Some issues go round and round the maypole in Australian public life. Media standards, and in particular the outsized influence of News Corporation, is one of them.
On Friday of this week, submissions will close for the Senate Committee inquiring into media diversity in Australia. This inquiry is the parliamentary response to Kevin Rudd’s petition calling for a Royal Commission into News Corporation.
As I have written previously, there have been more than 30 inquiries into aspects of the media over the last twenty years. Most of them have come to nothing.
But I want to talk about one of them – perhaps the most reviled – as a way of thinking about what has changed and what remains the same since it was reported nearly nineteen years ago.
The Independent Inquiry into the Media and Media Regulation was generally known as the Finkelstein Inquiry after its head, Ray Finkelstein QC. It was appointed by the Labor Government as a local version of the Leveson Inquiry in the United Kingdom, which followed revelations that journalists at the Murdoch-owned News of the World had hacked the phones of politicians, murder victims footballers and entertainers.
Nobody suggested that News Limited (as News Corporation was then known) had done anything like this in Australia but, then as now, News Corporation bias was at the centre of public debate. Most pointed to the Daily Telegraph and The Australian and their reporting on climate change and the National Broadband Network.
Finkelstein’s terms of reference ended up being more narrowly drawn – not covering media ownership but instead focussing first on ethical standards and second on the impact of technology on the advertising-based business model that paid for most journalism.
All the media organisations insisted there was no need to strengthen media accountability.
The then head of News Limited, John Hartigan, said any suggestion of bias on the part of the company was “an insult to readers” who were capable of making up their own minds.
But Finkelstein’s staff did some confronting research. They conducted a review of more than 45 years of public opinion polls, which showed a longstanding and worsening crisis of trust in mainstream media.
“The level of public confidence in journalists as a professional group and the media as an institution is lower, much lower than it is for other professions and institutions,” said Finkelstein.
Then as now, the ABC was consistently identified as the most trusted source of news and information. It was trusted by up to four fifths of citizens, whereas other media organisations struggled to get to half.
At the time, this aspect of Finkelstein’s report was either ignored by mainstream media, or rubbished. The common response was to deny that the polls were accurate.
Twenty years on, and I think we see the result of that crisis of trust. The words “Mainstream Media” have become terms of abuse in the right-wing social media forums where conspiracy theories brew. In the USA, at least, this threatens to undermine democracy. If the media isn’t trusted, democracy can’t work.
But back to Finkelstein. He surveyed the current methods of media accountability – from defamation law to the self-regulation system of Australian Press Council and the co-regulation system that applies to broadcasters. He found them wanting. ”I have come to the conclusion that these mechanisms are not sufficient to achieve the degree of accountability desirable in a democracy”.
He recommended setting up a new federal government funded body, called the News Media Council, to set journalism standards and handle complaints from the public. It would have the power to require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction or allow someone a right of reply. “This is in line with the ideals contained in the existing ethical codes but in practice often difficult to obtain,” observed Finkelstein.
Ultimately, if an editor refused a direction to print a retraction, she could be taken to court. If the editor still refused, she could be prosecuted for contempt.
As for the health of the media, Finkelstein reviewed it, and concluded it was too early to conclude that the news media needed government support to survive.
He said, though, that the “situation was changing rapidly” and should be kept under review. To that end, he recommended that the Productivity Commission be instructed to conduct an inquiry into the health of the news industry and make recommendations on the need for government support. “It should also consider the policy principles by which any government support should be given to ensure effectiveness, as well as eliminating any chance of political patronage or censorship”.
Now I should make a declaration. I appeared before Finkelstein and was, partly as a result, on the end of attention from The Australian. You can read an account of this ancient history here.
But despite The Australian claiming otherwise, I did not support Finkelstein’s main recommendation for the News Media Council. For me, the idea that an editor conscientiously defending their reporting might be jailed was several steps too far.
But nor was I prepared to rubbish everything that Finkelstein had done.
It all came to nothing. The then communications minister, Stephen Conroy, responded with a different proposal – setting up a Public Interest Media Advocate (PIMA) as a statutory official. This person would be able to impose a public interest test on changes to media ownership, and also would certify industry self-regulation schemes as meeting certain standards.
Media organisations would have to be members of these schemes, or else lose various protections and privileges under law – in particular, the media exemption in the Privacy Act.
Broadly, I agreed with what Conroy proposed. I thought it was a reasonable balance. Self-regulation bodies, such as the sclerotic Australian Press Council, would have to lift their game. No editors or journalists would go to jail.
Most media people did not agree. There was a Senate Committee Inquiry at which all the media moguls appeared in high dudgeon. The proposals, they said, were a threat to democracy and freedom of speech.
