Janet Flanner is not a familiar name today, but by any measure her career is worth knowing about. Born in Indianapolis in 1892, she saw in her hometown’s endless tabletop of corn fields a life of excruciating boredom. At age twenty, she reacted to her father’s suicide by choosing to live wildly, careering out of her university studies and into a succession of journalism jobs she swiftly made her own. Unwisely married, she escaped to New York and then into a relationship with actress and writer Solita Solano, with whom she decided to emigrate to Paris in 1922.

Like so many other young Americans, Flanner was intent on writing about “beauty with a capital B” in the City of Light. With aspirations on a level with Henry James, Laurence Sterne and “any of the Brontës,” she picked up the odd bit of journalism while pouring her early energies into a novel. Cubicle City (1926) was the result. Though it has since been grouped with landmark works of queer literature including Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Djuna Barnes’s The Ladies Almanac (1928), its lack of contemporary success tempered Flanner’s willingness to persevere with fiction. As a friend said, her desire to write fiction exceeded her talent at it.

But Flanner’s ability with the real was something else. Her letters about life in Paris to family and friends back in the United States sparkled. Whether she described the people strolling through the Tuileries Gardens, what was being said around the nightclubs and galleries, or the dramas and scandals of the American expatriates who increasingly crowded the cafes and bistros, she had a talent. As friend Jane Grant said, Flanner’s letters were “so gay and attractive.”

Moreover, in Grant’s view, such letters would fill a vital gap in the new, weekly magazine her husband had recently founded. “The New Yorker,” Harold Ross famously declared, “will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers.”

Finding a Paris correspondent was part and parcel of such a pitch: Ross expected his readers to be versed in all things French and regard Paris as the world’s centre of art and fashion. For them, Flanner’s letters — as Grant soon wrote to her — were “just the thing.” Thus, for $40 a pop, she should commence sending to the magazine 1000-word letters containing “anecdotal and incidental stuff familiar to Americans… Dope on fields of the arts and a little on fashion, perhaps… There should be lots of chat about people seem [sic] about and in it all he [Ross] wants a definite personality injected.”

Flanner swiftly realised that tone and voice were more important than subject matter. Ross was an editor obsessed with finding the precise word, with prose that was direct and as tight as a drum. Thus, Flanner’s voice became cultivated but detached, wry and often pithy. It resulted in letters that were endlessly amusing. Ulysses, she wrote, was the book “the civilised half of a half-civilised world has long been humbly waiting.” The dadaist writer Tristan Tzara was “a great man of small stature.” A book by Jean Cocteau provided “an hour’s delight” and a memorial to the inventor of camembert cheese unfortunately resembled “a slice of gruyere.” “There is no justice,” she added.

Signed “Genêt,” Flanner’s letters began appearing in September 1925. She would continue filing them — albeit with breaks — for another fifty years. And the magazine she likened at this time to an “oversized minnow learning how to swim” soon became the blue whale of the literary and publishing world.

Mark Braude’s Typewriter and the Guillotine tells the story of that evolution through Flanner’s experiences and work. It is the most notable and most interesting thread of his book, and if it is a story told before — in Brenda Wineapple’s fine biography of Flanner (1989) and in Ben Yagoda’s comprehensive history of the New Yorker, About Town (2000) — it gets a welcome retelling here.

Perhaps most refreshing is Braude’s focus on the women in that “Lost Generation” of artists in Paris. While Hemingway, Joyce and the others make their due appearances, Braude pays more attention to the innovative women also working at their craft and enjoying life on the continent. Cameo appearances by Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Nancy Cunard, Collette, Edith Wharton and more are enlivened by striking details: Djuna Barnes’s preference for nude suntanning, for example, or Toklas’s single-minded interest in herbs.

A central conceit of the book is that the New Yorker’s evolution paralleled an evolution in Flanner’s work. At first, Braude writes, Flanner wrote in a “casual, loose style,” conversational and reminiscent of the cafes in which she gathered information, and left it to editors to refine her prose. Soon, however, she was doing that herself.

The context of her work also evolved. If the Paris she initially wrote of was simultaneously elegant and rough, glittering and squalid, it was also an old-world metropolis in a period of sustained change, where iconic cafes were unceremoniously shuttered and new fashions and ideas in art were constantly swirling. But Flanner rarely wrote about the “lingering sense of mourning” that abided in Paris. Exacerbated by Europe’s economic uncertainty and social unrest, the trauma of the first world war arguably lay at the root of the hedonism and pursuit of abandon charted by Flanner’s letters.

This was not a subject Flanner was prepared to probe: as Wineapple wrote, she believed her Genêt persona was “a high-class gossip columnist.” It couldn’t do that kind of work. Nor was the New Yorker pushing Flanner to do so. As magazine colleague E.B. White once joked, the only strong political stance the New Yorker took in the 1930s was on a proposal to relocate the information booth at Pennsylvania Station. It simply was not part of the magazine’s outlook to be overtly political or so engaged.

This began to change in the 1930s, when Flanner started regularly visiting Germany. At first, her attention to the darkness amid the glitter was fleeting: writing in 1931, she acknowledged that Germany had produced “workers without work and capitalists without capital,” that there was “terrible want in certain quarters.” But, as Braude notes, Flanner then “moved quickly from that gloomy material” to the giddy decadence of the Weimar Republic’s restaurants and cabarets and general party atmosphere.

Two years later — by which time Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Germany’s chancellor — the darker facets of the country were clear. Signs outside towns announced that Jews were not welcome, Nazi flags were everywhere, and the harassment of foreigners and Jews was not even disguised. During one trip, Flanner saw a Jewish boy “being marched down the street with a placard around his neck, confessing to the sin of kissing a non-Jewish girl.” And yet still her despatches shied away. As she wrote lightly, “All over Europe, 1933 has been a worrying kind of year.”

The New Yorker didn’t want her to look closer. “AVOID DANGER TAKE NO CHANCES,” the magazine telegrammed when news of riots in Paris reached American shores. The magazine needn’t have bothered: when she realised she couldn’t get through the crowded streets to see the action, Flanner left to have a beer at a brasserie with friends.

As time went on, though, that detachment, that deliberate inattention, became untenable. Flanner’s friends and social circles increasingly acknowledged there might be another war in Europe, and the social unrest evident in those riots continued to swell. By the second half of 1934, convinced Germany was going to “come and gobble France as sure as we sit here,” Flanner was pitching to Harold Ross a profile of the German chancellor. She was second-guessing herself, conscious of her limits and uncertain whether she could transcend them to write about such an important subject. Ross, meanwhile, was reluctant: he had earlier vetoed an interview with Mussolini as “out of bounds for us” and thought serious current affairs material was ill-suited for what he persisted in calling a “humour magazine.”

When it went ahead, the resulting three-part profile didn’t entirely vindicate either Flanner or Ross. Flanner had been fascinated by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and aroused by the magnitude and precision of the German military she saw at the Nuremberg rally in 1935. But conversations with everyday Germans and a prolonged period of reading Hitler’s speeches and writings, including Mein Kampf, convinced Flanner that Hitler was a fanatic, that Germans were crazy, that war was likely, and that she shared all anti-Nazi attitudes. And yet she feared a profile saying as much would be used as crude anti-Nazi propaganda. As Braude writes, keenly, “She was a writer, not a publicist. She was certainly no diplomat.”

And so Flanner decided to write that profile in the style she would use for anybody, writing of Hitler’s life without any mention of whether people might agree with his views. She included a considerable amount of information about Nazi dogma, the number of bodies Hitler had climbed over in his scramble for power, and the violent outlook at the heart of the Nazi regime. Yet there was also a measure of detachment and wryness that seemed incongruous. As it began: “Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaller, non-smoker and celibate.”

It marked a change nonetheless. In 1936, when he asked Flanner to cover the Berlin Olympics, Ross added a new request — that she “get something of the [German] political and economic situation” into her work. And, particularly once the Spanish civil war broke out, Flanner focused more and more on political and military developments in Europe. Over the next three years, the tone of detachment faded and a sense of immediacy and presence took root. “It’s melancholic to see,” she wrote in May 1938, “how quickly humanity, if left free after its initial success, deserts the early, earnest union that gave its cause strength and squabbles itself to bits.”

Within two years, recognising the Genêt persona and style was now fundamentally wrong for the moment, Flanner began signing her columns with her own name. She would not return to Genêt until after Paris had been liberated.

Braude tells this story well, with evocative prose and a sharp eye for the tangible detail: readers will encounter many smells and tastes in this book. Less successfully, he also tries to graft another story onto Flanner’s life — that of German serial killer Eugen Weidmann.

In short, fragmentary chapters spliced between chapters about Flanner, creating an ominous drum beat through the book’s first two-thirds, Braude tells of how this social outcast and misfit turned criminal. Imprisoned in Germany for theft, Weidmann and several accomplices escaped to Paris with a plan to enrich themselves by kidnapping and ransoming rich foreigners.

The men were inept, and soon turned to murder. Weidmann killed six people, including a young American woman, Jean De Koven, unleashing a short and dramatic police hunt in the latter half of 1937 that ended with a shoot-out at a villa just outside Paris. Tried and convicted — a task made easier by his willingness to confess — Weidmann was executed, in public, by guillotine, in June 1939.

Given the geopolitical tensions and anxieties as well as the American press attention engendered by De Koven’s murder, it was no surprise that the trial took on a broader significance than its senseless and squalid crimes deserved. The prosecution and defence, for example, tried to claim Weidmann was representative of a broader German outlook and nature — of violence, bloodthirstiness and depravity. Told in hasty and cluttered chapters, the story of Weidmann’s trial is profoundly anti-climactic, not the least because of Braude’s decision to open the book with the scene of Weidmann’s execution.

According to Braude, strong parallels in Flanner and Weidmann’s lives warrant their stories being told together. But the parallels are generic and strained: “Both were foreigners in France… Both adapted quickly to their new surroundings… Both longed for beauty.” The intersection of their lives, meanwhile, is momentary. While Flanner reported on Weidmann’s trial and execution, nothing suggests it left a deep impression on her.

As a mark of her evolution, the fact she covered the trial is telling. As Braude writes, “She hadn’t come [to Paris] to write about decapitated murderers.” But the more important mark is surely that of her engagement with the looming Nazi shadow in the lead-up to the second world war.

Flanner certainly saw that. Her coverage of war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, her reportage of the Nuremberg trials and her work on the Nazi looting of priceless cultural artefacts were indefatigable. And they inflected the New Yorker’s style and outlook thereafter.

As Ross wrote to her, in June 1946, “I think our transition to peace, art, amusement, frivolity, etc, will be gradual, and probably the magazine will never get back to where it was.” •

The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII
By Mark Braude | Grand Central Publishing | $65.99 | 421 pages

The post Just the thing appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite commanding the world’s most powerful military, Trump looks like achieving, at best, the agreement Barack Obama secured with Iran — the one Trump tore up in his first term on the ground that it was the worst deal ever. Consider the cost in human lives, to the world’s economy and to the vestiges of Middle East stability of his reckless aggression.

In her new book Done in a Day, Elisa Tamarkin wants us to remember how badly an earlier war, in Vietnam, went for the US — not to mention for the millions of Vietnamese killed and injured — and how little politicians, and the public, seem to have absorbed its lessons.

Tamarkin brings an interesting dual perspective to her task. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is the daughter of Bob Tamarkin, a foreign correspondent with the Chicago Daily News. Her family arrived in Vietnam early in January 1975 and her father was on the last helicopter out of Saigon on 30 April. Elisa, then aged four, had been evacuated with her mother to Hong Kong on 10 April.

Tamarkin has both real affection for journalism of the kind her father practised and a critical awareness of its shortcomings. Her book is richly illustrated with photos showing the innards of news work: the reams of telexes, the telegrams between her father and his editors, the final front pages of more than twenty American newspapers between 1978, when the Chicago Daily News closed, and 2025.

There is nostalgia in this and also, remembering the word’s Greek roots, pain (álgos) as Tamarkin recalls the proud history of the News’s early, deep commitment to reporting foreign news. As long ago as 1901 the newspaper’s publisher, Victor Lawson, had set up bureaus in Tokyo, Peking, Egypt, South Africa, Latin America, Australia and various cities in Europe, pioneering the comprehensive surveilling of world affairs that took grip during the twentieth century.

Lawson wanted a “man on the spot” (and they were almost all men) in each of these cities, living in foreign capitals rather than flying in and out. That way they would learn the local context, cultivate local contacts and anticipate events, equipping them to recognise a real scoop when it came their way. By the first world war, the paper had thirty resident reporters covering events from the front lines.

All this cost a lot. But it yielded other dividends: apart from strong coverage of breaking news, the News specialised in what one of its correspondents called “side-light stories” — “the unexpected, incidental angles on events that you could never drop in to find.”

By the time the paper closed in 1978, the amount of foreign news carried by it and its fellow American papers was in decline. In 1970, Tamarkin reports, foreign news occupied 11 per cent of the “news hole” in daily newspapers. By the time the Vietnam war ended the figure had dropped to 6.3 per cent. A decade later, after big companies began buying up newspapers in individual cities and consolidating them into chains, the figure had fallen even further to 1.8 per cent. Today, only the most resilient of the world’s legacy media, like the New York Times, can afford to run foreign bureaus.

Foreign reporting is not without its problems: newspaper publishers’ interests, whether ideological or commercial, are often aligned with their government’s foreign policies, as Tamarkin shows was the case with Lawson. Foreign postings were keenly sought after in newsrooms, leading to a certain arrogance among the species. As a character in Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play Night and Day remarks: “A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.”

From the vantage point of 2026, it is also clear something has been lost. Ideally, foreign correspondents go out into the world, get to know other places and people and then translate what they find for their audience at home. They are an inoculation against the kind of news and opinion silos created and then cemented by the digital age.

Tamarkin’s book is carefully researched and genuinely thought-provoking, but it is also dense and allusive. Five extended chapters each cover several meaty topics with digressions into, say, Thomas A. Harris’s 1969 book about transactional analysis, I’m OK — You’re OK, or an early twentieth century “cine-poem,” The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre-Dame.

That aside, the most important theme of the book for me was Tamarkin’s complicating of the history of the Vietnam war. She begins by focusing intently on the final days of a conflict that had begun as a civil war in 1955 and ended in 1973 with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Saigon’s fall to North Vietnamese forces prompted the largest evacuation by helicopter of Americans and selected foreign nationals from the US embassy, though not, sadly, many of the Vietnamese who had fought with and supported the Americans.

How the war ended, though, is just the starting point for the author’s meditation on how political leaders think about wars and how the public’s perception of war is shaped by the news media.

Done in a Day also reaches beyond most media history by asking how the interaction between political leaders and the public shapes what each did next, especially after it became blindingly clear to anyone paying attention that the war was going disastrously for the Americans yet the nation’s political leaders kept it going for year after year.

Tamarkin points to Daniel Ellsberg’s famous leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg had been among the authors of a secret forty-seven-volume history of America’s political and military involvement in Vietnam since 1945, which had been commissioned by defense secretary Robert McNamara.

Although the New York Times published only part of the 3000-page narrative, writes Tamarkin, it was more than enough to make clear how the public “had been deceived by four presidents who knew from the start that the war would never end until it was lost, even as they continued to drop millions of tons of bombs.”

Even by 1970, before Ellsberg’s leak, there had been no shortage of information about the war’s disastrous progress in news reports and in books by journalists who reported from Vietnam, among them Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in the Lake, 1972) and David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest, 1972).

Ellsberg lamented the “endless, escalating stalemate” that first the Johnson and then the Nixon administrations allowed to continue. In his 1972 book, Papers on the War, he argued that members of the executive branch of government and in congress “had neglected totally to unlock and study its own copies” of the history of the war.

Ellsberg had tried in 1970 to persuade the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to skim the study or assign it to an assistant to read it for him, to which Kissinger replied, “Is there really much to be learned from that?” Tamarkin comments: “We know now there probably wasn’t much for Kissinger to learn, since he had been striding toward failure all along with a realist’s resolve, eyes wide open, hoping just to hold it back until… the next election.”

Ellsberg had also revealed parts of the secret history to a Senate foreign relations committee, but with little impact, and later in 1970, presenting a paper at an academic conference, he saw that even political scientists were largely unaware of its contents. As he acidly remarked, “An expert — I once heard — is a man [sic] who has read a book that no one else has read.”

Meanwhile, as Tamarkin notes, another million ton of bombs had been dropped, and hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos had died, along with 10,000 Americans. She quotes Hannah Arendt, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1971: “The public had access for years to material that the government vainly tried to keep from it,” which underscored the news media’s power but also a willingness to turn a blind eye for more than two decades “as though a fact is safely removed from the world if only enough people believe in its nonexistence.”

It is hard to ignore the present-day parallels. I can’t be the only person to have noticed that the news media’s rush to quote Donald Trump’s latest utterance about the war in Iran doesn’t exactly meet the definition of news — reporting something new — but instead underscores how easily the convention of seeking the views of those in power can be gamed by politicians.

Nor can I be the only one to have noticed that journalists reporting for the ABC’s metropolitan stations here in Australia don’t seems to have been listening to the first hour of Radio National Breakfast when various experts have been saying for months that the American president’s war in Iran was ill-conceived, ill-informed and illegitimate.

Either the journalists are not doing their job properly or their deference to power is growing, despite all their protests to the contrary. When the role of journalism is under multiple threats — many of them aggressively shaped by Donald Trump — we don’t need more deference to power, not least because those in power, like Trump, are abusing their positions and damaging so many in the process.

If it is dispiriting to see how easily and thoroughly the lessons of history are erased or forgotten, it is welcome, and bracing, to have them put before us so carefully and thoughtfully as Elisa Tamarkin has in Done in a Day. •

Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon
By Elisa Tamarkin | University of Chicago Press | $46.95 | 300 pages

The post The last helicopter appeared first on Inside Story.

To take a local example: on Anzac Day in 2015, Scott McIntyre, a sports journalist with SBS married to a Japanese woman, sent out a number of tweets including the words “remembering the summary execution, widespread rape and theft committed by these ‘brave’ Anzacs in Egypt, Palestine and Japan.” Understandably, this offended many Australians, even though it was grounded in some uncomfortable facts.

Several News columnists took up the cudgels, and for good measure the Australian’s Chris Kenny sent messages to communications minister Malcolm Turnbull urging him to force McIntyre off the public payroll. Turnbull rang the managing director of SBS, Michael Ebeid, who subsequently made clear that the tweets were “not at all the views of @SBS.” McIntyre was sacked the following day.

That was that. The caravan moved on. Except for McIntyre and his family. They received death threats; his wife and children moved to Japan; his marriage broke up. In short, McIntyre was cancelled and the right to free speech swept aside — practices the Murdoch media condemn whenever their journalists come under attack.

A year after the controversy, McIntyre received what he described as “quite a substantial financial settlement” from SBS after he sued for unfair dismissal. The SBS guidelines were ambiguous: employees had “a right to make public comment and to enter into public debate in their personal capacity” but also required that SBS was “not brought into disrepute.” It is not as though his sports journalism was likely to do that.

Another Australian example: that of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who migrated from Sudan with her family in 1992. In a stellar rise, she co-founded a youth charity at the age of sixteen, gained a first-class honours degree in mechanical engineering, was chosen as Queensland Young Australian of the Year and appointed by the federal government to the board of the Council for Australian–Arab Relations.

She also made frequent media appearances and sometimes attracted controversy, such as when she said in early 2017 that Islam was “to me, the most feminist religion” (attempting to draw a distinction between the religion itself and how Islam is practised). The Australian ran more than thirty articles denouncing her, report Dodd and Ricketson, and Andrew Bolt wrote seven columns about her for the News tabloids.

