Why Does Kevin Rudd Want a Royal Commission into Australian Media Ownership?

UPDATE Nov 6: The petition is now closed, and achieved a record-breaking 501,876 signatures. Greens leader Adam Bandt has tweeted that he will table the petition in Parliament – although it’s not clear when this may happen.

ORIGINAL STORY: This week former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called on the Government to investigate Australian media ownership. He did so by launching a Parliamentary petition calling for a Royal Commission into the issue, sharing a powerful video to social media encouraging the public to sign. It has received over 220,000 signatures in just three days (Ed Note: correct as of this article’s publish date).

It’s not the first time Rudd has spoken out about the problems with media ownership, and Rupert Murdoch’s outsized influence in Australia via News Corp (which he called an ‘arrogant cancer’).

There is a lot to get your head around in this one story: concentration of media ownership in Australia, Rupert Murdoch’s reputation and influence, the role of Government and the other huge challenges facing the media (i.e.: Facebook and Google).

Australians have watched with growing anger at what the Murdoch media monopoly is doing to our country. A cancer on democracy.

Today I am launching a national petition to establish a #MurdochRoyalCommission.

If you value our democracy, please sign here: https://t.co/FjfK7ij7YQ pic.twitter.com/gIGfmMF49W

— Kevin Rudd (@MrKRudd) October 9, 2020

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What is the petition asking for?

Kevin Rudd’s petition calls for a Royal Commission into the ‘strength and diversity of the Australian media’. A royal commission would theoretically be an independent investigation into the factors threatening media diversity, ultimately making policy recommendations to achieve ‘optimal diversity across all platforms’. 

While News Corp and the ‘Murdoch media’ is one of Rudd’s biggest concerns, it would not be the sole focus of a would-be royal commission. The entire industry would be looked at – of particular interest alongside News Corp is Nine Entertainment Co, which also owns lots of news media outlets across print/digital, TV and radio.

The royal commission would have to be established by the Federal government.

FWIW, we think it’s unlikely that a media royal commission will happen. There is no threshold for the number of signatures that would force the Government to address the issue – they can ignore the whole thing if they want.

But the issues being raised are absolutely worth considering.

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Why is Australian media ownership a problem?

Two basics to understand first:

1. Media ownership diversity is crucial to democracy. The media is the main way that the public gets information about the government, good and bad. Every media business will have a level of bias (perfectly normal); it’s important for the public to have access to a range of different views on the actions of government in particular, so they can better decide what they will and won’t accept from elected officials.

2. Australia has one of the most concentrated media landscapes in the world, which means that a small number of companies own the majority of media titles.

So while it might seem like there is a wide range of news outlets to choose from in this country, most of that ‘choice’ is provided by two corporations: News Corp Australia (part of Rupert Murdoch’s global News Corp empire) and Nine Entertainment Co. (which bought Fairfax media in 2019).

Competition in any industry is good for consumers. As the media is the public’s main source of information, the potential impact of this lack of choice is: 

• Less accountability for Government – it’s easier for politicians (of either party) to keep the media ‘on their side’ if they only have to manage high-level relationships with two companies
• These for-profit businesses can attempt to sway public opinion for or against things that will benefit those businesses

An example of the latter is Rudd’s allegation that News Corp titles campaigned heavily against him in the 2013 election in order to “kill off” the NBN. Rudd alleges that Rupert Murdoch was trying to protect Foxtel (which News Corp owns) as better internet would open the door wide open for Netflix and other streaming platforms. There is no way of knowing whether or not that is true, and the streaming platforms entered Australia anyway.

As for political accountability, all news publishers will have some degree of political affiliation and connection – after all, they report on politics day in and day out. Both News Corp Australia and Nine have leadership with strong ties to the Liberal Party and a politically conservative view of the country and the world.

Rupert Murdoch’s personal beliefs and ideologies have been the focus of many feature profiles (‘The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch’ from The Monthly in 2018 is in-depth reading, but is behind a one-per-month freewall). For a quick assessment of what those views are, his son James Murdoch resigned from the board of News Corp (US) saying that “great news organisations… should not sow doubt to obscure fact.”

Nine Ent. Co.’s Chairman is Peter Costello, a former Liberal MP and the longest serving Australian Treasurer in history, under John Howard from 1996-2007. 

Rudd and many, many others are concerned that so much of Australia’s news reporting comes from businesses aligned strongly to only one side of politics.

Honestly, there isn’t a positive argument to be made for a concentrated media landscape. It’s flat out bad no matter which ‘side’ has the monopoly.

Everyone should support free and independent media. Doesn’t matter if you’re Labor, Liberal, Green, One Nation. Let’s not turn this into another ‘us and them’. This is about strength of our democracy. Power must be held to to account, fairly and equally #MurdochRoyalCommission

— 💧😷Queen Victoria (@Vic_Rollison) October 11, 2020

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How concentrated is media ownership in Aus?

This is a big ol’ yikes.  News Corp and Nine own basically all the major metropolitan newspapers in Australia. Their dominance is more diluted in rural and regional areas, with Australian Community Media printing over 160 titles across the country – although it has been hit hard by COVID-19.

However, printed newspapers are no longer the only source of news. While News Corp and Nine also operate the digital versions of those papers, the digital news space has a somewhat healthier degree of competition. Think: 7News (owned by SevenWest Media), The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, Daily Mail Australia, Junkee, VICE, The New Daily and of course government-funded SBS and ABC.

To really understand what the Australian media ownership looks like, below is a list of the media businesses of just News and Nine.

Again, to be clear: regardless of the political ideology, it is still bad that the overwhelming majority of news outlets are owned by two corporations. Just two.

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Are there laws to prevent this happening?

There were some laws relevant to Australian media ownership… but they were repealed in 2017:

• A law stopping one company from holding more than 2 out of 3 types of media in one region: TV, print or radio
• A law prohibiting one TV broadcaster from reaching more than 75% of the population

These laws were removed in an effort to help the Australian media industry which has been destabilised by the rise of the Internet. The decision to remove these laws essentially saved Fairfax Media titles (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, AFR) by allowing Fairfax to merge/be bought by Nine. 

As Nine already had TV and radio stations, they would not have been able to buy the Fairfax and it’s newspaper titles under the “two out of three” law. 

Technically both companies are on the right side of the law.

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Does this affect the inquiry into whether Google and Facebook should have to pay for Australian news?

Problems with Australian media ownership aside, another huge battle faces the media industry: Australian news publishers are arguing that Google and Facebook should have to pay a few for news used on those platforms.

This is a complicated and separate issue. However it does reveal the challenges that all media owners have faced in the past decade, regardless of their size. 

The Internet made digital content so accessible, and also trained us to expect that news content would mostly be free. On top of that, Google and Facebook have been sucking up advertising dollars – cutting off some advertising supply from news outlets that would otherwise fund the journalism you need to get local news. 

All media publishers have been more or less united on this issue; a draft version of the agreement between the digital platforms and news outlets is expected before the end of the year.

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What are the potential outcomes of all this?

Hard to say, but it does seem unlikely that a royal commission in Australian media ownership will be called.

And even if it was, it’s unclear how effective it could really be.

We covered some possible outcomes on this episode of Debatable. Listen below or on your favourite podcast app.

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