With Fox News raking in viewer numbers, seizing about 70% of the market in November, Rupert Murdoch is keen to ensure the profits continue to roll in by entrusting Lachlan Murdoch full control. Binoy Kampmark reports.
Rupert Murdoch
News Corps' calculated change of heart on climate change in the lead-up to COP26 has not fooled too many, argues Binoy Kampmark.
Facebook's “Zucker” punch successfully forced the federal government's hand. It is another reason why we need to fight for real public interest journalism, argues Zebedee Parkes.
The government's media bargaining code bill aims to help in the transfer of profits from one section of big capital to another. It will make public interest journalism even more precarious, argues Zebedee Parkes.
Green Left is one of the many independent outlets that have become collateral damage in the power struggle between old and new media oligarchs, argue Pip Hinman and Susan Price.
As more of our lives are mediated through the internet, private companies cannot be allowed to dictate the terms on which we relate to each other, argue Tim Scriven and Aleks Wansbrough.
All around Australia, racially oppressed minority communities are celebrating the late night defeat of the federal government’s attempt to weaken section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
The bill, which sought to remove the words “offend”, “insult” and “humiliate” from the section against racial vilification and replace it with “harass and intimidate” was defeated 31-28 with the support of Labor, the Greens and other small party and independent Senators.
With polls showing growing support for the Greens and independents, the powers-that-be and their media hacks are becoming increasingly hysterical.
For the 1% and their supporters, the prospect of the July 2 double dissolution election delivering a hung parliament is the worst of all possible worlds. Uncertainty threatens their profit margins and means political and economic chaos — a nightmare for the ruling class that has had it so good for so long.
Reading Rupert Murdoch's Australian is always educational. For instance, Maurice Newman's September 11 op-ed exposed a media gang that represent “by far the major media presence in Australia and, from their bully pulpits, they present a common position on most social, economic and political issues”.
When thousands of people hit Melbourne's streets on May 1 to protest planned closures of Aboriginal communities, the Herald Sun followed up its front page denunciation of a similar April 9 protest as a “selfish rabble” with a special double page-spread under the headline: “Still Selfish. Still A Rabble.”
At a G20 meeting last October, Rupert Murdoch surprised some with a speech that criticised world leaders for, as it was described in his Australian newspaper, “their policies [that] have caused a ‘massive shift’ in societies to benefit the super-rich with a legacy of social polarisation”.
In particular, Murdoch criticised youth unemployment: “The unemployment rate for Americans under the age of 25 is 13%, which sounds awful until I remember that in the eurozone that number is 23%, and it is twice as high in places like Spain and Greece, and parts of France and Italy.
The other day, I stood outside the strangely silent building where I began life as a journalist. It is no longer the human warren that was Consolidated Press in Sydney, though ghosts still drink at the King's Head pub nearby.
As a cadet reporter, I might have walked on to the set of Lewis Milestone's The Front Page. Men in red braces did shout, "Hold the front page", and tilt back their felt hats and talk rapidly with a roll-your-own attached indefinitely to their lower lip. You could feel the presses rumbling beneath and smell the ink.
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