On Anzac Day in 2017, Abdel-Magied sent out a post saying “LEST.WE.FORGET (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine…),” which she meant as a reference to asylum seekers and Palestinians who had died. Warned by a friend about how it might be received, she took down the post and apologised. But it was too late to stop her being condemned by politicians and the media, led by News, who pursued her for months. That encouraged a public pile-on, with online abuse, including videos of beheadings and rape. Abdel-Magied sought help from a psychologist and left Australia permanently to live in Britain.

Free speech? Not when News disagrees with you. While many people were offended by her remarks, even though they were misunderstood, did it really warrant her being hounded for months until she fled Australia?

Social media has accelerated the coarsening of public debate, but before that Murdoch led the way, with his publications often playing the person rather than the ball. Shouting and outrage attracts attention; it also encourages appalling behaviour and, on occasions, violence. Challenging public figures is one thing; vilification only feeds the toxic debate.

Rupert Murdoch’s business achievements are impressive: he has built the biggest media empire in history. His journalism? Not so much. He said in 1996: “For better or for worse, our company is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values.” For worse is the authors’ assessment and few will disagree.

The negatives are many and major. Murdoch’s newspaper the Sun campaigned for Brexit, now widely acknowledged to have been the economic disaster experts predicted. It was not the only newspaper to do so but it had one of the biggest circulations.

Murdoch has always followed the money and the power, meaning that Fox News and Donald Trump were an irresistible combination. Murdoch didn’t believe Trump was fit to become president in 2016 and nor did he think he deserved to be re-elected in 2024. Yet Fox News gave him the exposure and backing that helped enable his rise and promoted the democratic outrages he has perpetrated.

That includes the claims of the stolen 2020 election, even though, as revealed by the Dominion court case (which cost Murdoch US$787.5 million), Fox commentators knew them not to be true. But it all helped Fox to become the single most profitable news business in the world.

The Murdoch outlets have taken every opportunity to cast doubt on the urgency of tackling climate change while giving credence to all manner of crackpot and fringe arguments.

And then there is the illegal hacking of the phones of celebrities, royalty and others who were potential sources for stories, practised on an industrial scale by the Fleet Street newspapers in Britain, mainly but not solely those owned by News. It epitomises one aspect of Murdoch’s “whatever it takes” journalism and was described by Australian media academic Rodney Tiffen as “the biggest media-related scandal in the history of English-speaking democracies.”

It ended up costing News £1.2 billion in legal fees and settlements. The even greater cost was to its reputation, particularly over the one case that outraged the British public and was the trigger for the Leveson inquiry into the media: the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler, the thirteen-year-old who went missing in 2002 and was subsequently found murdered.

That particular offence wasn’t uncovered by the Guardian until 2011. In a public display of contrition, Rupert Murdoch asked to see her parents to apologise and, putting his head in his hands, told them “this is the worst day of my life,” leading Milly’s older sister Gemma to later remark that, if it was the worst day of Murdoch’s life, “then you’re bloody lucky.”

That same year Murdoch appeared before a parliamentary inquiry to declare it was the “humblest” day in his life. The contrition didn’t last: in 2013, he met with journalists at the Sun to reassure them he was on their side. Thanks to employees who recorded his address and leaked it to other media, we know that Murdoch thought the police investigations into hacking were “laughable” and “outrageous.” There was an admission of sorts: “We got caught with dirty hands, I guess.”

Not everything about the Murdoch media is black and white. It employs many fine journalists in Australia and overseas, many of them working in areas unaffected by culture wars and political agendas. Even as a senior journalist writing about politics and national affairs for the Australian for a decade and a half from the 1990s, my columns and feature articles were published with only occasional and minor editing, whether or not they contradicted the newspaper’s editorial line.

But I felt more and more uncomfortable as the newspaper’s right-wing agenda spread to its news coverage and diversity shrank on the opinion pages. With few exceptions, the “contest of ideas” the Australian proclaims on its website has become an echo chamber. But the Murdoch media doesn’t do shame: Fox News carries the deeply ironic slogan, “fair and balanced.”

For less senior staff than I was, life is more complicated. Often reporters are assigned a story with an angle that reflects a pet News Corp issue or prejudice. That can put them under pressure to stretch the facts to meet the request, perhaps by seizing on a relatively minor aspect. Regularly reporting back to editors that there is no story or finding a better one that doesn’t fit its agenda are not career-enhancing moves.

The agendas in the News publications are increasingly blatant. One tabloid interpretation likened this year’s federal budget to communism. News outlets support Israel whatever it does. They rail against antisemitism, completely justifiably, but ignore Islamaphobia.

Journalists are taught, or used to be, that nothing matters more than seeking out the truth. After all, that’s what distinguishes professional journalism from the gut beliefs and random thoughts presented as facts on social media.

But the owner of the largest share of English-speaking media has a different view. Rupert Murdoch was warned in 1983 that the diaries of Adolf Hitler were fakes but his British paper, the Sunday Times, published them anyway. The proprietor’s defence was that they increased circulation and that “after all, we are in the entertainment business.”

Murdoch established his priorities early in his career, when, as owner of the Sunday Times in Perth, he lobbied WA industrial development minister Charles Court to allow him a stake in the developing mining boom. As reported by author Robert Duffield in 1979, he told Court: “Look, you can have a headline a day or a bucket of shit every day. What’s it to be?” •

Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch’s Media Wields Power and Punishment
By Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson | Hardie Grant | $39.99 | 424 pages

The post Lest we forget appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are absent from the index, and Donald Trump gets only passing mentions. Instead, the authors are concerned with tracing the question to its best-known source in the philosophy of David Hume, and even further back to the work of Etienne de la Boétie, who wrote in the sixteenth century, a generation after Machiavelli. Force alone was not enough to account for the submission of thousands to a single tyrant, La Boétie reasoned.

Margalit and Sharon bring exceptional knowledge and experience to their subject. As cultural historians, they draw their lines of analysis through Montaigne, Hobbes, William Godwin and Tolstoy to the twentieth century’s Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky. But what of the twenty-first? When it comes to compliance — a central factor in the success of manipulative politics — the second Trump administration has seen truly stupefying manifestations in the judiciary, the academy, the commercial world and the media. And yet the book doesn’t go there.

The authors make the case that examining political manipulation in ancient democracies and early modern republics helps to make us aware of recurring or enduring elements. Certainly many of the assertions drawn from historical sources have a keen relevance, all the more arresting for the terms in which they are expressed. La Boétie points to “practices and enticements” that serve to keep the people “stupefied.”

“Stupefied” is a good word for a study of manipulation. It communicates so much more than “stupid” and is not so readily weaponised. If claims that the people are stupid are replaced by the question of how they became stupefied, attention turns to causes and remedies. And so the authors set out to offer “a workable account of manipulation.”

The finger is most obviously pointed at propaganda campaigns, with social media as the arena of worst offences. But the authors also quote philosopher Susan Stebbing’s 1939 observation about the need to examine our individual failures of thinking, and the book’s argument is balanced between those polarities: personal responsibility for the formation of opinions versus external influences seeking to confuse or confound ethical judgement.

On the first, Margalit and Sharon take examples from literary and philosophical sources ranging from ancient Greek mythology to classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with Shakespeare’s Othello as a recurrent illustration of how “perverting the way a person reaches decisions” is a deeply psychological process. It is also a form of domination. The authors emphasise that their main interest is in political manipulation, but Othello is a complex case of the personal being weaponised to political ends.

Margalit and Sharon introduce Plato and Aristotle as commentators on the centrality of flattery in tyrannical government. This is not just something that goes on among courtiers, as in Machiavelli’s account. Plato stresses the appetite for flattery within crowds seduced by grandiose figures purporting to embody their interests and aspirations. Aristotle identifies the strategy at all levels as “pandering to extract benefit.” Is this dynamic an insidious by-product of the arts of rhetoric?

That’s a disturbing ethical question. Rhetoric is the art of convincing, which is about more than presenting valid truths and arguments. It works by “engaging cognitive abilities” with opening gambits that implicitly flatter the audience’s intelligence: “This is a deep point…”; “We who can see through the lies…”; or (a Trump favourite) “Not many people know this…” But the book refers only in passing to the culture of sycophancy in the Trump White House.

Historical parallels can certainly be illuminating. Gustav Le Bon wrote in 1895 that new psychological characteristics emerge among people “from the mere fact of their being assembled.” This quotation appears in a section on mass manipulation, “mass-man” and the mob. Le Bon’s words could be applied, though, in a way he had not anticipated: what of the assemblies at Mar-a-Lago, or Epstein Island?

In our time, the concentration of wealth and celebrity in circles of political influence is a more bizarre and consequential manifestation of “new psychological characteristics” than anything we are seeing on the streets. The normalisation of plastic surgery, huge investments in immortality research, and exhibitions of infantile behaviour recall the excesses of eighteenth-century Versailles. The role of extreme wealth in contemporary manipulation is also something a book on this subject might be expected to deal with.

Concentrated analysis of psychological manipulation through the examples of Machiavelli, and Iago in Othello, may yield insights that apply to strategies used by influencers like Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro — or, for that matter, the left’s Rachel Maddow and Kara Swisher, who explicitly aim to call out manipulative tactics. Perhaps we should be able to draw the parallels for ourselves, but it’s complex work to untangle what is new and specific to the political dynamics of our times.

There’s certainly a case to be made for critical distance in an overheated political milieu in which public opinion is assiduously stirred by influencers seeking to push it into the red zone. Discussion of how manipulation contributes to the rise of the MAGA movement, the British Reform party or One Nation risks becoming caught up in the incendiary dynamics. The ideological vehemence of the Likud government under Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, has made commentary on antisemitism a high-risk activity, but it is one in which many forms of dangerous manipulation are at work.

What makes Netanyahu an especially striking omission from Captive Minds is the credentials of its two authors. Avishai Margalit is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Assaf Sharon is professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and co-founder and senior fellow of Molad: the Center for Renewal of Israeli Democracy. Both have impressive records of active intellectual engagement with Israeli politics.

Margalit’s landmark books on the ethics of memory, occidentalism and compromise are informed by a lifelong engagement with the realities of a crisis-ridden nation. As a contributor to the New York Review of Books he has written articles on Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres. In April 2023 he spoke with the New Yorker about the fusion of religion and nationalism strategically promoted in Netanyahu’s rhetoric.

Sharon’s Molad centre conducts research on forms of current populism associated with conspiracy theories, disinformation campaigns and anti-liberal incitement. He discusses the difficulty of speaking plainly in an environment where denunciations of the massacre by Hamas immediately bring accusations of being an apologist for Zionism. He, too, sees religious nationalism as an emergent force that deprives “actual living citizens” of the freedom to define their identity in the face of hereditary determinations.

They do return to the present in the final chapter, with a review of how manipulation is evolving in the present communications environment. They identify two primary aspects. One is the growing dominance of images in public discourse, which they describe as “a shift of momentous proportions.” Perhaps we need the perspective of a deeper history to see it that way, having taken it for granted for more than three generations.

The second factor is the rise of social media and independent blogging, and here the authors fall into the trap of judgementalism. They cite Gresham’s law: bad money drives out good. (Thomas Gresham, an advisor to Elizabeth I, urged her to raise confidence in the coin of the realm by reversing the practice of blending the metals with alloys.) Something similar, they say, is true of public discourse, when professional journalism is driven out by amateur punditry and the viral propagation of shrill opinion.

It’s a common complaint, but one that skates over the more complex realities. Social media is not all bad. To cast it as debased currency is to ignore the amount of genuinely informed and ethical concern circulating among regular contributors. In many situations it serves as counter to the heavily weighted messaging of billionaire-owned newspapers and television networks. Professional journalism is itself a debased currency in an era when media owners determine what is reported, and how.

The authors describe their own conclusion as “unsatisfying,” a word that may echo Margalit’s long engagement with the principle of compromise. Like generals, they acknowledge, philosophers tend to prepare for the previous war, but they rest their case for the value of hindsight on some fundamental principles, the most important of which is freedom. A free society can only be built on the freedom of individuals as thinkers and adjudicators of the most important issues confronting them. It is this freedom at the level of cognition that is the book’s fundamental concern. •

Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation
By Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon | Harvard University Press | $64 | 288 pages

The post Not many people know this… appeared first on Inside Story.

An opportunity lands at their feet in the shape of a ball. They guide it through space and time, avoiding obstacles with inexplicable grace. From their boot, the ball describes a magnificent arc to a teammate. Miraculously, the Beauty of the Second Touch is now enacted: the ball glides back to its original master. In seconds, a triangle has been formed that would delight Pythagoras. Then, with the precision of a Japanese sushi knife, the ball passes just out of the goalkeeper’s frantic reach and is welcomed by the net.

In the British director Asif Kapadia’s new documentary Kenny Dalglish, the eponymous hero, the great Celtic, Liverpool and Scotland player, is shown scoring goal after goal with this kind of preternatural skill. Each successful strike is followed by two unvarying rituals: Dalglish runs towards his adoring fans with his trademark sign of victory, both arms raised above his head; in the background, a crest fallen goalie looks on in abject bewilderment. Though literally made up on the run, every goal looks uncannily preordained.

If you love football — or just love seeing something done at its highest level of skill — these sequences would be worth the price of admission alone. (And I say that as someone who doesn’t even like soccer that much.) But if this were all that happened in Kenny Dalglish, it wouldn’t work as a film.

In Kapadia’s telling of the story, football is important, but it’s not at the heart of the film’s narrative. Kapadia clearly thinks Dalglish is a great man, and not just because he can kick a ball. When, in the latter half of the film, tragedy strikes, Kapadia has structured his film so Dalglish’s rising to the occasion looks as inevitable as one of his famous goals.

Kenny Dalglish was born in Glasgow in 1951. His family supported Rangers, the club of choice for Protestants in this famously sectarian city. That he went on to play for Celtic, the city’s Catholic club, and marry Marina Harkins, a local Catholic woman, tells you a lot about him. Dalglish and Marina have four children and are still married today.

Kapadia paints Dalglish as a supremely down-to-earth man; funny and cheerful; in touch with ordinary life despite his success. When he moved from Celtic to Liverpool for a huge transfer fee, he was asked by a journalist: “Do you think you’re worth all that money?’ Dalglish disarmingly replied: “I never paid it, I don’t know.”

Kapadia also wants you to understand Dalglish’s innate sense of loyalty: for his family, his team, and his community. For Dalglish, tribalism is not based on something as ephemeral as mere religion; it’s about who you’re related to, who you play for, and who you support.

Dalglish loved playing for Liverpool. After years of unparalleled success with the club as a player, in 1985 he became that rarest of football animals: the player-manager. Under his benign rule Liverpool continued on its winning ways. Then tragedy struck.

On 15 April 1989 Liverpool was playing Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough in Sheffield. Soon after the game began, overcrowding in one of the stands led to fatal crowd crush. In the end, ninety-seven people — all Liverpool fans — died of the injuries they received.

Merseyside went into mourning. In the days following the tragedy, Liverpool’s home ground, Anfield, became a shrine for the city’s grieving public. The pitch was covered with bouquets of flowers, Liverpool scarves, and other tributes. And then, completely without evidence, the Liverpool fans themselves were blamed by the police and parts of the media for inciting the disaster. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper ran a now notorious headline, “The Truth,” above an article full of lies. It alleged, for example, that Liverpool fans urinated on the police, that they picked the pockets of victims.

Dalglish immediately defended the Liverpool fans from this libel. When Kelvin Mackenzie, the rag’s powerful editor, rang him to make amends for the coverage, Dalglish suggested he run another headline: “We Lied.” Mackenzie refused, so Dalglish hung up on him.

The documentary reports that Dalglish attended every funeral of every killed fan, including four on one day. Many years later, and after many inquiries, the Liverpool supporters were completely exonerated. It is now accepted that the South Yorkshire Police were culpable for mishandling the situation.

Asif Kapadia is best known for documentaries that explore the notorious flameouts of famous and talented people. Senna (2010) is about the doomed Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna; Amy (2015), which won the Oscar for best documentary, is about the doomed singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse; and Diego Maradona tells the story of another footballer, but one whose genius on the pitch was never going to protect him from himself.

In Kenny Dalglish, he has found a new story to tell. It’s the story of a good man tested; a man who comes through for his community by never losing sight of the values he was brought up with. As a football fan, Kapadia wants you to appreciate Dalglish’s excess of playing skill, but primarily he wants you to recognise the man’s decency and humanity. By design, Kapadia has made Kenny Dalglish into a film about good leadership at a time when good leadership is often hard to find. •

Kenny Dalglish is available on the streaming service DocPlay and via Amazon Prime.

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The idea in a nutshell was this: Two giant American tech companies, Google and Meta, had abused Australian news publishers by “taking” their stories and including them in their search results and social feeds. Publishers were due compensation for this wrong — but the tech giants refused to negotiate over how much. So the government ordered these negotiations to take place; Google and Meta would need to strike individual deals to pay some undetermined number of publishers some undetermined amount of money.

If the government felt they’d paid publishers enough, then that’s that. If it didn’t, though, the government could mandate further bargaining and, eventually, require third-party arbitration that could cost companies bigly.

I am in favour of publishers getting money, and I am in favour of Google and Facebook being the ones writing the cheques. But the system had major problems, both philosophical and practical.

Last week, the Australian government announced a successor to the News Media Bargaining Code — the (annoyingly similarly named) News Bargaining Initiative. It’s a clear improvement. Indeed, with a single change, it’d be close to an ideal system. But without that change, I suspect it’ll end up repeating many of the old system’s flaws.

You can read my 2022 piece for a lengthy discussion of those flaws, but here’s a summary of the two big ones.

Problem 1: The code lied about what problem it was addressing

Australian media companies, like their peers around the world, have long complained of the tech giants’ “theft” of their intellectual property. That “theft” consisted of… letting Facebook users link to news stories and Google including news stories in search results. Those things are not theft; social media platforms and search engines are legal. And if you want to argue that they are theft, then why are they theft only for a small set of news companies and for not every site on the internet?

The intellectual-property theft claims have always been a way to paper over publishers’ actual complaint, which is what this has always been about: Google and Meta have a near-monopoly on digital advertising revenue. More than 80 per cent of all Australian digital ad dollars go to those two companies. It turns out that putting ads next to search results and social feeds is a much more lucrative and scalable business than putting ads next to news stories. News outlets used to make enormous sums from advertising in print and broadcast media, but online they only earn a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what these two tech giants do.

This is, to be clear, a very legitimate complaint! Google and Meta having that much market power is a dangerous thing from an antitrust perspective. It is perfectly appropriate for both Australian publishers and the Australian government to be concerned that their nation’s media is being undercut by a new revenue paradigm they can’t win at. Liberals will argue quality journalism is a civic good essential to an informed democracy. Conservatives will argue this is an important Australian industry that deserves protection. Populists will argue the need to confront American cultural imperialism. They’re all correct.

But it’s not the complaint the News Media Bargaining Code was based on — the complaint that including news stories in search results and social feeds is somehow a violation of publishers’ rights and that they are due financial compensation for it.

You might say that’s just a philosophical quibble. But Meta turned it into a very practical one when it called Australia’s bluff — twice. First, in 2021, it announced that, if the problem was really how Australian news appeared in Facebook feeds, it had a solution: banning Australian news stories from Facebook. Problem solved, right? Of course not — because the “theft” of letting someone share your story on Facebook was never the actual problem. Meta lifted the ban after extracting concessions from the plan. (It repeated the move in Canada when faced with a similar program — except there, it’s never lifted the ban, making it clear to governments that it considers news very much optional on its platforms.)

