
Before the internet, Australians possessed few choices for news. If you lived in a metropolitan region, you opted between two or three daily papers and you tuned in to a handful of TV and radio stations.
The jingle with which Melbourne’s Channel Nine promoted its newsreader Brian Naylor captures something of the power that journalists once possessed.
“I know everything I need to know,” it ran, “because Brian told me so.”
No contemporary outlet would dare make a similar claim to a monopoly on relevant information. How could they? Today, the internet’s become the main source of news for Australians – and the diversity on offer dramatically reduces the authority of any particular outlet.
A survey found only 43% of Australians trusted the media, the only major institution distrusted by the majority of the population.
The popular scepticism about the media pertains particularly to the outlets most associated with rightwing culture wars, with, for instance, another study in 2021 showing how few people trusted the Daily Telegraph.
Yes, the rightwing media still wield power – but not nearly as much as they would like us to believe.
Think of the coverage of Anthony Albanese’s “gaffes”.
His campaign could only be derailed by gotcha questions because Labor’s “small target” strategy partly rested on placating News Corp so as to avoid even the hint of controversy. Hence Albanese’s willingness to endure the Daily Telegraph’s humiliating pop quizzes about his wokeness or lack thereof.
By refusing to fight for an agenda of its own, Labor’s allowed the media to set the terms of debate.
It didn’t have to be like that.
When Adam Bandt snapped “Google it, mate” at a reporter trying to catch him out on statistics, the answer resonated with a public disdainful of stunts and shenanigans.
Likewise, when pundits attacked Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, he simply attacked them back, consciously cultivating hostility from a deeply unpopular media class on the basis it would boost his own stocks.
In Victoria, Dan Andrews developed a different strategy with the lengthy press conferences he staged during the pandemic. The aggressive questioning Andrews received did not dent his standing; on the contrary, live footage of journalists questioning him won the premier considerable sympathy.
Even in the past, the conservative media has often proved impotent against those prepared to take it on.
In 1856, the stonemasons’ “useless perambulations” meant that Australian workers enjoyed the eight-hour day long before most comparable countries. The anti-war campaigners forced the government to withdraw from the cruel war in Vietnam; the gay rights movement grew and grew and grew, with the SMH eventually apologising for its coverage.
Today, Jack Waterford correctly describes the Murdoch media as a “paper tiger”, noting that its titles failed, despite concerted campaigning, to swing the vote in elections in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.
He adds: “They often fail to set the agenda as well. It appeared, for example, that the moral panic about African gangs – supposed to have made every Melburnian afraid to go out at night – caused a backlash – making many voters disgusted at the thinly disguised racial basis of the campaign and swinging instead to Labor. At the height of the Dictator Dan disturbances, with the Herald Sun (and the Australian) virtually inciting an uprising against Melbourne’s lockdown, the popularity of the premier, Daniel Andrews, seemed to actually increase.”
Mind you, paper tigers may as well be real if we cower under our beds in fear of them.
Obviously, it’s a good thing that so many people feel passionate about improving the media.
We can and should demand a different approach.
At the same time, progressives can’t use the media as an alibi for our own failures. The best reporting in the world won’t change society for us.
If we want to win, we have to actually fight.
Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist
