- The Guardian
- Issue #2191
Australia didn’t win the Eurovision song contest, but this country punches above its weight in one area. When it comes to media ownership concentration, Australia is world number two, only edged out of the top spot by Brazil. We (almost) win! Not that you’ll find our mass media making much fuss about it.
This doesn’t sound healthy and it isn’t. It’s no surprise to communists. We know that capitalist ‘free market’ economies tend towards monopoly. Australia has similar concentrations in groceries, where the ‘Colesworth’ duopoly has huge market power, and banks – the ‘big four’ have a grip on the nation’s finances. Contrary to the popular view that free markets produce competition, better products and more choice, what we wind up with is the appearance of choice – as when one company owns ‘competing’ brands. Banks own smaller banks so it looks like there’s a choice, and media outlets start little offshoots like The Australian’s recent youth outlet.
It’s also no surprise to communists or indeed to anyone who pays attention, that the monopolistic, concentrated media doesn’t do a great job. NewsCorp swallowed up the smaller local papers and just left news deserts in its wake – too bad if you want to know what your local council is up to.
The near-monopoly media is very bad at its core function – telling us things we need to know. Take the recent Budget. NewsCorp papers depicted mild alterations to tax lurks as actual communism, depicting Treasurer Jim Chalmers next to a hammer-and-sickle. Even the supposedly centrist-progressive Nine papers described trimming of lurks such as negative gearing or Capital Gains Tax as though new taxes had been announced. Any threat of a tax on inheritances is routinely described as a death tax instead of the tax on unearned wealth it would be (for a media that loves to talk about ‘battlers,’ Australia’s mainstream media really likes standing up for unearned income).
Australian media has done real harm to this country through its depiction of climate change and action to avoid it. Compare and contrast: the Chinese city of Hangzhou had electric buses in 2015, while Australian cities are getting just a few now. Australians are paying for climate change by paying the bills for ‘natural disasters’ it makes more frequent and worse. It’s a real emergency.
What has our media been doing about it? Sometimes outright lies, as in a recent Seven ‘documentary’ about renewable energy which contained untruths about what the presenter called “blood cobalt.” Renew Economy said the program “failed basic journalism principles.”
More often misdirection – putting a lot of attention on the costs of reducing carbon emissions while ignoring the costs of just letting climate change get worse. Our mass media act as stenographers for fossil fuel companies – repeating their lines about the importance of keeping fossil fuels, and gas as a ‘transition tool’ (it isn’t). A lot of effort has gone into demonising climate scientists and activists as impractical hippies. This is serious. In the face of a colossal crisis, our media has worked on preventing action and making it worse.
The mass media has also tried hard to sell Australia on the continued need for expensive and dangerous subservience to the US and done their best to paint China – a nation with exactly one overseas base – as a threat.
It’s not all doom and gloom – there are some promising independent news sites that have their moments. But the power of capital in this country means we won’t have really good independent media until we have socialism. We’re working towards that.
In the meantime, stay sceptical and support Guardian, the Workers’ Weekly. We’ll continue to bring you news and views you won’t get elsewhere.