Then, two years ago, Meta announced that it was done negotiating these deals with publishers and let all existing ones expire. Did the government then follow through with what the News Media Bargaining Code allowed — declaring Meta in violation of its obligation to negotiate fairly and force them into mandatory arbitration? No. Instead it did… well, nothing, really. It didn’t pursue further action (called “designating” Meta, in the code’s parlance) because it believed that doing so would just lead to Meta blocking news on Facebook again, and it wanted to avoid that outcome.

This has never, ever been about the platforms’ “theft” of news. It has always been about the platforms’ dominance of the digital advertising market and the hole that has left in publishers’ budgets.

Problem 2: The code had zero transparency and uneven power

The code set no firm requirements on what these “negotiations” needed to entail. It didn’t set how many publishers needed to be paid or how much. It just said that Google and Meta needed to show a good enough effort that the government wouldn’t designate them as unfair bargainers. Which basically came down to vibes — the companies weren’t required to share the totals with other publishers or even with the government itself. It was all done in secret. Deals contained clauses forbidding publishers from revealing how much they got.

That’s an artifact of the code’s fundamental lie that this was about business negotiations between private companies. Google was supposed to figure out how much it “owed” News Corp for the crime of including Brisbane Courier-Mail stories in search results, and News Corp could keep saying “higher” until it got a number it was happy with. It was a private act of theatre.

This had several negative knock-on effects. First, the country’s largest news publishers — Rupert Murdoch’s aforementioned News Corp and Nine Entertainment, owner of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age — had some actual power in the negotiations, because they were big enough to plausibly complain to the government if they felt they weren’t getting enough. But smaller fry were either given perfunctory take-it-or-leave-it offers or excluded altogether.

(It surely didn’t hurt that the largest reported payments went to News Corp, which just happened to be a big supporter of the conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, whose government came up with the scheme.)

The contracts were also dishonest about what the tech companies were buying. On paper, the deals were all about Google and Meta licensing news stories for Google News Showcase and Facebook’s News tab. In reality, those products were constructed in part to be vessels for these payments to happen.

These are significant problems, and they all come down to that fundamental act of pretending what this is all about. If this is about how individual companies have been wronged, and all the government is doing is bringing the two sides to a negotiating table, then you can argue this secrecy and imbalanced power is fine. But cloaking a government-mandated subsidy in the language of “bargaining” made the system worse at every turn.

What the News Bargaining Initiative changes

Morrison’s party was ousted in 2022 and he was replaced by the Labor government of Anthony Albanese. While Albanese’s government was the one that declined to “designate” Meta after it stopped paying publishers, it recognised that a new approach was needed. After much process, it unveiled its proposed result last week: the News Bargaining Incentive.

It’s an improvement. But unfortunately, the Albanese government seems intent on continuing to dress up a public policy decision as the marketplace at work, and that will continue to weaken the system.

The NBI, as the name implies, still aims to offer an incentive for Google and Meta to bargain with Australian publishers. But it creates a different backup mechanism if they don’t do so to the government’s liking.

It expands the targeted companies from two to three — Google, Meta and now TikTok. Second, it creates a 2.25 per cent tax on those companies’ Australia-generated revenue, which the government expects to generate more than A$300 million a year. And it gives the companies a way out of paying that tax by instead negotiating deals with publishers.

Here’s how it would work: For every A$1 Google pays to News Corp via a negotiated deal, Google’s tax liability will be reduced by A$1.50. And for every A$1 Google pays to what the government defines as a “small or medium” publisher, that tax liability will be reduced by A$1.70.

That’s a good change. Instead of an incentive to overpay the loudest potential voices (*cough* Murdoch), tech companies will have a (mild) incentive to pay more to smaller outlets. The NBI also adds a (minimal) requirement to spread the money around by saying companies must make deals with at least four different media companies to offset their entire tax liability. (Under the old system, there was no rule saying a company couldn’t just give News Corp or Nine a giant lump sum and declare itself done.)

Is the NBI more honest about what this money is actually for? Well, yes and no. Not rhetorically — at his announcement press conference, Albanese still paid homage to the idea that this was about compensation for content being “taken”:

We think that investment in journalism is critical to a healthy democracy. It matters. It’s something that defines the way that Australian society operates. And frankly, if the work is being done by the people here at this press conference and in other places right around Australia, then your work needs to have a monetary value attached to it. It shouldn’t just be able to be taken by a large multinational corporation and used to generate profits for that organisation with no compensation appropriate for the people who produce that creative content.

Still talk of “taking” without “compensation,” alas. At the same press conference, assistant treasurer Daniel Mulino was closer to the mark: “What we know is that news media organisations are having to deal with large digital platforms which have very substantial market power, and that’s undermining the traditional business model.”

But what’s important is that the Albanese bill itself actually gets this right. It makes it clear that tech giants will be subject to this scheme regardless of whether they have anything to do with the news. As the government’s own explanation of the bill puts it, “A significant social media or search service does not need to carry news content to attract an NMI [News media bargaining incentive charge].”

In other words: Meta, don’t try to pull that banning-news-on-Facebook trick again.

The addition of TikTok to the program also shows how little this has to do with news “theft.” Google and Facebook do at least display headlines from news stories in the act of directing users’ attention to them. But TikTok? TikTok bans the sharing of links in all but a few specific contexts, and it wants nothing more than to keep you scrolling from vertical video to vertical video, forever. The idea that it is engaged in compensation-worthy theft of news is laughable.

Unfortunately, the NBI is only marginally better on transparency and market imbalance than the old code was. Tech companies would have to report their deals to the government in order to cancel their tax liability — so at least someone would know how much money was changing hands. But there’s no language requiring those deals to be reported publicly. Which means that Australians will still have no idea how much money outlets are getting — and, more importantly, other publishers won’t know either. So smaller outlets won’t be able to be more informed bargainers, and tech companies will still be able to play politics or favourites however they wish.

The solution that’s under everyone’s nose

So what happens under the NBI if the tech giants decide not to play along? What if Meta sticks to its guns and says we still won’t make any deals?

Well, they’d have to pay that 2.25 per cent tax to the government. And what would the government do with that money? It would give that money to Australian news organisations based on a simple formula — how many journalists they employ. Albanese:

Importantly as well, this is not about government revenue. Every single dollar will go back to journalists to pay for the journalism that you all produce here in the Gallery, but newsrooms right around the country produce as well.

Here’s Anika Wells, the government’s minister for communications:

The News Media Bargaining Incentive means if a platform doesn’t do a deal with a news publisher, the money will come to us and we will deliver that funding to news organisations based on how many journalists they employ. The more journalists they have, the more money they will get under this proposal.

That sounds… awesome?

A straightforward formula that directly incentivises news outlets to hire journalists. (There is zero requirement that tech company money given directly to publishers be spent on journalism at all. News Corp could use it all on a new jet for Lachlan if it wanted to.) It would completely eliminate the uneven bargaining power among small and large outlets. It would eliminate the need for kabuki-theatre “negotiations.” And of course there’d be more money to go around, since tech companies are getting those 150/170 per cent incentives to make deals.

Such a plan would create a reliable, sustainable revenue source that Australian news publishers could count on. No more need to hope that your corporate office did a good job debating made-up numbers at the negotiating table. I think it’s fair to assume that Google, Meta, and TikTok will keep increasing revenue in the coming years, which means that the amount going to publishers would automatically increase as well. And if some new platform comes along that starts to eat up ad revenue, they’ll get automatically added to the program when they reach a certain size.

In fact, a tax like the one Albanese is proposing is exactly what I proposed back in 2022:

Google and Facebook are too big and powerful for the good of society. Their business, highly targeted advertising, is one that naturally tends toward monopolies: the more data you have, the bigger you get; the bigger you get, the more data you have. And while they make some fine and useful products, they aren’t creating the civic good that the earlier advertising gods — newspapers and other local news organisations — did by doing good journalism on a huge scale.

So tax them. Say you’re going to put a 1.5 per cent tax on the targeted digital advertising revenue of all companies with a market cap over $1 trillion, or annual revenues over $20 billion, or whatever cutoff you want. That would generate billions of dollars a year in a way that doesn’t warp competition or let Google and Facebook use their cash as a tool for targeted PR payoffs.

Then decide how to spend it. Maybe you subsidise reporter salaries in a big way… Maybe you give it all to public media… Maybe you distribute it as vouchers to [Australians] so each of them can spend $100 a year on news subscriptions at no cost to them.

There are lots of ideas! Some you might like, some you might not. But they’re all better than giving Rupert Murdoch $50 million a year and small local publishers zilch because of who they know and how much the tech giants value their silence.

What’s frustrating about the News Bargaining Initiative is that it… incentivises bargaining. It creates this powerful, transparent system to sustain journalism — and then asks everyone involved to make the same sort of shady secret deals the old system encouraged. The Albanese government has been very clear that it doesn’t want tech companies to pay this tax and would rather they keep striking deals. Albanese:

We have engaged in extensive consultation. At this point, the three organisations, Meta, Google, and TikTok as well have been consulted with and we’ll continue to engage with. But we want to see these deals done as were previously done under the previous regime.

Mulino:

I’ll just conclude by saying that the intention here is that digital platforms will enter into deals, and that’s very much the way this has been designed.

Wells:

The News Media Bargaining Incentive encourages platforms to enter into deals with news outlets and to contribute its fair share to Australian laws. Platforms should do deals with news organisations. If they decide not to, they will end up paying more.

Albanese again, in response to a question about what happens if Meta decided not to do deals:

Then they will be subject to higher payments than they will if they do a deal with the news organisations. That’s why there’s this incentive being put in and the distinction that’s there between paying 2.25 per cent or paying 1.5 per cent. And by having that incentive, what we’re encouraging is for organisations to sit down with news organisations, get these deals done, and then we can move forward.

In other words, the Albanese government wants to create an efficient, equitable way to give more than A$300 million to Australian news outlets — and then ignore it, because it would rather give around A$200 million to a subset of those outlets who can do well in secret negotiations.

To make the News Bargaining Initiative better, all it has to do is reverse the incentives. Instead of offering tech companies a discount for striking secret deals with the most powerful news companies, give them a discount for paying the tax. Or don’t offer them a discount at all! There is no reason to believe that Google’s negotiators are going to distribute money more equitably than a clear, uniform government pass-through program that pays per journalist. Australia shouldn’t be asking them to. Relying on backroom deals will benefit the tech companies (by paying less) and the Murdochs (by emphasising their market power), but no one else.

This one change would repair the damage done by the News Media Bargaining Code’s fake free-market framing. This isn’t about individual news companies seeking compensation for imaginary thefts — it’s a question of public policy. The Australian government has good reasons to want to support its local media industry, and it has designed a good mechanism to do so. It should use it. Kill the bargaining — keep the tax. •

The post Kill the bargaining, keep the tax appeared first on Inside Story.

Curious crossovers haven’t helped. Rupert’s divorce settlement with his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, barred her from giving story ideas to Succession’s scriptwriters. At one stage Lachlan told Rupert his brother James was leaking stories to those same script-writers. After daughter Elisabeth saw the TV patriarch Logan Roy die on-screen she began making plans with James and Prudence (Murdoch’s daughter from his first marriage) for how they would respond to their father’s death.

Essentially, though, none of the main characters in the TV series resembles any of the main players in the Murdoch dramas. Nor do any of their conflicts.

But the real life Murdoch story could make a good TV series of its own.  The story would begin in 1998 with a departing wife (Anna) giving up a large fortune in return for an irrevocable trust to protect Rupert’s four children against future usurpers. Decades later, the father and oldest son Lachlan, fearful the favoured son could be outvoted three-to-one after Rupert’s death, sought to overturn the irrevocable trust — and actually called the move Operation Family Harmony. Unsurprisingly, the other three siblings refused. Father and son mounted a legal action in Nevada; equally unsurprisingly, it failed. Then, in a denouement only accountants could be excited by, the three siblings were paid a huge amount of money to go away (thereby ruling out a second season). The anointed heir’s future control is assured, but at a huge cost.

Gabriel Sherman’s new book, Bonfire of the Murdochs, is the first biography of Murdoch to be published since that sequence of events was revealed in the 3000 pages of discovery documents and legal testimony from the Operation Family Harmony court case leaked to the New York Times. More than any other Murdoch biographer, Sherman puts family relationships and dramas at its heart. His conclusion is brutal: “Over seventy years, Rupert said he was building a family business. But what he built was a business that destroyed his family.”

Sherman comes to his task with impeccable credentials. He wrote an excellent book about the boss of Fox News, Roger Ailes, has just written the reality-based TV drama The Apprentice — acclaimed by critics and attacked by Donald Trump — and has been a leading chronicler of Murdoch machinations over the past two decades.

First, the bad news. Sherman’s first chapter is, quite simply, terrible. It seems to be compulsory for American writers to be error-prone whenever they write about Australia. Among many lapses comes this: “Rupert also watered down [Rohan] Rivett’s coverage of a local murder trial because it undermined Rupert’s effort to curry favour with government officials who approved lucrative television licences.” Presumably this is a reference to the Adelaide News coverage of the trial of Max Stuart, which was appealed all the way to the Privy Council and prompted a royal commission into claims that police had written Stuart’s confession. Murdoch was just as active as his editor Rohan Rivett in a courageous campaign that climaxed with a threat of criminal defamation charges against the paper. And, of course, television licences are a federal not a state government responsibility.

As the action moves closer to the present day and New York, the standard fortunately improves greatly. Developments in Australia, Britain and China, though, are essentially a backdrop to changing family relationships.

That means Sherman’s account of the British phone-hacking scandal doesn’t mention the five years after 2006 when News Corp claimed the hacking was the work of just a single rogue reporter, or the frustrations and courage of Nick Davies and the Guardian in trying to penetrate their lies, or the efforts by some lawyers to hold the company to account, or the shameful passivity of the London police. Nor is the momentous Leveson inquiry and its report mentioned.

The family was still largely united when Rupert and James testified to a parliamentary committee in 2011. Lachlan and Prudence flew in to support them, and even Rupert’s ex-wife Anna came to support her son.

The only dissenter was Elisabeth, who thought James — the son in charge of the company’s UK branch — should resign. When she said this to Rupert, he agreed. “Rupert then made as cruel a request as a father could make,” writes Sherman: he told Elisabeth to fire James. “Dad and I think the only way to stop the noise is for you to step down,” she told James, who was “gutted” not only by his sister’s betrayal but also by their father’s cowardice. James told his sister that if Rupert wanted to fire him he should say it to his face. The siblings didn’t speak for years. Elisabeth later described her action as one of her greatest regrets.

This was not the only occasion when Rupert had one of James’s siblings deliver bad news. In 2015 Fox chief executive Chase Carey, who was in his early sixties, grew tired of being caught between the “warring brothers,” Lachlan and James, and told Rupert he wanted to leave after his contract ran out. Rupert was forced to make a decision on which son would take over. When James arrived for lunch with Carey and Lachlan at a club near the office he was told Lachlan would be chief executive and James would report to him. James recalled feeling hot anger surge through his body. Having Carey and Lachlan ambush him in public was, he felt, pathological, a corporate execution.

James felt — and Sherman argues — that while Rupert went to great lengths to foment competition between his children there was always only going to be one winner, Lachlan. Rupert’s treatment of Elisabeth seems particularly unfair. Despite her business successes, Rupert clearly thought her gender ruled her out from being his successor.

Lachlan was annoyed, meanwhile, that James “peacocked” around as if he were a better businessman than their father, and that James should show more respect. Others in the company thought James was happy to take the money earned by Fox News while also looking down on the network. In turn, James felt he had put in the hard yards for the company, in Hong Kong and with BSkyB, while Lachlan ran away to Australia and presided over a string of business failures.

Apart from anything else, James’s relations with his father were often confrontational, while Lachlan was much more emotionally supportive. Lachlan was most in tune with Rupert’s attitude to Fox News and its unwavering support for Trump, and was the only one who shared Rupert’s fondness for tabloid newspapers.

There is no doubt who the book’s chief villain is. While Rupert himself was vaccinated and took many precautions during the Covid-19 pandemic, he let Fox rail against lockdowns and often air anti-science stances. While Rupert had no doubt that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election and thought Trump should concede, a dip in ratings led him to encourage Fox News to stoke viewers’ prejudices; this proved a financial disaster when Dominion Voting Machines successfully sued for defamation.

Sherman chronicles the ups and downs of Rupert’s marriages, and particularly his resistance to looking back. Once he deems a relationship to be over, he is cold, unbending and unwilling to engage in any dialogue. This is true not only of his marriage break-ups, but at least sometimes with his children.

After the hearings in Nevada wound up, but before the verdict was handed down, James and his sisters sent Rupert a letter seeking to reconcile. “Thanksgiving and Christmas are upon us and the three of us wanted to reach out to you personally to say that we miss you and love you,” they wrote. “We are asking you with love to find a way to put an end to this destructive judicial path so that we can have a chance to heal as a collaborative and loving family.”

When Rupert replied a couple of days later, he said he’d read the children’s trial testimony twice and concluded that he, Rupert, was right: they were unfit to inherit the business. He said he only wanted to speak through lawyers henceforth, and signed off “Much love Dad.”

While the general thrust of Sherwin’s case against Rupert is sound, a couple of times he seems to overstep the mark. He writes, for example, that James denied knowing about the phone-hacking by his London-based tabloids, yet Rupert used the biggest scandal in the company’s history to demote him and promote. James’s wife Kathryn makes a similar point: she “later realised that Rupert had used James’s promotions as opportunities for James to fail so Lachlan could inherit the company.”

Rupert was not the author of James’s mismanagement of the phone-hacking crisis, James was. He signed off on payments of around a million pounds, he says, on the advice of the lawyers that misled him about the scale of the misdeeds. The lawyers deny this. At best, this shows an amazing lack of curiosity, indeed a lack of due diligence. True, he was much more interested in BSkyB, but newspapers were a big part of his job in Britain. (Rupert eventually defied the many calls that James should be forced to resign, and moved him sideways to a senior position in New York.)

Both James’s and the company’s behaviour stems from their sense of invulnerability. After the Independent ran an advertisement declaring “Rupert Murdoch Won’t Decide This Election. You Will,” James barged unannounced into the editor’s office and yelled “What the fuck are you playing at?”

Back in 2010, Rupert had taken an extraordinary step: he asked the children to join in family therapy. A therapist met with Rupert and the kids (no spouses allowed) on their farm in Australia. Ostensibly the family saw it as a chance to help James and Rupert get along. Each family member had to stand with their back to the others and let them vent their grievances. It was a car crash, James later said. By the end, they were more alienated from each other.

It was another move that would make great TV. •

Bonfire of the Murdochs
By Gabriel Sherman | Simon & Schuster | $36.99 | 256 pages

The post Murdoch versus Murdoch appeared first on Inside Story.

It might seem surprising that a leader with Churchill’s responsibilities, at such a crucial time, would undertake a task usually performed by the postal service. But Jessica “Decca” Mitford (1917–96) was rather a special case.

She and her five sisters had been fixtures in the British press ever since their “debuts” in the 1920s and 1930s, celebrated for their good looks, aristocratic upbringing, and wildly divergent politics. By the time of Jessica’s meeting with Churchill, Nancy (1904–73)  was on her way to becoming a well-known novelist, Deborah (1920–2014) had become a duchess, and Pamela (1907–94) was a socialite. Diana (1910–2003), the most beautiful of the Mitfords, had famously left her first husband to marry Oswald Mosley, founding leader of the British Union of Fascists, and by 1941 was interned alongside him at Holloway Prison, regarded as a serious threat to British security.

