Murdoch’s election coverage ‘insult to Australians’

Date

August 26, 2013

Fears for democracy: British Labour MP Tom Watson.Photo: Ken Irwin

Even now, Tom Watson routinely memorises the number plates of unfamiliar cars outside his house.

”To be targeted like I was – to be followed by covert surveillance specialists, to have someone try to destroy your character – is very threatening,” says the British Labour MP who helped blow the whistle on News of the World‘s phone hacking scheme.

In 2011, it was revealed Mr Watson had been stalked by the paper’s private investigators as payback for his dogged investigation of its affairs. News International’s executive chairman James Murdoch apologised ”unreservedly”.

”It insults Australians when they produce content like that,” Watson says, referring to the recent front pages depicting Labor politicians as clowns and Nazis and demands to ”KICK THIS MOB OUT”.

A fortnight ago, the ABC’s Media Watch analysed one week’s political coverage in Mr Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph. Of the 80 election stories it printed, the program deemed half negative to Labor but none negative to the Coalition.

”Can the Telegraph editors seriously claim they’re balanced?” Mr Watson asks.

What about the argument that a free press can cover an election however it likes?

”Of course,” Mr Watson says. ”But has Rupert actually learnt anything from the Leveson inquiry [into UK press ethics, sparked by the hacking scandal]? Leveson looked at how papers blur news and editorial and it’s hard for readers to distinguish. If Murdoch’s papers are doing that, we should call him out.”

As for the suggestion that Mr Murdoch’s editors enjoy editorial independence: ”All 175 of his newspapers supported the invasion of Iraq. Are you telling me that all 175 of his editors independently reached the same decision?”

While Mr Watson’s Australian media tour – including ABC1’s Q&A on Monday night – is sponsored entirely by activist group Avaaz, he is open in his support of Kevin Rudd. Yet he believes Mr Murdoch’s desire to unseat the Prime Minister could succeed.

”I have absolutely no doubt he could swing this election,” he said.

Cuts threaten the ABC but there’s no point looking to media rivals for sympathy.

‘What better way for Tony Abbott to repay… the Murdoch press than by cutting the ABC’s budget.’ Photo: Melissa Adams

In a recent column over on the ABC’s The Drum, veteran presenter and former staff-elected director Quentin Dempster wonders out loud about the Coalition’s plans for his beloved national broadcaster.

He recalls that to help fill ”Beazley’s black hole” back in 1996, the newly elected Howard government pulled $55 million out of the ABC’s three-year forward funding.

Dempster recalls ”endless farewells for traumatised colleagues made to walk the redundancy plank … The grief, distress, anguish and pain went on for years afterwards.”

But Dempster shouldn’t look for sympathy, this time around, from the ABC’s media rivals. It’s not ABC people who are walking the redundancy plank these days. It’s just about everyone else in the journalistic world, from Ten News to News Corp, not to mention Fairfax Media.

Others are proving all too willing to jump. Just last week the ABC announced an expanded national reporting team, its ranks swelled by millions of extra dollars from the taxpayer, and several high-profile recruits from hard-pressed newspaper companies: notablyThe Sydney Morning Herald’s Linton Besser, the Brisbane Courier-Mail’s Mark Solomons and The Age’s Dan Oakes.

These are high-calibre people at the top of their game. A decade ago, enticing them from top jobs in our national newspapers to the – then – somewhat torpid ranks of ABC News would have been difficult, if not impossible.

And it’s not just by poaching staff that the ABC is causing angst among its media rivals. It is poaching eyeballs, too.

News Corp in Australia and Fairfax Media are trying desperately to erect effective paywalls around their online content.

It’s a tough job, made tougher by the fact that the ABC is offering text-based news and online comment – such as Quentin Dempster’s reflections on The Drum – absolutely free.

A few years back in Britain, James Murdoch called loudly for the BBC’s online activities to be reined in. News Corp’s Sunday Times memorably told the Beeb to ”get your tanks off our lawn!”

What better way for Tony Abbott to repay some of the favours received from the Murdoch press than by cutting the ABC’s budget, on the grounds that online activities are not part of its remit, and shouldn’t be funded by the taxpayer? ”If you want to compete with commercial media online,” he could say, ”then compete on fair terms: erect your own paywall, or take advertisements, like everyone else.”

But it’s not as easy as that.

For one thing, only months ago the Federal Parliament passed amendments to the act that governs the ABC. Its charter now obliges it to provide ”digital media services” – and those services ”must not have advertisements”.

Those changes were supported by the Coalition. It would look a bit odd if, a few months later, it turned around and amended the amendments, even assuming it could win over the Senate.

There’s no legal obstacle that I can see to the ABC erecting an online paywall – but the practical obstacles are formidable. Is the public going to watch live television for free, but pay to watch a program on iView? Listen to AM or the Science Show free of charge, but pay to download a podcast or check out an interview online? Or would only ABC Online News and The Drum be enclosed by the paywall? How would that work?

And then there’s Malcolm Turnbull. ”The ABC is more important than ever,” the opposition’s communications spokesman told Parliament in March. ”The great foundations of journalism are under real threat … [so] I am very pleased to see the way the ABC is putting more effort into news and information.”

Of course, Turnbull added, the ABC has ”a very clear obligation” to be accurate and impartial. But, unlike many of his colleagues on the opposition benches and the braying chorus of ideological warriors urging Abbott to renew the culture wars, Turnbull doesn’t seem to think that the ABC consistently fails in that obligation.

Turnbull is the Coalition’s indispensable expert on the NBN. It is hard to see Abbott moving him from the communications portfolio, at least in his first term of government. And, while he’s there, the ABC will have at least one vocal ally round the cabinet table.

But it’s Joe Hockey and Abbott who will hold the purse-strings. And as Hockey said bluntly on Q&A last week, ”if there’s waste [in the ABC], we will cut it”.

Well, waste, to a large extent, is in the eye of the beholder. Pulling $50 million or even $100 million out of its triennial funding would have devastating consequences for the ABC, while making piddling inroads on our looming structural deficit.

That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Hockey needs to find a lot of savings and every little helps.

And whereas poll after poll shows that the ABC is the most trusted news organisation in the nation by a country mile, it can expect less support than ever from its media rivals.

Leaving aside News Corp’s unrelenting ideological war on the public broadcaster, there’s a simple fact of life.

Nobody loves a fat cat. And, in the past 15 years, all the other cats have got thinner and thinner. The ABC, that once looked so scrawny, now looks comparatively plump and glossy and ripe for the plucking.

Jonathan Holmes is a regular columnist and former presenter of the ABC’s Media Watch program.