The Herald Sun labelled the package ‘a muzzle on free speech’. It called the PIMA the ‘Political Interest Commissar’ and saw it as having ‘powers more suited to an old Stalinist state than a modern democracy’. The Australian saw the package as reckless and flawed—a danger to democracy and free speech. The Sydney Morning Herald said that freedom of speech was too important ‘to be tossed at will into the fickle winds of cynical, face-saving politics’. And in the pinnacle of the one-sided reporting, The Daily Telegraph ran a front page mocked up photo of Conroy dressed as Joseph Stalin. When some suggested that the Telegraph had rather proved the point about media bias, it ran a mock apology – to Joseph Stalin.
In any case, the legislation lost the support of key cross benchers and the bills were withdrawn before the Senate Committee had even reported. All this was part of the story of the last days of the Gillard Government.
So, a couple of decades later, here we are again.
What has changed?
First, Finkelstein was plainly wrong in his relatively upbeat assessment of the financial health of the news media industry. As the recent Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report on digital platforms found, the disruption of the 90s and early 2000s as classified advertising disappeared online was only the beginning.
Advertising for news media dropped off another cliff in 2014. This was about the rise of Google and Facebook.
Data provided by media companies to the ACCC showed the number fell by 20 per cent from 2014 to 2018. This was at a time when both the population and the rest of the economy was growing strongly.
By the mid-2000s, Australia’s major metropolitan and national daily newspapers published:
- 26 per cent fewer articles on local government issues than at the peak of local government coverage in 2005;
- 40 per cent fewer articles on local court matters than at the peak of local court reporting in 2005;
- 30 per cent fewer articles on health issues than at the peak of health reporting in 2004 and
- 42 per cent fewer articles on science issues than at the peak of science reporting in 2006.
I was asked this week to name one thing that the media’s critics on Twitter did not fully understand. I am generalising, of course. But I think this is it.
It does not excuse all the faults of the media – as I have said, the crisis in trust is longstanding. So is News Corporation bias.
But who can doubt that the reporting of the coronavirus would have been better if it had been done mostly by specialist health reporters, for example? To those with a hammer, everything looks like a nail – so we got the politics of coronavirus, and not much else.
Investigative and national political reporting have been retained because they are important to brand. But behind that, the newsrooms are hollowed out.
In the late 1980s I was The Age’s Brisbane correspondent. I worked in an office that also housed two correspondents for the Australian Financial Review, two for the National Times newspaper (now defunct) and a correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. Reporting Queensland for southern audiences was regarded as crucial.
All those jobs have gone, and all the other jobs that involved reporting Australia to itself. So it is that we are taken by surprise when voters in Queensland determine an election. We struggle to understand why they think as they do. Or as I have written before Canberra and Sydney misread the mood in Victoria during the lockdown.
Appearing before Finkelstein, all the heads of media organisations rejected any suggestion that the government might provide funding or other kinds of help to safeguard a healthy news media.
That has changed. Now, everyone looks to government for action – from the News Media Bargaining Code to make Google and Facebook pay for using news media content, to the grants available under the Public Interest News Gathering program.
Concentration of media ownership, and the dominance of News Corporation, remains a dominant issue – but there are changes.
On the one hand there are new, digital only players. On the other there is further consolidation, with News Corporation allowed to take over regional newspapers (and close them down) and Nine amalgamating with Fairfax – a move that would certainly have been prevented had the public interest test proposed by Conroy become law.
Meanwhile James Murdoch, who took the rap for many of the problems revealed by the Leveson inquiry on phone hacking, has left News Corporation, citing its bias in the reporting of climate change.
So, here we go round the maypole once more.
I don’t think any government can force News Corporation to divest. Perhaps some laws could be changed to prevent further concentration of media ownership. But the main action has to be on encouraging the overall health of news media, including smaller players and startups.
In this context, it is Finkelstein’s neglected recommendation for a Productivity Commission inquiry into the news media that echoes most strongly
Imagine if that had been done back in 2012. The findings could have informed government policy. Perhaps we could have avoided some of the hollowing out of newsrooms, and the news deserts that have emerged in our suburbs and regions.
The current inquiry has terms of reference that emphasise media ownership and the impact of the collapse of the business model.
History suggests it will struggle to achieve anything – but a renewed recommendation for a Productivity Commission inquiry would be both useful and achievable.
The Productivity Commission has the muscle and expertise to assess and model proposals such as tax favourable treatment for investment in public interest journalism – an idea being advanced by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative.
It would be an incremental move – but so much better than one more round of a circular dance.
Declaration: Margaret Simons is on the Board of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative. The views expressed here are her own, and do not necessarily reflect those of PIJI.
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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