But the most notorious of the sisters was the indomitably named Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914–48). A glimpse of the moustachioed ranter at the 1933 Nuremberg Rally had transformed Unity into a slavish admirer of all things Nazi, to the point that she inveigled herself into a friendship with the dictator himself: “The Führer was heavenly,” she cooed in her diary after a lunch with Hitler. But the outbreak of war between her home country and “the greatest man of all time” left her distraught. She attempted suicide only to survive with permanent brain damage, and by 1941 was living in her mother’s care in Oxfordshire.

Jessica had always been closest to Unity, but her divergence from her siblings had become visible early. Alone of the sisters, Jessica had become disconcerted by the palpable differences between her cosseted existence and that of the people she spied living in the village nearby. Her family lived in palatial, well-kept surroundings; these people had small cottages smelling of years of tea and overcooked cabbage. The Mitfords were “slender, aqua-eyed, and graceful”; the women in the village were toothless, marked with cysts and goitres, and had backs bent from years of manual labour and poverty. “Could these poor creatures be people, like us?” Jessica wondered.

Her sympathy and her revulsion at the aristocratic life her parents had created for their children — no formal education, no children to play with, no modern medicine — didn’t stop her from reaching for dangerous ideas. When Unity began decorating their shared bedroom with Nazi paraphernalia, Jessica responded by drawing a chalk line down the middle and decorating her side with hammers, sickles, and photographs of Lenin.

She was searching for a way out and, in Esmond Romilly, her second cousin and nephew of Clementine Churchill, she found someone who could offer that. A handsome and rebellious young man, Esmond had been an early critic of the British upper-class fascination with fascism. He had twice been injured protesting against Moseley’s Blackshirts — including at the infamous Battle of Cable Street — and he had been among the first Englishmen to join the volunteer brigades that went to fight the fascists in Spain.

Sitting next to him at a dinner, Jessica asked if he would be going back to Spain. And if he was, would he take her with him?

Their elopement, in February 1937, caused a stir up and down the length of respectable Britain. So well-publicised were their plans that when they disembarked in Bilbao, the foreign minister of the Basque republic turned up to meet them. Jessica’s parents attempted legal action to bring her home, then brought in Scotland Yard, then appealed to friends in high places. Foreign secretary Anthony Eden ordered Britain’s consul to Spain to persuade Jessica to return home and deputised a destroyer-class warship to transport her.

Every inducement failed until that consul finally threatened to leave hundreds of Spanish refugees stranded unless Jessica acquiesced. She gave in — but only went as far as Bayonne, in southwestern France, where she and Esmond were married.

The couple finally returned to England in September, where Jessica bore a daughter, Julia, and found work as a marketer. But tragedy struck. One consequence of Jessica’s childhood isolation was that she had never been exposed to measles. She therefore had no immunity to pass onto Julia, who died in 1938 amid a measles outbreak. When supposed friends and acquaintances scoffed that she had bought it on herself, Jessica became only too ready to fall in with Esmond’s suggestion that they go and live in America.

Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, believes the decision was of a piece with Jessica’s determination to get out of the class that she detested. Rather than retreat into its comfortable safety after Julia’s death, she decided to keep moving — and to put the bereavement behind her, not to be dwelled on or talked about again.

She did something similar when Esmond died. After their somewhat itinerant life on the east coast was interrupted by the second world war, Esmond enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and Jessica settled in Washington, giving birth to a daughter, Constancia, in February 1941. Esmond was posted to England, where he was seconded as an observer with the RAF. That November, his plane set out on a bombing raid on Homburg but failed to return. Search and rescue found no trace of him, but Jessica — by now, pregnant with a boy — refused to believe that her husband was dead. Even Churchill’s insistence at that Christmas 1941 meeting could not move her. “WAITING FOR BETTER NEWS,” she telegrammed her mother, in mid-January 1942.

When she did give into reality, Jessica fled west, to San Francisco. “Separated by six thousand miles from family in England and by three thousand miles from my nearest American acquaintances, I could be virtually reborn as an anonymous bit of human flotsam in this remote outpost,” she later wrote. “I was both excited and a bit desolate at the prospect.”

Like the Lisbon girls in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, the Mitford sisters have been the subject of fascination that borders on the voyeuristic. They arguably encouraged it. Nancy’s most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love (1945), was a family portrait lacquered with the veneer of a fictional romantic comedy, while Jessica’s autobiography, Hons and Rebels (1960), removed the veneer of fiction entirely. In a tone leavened by self-deprecation and shadowed by knowledge of what would come, she wrote of her upbringing with an eye for the telling detail.

One reason for the fascination lies in way history cuts across the siblings. The Nazi and fascist sympathies in the family were pronounced and proved ruinous. Parents David and Sydney Mitford became estranged after war was declared: he was willing to renounce his earlier Nazi sympathies but she remained steadfast. Tom, the only son, remained so sympathetic that he refused point blank to fight Germans. Posted to Burma instead, he was shot dead in 1945 by a Japanese sniper. Diana Mosley’s unrepentant views led her to deny the Holocaust and affect a lack of interest in her own actions that was, at best, repugnant. “I can’t regret it,” she wrote, of her involvement with fascism. “It was so interesting.”

Kaplan, a biographer of Zora Neale Hurston and professor of literature at Northwestern University, is interested in how Jessica could have emerged from this. While initial chapters will be hard going for readers unacquainted with “Mitford-mania,” she gives considerable space to the intellectual and emotional makings of a Mitford sister who, in works written largely by British writers, has often been derided as an eccentric, the “red sheep” of the family. She is sympathetic in her description of the halting process by which Jessica broke free from her family, with all the pain that it aroused, while remaining in her family’s orbit. She parses the contradictions and complexities that saw Jessica estranged from her father, reconciled with her mother, estranged from Diana, and simultaneously dependent on and disenchanted with her remaining sisters.

In doing so, Kaplan adds considerable depth and understanding to the turbulent years that shaped the “queen of muckraking,” as Jessica Mitford became. As Kaplan tells it, Mitford’s flight west plunged her into a heady period in which her outlook was both validated and remade. Jessica made up for her lack of formal education by reading widely and becoming alert to the damaging effects of racism, sexism, and class-based discrimination. As an investigator with the Office of Price Administration, she learned how to find information that people wanted hidden; as a member of the Communist Party, she tested her ideals and courage by refusing to answer questions when subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Her second marriage, to civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, gave her a foothold from which to witness the struggle for civil rights.

All this informed her turn to writing and her focus on investigative book-length journalism. The American Way of Death (1963) was a needle-sharp exposé of avaricious pretension and blatant lies in the American funeral industry. The lingo alone was ridiculous: graves were referred to as “internment spaces,” she discovered, and undertakers called themselves “grief therapists.” They retailed devices to make a corpse’s breasts look perky, and flogged expensive metal caskets to mourning families with the promises they would preserve loved ones from decomposition. The truth was rather different: gas build-up inside those sealed caskets increased the speed of decomposition, and explosions were not unusual.

Published by Simon & Schuster’s Robert Gottlieb, with an enormous dollar-sign funeral wreath on the cover, The American Way of Death became a bestseller, and vies with Hons & Rebels as Mitford’s most notable and best work. Her other books — on prisons, on a high-profile trial, on her experiences in the Communist Party, and on the birthing industry — never reached quite the same heights, partly because those heights were so lofty. But a steady stream of articles identifying hucksters and frauds in other industries ensured that Mitford remained the “queen” of the genre.

Her books constitute the most substantive part of Jessica Mitford’s career, a claim to fame beyond her family upbringing. It is peculiar, and somewhat unfortunate, that the half of Troublemaker that deals with this part of her life is less enthralling and more abrupt than what precedes it. Her likely rape by a stranger seems to have warranted more attention, especially given the fact that she declined to report it and embroidered her later accounts with the well-timed but fictional intervention of her husband; or the revelation, late in their marriage, that Treuhaft had carried on a prolonged affair with a mutual friend. “It was typical of Decca to say least about whatever hurt her most,” Kaplan writes.

True — but in that silence is surely something more. But for Kaplan it is Jessica Mitford’s empathy and resolve are the most astonishing things about her, and the quality that makes her important right now. “She demonstrates the difficult process through which true empathy can be learned and practised… Those who seek to become good allies can learn a great deal from Decca’s ways of change. So can anyone who would like to start a life over, anyone who would seek a do-over that goes in unanticipated, improbable directions.” •

Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford
By Carla Kaplan | Hurst | $49.99 | 616 pages

The post The other Mitford appeared first on Inside Story.

There are the very specific lists that some completist has taken on as a challenge. (Last week, “List of Phi Alpha Honor Society chapters” was edited 257 times — by only two authors. Or “Deaths in March 1982,” edited 398 times by five authors.)

There are the sports tournaments and reality TV shows that demand moment-to-moment updates. (Last week, there were 268 edits on “2026 Malaysia Open (badminton)” and 605 on “Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series) season 9.”)

There are the biographies of people someone has decided deserve memorialising. (Last week, user Mary Mark Ockerbloom created the article on Quaker abolitionist John Vickers and edited it 161 times. User pigsonthewing did the same for the artist Charles Shepard — best known for making posters for the British travel industry — but edited it only 90 times.)

But the most common Wikipedia genre represented each week is news. When something big happens in the world, some Wikipedian will start an article — and within minutes, editors will descend on it, using news articles as raw material to construct something encyclopaedic. Here’s last week’s top 10 — it’s awfully close to a summary of the week’s front pages:

• 2026 United States strikes in Venezuela (3057 changes by 575 authors)
• 2026 ICE Minneapolis shooting of protestor (1068 changes by 220 authors)
• Killing of Renee Good (1067 changes by 220 authors)
• 2025–2026 Iranian protests (762 changes by 155 authors)
• Nicolás Maduro (647 changes by 242 authors)
• 2026 Crans-Montana bar fire (597 changes by 167 authors)
• 2026 Caracas airstrikes (3058 changes by 575 authors)
• Deaths in 2026 (574 changes by 108 authors)
• Delcy Rodríguez (548 changes by 207 authors)
• International reactions to the 2026 United States strikes in Venezuela (530 changes by 149 authors)

Wikipedia turned twenty-five this week. On 15 January 2001, at 2.27 pm American eastern standard time, Jimmy Wales made the first edit: “This is the new WikiPedia!” (They’ve gotten better since then.)

To celebrate, you can take a “What Wikipedia of the future are you?” quiz. Without even taking the quiz, though, I know which one I am: the Wikipedia That Gets Respect As a Source of News.

The site’s early years were filled with media outrage about a source of “truth” that anyone could edit. And yes, you could right now edit in a claim that Happy Chandler was a lizard person. But the layers of accountability the site has built up over the years would likely reverse your edit within minutes. If those minutes are the cost of creating perhaps humanity’s single greatest source of information, I’m willing to pay it — with apologies to Happy’s descendants. Here are a few things news organizations could learn from it.

News isn’t always what just happened. A few decades into the web, this might seem obvious today. But in 2001, news organisations were still very much constructed around producing daily newspapers and nightly newscasts. The rhythms of production drove everything from story selection to writing style to revenue models. Wikipedia was the first site that gave most journalists a vision of an “article” that is constantly updated, not rewritten with a new lede the next day. If there’s an important new detail in that Swiss bar fire investigation, it’ll be used to make the current Wikipedia article a little bit better — not to have a new unique URL to push out on social.

Whatever questions your journalism answers, people will probably still be asking them tomorrow, and next week, and next year. Wikipedia is optimised for catching people up on news stories they missed the first time around.

Building processes means building culture. Wikipedia succeeds because it has a core set of standards and practices that its editors treat as holy writ. No original research. Neutral point of view. Not every source is equally reliable. No sockpuppetry. Do not disrupt Wikipedia to make a point — but assume good faith. Most (though not all) align perfectly well with the principles of journalism. But they’ve been constructed, a codified set of editorial standards, a collective ethos that guides the whole operation. For Wikipedia to work, there has to be consensus about how things are done, and that requires building a culture among editors. Why have so many other wiki-driven sites failed? They never build the culture that undergirds the processes.

Don’t break links. Unless an article has been taken down entirely, just about every link to a Wikipedia page created in the past quarter-century still works. Its article on Nicolás Maduro is still in the same place it was when first created in 2006, 4493 edits ago. How many news articles published online in 2006 still live at the same address? Vanishingly few. When you start to think of articles as something with permanence, you realise the high cost of breaking a perfectly good URL.

Document your work. Check out one of those newsy Wikipedia articles, like this one on the killing of Renee Good. It’s currently 4559 words. It’s been read nearly 1.4 million times. A total of 331 people have made 2204 edits to it. Its talk page includes more than 1000 signed comments from Wikipedia users arguing for something’s inclusion or exclusion. (Should the page’s title refer to Renee Good or Renée Good, with an accent? Should we note the date the shooter was first publicly identified? Should this article include details about anti-ICE protests after the killing, or should that be in a separate article?) It backs up its claims with 169 footnotes linking to news sources and official statements. And all of this work is available for anyone to see. The back-and-forths on the talk page let the reader see that points of view are being heard and debated. And anyone can click a link to confirm if a source is being accurately reflected.

All that transparency won’t be practical for all journalistic work — but there’s no denying the trust that is built by operating in public. •

The post At 25, Wikipedia shows news doesn’t need to look like news appeared first on Inside Story.

Operation Hamkari was a concerted effort by Australian and Afghan government forces, backed by US air power, to break a Taliban stronghold northeast of Kandahar and end a long-running security threat to Afghanistan’s second largest city.

The operation began when soldiers from Australia’s 2nd Commando Regiment launched an initial raid on the village of Chenartu, seventy-five kilometres from Kandahar, forcing Taliban fighters to retreat. The next morning, four US Black Hawk helicopters descended at dawn on the nearby village of Tizak, carrying twenty-five SAS troopers and additional Afghan soldiers.

According to the official account, the Australians came under heavy fire from the moment they landed at the edge of Tizak. It would later be estimated that they faced more than one hundred Taliban, including some of the enemy’s most experienced and tenacious fighters.

As the Australians desperately sought shelter, they were strafed by machine guns positioned on nearby higher ground and fire from snipers with AK-47s. Under cover of protective fire from armoured Apache helicopters hovering above, three of the Australians managed to get within forty metres of a mud-walled compound later identified as a mosque.

Now too close to the compound to be helped by the helicopters, the trio began to crawl through the dirt, one taking turns to shoot back while the others scrambled forward on their elbows towards the mosque, each convinced that they might be killed at any moment. “I had an absolute feeling of dread and fear due to the amount of fire that we were receiving,” Trooper Justin Percy later recounted. “And that is not only accurate fire but sustained, effective fire.”

A corporal accompanying Percy then made a bold decision to break the deadly standoff, a decision author Aaron Patrick says turned him into the most famous Australian soldier alive: “It might have killed him. Instead, it ruined his life.”

With covering fire from Percy, Ben Roberts-Smith dashed towards an empty barn to be confronted by a Taliban fighter pointing a grenade launcher through a window. After shooting the Taliban, Roberts-Smith saw two more fighters with machine guns moving along the wall of the mosque courtyard firing towards him. He threw a grenade that failed to detonate.

As Sergeant Philip O’Connor and two other troopers rushed forward to join him, O’Connor thew another grenade. This one worked but failed to silence the machine guns. Roberts-Smith then charged toward the courtyard wall, shooting one of the machine gunners twice through the head as he was turning to fire at him. The Australian then entered the courtyard to find a second machine gunner, a boy he reckoned was only fifteen. “I just moved a little further along the wall, dropped down and killed him as well,” he would recall.

Moments later, Roberts-Smith burst into the mosque with two other Australians and shot another armed Taliban. Entering a small room to his left, he faced yet another insurgent standing with a rifle and ammunition pouches. This time his Mk 14 battle rifle jammed. As Roberts-Smith sidestepped to distract the Talib, Justin Percy fired three rounds, killing him instantly.

The confrontation — which became known as the Battle of Shah Wali Kot — was the turning point in a battle that might easily have ended in disaster for the Australians.

Patrick provides a gripping reconstruction of that confrontation in his new book, The Last Battle. Yet although the Australian army considers it the greatest victory in its longest war, he writes, few Australians have ever heard of it. This alone would seem ample reason for Patrick’s meticulous reconstruction of the events based on extensive interviews with many of those who were there. But that was not the journalist’s sole motivation, perhaps not even the primary one.

For his actions at Tizak, Ben Roberts-Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest and most venerated award available to a member of the Australian military. Fifteen years on, that medal is indelibly stained. In June 2023, Judge Anthony Besanko of the NSW Supreme Court found that Roberts-Smith had committed or was complicit in the murder of four Afghan prisoners (in actions separate from the Battle of Shah Wali Kot). The case was a defamation action brought by Roberts-Smith against Fairfax newspapers and journalists Chris Masters and Nick McKenzie, whose reporting had first revealed alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

In May this year, the Full Court of the Federal Court rejected an appeal brought by Roberts-Smith against the Besanko judgement, unanimously dismissing all sixteen grounds. The verdict of the three judges was damning: “The burden of proving that his honour [Besanko] erred on appeal rested with the appellant. The appellant has not discharged that burden. What is more, we are satisfied that his honour’s conclusions with respect to the substantial truth of the relevant imputations conveyed by the respondents’ articles were correct.”

Early last month, the High Court slammed the final door on Roberts-Smith’s legal efforts to clear his name when it rejected a special leave application for him to challenge the Federal Court decisions. This emphatic conclusion to the disgraced soldier’s seven-year legal crusade against his accusers might have convinced most observers of the sordid saga that enough was more enough on the matter of Ben Roberts-Smith and his VC. But not Aaron Patrick.

In a post on LinkedIn earlier this month, Patrick declared: “If you’re interested in learning what the former SAS soldier did to deserve the medal, this book is for you. But The Last Battle is about a lot more than him. Some 150 Australian soldiers directly participated. His story is important. So are the other soldiers. I hope my book can help Australians better understand how our men and women fought in Afghanistan, and why they deserve our respect, gratitude and understanding. It’s also one hell of a war story.”

When it was first learned that Patrick was writing the book, there was scepticism about his intentions, not least at the Australian Financial Review, where he had worked for some years as a senior correspondent. Under the headline, “Ben Roberts-Smith Gets Another (Positive) Chapter Written,” the Fin’s popular Rear Window column began an item last March: “Over at Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media, efforts to rehabilitate the reputation of former employee and war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith continue.”

Columnist Hannah Wootton noted that Patrick had recently joined Seven West’s daily digital newspaper, the Nightly, as chief writer, after writing occasional opinion and news pieces for the outlet while penning his book.

Kerry Stokes is, of course, the most ardent supporter of Ben Roberts-Smith, whom he once employed to run Seven’s TV operations in Queensland. Early last month, the multimillionaire was ordered by the Federal Court to pay $13.5 million in costs incurred by the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in their successful defence of his protégé’s defamation case. The total costs of the proceedings — including money spent by Stokes underwriting Roberts-Smith’s legal team — have been estimated at between $30 million and $40 million. At Seven West’s annual general meeting in 2022, Stokes famously declared: “Ben Roberts-Smith is innocent and deserves legal representation and… scumbag journalists should be held to account.”

Hannah Wootton quoted Patrick as saying the war in Afghanistan was not understood by a lot of Australians and his book about the Battle of Shah Wali Kot was “a really great way to tell the story of what the soldiers did over there,” before adding: “This is not a war crimes book.” Wootton concluded: “A book painting a picture of his [Roberts-Smith’s] bravery… without diving into those pesky war crimes, is bound to please Patrick’s new boss.”

