News Corp executive chairman Michael Miller fronted the National Press Club this afternoon where he denied his company is responsible for the scourge of trolling and bullying he says should be addressed by greater regulation of the nation’s media sector.
In a question to Miller, AAP’s Kat Wong noted that “a lot” of News Corp’s reporting has “caused women to be bullied”, pointing to the examples of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Brittany Higgins and Antoinette Lattouf. Wong asked whether it was acceptable for News Corp reporting to result in such detrimental outcomes.
“The work wasn’t intended to bully. They raised issues,” Miller said.
“I’d actually stand by a lot of our journalism and the positive impact it has and the advocacy we undertake.”
With News Corp having recently slashed jobs amid a major restructure, and the company launching a number of public campaigns with an election on the way, journalists from other outlets (including your correspondent, who drove down to the capital for a dose of the action) were lining up to ask Miller a question.
SBS chief political correspondent Anna Henderson asked about fact-checking standards and accuracy, as well as content produced during the Voice referendum by the likes of News Corp commentator Andrew Bolt. Miller said he realised not everything the company produced was “liked by all, but that is part of what our democracy is, ensuring that various views are surfaced”.
Miller also disputed the premise of a question from the ABC’s Monte Bovill asking whether the level of News Corp reporting on the ABC was justified. In Senate estimates last week the ABC’s managing director David Anderson said the broadcaster hadn’t cowered to a “News Corp pile-on” over political journalist Laura Tingle’s recent comments that Australia was a “racist country”. While Miller refuted that News Corp was obsessed with the ABC, he made multiple mentions of the ABC’s Media Watch (he also mentioned the program in an interview on Radio National on Wednesday morning).
Asked by Crikey about whether News Corp’s tax record — the company paid no tax in Australia despite making $1.4 billion in profits in 2023 — was a model of a company that operated with a social licence, Miller dodged the question, insisting the company had “no issues with the tax department”. Further pressed by Crikey on the issue of media concentration, Miller said “Australians [have] never had more choice for media … we don’t have a monopoly on news.”
That is of course except for print papers in Queensland.
Miller also decried the likes of Meta and X as “a protected species”, and told the Press Club that social media algorithms had “turned us into addicts”, with negative effects of social media felt by a generation of young people whose leading cause of death was suicide.
“The blue thumbs up has a lot to answer for,” he said, as “young people became addicted to social media.”
Miller lambasted online scams and fake advertisements that misuse images of celebrities (referencing conversations he had with billionaire mining magnate Andrew Forrest, whose image has been used in scam ads).
“The list of what is going wrong just keeps getting longer,” Miller said, because “on social media, bad behaviour is good for business”.
Miller called for the implementation of a “social license” that technology companies would have to attain in order to operate in Australia, which would make those companies “liable for all content that is amplified, curated and controlled by their algorithms or recommender engines”.
Miller’s performance received a mixed response, according to people in the room.
One person told Crikey that the “irony was not lost” that a News Corp executive was speaking on social licences and corporate responsibility.
One News Corp reporter described Miller’s performance as “uninspiring”, but other business figures felt Miller had performed strongly under two rounds of significant scrutiny and questioning.
