A community newspaper print run.Credit:Fairfax
That’s the thesis. In practice,large news organisations don’t just create journalism,they wield extraordinary political influence. In Australia,one organisation – News Corp – dominates commercial news journalism in a way that has no parallel in any democratic country.
With that domination comes raw power of the kind experienced by the former British prime minister John Major in 1992,after his government exited the European Exchange Rate Mechanism,and therefore acted against the express wishes of News Corp’s proprietor,Rupert Murdoch.
When Major telephoned Kelvin MacKenzie,then editor of Murdoch’s flagship British newspaperTheSun, to ask how he planned to cover the story,MacKenzie replied:“Prime Minister,I have on my desk in front of me a very large bucket of shit which I am just about to pour all over you.”
Large news publishers still possess buckets of political influence,even in an era of social media and shrinking newspaper circulations.
Evidence of that power is currently playing out in the Australian Parliament,where the federal government has created legislation designed to force two global digital players,Google and Facebook,to compensate Australian news publishers because their old business model doesn’t work any more.
News Corp,along with Nine Entertainment (owner of this title),has apparently convinced the government that the two digital giants have stolen their content (they haven’t – media companies actively provide snippets or their full journalism to the platforms because they gain huge benefit from the exposure their content attracts on Google and Facebook) and stolen their advertising revenue (they haven’t – most of the classified advertising that used to support newspaper journalism has actually ended up in the pockets of realestate.com,owned by News Corp,Domain,owned by Nine,and websites such as Seek and Carsales).
But Google and Facebook are hardly saints. Even though they aren’t directly responsible for the collapse of the huge profits that filled the coffers of the owners of big daily newspapers for decades,these two digital players are almost certainly too powerful. Their market dominance and the information they collect about their users’ online behaviour is scary. And there should be laws to make sure they pay Australian corporate tax onall their Australian profits that stem fromall their Australian revenue.