In fact, The Last Battle does deal with the pesky war crimes matters, though with kid gloves. Patrick writes at some length about the efforts of Roberts-Smith’s lawyers to “demonstrate their client’s bravery and professionalism” and to denigrate the journalists who exposed the unlawful killings (The Full Court rejected the attacks on Nick McKenzie, saying the appellant failed to establish that he had engaged in any misconduct.)

Patrick prefaces his brief account of the devastating Besanko judgement by trumpeting that the judge “did not question his bravery at Tizak or his right to the Victoria Cross.” He quickly summarises the killing of prisoners before adding: “Roberts-Smith’s medals were never revoked. The Australian War Memorial kept them and his uniform in the Hall of Valour, a section of the museum that commemorates Victoria Cross recipients.” He then indulges Roberts-Smith by quoting him saying: “Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant, and I believe one day soon the truth will prevail.”

Patrick repeatedly styles Roberts-Smith as a victim — of a public that doesn’t appreciate the dangers and pressures on a soldier in battle, of military colleagues jealous of another’s success and medals, and of the kind of journalists his new boss derides as scumbags.

Patrick writes of the 2018 Sixty Minutes program, presented by Nick McKenzie, in which a disguised senior SAS soldier gave a detailed account of how Roberts-Smith had in 2012 kicked a handcuffed Afghan prisoner off a small cliff before ordering his execution. He laments that the “allegations” in the program and related newspaper reports had “destroyed” Roberts-Smith’s hard-won reputation: “He was shunned by military and civic organisations. No Anzac Day marches wanted him to speak. Charities cut ties. He lost the opportunity of becoming a partner of PwC, a large financial services firm. Instead of embodying courage in war, he became a symbol of its capacity for personal destruction.”

A more realistic explanation of the cause Roberts-Smith’s downfall might have been to quote directly from the Besanko judgement. The judge found that the soldier had indeed kicked the handcuffed villager, Ali Jan, off the cliff before directing another soldier dubbed “Person 11” to shoot him, that Roberts-Smith had falsely claimed Ali Jan was a Taliban fighter who had been engaged in combat rather than an innocent farmer, and that Roberts-Smith had “aided, abetted, counselled or procured Person 11 in the murder of Ali Jan.” Patrick might equally have given a detailed account of the three other killings in which the judge found Roberts-Smith to be a war criminal involved in unlawful executions.

If Patrick’s primary intention was indeed to mitigate Roberts-Smith’s rogue actions in Afghanistan by recasting them in the golden light of the heroic events at Tizak in 2010, he has failed dismally. Even while skirting most of the shocking evidence that emerged during the defamation case, the book still amounts to a damning portrait of the principal character of the tale.

Rather than the intrigues of scumbag journalists, it was the disgust of fellow soldiers — at his unauthorised actions on the battlefield and the merits of his Victoria Cross award — that ultimately brought Ben Roberts-Smith undone. McKenzie and Masters have rightly applauded the actions of the numerous special forces soldiers, many of whom gave evidence reluctantly, whose truth-telling enabled the truth defence to prevail in the defamation case.

A total of twenty-two soldiers were nominated for bravery medals for their valour in the Battle of Shah Wali Kot. Only three were awarded. In addition to Roberts-Smith’s VC, Philip O’Connor was awarded the Star of Gallantry and Justin Percy received the Medal of Gallantry, but only after an outcry, a review and a two-year wait. The bureaucratic parsimony triggered immediate resentment in the special forces ranks and a widespread belief that Roberts-Smith had been singled out for special treatment. “The army needed a positive message from the messy and confusing war,” Patrick concedes. “In the 202-centimetre-tall son of a general, was a hero who could deliver it.”

Almost as soon as it was published, the details of the VC citation were being picked apart, and revealed as deeply flawed by some of the soldiers who fought with Roberts-Smith that day. Sergeant Kenneth Barber — who would become the anonymous witness on the Sixty Minutes program (with defence department approval) — told Chris Masters that every aspect of the official account of Roberts-Smith’s actions was flawed and the citation contained “lies and embellishments.”

Barber argued that the fighting at the mosque was not particularly daring or dangerous and the intensity of Taliban firing was “minimal.” He said the insurgent purportedly killed by Roberts-Smith while pointing a grenade launcher at the two other troopers was in fact unarmed, his RPG leaning against a wall. And he said the reason the grenade Roberts-Smith threw at the attackers in the mosque failed to explode was not because it was a dud but because the corporal had failed to remove the safety clip necessary to arm it.

Barber claimed the pivotal moment of the battle — when Roberts-Smith is credited as having run into the courtyard killing two Taliban machine gunners — did not happen. He said the pair had been driven inside by helicopter fire and the corporal and the other troopers entered the compound without being shot at: “He did not charge in on his own and save blokes lives. They all ran together.” Percy, who was beside Roberts-Smith throughout the action at the mosque — and who Roberts-Smith concedes saved his life when his gun jammed — also argued strongly that he did not deserve the VC.

In the end, it was the awarding of the VC that unravelled the once brilliant career of Ben Roberts-Smith — and the once inviolable code of solidarity and secrecy in the Australian SAS Regiment. The griping about the fairness of the award lead to loose talk about the corporal’s history of bulling and brutality that eventually spilled into the media. It gave momentum to events that triggered the four-year inquiry by Defence Force inspector general Paul Brereton, who found in November 2020 that twenty-five members of the Australian special forces were involved in the killing of thirty-nine prisoners and civilians in Afghanistan. None of the twenty-five were named in the Brereton report, although four of them were SAS troopers who fought at Tizak. It was Roberts-Smith’s decision to sue the Fairfax newspapers that brought the house of cards crashing onto his own head.

Aaron Patrick laments that the medals awarded after the Battle of Shah Wali Kot — and especially the Victoria Cross — became a focus of disappointment and rancour rather than a celebration of service. “After the initial adulation, Ben Roberts-Smith found himself a target. Without it [the medal], his identity would not have been disclosed and he would have had no public reputation to destroy,” he writes.

In defence of his thesis that the genuine heroism of Shah Wali Kot deserves to be honoured and celebrated despite the scandals that have now engulfed the record of Australia’s engagement in Afghanistan, Patrick argues: “Whether Afghanistan was the right war at the right time was irrelevant to the men of the Special Operations Task Group, the commando and SASR force in Afghanistan. They did their duty. Some died. Others came back badly injured, physically and psychologically. All were shaped by the experience. They deserve recognition for their sacrifice, praise for their courage.”

Unfortunately for all those who served with honour and dedication in that ultimately pointless war, the gross misconduct of a few has permanently tarnished the record of the entire deployment. And when the intensive war crimes prosecutions process initiated by the Brereton inquiry is eventually concluded, Ben Roberts-Smith will not be the only Afghan veteran left with nowhere to take cover. •

The Last Battle: Australian SAS, Commandos and Our Greatest Victory in Our Longest War
By Aaron Patrick | Macmillan Australia | $36.99 | 304 pages

The post One hell of a story appeared first on Inside Story.

The book is a wide-ranging account of how Australian television and migrants have intersected since the 1950s, the decade in which both television and mass immigration began to transform culture and society at large. Australian television officially started in September 1956, coinciding with the Olympic Games in Melbourne in that year. Mass immigration had begun in the late 1940s following the Chifley government’s postwar decision to boost the population with a large-scale intake of migrants not just from Britain and Ireland (who were preferred in “white Australia”) but also from southern and eastern Europe. Later, from the 1970s onwards, they would also come from Asia and the rest of the world. The massive demographic change that resulted profoundly affected the workings of Australian institutions, including television.

The “Australian Stories” in the book’s title signals the fact that television is quintessentially a story-telling machine. In this regard the intersection of television and migrants has not always been a happy one. Indeed, the launch of the Special Broadcasting Service in 1980 was principally a response to the lack of migrant stories on Australian TV and a more general lack of recognition of the ethnic and cultural diversity that the flows of migrants engendered.

For a long time the “Australianness” depicted on Australian television was overwhelmingly white, foregrounding white voices, faces and stories, and failing to reflect the multicultural society Australia was becoming. Australian television institutions were, and to large extent still are, Anglo-Celtic bastions. As the authors note, “there has been a stilted, gradual acceptance by the public and the industry of non-Anglo-focused stories as part of Australian culture over many decades.” Nevertheless, they highlight some very interesting instances, dating back long before SBS was established, of TV programs incidentally appealing strongly to migrant audiences.

One of those programs was World Championship Wrestling, which ran from 1964 to 1978 on Channel 9. International wrestlers were pitted against local wrestlers, many of whom were of migrant backgrounds, making the program phenomenally popular among young migrant viewers. By the late 1960s some migrant entrepreneurs had also succeeded in producing TV programs for Australian broadcasters eager to fill their schedules with cheap content. These included Variety Italian Style, a highly successful Italian variety show initiated by Italian-Australian advertising worker Antonio Luciano, and The Greek Variety Show, produced by Cyprus-born actor Harry Michaels (surely an Anglicised name!), who even re-mortgaged his house to pay for his foray into Greek program-making but achieved financial viability with advertising income from Greek businesses. These programs were shown on commercial television for many years in the 1960s and 70s.

Documenting such largely forgotten instances is one of the great strengths of this book. The authors have used archival material and oral interviews to reconstruct the stories of these programs. The examples of Luciano and Michaels also highlight how the gradual admission of ethnic and cultural diversity onto Australian screens was largely the work of trailblazing migrant individuals. This seems to be the case even to this day, despite “inclusion and diversity” having become a much more mainstream policy priority.

Examples of such trailblazers include Paul Fenech, of Maltese and Indigenous background, who emerged as creator, producer and actor in the mid-1990s and led the making of the highly popular series Pizza in the early 2000s, and Benjamin Law who, with producer Tony Ayres (both of whom are Chinese Australian), created the wildly successful comedy series The Family Law, shown on SBS.

But this dependence on the success of a few cultural leaders and advocates has resulted, as the authors observe in their epilogue, in a “patchy situation” in which “a piecemeal approach to inclusion” reigns. On several occasions they argue that this unhappy situation reflects a lack of regulatory frameworks governing Australian screen production. I am not so sure, however, that regulation (such as quotas) would have made a huge difference.

Even SBS, whose existence is of course the result of a seminal act of legislation and regulation — perhaps the most significant achievement of Australian multicultural policy-making — has often struggled to put into practice its mandate “to reflect multicultural Australia” in the face of the complex realities of the television business. These realities are, last but not least, to do with what TV industry folk call the “fickleness” of audiences. Ultimately, success and popularity are dependent on audience preferences and practices, which cannot be controlled.

In this regard, it is fitting that Migrants, Television and Australian Stories opens and closes with a chapter on migrant audiences. Chapter 2 (which follows the introductory Chapter 1) focuses on how migrants watched Australian TV in the early days. Not surprisingly, they viewed in a great variety in ways and for a variety of reasons, although the homogeneous whiteness of early television — free-to-air broadcast television characterised by centralised transmission and limited choice — did make many of them feel less at home in Australia.

By the third decade of this century, however, new technologies of delivery and reception have radically altered the contexts of television viewing, discussed in the book’s final chapter. Audiences have been served increasingly with a huge array of options, beginning with the video cassette recorder, or VCR, in the 1980s, then DVDs, satellite and pay TV in the 1990s and, in the 2010s, streaming services such as Netflix. These developments have massively fragmented viewership and allowed many migrants to by-pass mainstream Australian television altogether. Indeed, migrants’ use of new technologies to access TV content from “home” has been a well-known practice since it was made possible by the VCR.

Television as we knew it in the twentieth century would be virtually irrelevant for young people of migrant backgrounds today. Just like their non-migrant peers, they are more often hooked into a global youth culture via transnationally accessible digital media, using their phones to watch screen content on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms. These platforms also give creators a potentially global reach, far beyond traditional broadcasting, as is shown by the international success of Australian web series (short, episodic scripted content uploaded to the web) focusing on multicultural communities. Among these are Superwog, created by two Sydney brothers of Egyptian background, Theodore and Nathan Saidden, and Halal Gurls by Western Sydney-based writer-director Vonne Patiag, who is of Filipino background.

The proliferation and hybridity of global content of all kinds, and of production structures and viewing practices, is an ongoing, unruly process with uncertain future trends. As a result, the question of how “migrants,” “television” and “Australian stories” intersect, and the associated policy pursuit of “diversity and inclusion,” is perhaps becoming increasingly obsolete.

As the authors of Migrants, Television and Australian Stories note, “In an era where international co-production is the norm, and screen content can be viewed globally by a mobile and transient population of migrant diasporas, the ‘Australianness’ of television making and viewing is hard to define.” Against this background, this book stands as an invaluable documentation of the multiple ways in which migrants, against all odds, have made their presence felt — as workers, creators and viewers — in the evolving Australian television landscape. •

Migrants, Television and Australian Stories: A New History
By Kate Darian-Smith, Sue Turnbull, Sukhmani Khorana and Kyle Harvey | Routledge | $83.99 | 278 pages

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The New York-based institute, an initiative of the prestigious Asia Society founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller III, was a welcome sinecure for the irrepressible intellect of the twenty-sixth prime minister of Australia. By 2021 he would add the titles president and CEO of the Society itself to his tirelessly burnished CV.

Dr Rudd described himself as an “independent think tanker” during his time at the policy institute before he landed the job of Australian ambassador to Washington in 2023. “As an independent think tanker, people expect you to exercise a wide latitude of engagement in the public policy debate,” he later explained.

As we are all now painfully aware, wide latitude includes offering frank assessments of former presidents of the United States, which is all very fine unless the president in question makes a Lazarus-like comeback for a second term and you become Australia’s supplicant-in-chief in America.

In social media posts back in 2020–21, Rudd wrote that Trump was the “most destructive president in history” and “a traitor to the West,” among other unflattering appraisals. But in November last year, after Trump was re-elected, he promptly deleted all the posts “out of respect” for the office of president.

As some in the media have pointed out in recent days (with notable exceptions in the Murdoch camp) Rudd’s social media history was positively tame compared with the two most senior members of Trump’s cabinet. In 2016 Vice President J.D. Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” and compared him to O.J. Simpson as a “hated, villainous, douche celeb.” Around the same time, secretary of state Marco Rubio called him ”a con artist” who had “spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy.”

The revisiting of this awkward history during Anthony Albanese’s visit to Washington has brought back troubling memories of reporting from Southeast Asia in another millennium.

Back in the 1990s, former foreign minister Gareth Evans would rail in exasperation that there were only two types of stories that interested Australian journalists covering the region — “the row and the kowtow.” In essence, the stories that guaranteed media coverage were ones where Australian leaders and officials were in heated disagreement or, better still, open conflict with their regional counterparts (the row) or were deemed to be compromising or, better still, grovelling to defuse or end such conflicts (the kowtow).

In my experience, one of the richest veins tapped in this unedifying journalistic genre was the unhappy relationship between prime minister Paul Keating and his Malaysian counterpart Mahathir Mohamad.

In 1993, when Mahathir declined an invitation to attend the leaders’ meeting in Seattle of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum — a project pioneered and driven by Australia — Keating dismissed him as “recalcitrant.” While many observers needed to dust off their dictionaries to clarify the gravity of this rebuke, a row erupted in Kuala Lumpur that strained relations between the two countries… and Keating refused to kowtow.

For years thereafter, Australian journalists in need of a quick headline from Mahathir press conferences would throw baiting questions about the shortcomings of Keating in particular, and Australia in general. Mahathir was rarely recalcitrant in replying, and indeed seemed to relish the sport. This nonsense of course did nothing to advance the sum of human wisdom or the health of the relationship between Australia and Malaysia.

I was overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu reading the headlines after last week’s White House meeting and press conference between Trump and Albanese. “Trump Takes Swipe at Rudd”; “White House Spray”; “Australian Ambassador Humiliated”; “Trump Scolds Rudd”; “Trump Puts Kevin Rudd in his Place” etc. etc. Even the earnest Conversation joined the pile on: “Clip Over the Ear for Kevin Rudd.”

I rushed to find video footage to witness the enormity of what clearly had been a disastrous confrontation between the Kevin we thought was there to help and the pugilist president. How could what, by all accounts, was an astonishingly cordial and constructive meeting between Albanese and Trump have been derailed so dramatically?

Moments after Sky News Australia political editor Andrew Clennell caught Trump’s attention, I saw the good old “row” button flashing green. Clennell then charged in, helpfully offering Trump a multiple-choice opportunity to stick the boot into Albanese, Rudd or both.

“There is concern in Australia that it has taken nine months to get this meeting,” Clennell intoned, neglecting to acknowledge that the only people genuinely exercised about the delay were a flailing faction of the Coalition and their Sky After Dark and Murdoch tabloid spruikers. “Have you had any concerns with this administration with its stance on Palestine, climate change or even things that the ambassador said about you in the past in Australia, the Australian ambassador?”

The question triggered a bombshell. But it was not the one Andrew Clennell so ardently anticipated and the subsequent coverage “buried the lead,” as they say in the craft. The real revelation was that Donald Trump had no idea who Kevin Rudd was and no idea what he had said that so clearly deserved his umbrage.

“I don’t know anything about him,” said a bewildered Trump. “If he said bad then maybe he’d like to apologise.” Then, turning to Albanese, he asked: “Did an ambassador say something bad about me?” As Albanese was about to speak, Trump continued: “No, don’t tell me. Where is he? Is he still working for you?”

On the opposite side of the table, Kevin Rudd seemed momentarily and uncharacteristically lost for words, obviously fearful of what might be coming next — and presumably mortified that after two and a half years as Australia’s top envoy in Washington and nearly a year at the court of King Donald, Trump apparently did not recognise him.

As the press pack standing behind Rudd howled with laughter, Clennell gleefully pointed the president in the direction of Rudd. “Did you say something bad?” asked Trump. “Before I took this position, Mr President,” replied Rudd. “I don’t like you either and probably never will,” said Trump.

It was, the Guardian later observed, “the testiest and most uncomfortable remark at a typically freewheeling” presidential press conference: “But it was quickly followed by laughter across the packed room: the guffaws coming as if a pressure value had been released in government and diplomatic circles.”

After an immediate apology delivered by Rudd at the end of the presser (Kowtow: “Rudd Issues Grovelling Apology”), Trump was reported to have told Albanese that he “seems like a nice guy” before declaring: “All is forgiven.” That ought to have been the end of it — especially after Albanese later batted back opposition calls for Rudd’s sacking and heaped praised on Rudd as “an outstanding representative” of Australia in Washington who was “working his guts out.” But this ignores one of the foundation principles of row/kowtow journalism: when you’re on a roll, stick with it.

At the weekend, as Trump was leaving Washington to attend the Asean summit in Kuala Lumpur, Australian journalists were back in the hunt. Asked by Nine newspapers’ Michael Koziol whether he had forgiven Ambassador Rudd (kowtow plus row), Trump unhelpfully replied: “No, I don’t know anything about him.” Then, having just forgotten, he declared that he was a man who never forgets: “I think he said a long time ago something bad. You know, when they say bad about me, I don’t forget.”

Perhaps this could have been the basis of fresh news stories about Donald Trump’s apparently accelerating mental decline, but Murdoch’s news.com.au was in no doubt that they had yet another “row” in the bag. “Smiling Assassin: Donald Trump Takes Another Swing at Kevin Rudd,” shouted the headline, then: “Donald Trump has warned Kevin Rudd he never forgets people who badmouth him despite telling Australia’s Ambassador that ‘all is forgiven’.”

Maybe we should never forget that Kevin Rudd along with Malcolm Turnbull led the campaign for a royal commission into the Murdoch media empire, describing it as a “cancer on our democracy.” •

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The Murdoch family trust was created in 1999 during Rupert’s divorce from his second wife, Anna, and not long before he married his third, Wendi Deng. It sought to prevent Rupert’s four children from losing their inheritances to any other children he might father. Rupert controlled four of eight shares, and each of his four oldest children were given one each.

But the problem preoccupying the patriarch and his older son, Lachlan, in recent years has not been the threat from new arrivals but a conflict with the other three beneficiaries of the trust. After Rupert dies, they feared, James, Elisabeth and Prudence could well join together to out-vote Lachlan and dilute or change the editorial direction of the company’s media.

In December 2023 Rupert and Lachlan sought to change the “irrevocable” trust to ensure Lachlan’s ongoing control. The court, however, gave a clear victory to Lachlan’s siblings. The struggles continued: “For the Murdoch family,” the New York Times reported last month, “the last nine months have been filled with a flurry of warring sealed briefs, secret buyout negotiations and ever-mounting legal fees — some fifty lawyers are listed on the case docket — as they fought one final battle.”

That battle ended with a settlement bringing all outstanding litigation to an end. The three siblings, referred to in the trial as “the objecting children,” now became “the departing beneficiaries.” They will each receive $US1.1 billion, around 80 per cent of the current share value, and must resign from the trust. According to the Fox Corporation announcement, “They will be subject to a long-term standstill agreement [reported to be twelve years] preventing them, and their affiliates, from acquiring shares of Fox and News Corporation and taking certain other actions with respect to the companies.”

Those “certain other actions” have not been revealed but probably include a bar on investing in News Corp’s competitors and perhaps a pledge not to disparage the company’s activities, which would inhibit any public criticism of Fox News, for example.

James, Elisabeth and Prudence walk away not only with huge fortunes but also having escaped what would have been an all-but-impossible managerial challenge. How, for instance, would you turn Fox News into a more honest and professional news organisation? Any attempt would probably see an exodus of its audience to one of the other right-wing broadcasters, with a negative impact on the bottom line.

For Rupert the issue was also one of legacy:  “Fox and our papers are the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media,” he wrote in 2022. “I believe maintaining this is vital to the future of the English-speaking world.”

Securing control of the empire cost Lachlan and Rupert much more than it might have because their hamfisted strategy sharpened the lines of conflict in the family and locked in the other three siblings more solidly against Lachlan. After the verdict, their bargaining position also became much stronger.

Initially, the highest price Lachlan was prepared to pay for their exit was 60 per cent of the value of their shares, which they refused. Now he has paid around 80 pe cent of a much higher share price.

Will that extra expense have larger consequences? Raising $US3.3 billion — by selling shares and by taking out a loan — is a big task even for the Murdochs.

The empire has long been notorious for its dual-voting structure, which has given the family more than 40 per cent of the vote with fewer than 20 per cent of the total shares. The share sell-off potentially makes their control more vulnerable. At the moment they own 41 per cent of News Corp voting shares and 43 per cent of Fox voting shares. With the sale, the proportions will fall to 33 per cent and 36 per cent respectively.

That reduction isn’t likely to matter in the short-term. Shareholders are presumably happy with Lachlan’s leadership, and the value of both companies has been rising. Fox shares, selling at about $30 share in 2014, now change hands for $56.81; News Corp’s, around $17 in 2014, are now $33.97.

But if things go sour for any reason in the coming years, Lachlan could be vulnerable. The founder and builder of an empire enjoys a status and reputation that isn’t simply inherited by his successor. Nor does Lachlan show any sign of encouraging a more informed and vigorous board: when Jack Nassar, former chair of BHP and global chief executive of Ford, stepped down recently, he was replaced by Tony Abbott, who has never sat on a public board and has very limited commercial experience.

There have already been moments when Rupert has not always got his own way. In 2023 shareholders decisively blocked his attempt to re-merge the two wings of his media empire, which had been split following the phone-hacking scandal in Britain.

In the closest vote on the future of the dual-voting structure, in 2017, 90 per cent of non-Murdoch family shareholders voted to overturn the system (diluted to 49.5 per cent by the dual-voting system). With the trust’s recently reduced voting share, the non-Murdoch vote would have made up a majority. Although any such victory would be non-binding, it would have been an acute embarrassment, and would probably have eventually forced change.

But the real powder keg, according to Sydney Morning Herald business writer Colin Kruger, is the $US1 billion J.P. Morgan loan that will help cover the payout to the three siblings. The loan is secured against the Murdoch trust’s share in each of the empire’s businesses, so if things go badly wrong at any point family control will be over. Even now, such a large debt may inhibit the company from pursuing opportunities that require cash up front.

As it happened, such an opportunity beckoned even before the ink was dry on the family trust settlement. President Donald Trump offered Fox a place in a consortium he was organising to buy the US assets of TikTok, the world’s fastest-growing social medium. The short-form video channel carries a huge array of material — sports, entertainment, news and opinion — pitched at younger users and claims more than a billion worldwide visitors each month.

TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, in which the Chinese government has a “golden share” that gives it a veto over business decisions and the right to seek information from it. Many Western democracies see this link as a potential threat to national security.

The Biden administration argued that the channel, with 170 million US users, could be used by China to boost propaganda and undermine free expression. After securing considerable bipartisan support, Biden signed a law requiring ByteDance to sell its US assets to an American owner or have it banned in the United States.

Although Trump tried but failed to ban TikTok during his first term, but then reversed his stance and repeatedly pledged to save TikTok. The reason is not hard to find: he had become “a big star” on the app, and TikTok users who get their news from the site were one of the groups that swung most his way in last year’s election.

Where Biden worried about national security, Trump saw an opportunity for patronage. One of the four executive orders he signed on the first day of his presidency was a direction not to enforce Biden’s TikTok law. The following month he created a US sovereign wealth fund whose first investment would be in TikTok.

Two invited guests — Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, one of America’s richest men and a strong Trump supporter, and Rupert Murdoch — watched him sign the order. They are among the half dozen American figures named as part of the group Trump is assembling. The US-owned TikTok will have a seven-person board, comprising national and cybersecurity experts. Six will be American; ByteDance will choose the seventh.

This is crony capitalism at its most blatant. Trump will essentially choose who the American participants will be. “Larry Ellison is one of them. He’s involved. This great guy, Michael Dell” — chief executive of Dell Technologies — “is involved. I hate to tell you this, but a man named Lachlan is involved. Do you know who Lachlan is?” Trump told Fox News. “And Rupert is probably going to be in the group.” They’re “American patriots,” he said. “They love this country. I think they’re going to do a really good job.” He also joked that he would like it to see lots of MAGA content on TikTok.

In return, participants in the new TikTok will have what amounts to a government-guaranteed cash cow. But the ticket to be a passenger on this lucrative gravy train is likely to be expensive. Trump has made clear “that he wants investors in the TikTok divestiture to pay the US government a ‘tremendous fee-plus’ for arranging it,” reported the New Yorker’s John Cassidy. Vice-president J.D. Vance has said the US company will be valued at around $14 billion (possibly “lowballing” TikTok’s value as a favour to friendly investors like Ellison and Murdoch). Others have estimated $30–$40 billion.

Putting considerations of corruption to one side, this is clearly a great investment opportunity. Can the Murdoch empire, with its newly acquired debt, afford to buy in? And will the commitments Lachlan incurred to free himself of his troublesome siblings inhibit what else he can do in the next few years? •

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If it was complicated then, the whole affair was only halfway through its obnoxious cycle of failed investigations, misfired prosecution attempts, cancelled legislative measures and bungled trials. And it’s not over yet. ITV’s new seven-part miniseries The Hack, streaming on Stan, finishes with a summary of where things have gone since the conclusion of its part of the story in 2014, and the message is, essentially, backwards. Rodney Tiffen, reviewing the state of affairs for Inside Story in 2024 chronicled a roller-coaster of spoilers. Most of the bad actors are still in their roles.

The series starts with Guardian journalist Nick Davies trying to write the opening sentence of Hack Attack, his attempt to give a comprehensive account of what he learned during six years of indefatigable investigative work. To a soundtrack of scrabbling keys, he’s deleting his own introductory statements, one after another. How do you tell this story?

From a production point of view, the creators have adopted two successful recent models. Writer Jack Thorne has to his credit the Netflix series Adolescence, whose unflinching focus on a harrowing social crisis led to multiple awards, including a swag of Primetime Emmys. The 2024 limited series Mr Bates versus the Post Office, a social justice drama also from ITV, starred Toby Jones, who plays Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in The Hack.

Both those series tackled big, complex sociopolitical issues, but the vast quagmire of the hacking scandal presents another order of difficulty for a team creating television drama, even when they have a top-of-the-range cast and seven hours of screen time, more than twice the length of a major feature film. Their strategy is to focus on two figures at the centre of intersecting lines of events, both of whom entered the picture in around 2002.

Davies, backed by Rusbridger, fronts the investigation. Looking permanently dishevelled in Davies’s trademark worn jeans and leather jacket, David Tennant plays him as man who doesn’t eat or sleep much, and has the effect of disturbing the peace every time he enters a room because he’s always after something and usually just been thwarted in his quest.

In the convention of breaking the fourth wall, he treats the camera like an ever-present witness and confidante, sometimes just giving a look that says what he can’t say at that particular moment, but at key points delivering recaps and contextual narrative to clarify the ever more confusing plotlines. The convention is sometimes used (as in Fleabag and House of Cards) to provide psychological insight into the lead character, but here it harks back to traditions of social realism where the audience are co-opted as witnesses in a crisis of truth and justice.

While Davies skirts the quagmire, Metropolitan police detective Dave Cook finds himself pulled into it. He’s a assigned to a cold case dating back to 1987, when the body of private investigator Daniel Morgan was found in a pub car park with an axe embedded in his skull. One of the suspects, Jonathan Rees (Andrew Whipp), was serving a seven-year jail sentence on another charge, but the police attempts to link him and four other associates to the murder kept getting embroiled in ways that put the investigators under suspicion.

Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery of the Catford police, who headed the first investigation, had been working for Morgan’s company, Southern Investigations. And Southern Investigations had been working on commission for News International, obtaining information about celebrities and others in the public eye by illegal means. Rees, who had a network of contacts across many domains, had received hefty payments from News of the World for his efforts.

By the time Cook is brought in, four prior investigations have had no consequences other than intensified internal tensions and some blatant intimidation. Episode two shows Cook being harassed at his family home by masked men and chased by a sinister black van as he’s driving his children to school. His wife (Eve Myles) suffers from PTSD and is at her wits’ end.

Robert Carlyle plays Cook as a counterpoint to Tennant’s Davies. He is a seasoned realist and skilled observer whose reserve is only broken by the threats to his family. It’s through him that the human impact of the saga is really brought home, while victims of the hacking are featured only briefly.

The episode as a whole exhibits the strongest and weakest aspects of the series’ approach to  dramatisation. Producer Patrick Spence has explained a strategic decision to introduce Cook’s investigation as if it is a separate narrative, leaving viewers puzzled as to whether they are still watching the same series. That way, the point of intersection gains sharper impact. Perhaps. But it’s also confusing, and there’s more than enough confusion in this already. Photos on a pin board between short sequences from police interviews do little to help viewers keep track of the multiple suspects, who are never effectively realised as individuals.

Other names are thrown around. Andy Coulson (Mark Stobbart) and Glen Mulcaire are murky background figures, travelling between various frames of the investigation, though in the larger political situation they were very much in the foreground.

Coulson, editor of News of the World from 2003–07, had become communications director for the Conservative Party before being appointed communications adviser to prime minister David Cameron. Mulcaire, who was working as a private investigator in association with News of the World journalist Clive Goodman, had been found guilty of illegal phone hacking in 2007 but was hired three years later as a senior investigator for a company run by former Metropolitan Police commissioner John Stevens, who had become Baron Stevens in 2005.

Police, parliament and the press form an ugly moebius strip, as Cook begins to realise, and the prospect of getting the law to cut through it all doesn’t look clear.

One figure comes into focus with stunning effectiveness, however. Rebekah Brooks, editor of News of the World from 2000 to 2003, is typically seen at some distance from the cameras, which gives the actor and writer latitude in interpreting her character during a critical scene. Cook manages to secure an interview with her on the connection with Southern Investigations.

“Rebekah’s very charming,” says his colleague as they await her entrance. Rosalie Craig plays her with all the charm of Cruella de Ville, controlling the exchanges with patronising smiles and glib disclaimers. Cook’s complaints of personal harassment by an agency she appears to be employing don’t cause a ripple in the smooth performance. “I’ll look into it,” she says and stands, briskly drawing the meeting to a close. “Thank you for your service.” It’s the kind of behaviour anyone might encounter from a powerful executive used to brushing off annoying distractions.

What really burns is the attitude of those around her. We see Cook with the steely expression of someone who sees exactly what he is up against, trying to ignore the egregious sycophancy of his fellow officer. As they leave the building, Brooks is visible in the distance, warmly embracing the police commissioner. It’s all about the difference between those who see the game for what it is and those who choose to play it, not just because they’re pressured into cooperation, but through keen opportunism and their own naive vanity.

The Hack’s later episodes gain momentum when Rusbridger calls in the New York Times, which is unconstrained by Britain’s strict sub judice rules, and offers them the Guardian’s files on the case. Four Pulitzer prize–winners are sent over, and the story breaks as a major scoop, with new details, in America. Then, with the discovery that hackers interfered with the phone of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler before her body was found, the sluice gates open and angry headlines appear in all the major British news outlets.

Under pressure, the Conservative government appoints the Leveson inquiry, which carries the promise of a decisive turning point. All the principle figures in the scandal, led by none other than Rupert Murdoch (played with a dodgy Australian accent by Steve Pemberton), finally have to face questioning, and Davies gets his chance to provide a full public testimony, laying down the ethical parameters at risk of erasure.

In dramatic terms, it’s a classic example of what might be called the double court: we the viewers are addressed as the jury, so the courtroom before the camera is replicated by the court of public opinion, the ultimate arena for any case serious enough to call for the judgement of history. But this is not history yet. Hacked Off campaigners are hoping the series may help to influence what happens next.

The hardest thing to reckon with about this whole rotten business is that it remains unresolved. Leveson left the inquiry with stern recommendations that weren’t acted upon, despite David Cameron’s promise to do so. Phase two of Leveson has never happened. Keir Starmer, who as director of public prosecutions brought an unsuccessful case against Brooks and her associates in Leveson 1, abandoned his promise to pursue the investigation when he became prime minister. “Truth is on the march,” said Emil Zola, “and nothing will stop it.” If only. It seems, rather, we’re still waiting for something to stop the lies. •

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Under Labor’s policy, around $7.7 billion a year had been collected via a price on carbon emissions and returned to Australians through various channels but mostly direct tax cuts. The Abbott government, by contrast, paid companies to reduce their emissions. It was budgeted to cost around $2.5 billion over four years.

Wielding a nifty pea and thimble, Hunt used the emissions cut under the carbon price, the total money churned, the emissions cuts promised by businesses and the dollars paid to them to pronounce that “Labor’s $15.4 billion carbon tax reduced emissions at over $1300 per tonne” while his government’s scheme “averages $13.95 per tonne.” Labor’s “failed carbon tax was more than ninety-three times more expensive.”

This was a false comparison in many ways, the main one being the dollars: one figure (the ERF’s) was a cost to the budget and the other (Gillard’s) wasn’t.

That’s political spin for you — nice work if you can get away with it — and if you’re very lucky journalists will pick it up and run. In this case no journo obliged with more vigour than the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan who, in a celebratory column, wrote that Hunt (yes, Hunt personally) was “going to cut Australia’s carbon emissions four times more than Labor did with its carbon tax at 1 per cent price per tonne of emissions…”

Sheridan evidently liked the cut of Hunt’s jib, for his columns in those years were littered with glowing mentions of the frontbencher — too many to list, in fact, but here’s a sample and a final farewell.

Hunt is long gone, and these days the object of Sheridan’s besottedness seems to be Matt Canavan, the coal-revering Queensland LNP senator. Canavan was a minister in the Turnbull and Morrison governments, and Sheridan is very much of the opinion he should be back on the frontbench. In particular, Greg shares his conviction that the Coalition should abandon the net-zero-by-2050 target.

In May this year, Canavan shared on social media a screenshot of a London Daily Telegraph headline “New Zealand Abandons Jacinta Arden’s Net Zero Push” and added his own words: “New Zealand just dropped net zero. Why do we remain committed to this madness?”

The Tele’s headline, repeated in the article’s introduction, was fake news: New Zealand hasn’t dropped net zero. (But if you google the words you’ll find them gleefully repeated many times.) The piece instead referred to that country’s National government’s plans to “invest NZ$200m (£90m) in new offshore gas fields,” overturning Labour’s fossil fuel policy. If expanding gas exploitation is abandoning net zero, then the Albanese government has also dropped the target.

Within days, Sheridan was writing that the “Nationals in New Zealand… are abandoning the inherently fraudulent concept of net zero” and Australia’s federal opposition should do the same. And, of course, “By far the most policy-competent and intellectually substantial National is Queensland senator Matt Canavan.”

Sheridan articles railing against net zero — both in itself and as Coalition policy — and advocating Canavan’s return to the frontbench have been many. One, in early August, began by asserting that “there’s not a centre-right party in the English-speaking world, Nationals senator Matt Canavan points out, that remains committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050,” though he equivocated further down that “New Zealand’s government has kept the notional commitment but reversed Labour’s main policy actions.”

There was more. The Economist magazine, that “high-gloss rendition of every globalist piety,” has “crossed a Rubicon by declaring the world should abandon net zero by 2050 as a hard target and conceive of it as a “more of a guideline strategy.’” Sheridan has repeated this interpretation of the Economist’s view several times since, including last Sunday on ABC’s Insiders.

Is it true? Well, it’s nuanced. The magazine’s editorial stated that the “scientific rationale for net zero is strong” and an “end to warming requires the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stop increasing… The logic is inescapable.” But the politics being fraught, and politics being the art of the possible, leaders need to make sure the perfect doesn’t get in the way of the good.

The magazine distinguished between wealthy countries (like Australia) and the majority that aren’t but are trying to be. The latter’s carbon ambitions, starting off such low bases, are “[in] many cases… barely physically imaginable, let alone politically feasible.” But wealthy countries, rather than “abandon stringent net-zero targets outright” should “find ways to ease [such targets] into the ‘more of a guideline’ category,” even if it means sacrificing economic purity.

So the Economist lauded, for example, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s decision to “rescind the aspects of Canada’s carbon-pricing scheme that affect [voters] directly.” That was the largest component of that country’s scheme, a tax on fuel, applied at the level of consumption. (Australia has never had such a tax. And Canada’s federal government still has a carbon price rather like our 2012–14 one but involving much smaller dollar amounts, as well various state abatement schemes.)

It’s a huge exaggeration, at best, to say the Economist takes the view that we should “forget about net zero as a guiding principle because it’s just not going to happen,” as Sheridan did on Insiders on Sunday. Greg’s most recent net zero piece, on Wednesday this week, had something for everyone: advice for Ley, more Matt, another dubious reference to the Economist, even Greg Hunt.

As far as I can tell (cheat sheet: AI) no country has followed Sheridan’s advice and dropped net zero, not even Argentina (yet) under Javier Milei. But some parliamentary oppositions have, including the British Tories — and Nigel Farage’s Reform party, which is leading that country’s voting-intentions opinion polls.

Australia might or might not get to net zero, but it’s hard to be optimistic about the planet’s ability to hit the goal by 2050. If global warming was restricted to the geographic area in which the carbon was let loose into the atmosphere, the incentives would be different. As it is, every country is encouraged to freeload.

But is the Economist’s realpolitik actually realistic? Can a government proclaim a goal that’s only an aspiration? Maybe the Albanese government is conforming to that prescription by having a net zero target, albeit one that many experts believe won’t be met, while not moving ahead of the international pack. And another actual carbon price for this country — forget about it.

And what of the domestic politics down under? I’m never one to project the most recent election result and/or current surveys into the future and forecast government victories as far as the eye can see. Parties in opposition tend to flaunt their flaws, and these are particularly discernible through the prism of disastrous polling numbers. The same defects are also present during their stints in office, though, and they are a driver of the ever-falling major-party support. But the total major-party election share after preferences still has to add to 100 per cent.

The electoral cycle goes on, voters will one day well and truly tire of this Labor government, as they tired of the Coalition three years ago, and a change of government will be in the offing, albeit in the context of that expanding crossbench.

With the evidently red-pilled Andrew Hastie promising to quit the frontbench if net zero is not discarded, other Liberals rumoured to intend the same, and the Nationals deeply anti-zero, Sussan Ley’s five-month-old leadership appears fragile.

Mr Sheridan will probably get his wish on Coalition climate policy, if not necessarily the full Canavan-as-shadow-minister quinella. Abandoning net zero in opposition probably doesn’t make much difference to how voters see them. The median Coalition MP has never seemed to believe global warming is real, let alone that Australia should do anything about it. It didn’t stop them winning three elections on the trot.

The danger for the opposition lies in the prospect of people like Canavan having an influence on energy policy in general. He is, for example, very keen on building new coal power stations — a fringe position. If undoing moves towards renewable energy actually became opposition policy it wouldn’t only be a “signal” to the electorate that they’re a bunch of out-of-touch blokey troglodytes. It would also mean taking big policy targets to future elections.

Back when the “carbon tax” was legislated in 2011 and implemented the following year, it was against the backdrop that most people expected the next election would result in the policy being undone. Today, by contrast, virtually everyone assumes that 2028 will be a shoo-in for Labor and the earliest the Coalition can conceivably take office is 2031.

So, twelve to fourteen years ago, big business made plans for the demise of the carbon price and then agitated like hell and poured cash into the Liberal coffers to make sure that happened. That won’t be the case in 2028 if the opposition is promising to upend a more deeply embedded climate policy.

Through my prism, one election result never tells us much about the next one. But that general expectation about the 2028 election is probably correct, and the chief reason is that America’s White House will contain either Donald Trump or J.D. Vance and will hence still be a madhouse.

If the Coalition campaigns then, or in 2031, to unscramble the renewables egg, regardless of how on the nose the government is, and even if voters are blaming it for high power prices… well we know from experience that even an electorate ready to toss out an incumbent can be driven back into its arms if the alternative is too stress-inducing.

The big danger for Coalition MPs is that they put their climate change policy money where most of their mouths are. •

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The offending greeting was part of a leatherbound book Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell organised for the financier’s fiftieth birthday. According to the Journal, Trump drew a pair of small arcs denoting a woman’s breasts and signed with “a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.” Trump concluded “Happy birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump’s immediate response to the Journal’s report was to sue, and to attack the article. “The Wall St Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein. Also I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert it was a SCAM, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper.”

Trump’s ferocious reaction was driven by the sensitivity surrounding his relationship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019. He and Epstein were good friends roughly from 1988 to 2004, and Epstein told journalist Michael Wolff that he was Trump’s best friend for ten years. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years,” Trump said in a 2002 profile of Epstein in New York magazine. “Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them on the younger side.” Epstein was a guest at Trump’s second wedding.

The relationship soured in 2004 after both men tried to buy the same oceanfront property in Palm Beach, and Trump won. They appear to have had minimal contact after that.

Epstein was arrested in 2006, and in 2008 convicted on state charges of soliciting prostitution. A secret plea deal with federal prosecutors shielded him from prosecution for much more serious charges of molesting young girls. He received a soft prison sentence of eighteen months that required him only to spend nights in jail. The following year he was released altogether and resumed his business activities and his criminal behaviour.

In November 2018, prompted partly by the new ethos of the #MeToo era, the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown chronicled Epstein’s victims’ stories and questioned whether prosecutors had reached a sweetheart deal with him. Partly as a result of that reporting, Epstein was charged with recruiting dozens of underage girls to his New York City mansion and Palm Beach estate between 2002 and 2005 to engage in sexual acts for money. He died before being tried for those crimes.

Epstein’s death provided fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. The official ruling was suicide by hanging (“Two guards who were meant to check on him had fallen asleep, and two CCTV cameras in front of his cell malfunctioned at the critical moment,” reported the London Daily Telegraph’s Ed Cumming) but that conclusion was challenged by Epstein’s lawyers. When the Justice Department finally released a tape of events that evening, analysts found that nearly three minutes had been cut.

Several official inquiries concluded that Epstein died by his own hand. No evidence of any intruders was ever found, and Epstein certainly faced a very bleak future: decades of jail, public humiliation and many, many legal actions against him by the women and girls he had abused.

Trump immediately tied Epstein’s death to Bill Clinton: “Epstein had an island that was not a good place as I understand it. And I was never there. So you have to ask: Did Bill Clinton go to the island?” Although he professed to have no evidence that Epstein’s death was linked to Clinton, he continued to cast doubt on the cause of death even after the New York medical examiner ruled suicide. “I want a full investigation and that’s what I absolutely am demanding,” he declared. No such investigations were published in the remaining eighteen months of his first presidency.

The idea that Epstein was murdered fitted nicely into conspiracy theories about secret paedophile rings propagated by QAnon and others. The idea that a secret cabal of Democrats, Hollywood figures and global financiers ran a global child-trafficking ring gelled neatly with their distrust of elites and deep suspicion of government institutions and the media.

Questions about Epstein sometimes resurfaced in the years leading up to the 2024 presidential election. In a 2023 podcast, for example, Kash Patel, later appointed by Trump to head the FBI, lashed House Republicans for not trying harder to force the release of an alleged list of high-powered Epstein associates. During the election campaign Trump said he would declassify the Epstein files and was willing to release them. In October vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance declared, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is the important thing.”

That seemed a real prospect in the first several months of Trump’s second presidency. Attorney-general Pam Bondi said Epstein’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now for me to review,” an imminent release of documents would contain “a lot of information,” and Americans would “get the full Epstein files.” The justice department had received a new “truckload of evidence,” said Bondi, including “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn, and “everything’s going to come out to the public. Americans have a right to know.” Trump declared that “100 per cent of all these documents are being delivered.”

A change in tone came around mid-May. On 16 May the two top FBI officials, Patel and Dan Bongino, both previously strong proponents of claims about Epstein, appeared together on Fox News and said Epstein had indeed died by suicide. Since then, several sources have claimed that Trump was told in the first weeks of May that he figured multiple times in the files, not necessarily engaged in illegalities but certainly mentioned in ways that would be politically embarrassing.

The first prominent person to publicly link Trump’s likely appearances in the files to the government’s behaviour was Elon Musk. On 5 June, at the height of his public feud with the president, he declared that Trump wasn’t releasing the Epstein files because he was in them.

Trump’s base wasn’t prepared, however, for the sharp reversal that came early the following month. Over the July holiday weekend leaders of the attorney-general’s department and the FBI approved a statement conceding that Epstein had indeed committed suicide; that there was no client list; that no unreleased evidence would “expose any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing”; and that, in order to protect the privacy of victims, no further documents would be released.

Divisions within the blindsided MAGA base were soon on full display. Trump confidante and ally, Steve Bannon spent weeks in his War Room podcast — a propaganda mainstay of the MAGA movement — trying to pressure Trump to release all the files. According to Fox News host turned podcaster Tucker Carlson, “Even people who are fully on board with the bulk of the MAGA agenda are like, ‘This is too much, actually.’”

Most strident was prominent MAGA congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene: “If you tell the base of people who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful cabals, then you must take down every enemy of the People. If not, the base will turn and there’s no going back. Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

While Trump supported the claims of a cover-up before he regained the presidency, now he wanted the whole Epstein thing to go away. As early as 8 July, he lashed out at reporters: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein [when the Texas floods are so urgent].”

“We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country,” he declared on Truth Social, “and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” Early in July his message was simply to move on: “He’s been dead a long time… I don’t knw what the… fascination is.” Soon, however, it became a Democrat plot: “a hoax that’s perpetrated by the Democrats. And some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net.” The Epstein “files,” were “made up” by former FBI head James Comey. “They were made up by Obama. They were made up by Biden.”

But Trump’s efforts to persuade much of his base failed signally. One MAGA operative observed: “Villainising your base for caring about the thing you told them to care about is never a good strategy.”

It was into this combustible mix that the 17 July Wall Street Journal article landed. And it was Trump’s angry reaction to the publication of his birthday greeting to Epstein that gave the story such oxygen.

The Journal’s article was interpreted by many as a deliberate attack by Murdoch on Trump. The strongest proponent of this view was Steve Bannon. “This is a [political] kill shot by Murdoch,” he told journalist Peter Hartcher. “Murdoch has done it because he is in league with the deep state, which is out to destroy Trump.” Bannon predicted that “all of MAGA will rally around because of the attack on President Trump.” This, he added, will “blow up the Murdoch empire in the US.”

But treating the Journal report as part of a determined anti-Trump move by Murdoch overlooks key facts. Murdoch’s main two American outlets have prospered under Trump, though for different reasons. Fox News is attracting almost three million viewers in prime time, putting it well ahead of its cable news competitors and even ahead of the free-to-air networks. It has prospered by reinforcing the messages MAGA wants to hear.

The Journal has also prospered, though among a very different audience. Always much less of a propaganda outlet than its stablemate, it must maintain credibility with an audience that would otherwise go to another high-quality newspaper, such as the New York Times. It has maintained a more mainstream, pre-Trump Republican editorial line, consistently critical of Trump’s high tariff policies for instance. One editorial called Trump’s tariff plans “the dumbest trade war in history.”

Perhaps most importantly, the offending story seems likely to have been bottom-up rather than top-down: the work of WSJ reporters discovering and verifying the key facts rather than the result of a management directive. Thus, the question for the paper’s and company’s management was: should the story be suppressed? If the Journal had suppressed it, the self-censorship would have become public and damaged the paper’s reputation.

Further evidence that this is not a campaign driven from the top is the response of other Murdoch media. Since the Journal report, Fox News and the New York Post have largely stayed quiet on the matter. Fox News has only mentioned Trump’s lawsuit a couple of times in passing.

Indeed, soon after the Journal story was published, Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who was on air, told her audience that straight after the break news would be coming of a scoop by the Journal. Yet no mention of it followed, and Ingraham spent the remaining twenty minutes of her program on unrelated topics.

Trump himself saw the difference. Within hours of denouncing the Journal, he was effusive about Fox: “Everybody should watch Sean Hannity tonight. He really gets it. 9PM ET Fox News.”

The response of Murdoch’s Australian flagship, the Australian, has also been decidedly tepid. While the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and Australian Financial Review have run several long and penetrating articles on the confrontation between Murdoch and Trump, in the first several days the Australian merely reported that the White House had taken away the Journal’s seat in the press pool on Air Force One. This lack of interest in such a newsworthy topic might suggest the Murdochs would like the story to go away, or perhaps that their editors are not yet clear on what line they should take.

While commercial and political pragmatism might suggest that both sides have an interest in de-escalating, so far there is no sign of this. One obstacle seems to be the personal antipathy between the two leading players. As is his wont, Trump framed his threat in personally demeaning terms: “I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his pile of garbage newspaper, WSJ. That will be an interesting experience!!!” In turn, Murdoch is reported to have told associates “I am ninety-four years old and I will not be intimidated.”

Nor is there any sign of the Journal backing down. The paper would “vigorously defend” itself against the lawsuit, it said, and it has full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting. Since then it has published a follow-up article asserting that Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files. And then, on 24 July, it ran a front page article claiming that Bill Clinton, several major corporate figures and British ambassador Peter Mandelson all wrote greetings in Epstein’s now-notorious birthday book.

When Trump launched his case against the Journal, one law professor commented that the complaint was “full of sound and fury but lacks legal merit.” This second story on the birthday book strongly suggests the paper either has a copy or has seen (and photographed?) it, which means Trump’s case will collapse. Trump also claimed he doesn’t “do” drawings, even though four of his drawings were sold during his first presidency. Nor is there any sign that Murdoch or others are displeased with the Journal. In recent weeks it has been more of a nationally prominent agenda-setter than it has been for years.

Trump is unlikely to make any progress on the legal front, and he has been equally unable to shift the political coverage. His most determined effort came on 21 July when he released the (deeply flawed) report of his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, refuting claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s response was immediate: “Obama himself manufactured the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX. Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe and numerous others participated in this, THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY! Irrefutable  EVIDENCE. A major threat to our Country!!!”

Even amid his unrestrained comments Epstein was lurking. The Gabbard records are “the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read,” he said. “So you ought to take a look at that and stop talking about [the Epstein] nonsense.”

Despite the pyrotechnics — Trump’s posts including an AI-generated video of Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office — he failed to change the political agenda, perhaps because, as Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler pointed out, there had already been four inquiries into Russia interference claims, including one led by Marco Rubio when he was in the Senate, which reached completely bipartisan findings.

The conventional wisdom is that Trump is scandal-proof. Already, for example, twenty-eight women have accused him of sexual assault or harassment, but his political career has continued to prosper. A key difference this time round is that the Republican base is so split. Congress is in its summer recess; indeed, it adjourned a day early precisely because the Republican leadership wanted to stop a bipartisan effort to release the Epstein material. Trump will hope that the heat of the affair dissipates over summer. If the scandal keeps metastasising when Congress returns, Rupert Murdoch will be the least of Trump’s worries. •

From the archive: Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have had their ups and downs, but it’s mainly been down since 2020, reported Rod Tiffen in April last year.

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Her predecessor, Michelle Rowland, declared ominously in October that broadcast TV was “entering a period of unmanaged transition.” Rowland “believe[d] in the broadcasting platform,” but a sustainable future would require “changes to the way… broadcasters operate and the way they reach their audiences.” Despite deep cost-cutting, the shift of viewers from linear to on-demand content services and the decline in advertising revenues were “putting some broadcasters in a position where they can’t keep the doors open, for certain services.”

A few months earlier, the company delivering Network 10’s channels to Mildura had announced it was turning off the transmitter and handing back its licence. Viewers who wanted those channels could watch the Sydney versions via the 10 Play app or website. The Seven, Nine, ABC and SBS over-the-air signals would still be available in the area. This was what an “unmanaged pathway” would look like. Staying on it, said Rowland, would lead to “more service closures in remote and regional markets, where the financial pressures are greatest.” This trend “may eventually manifest in the larger cities.”

The financial pressures noted by Rowland became visible again in June when Seven briefly disappeared from the airwaves of southeast South Australia during a dispute between the network and its regional licensee — further evidence of the precarity of regional television in a shrinking ad market.

Britain is further down the same path. Ofcom, which regulates TV, radio, online and postal services and allocates radiofrequency spectrum, says the system of “public service media” in Britain is “under serious threat.” By public service media, it means not just the publicly funded TV and radio broadcaster, the BBC, with its 2025–26 revenue of nearly £4.5 billion (more than A$9 billion) but all the other free-to-air broadcasters as well: ITV and STV in Scotland, Channel 4 and the Welsh language S4C, and Channel 5, which is owned, like Australia’s Ten, by Paramount Global.

Young British children spend more time watching YouTube than broadcast TV and less than half of sixteen- to twenty-four- year-olds watch any broadcast TV at all in an average week. “[I]n a world dominated by global streaming platforms, public service media risks becoming an endangered species, and time is running out to intervene to protect it,” says Ofcom’s director of broadcasting and media. This matters because public service media is “stitched into the cultural fabric of UK society. It starts conversations, educates and informs, and brings us together in moments of national importance.” It also “supports the UK’s production sector — a global leader which contributes meaningfully to the creative economy and attracts significant investment into the UK.”

Ofcom has proposed a “six-point plan” that includes remarkable steps to save an industry that dominated the media scene a little over two decades ago. Public service broadcasters “should work urgently with YouTube” to ensure their content is “prominent and easy to find on the platforms, and on fair commercial terms.” If YouTube doesn’t cooperate then the British government “should consider” new laws to compel the platform to increase visibility of public-service television content.

By early next year, meanwhile, “urgent clarity” is needed from the government about the future of the digital terrestrial TV transmission network: leave decisions any later and “the investment and innovation needed to put universal TV distribution on a sustainable footing [for] all audiences” is at risk. Decisions are also required about extra government money for specific program genres: Ofcom recommends priority to “socially valuable but commercially less viable genres, such as news, local news and children’s content.” These trusted, original programs “reflect British culture and bring the country together.”

These recent statements add to Ofcom’s high-profile interventions in television policy. Last year the agency released a major report that forecast several scenarios for British television, including the switch-off of broadcast television “over the 2030s” or its evolution into a slimmed-down “nightlight” service carrying only a few essential channels. Ofcom was signalling here that the economic model of broadcast television was unsustainable. Policy change was urgently required.

Ofcom’s argument about the pressing need for a “managed transition” in television preceded Minister Rowland’s more cautious statements by several months. But it is clear both countries face the same challenge: the steady, structural decline of the broadcast television model.

Broadcast television has been an “endangered species” for a long time. The dangers have come from different sources. In the mid-1990s, Australians finally got the multichannel pay TV services available years earlier in overseas markets. These provided new buyers for programs and new spots for TV advertising while accelerating the fragmentation of viewing that started when video-cassette recorders and games consoles were first connected to TV screens. Telcos Telstra and Optus entered the TV business, rushing out new cable networks and investing heavily in sports and other programming. Foxtel became a bigger business than any of the free-to-air operators, although it never attracted more than a third of Australian households, and its owners remained big but familiar locals until British-based streamer DAZN acquired it earlier this year.

The early internet promised what some envisaged as a “Celestial Jukebox.” Everything would be available to everyone, everywhere. Movies, TV programs, short films, music, books, whatever. If content had been created, it would be stored and discoverable, viewable, readable, listenable. A lot of content did become available online, but much, much more was created afresh, especially for the video-sharing site called YouTube, launched in 2004 and acquired the following year by search giant Google. The genres were both familiar and novel. Audiences watched, listened and uploaded, sometimes adding to the time they spent with broadcast media and sometimes substituting for it. Advertisers flocked to the site and to other social media platforms hosting video.

Streamers, too, attracted eyeballs and revenue. The US giant Netflix launched in Australia and New Zealand in 2015 and others followed. These were more like on-demand television services, initially offering drama, documentary, children’s shows and other well-established genres. Over time, they became even more like TV, commissioning exclusive titles, introducing advertising, acquiring rights to live sporting events, moving into genres like real crime, entertainment and reality. Ampere Analysis’s Guy Bisson, speaking at a Future of TV Advertising event in Sydney in April, called this the “broadcastification” of streaming.

The other potent new form of competition for TV broadcasters comes from the very tools that display their services: smart TVs. No longer dumb devices that simply translate digital code embedded in electrical signals into pictures and sounds, TV sets have become platforms. This enables consumer electronics manufacturers to earn revenue through ads carried on the home screen and on their own streaming channels: Samsung TV Plus now offers around 150 channels in Australia. Revenue also comes from content sales, rentals, and commissions, and from prominence fees for third-party apps. Manufacturers gather and control data about what is being watched on their screens that helps them to target their advertisements and services.

For TV broadcasters, smart TVs are a mixed blessing. They have generally loved the trend towards bigger screens, because this has helped to refocus fragmented household attention on a premium screening environment, perfect for live, “event” television. But these mighty, wall-mounted screens have ushered Samsung, LG, Hisense, TCL and Sony into the broadcasters’ revenue and customer relationships as well.

The Coalition’s most recent communications minister, Paul Fletcher, published a green paper nearly five years ago containing proposals to “modernise television regulation in Australia.” Attempting to tackle the problem of the long-term sustainability of the free-to-air industry in a world where online streaming of TV was surging, the paper proposed a kind of reverse incentive. If enough TV broadcasters were interested in squeezing their transmissions down to a smaller number of channels, thereby using less radiofrequency spectrum, the federal government might be willing to lighten their tax burden and hand them some of the proceeds from auctioning the vacated frequencies. It was complicated, the impacts were uncertain, and the proposals were not well received by broadcasters. Nothing came of the plan.

Under Labor’s Michelle Rowland change occurred in several areas. The most significant legislative initiative was a “prominence framework” that will commence in 2026. It is intended to ensure Australian audiences can easily find and access local free-to-air TV services and apps — ABC iView, SBS On Demand, 10 Play, 9Now, 7Plus — on the home screens of imported smart TVs that would otherwise prioritise the services of overseas media and technology giants. The commercial networks welcomed the outcome, as did the ABC and SBS, which regard prominence as an essential protection for public-service broadcasting. Further changes to legislation last year were designed to enable WIN and other broadcasters to seek operational efficiencies by consolidating services onto a single transmitter.

Licences for community TV services in Adelaide and Melbourne were extended beyond their 30 June 2024 expiry date, enabling those services to stay on air until another use is identified for their frequencies. An audit of TV infrastructure in remote and regional areas was undertaken and funding and administrative arrangements were extended for seven years so that the viewer access satellite television service, or VAST, continues to provide commercial and national free-to-air services to the estimated 1.5 million viewers in remote and poorly served locations who rely on it.

Rowland’s big commitment in October 2024, though, was not delivered before the election. A discussion paper was to be released for consultation in early 2025, “explor[ing] pathways for the future of television, shaped by the possibility of realising a digital dividend.” A digital dividend is what was reaped after broadcasters shifted from analogue to digital transmission between 2001 and 2013. The new technology enabled more efficient use of spectrum and a large band of frequencies was reallocated and auctioned mainly to support better mobile broadband. TV viewers got more TV; mobile users got faster broadband speeds and larger data caps; the Treasury got a lot of money.

The minister was crystal clear. She was “not [her emphasis] announcing that the Government has identified, or decided to yield, a digital dividend.” But she was “putting, front and centre, the important question of what the future of television may be.” It was “an essential platform in Australia, and we need a mature and measured discussion to plan its future.”

The technologies available to support a second digital dividend — such as higher-resolution DVB-T2 broadcasting — are not as revolutionary as those deployed for the first, and the TV industry that will need to pay for them is not as rich. Some efficiencies are possible but everything will come at a cost — to broadcasters, to viewers, and perhaps even to the government. There will not be more broadcast TV: there may even be a bit less in some places. Well down the track, there will probably be further improvements to mobile and other wireless services but alternative spectrum users are unlikely to pay as much for vacated spectrum as they did more than a decade ago.

This second Albanese administration has already seen a little more of what “unmanaged transition” looks like. The AFL decided no free-to-air footy would be shown on Saturdays this season in Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, although it has scheduled more of the Thursday night games that are shown live on 7. Only Amazon subscribers got to watch the biennial summit of men’s cricket, the World Test Championship final in June, where Australia played South Africa at Lord’s. Then, as noted earlier, some South Australian country viewers temporarily lost access to Seven’s channels, including Thursday and Friday night AFL, while the local broadcaster and Seven brawled over commercial arrangements.

Overseas, the French public service broadcaster France Television has done a deal with Amazon Prime to carry its free-to-air channels and its commercial rival TF1 has made a similar arrangement with Netflix. This follows the closure in 2022 of Salto, a streamer designed as a common platform for French broadcasters. The new deals represent a radically different kind of future for public service media, with a handful of channels embedded within a vast universe of content branded and supplied from elsewhere.

None of these threats to what is now free-to-air are directly the fault of governments, but electors in Australia and elsewhere are likely to ask what is being done about them. Ofcom’s call to arms is a further sign that the stakes for TV broadcasters everywhere, and especially for the distinctive programs they offer, are getting very high indeed.

Michele Rowland and Paul Fletcher both spent a lot of time in and around media before being allocated the communications portfolio, Rowland as a commercial lawyer acting for broadcasters and telcos, Fletcher as a senior executive with Optus. The media marketplace in Australia and overseas is serving up a crash course to their successor. •

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But we all know that people’s behaviour doesn’t always line up with their stated preferences. Oceans of social science data have found that people prefer content that aligns with their own beliefs over content that doesn’t. What sorts of people are the most likely to prefer ideologically friendly content — not just prefer it but also say they prefer it?

One potential lens is power: who has it and who doesn’t. If you sit atop society’s food chain, perhaps you see impartial news as a potential threat — something that could mobilise the have-nots against you by exposing things you’d rather not have in the open. Or conversely, if you’re in a disadvantaged group, maybe you see “impartial” news as part of the existing power structure — telling stories that support the system that has left you at the bottom.

That’s the question explored by an interesting new paper just published in the International Journal of Communication. It’s titled “Who Wants Impartial News? Investigating Determinants of Preferences for Impartiality in 40 Countries,” and it’s by (deep breath) Camila Mont’Alverne (University of Strathclyde), Amy Ross A. Arguedas (Oxford), Sumitra Badrinathan (American), Benjamin Toff (Minnesota), Richard Fletcher (Oxford), and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (Copenhagen). Here’s the abstract:

Despite the centrality of impartiality for many journalistic cultures, and widespread support across audiences, there is still limited research about which aspects influence people’s preferences for impartial news. This article draws on survey data across 40 markets to investigate the factors shaping audience preferences for impartial news.

Although most express a preference for impartial news, there are several overlapping groups of people who, probably for different reasons, are more likely to prefer news that shares their point of view: (a) the ideological and politically engaged; (b) young people, especially those who rely mainly on social media for news; (c) women; and (d) less socioeconomically advantaged groups. [Emphasis added]

We find systematic patterns across countries in preferences for alternatives to impartial news with greater support in places where people use more different sources of news and that are ranked lower in terms of quality of their democracies.

The first of those four groups is sort of a given. People who don’t have a strong personal ideology and who aren’t engaged with politics are unlikely to crave a strong partisan take in their news. After all, they don’t have one of their own!

But the other three — young people, women and poorer groups — indicate that it’s the people with less power in a society who are more likely to see ideological news. If you’re a wealthy middle-aged white man, a huge part of the “impartial” media is aimed squarely at you — no need to seek an alternative. And the effect is even stronger in less-democratic countries where the state typically has a larger role in how the news gets reported.

Let’s look at the study. Its basis is the 2020 Digital News Report from Oxford’s Reuters Institute. That massive effort asked 80,000 people across forty countries about their news consumption habits and preferences — twenty-four countries in Europe, seven in Asia, four in Latin America, two in Africa (Kenya and South Africa), plus the United States, Canada and Australia. Journalists have endless debates about the meaning of words like “impartial” and “objective” and “balanced,” but it’s rare to have this large a sample of how audiences think about them.

News outlets exist, in one sense at least, to serve their audiences. But they also exist to serve their advertisers. And their journalists exist in an uneasy symbiosis with a community’s institutions — government, police, schools, business, civil society — which are the subject of much of their work. Does “impartial” news represent a purity of audience service? Or some triangulation of all the various power sources and elite stakeholders that interact with it?

The Digital News Report survey asked people which they preferred when consuming news: “getting news from sources that share your point of view”; “getting news from sources that don’t have a particular point of view“; “getting news from sources that challenge your point of view”; or “don’t know.” The most popular responses overall were impartial (51 per cent) and share-my-views (24 per cent).

Within countries, they found the associations they expected — that people were more likely to prefer ideologically aligned news if they were: (a) heavily engaged in politics and had a well-defined ideology; (b) young; (c) heavily reliant on social media for news; (d) women; (e) less wealthy; or (f) less educated. Other than (a), these line up well with the idea that viewpoint-aligned news is more valued by those who feel disempowered within their society.

Interestingly, the United States was a standout on the issue of ideology — on both left and right. Among the forty countries, US liberals ranked No. 1 in how much extra support they gave to “impartial” media. This is almost certainly driven by liberals viewing the news media as a counterbalance to Donald Trump’s first administration. It’s a contrast to the broader global tendency of people on the left being more sceptical of neutral news sources. (Think of what was called “alternative media” before the internet came along.)

Meanwhile, among the forty countries, US conservatives ranked No. 2 in how much extra support they gave to ideologically aligned media. In other words, they don’t trust the “fake news” or “lamestream media,” turning instead to Fox and its ilk. (Only Spain’s conservatives gave more support to ideologically aligned media.)

I emailed Mont’Alverne, the lead author, about this tension. Part of the issue, she suggested, is that people’s ideas of “impartial” news in the abstract don’t always line up with their real-world opinions. “It is possible, and probably what is happening in this case, that American left-wingers express preference for impartiality in general and in the abstract,” she emailed. “But when they are asked about it in a more concrete way, the limits of this preference become more visible.”

Those effects appeared within countries. But looking at nations as a whole, a different set of predictors appeared in the data. People were less likely to value “impartial” news in countries where: (a) journalists are perceived as being under the thumb of the state; (b) governments are less democratic and more authoritarian; and (c) where people on average consume more sources for news rather than fewer.

The first two make immediate sense. If your country’s “impartial” media is dominated by an authoritarian state, people are less likely to value it as a source of ground truth. The third may seem a little more puzzling. But countries where people consume more news sources are likely to be ones with a more vibrant news ecosystem, representing distinct points of view — meaning a politically aligned alternative is more likely to be available:

This might be explained by the fact that in markets dominated by fewer brands — often publicly funded ones such as the BBC — respondents in that market also tend to express higher levels of preference for impartiality.

In the United Kingdom, where respondents used an average of four news brands, the lowest number across all countries, 62 per cent of respondents said they prefer news with no point of view. In Kenya and Turkey, on the other hand, two of the countries with an above-average number of news brands used (thirteen for each), a much lower percentage said they preferred news with no point of view (29 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively).

In only four of the forty countries did more people say they prefer news that shares their point of view to news with no point of view — Turkey, Kenya, Mexico, and the Philippines. All are countries where democracy traditions are, at best, challenged.

A couple variables didn’t have a significant impact on preference for impartial news: the degree of political polarisation in the country, and whether people rely more on newspapers, TV, or cable news for their information

People belonging to socially disadvantaged groups, such as women, younger, lower-income, and lower-educated participants, may find themselves less attached to journalistic norms that they do not feel have served their interests, which may be a reflection of grievances about journalistic shortcomings with respect to news that purports to be impartial but can come across as biased in favour of more privileged parts of society — especially when it comes to coverage of groups that are often stigmatised or ignored.

For some of these audiences, expressing a preference for news that shares their points of view might be another way of saying they prefer news that portrays people like themselves more fairly.

… [W]hen respondents say they prefer news with “no point of view,” as embraced by relatively more advantaged individuals in most countries, it is possible that what they are expressing is a preference for news that mirrors and does not challenge dominant perspectives in society. These respondents might answer differently should they encounter “impartial” news that did not overwhelmingly reflect their own lived experiences or outlooks on the world.

All of which is to say that audience desire for “impartiality” is profoundly contextual — embedded in the particular political, social, and economic environment that people live in. It’s less an iron law of journalism than an incentive-driven response to conditions. “It is up to news organisations and journalists, therefore,” the authors conclude, “to evaluate which approach better suits their contexts.”

Mont’Alverne told me her main takeaway from the study was that people who want news with a point of view can do so for quite different reasons — from political motivations to feeling a lack of representation. “This reinforces the importance of actually considering what audiences think about journalism,” she said, “as it is common that people’s perceptions differ from assumptions academics and practitioners might have.” •

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But then something changed: people stopped paying attention to the news, or decided that they didn’t believe it anymore. They got distracted by cable TV, Facebook and TikTok. They became ill-informed, and started to make decisions that went against their best interests. The media decayed and fragmented, along with the nation. Opinion and news became indistinguishable, misinformation ran amok, and that is how we came to live in the post-truth world.

This story is not unsupported. Polls have long shown declining levels of trust in the media. Trust in many other institutions has fallen too, but in journalism it has plummeted. Since 1972, Gallup has been asking people in the United States, “How much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media?” The numbers used to be highly favourable, but in 2024 (and previously only in 2016 and 2023), more people said they had none (36 per cent) than said they had a lot (31 per cent). At the same time, a survey of how highly Americans rated the ethics of various professions found that only a fifth believed journalists’ ethical standards were “high or very high”: a better ranking than car salespeople and senators, but worse than bankers and chiropractors. Almost half said that journalists’ standards were “low or very low.”

Increasing numbers of Americans say they do not follow the news, and when they do, it is increasingly via factually unreliable social or alternative media. In some places, the picture looks rosier — the Nordic states, outliers as ever, have far higher levels of media trust — but one recent survey showed the balance of media trust and distrust across twenty-eight countries to be neutral at best, and negative among the most developed.

At the same time, large swathes of the news business have been on the retreat, stricken by dwindling advertising revenue, hostile governments and declining audiences. In the United States, the number of working journalists dropped by more than a quarter between 2008 and 2020. Meanwhile, in 2022–23, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded more journalists jailed worldwide than ever before.

Technological change — most recently and acutely the mainstreaming of generative artificial intelligence — and political polarisation present their own challenges. In the United States, for example, the fall in trust of journalists has been sharper and more consistent among Republican voters, and the conclusion that many people turn to the news more for affirmation than for information can be hard to resist. What passes for truth often depends on where one falls on the political spectrum: it’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s venture into social media has “truth” in its name.

It’s a grim picture, but buried in the statistics is another story. People still worry about misinformation, even if they can’t agree on what to call it. “Fake news,” aptly defined as “information divorced from reality,” is not a new concept, but more Americans than used to now register displeasure with inaccurate or unverified information on social media, and a majority now think that somebody, perhaps even the federal government, should do something about it. There seems to be widespread recognition that bad facts are bad news — globally, fears of an “information war” are rising — and, despite endemic scepticism and distraction, there is an enduring thirst for reliable information. The question is, where can it be found, and how can its purveyors make themselves heard amid the noise?

One answer has been to lionise accuracy. For some, this represents a business opportunity. NBC, CBS and the BBC have all launched fact-checking units, and for the first presidential debate of 2024, the New York Times tasked twenty-nine staffers with fact-checking the candidates’ statements in real time. Not every entrant in the emergent accuracy economy is as large or well resourced: over the past decade, hundreds of small fact-checking websites have sprung up around the world, including many in countries, such as India, where press freedom is far from a guarantee.

Whether rooted in service or aimed towards revenue, though, this sort of “political fact-checking,” which spotlights specific claims and seeks to prove or disprove them, is not as neutral as some might like to imagine. Setting out to counter and correct inaccuracies, it often takes the form of rebuttal, and necessarily entails editorial decisions over what to cover (no outfit can scrutinise every statement by every politician, and none of them wants to). Its reach is limited, and it is unclear whether it is always helpful: as one journalism professor puts it, “Disinformation itself has become kind of a toxic term for a lot of people.”

An insistent focus on misinformation or disinformation may even inflate the scale of the problem, to the benefit of what the writer Joseph Bernstein has labelled “Big Disinfo,” and to the detriment of a publication’s appeal to uncommitted readers. The provision of accurate facts does not, in itself, necessarily engender trust: “notions of news and truth are linked to what people do with information rather than what journalism unilaterally decides are accurate portrayals of reality,” says media studies researcher Silvio Waisbord.

What is more certain is that from time to time every journalist, no matter how well meaning, gets something wrong, or misses the point. If journalists want to be trusted, they need to not only police the accuracy of others, but also to ensure that their own work is careful and considered. One way to achieve this is to practise the traditional (or “primary”) variety of fact-checking, which, whether carried out by someone called a fact checker or by reporters themselves, aims at verification in advance of publication.

Today, anyone who wants it can find reporting that is, as Michael Schudson puts it, “deeper, more analytical… less fully focused on what happened in the past twenty-four hours, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” as an essential goal” than was the case fifty years ago. If there ever was a golden age of journalism, we may still be living in it. The trouble is, much of the public — turned off, bored, or riled into disbelief — has ceased to listen. Pointing out the mistakes of others is not enough. If people are to trust journalists, we need to earn it.

The New Yorker, where  I work, has a reputation for accuracy. At least, that’s what the magazine tells itself. In reality, whether or not it is to be believed depends on whom you ask.

A prospectus announcing the first issue of The New Yorker in 1925 promised that,

As compared to the newspaper, the New Yorker will be interpretative rather than stenographic. It will print facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal nor sensation for the sake of sensation. Its integrity will be above suspicion.

(The same document was also where Harold Ross, the founding editor, was first rude enough to say that his new publication would “not be edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” The past hundred years have brought remarkably little change to some aspects of the magazine’s attitude, which remains equal parts tongue-in-cheek, earnest and supercilious. But today, such subscribers are highly desirable.)

True to Ross’s mandate, the New Yorker maintains an obsessive interest in facts, one that can sometimes seem to go beyond any obvious practical advantage. It didn’t take long for the early editors to recognise the usefulness of at least basic stenography. In 1927, the magazine published a profile of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay, “America’s first starlet,” claiming, among other fanciful details, that her father had been a stevedore (he was a schoolteacher). The embarrassment inspired Ross to install a fact-checking department, and since then, checkers have left their marks all over the magazine. John McPhee, in an essay published in 2009, depicted fact-checking as a pursuit bordering on mania. To shore up one important but rickety anecdote of his concerning wartime nuclear reactors, a checker placed calls that “ricocheted all over the United States: from Brookhaven to Bethesda, from La Jolla to Los Alamos.” The chase culminated, moments before the press deadline, in a call to a Florida police department, which the checker enlisted to track down a crucial witness. (He turned out to have gone to a mall.)

Not many pieces require such heroics: the reality is that fact-checkers are busy people, who traffic only infrequently in the dark arts of deep research. Most facts can be checked far more easily, especially with the benefit of the internet, and since there are so many, a checker has to prioritise. When a particular fact turns out to be especially sticky, persistence and attention, rather than any kind of special knowledge, are generally what’s needed. Checkers, of course, are not infallible, and their successes are mostly attributable to hard work and creativity. What is truly extraordinary about having a fact-checking department is that it exists at all. At the time of writing, thirty people work in fact-checking at the New Yorker, almost all of them full-time. It is labour, at scale, that produces accuracy.

Today, with a few pragmatic exceptions, fact-checkers go over everything published by the New Yorker, editing for accuracy, balance, fairness and context. Writers are asked to share their sourcing; checkers review both research materials (books, articles, emails, documents) and original reporting. For complex topics, and as needed for corroboration, they do their own independent research, perhaps conferring with relevant experts. And unless there’s a good reason not to, they get in touch with every person and entity mentioned in the story, and comb through what’s attributed to or said about them.

This fulfills a few functions. If the person cooperates, as they typically do, the checker can verify factual details, including those that appear within quotes. If they disagree with something, they get a chance to comment or correct the record. And if they are angry, well, it’s better to know. (This step is also important in libel-proofing a piece: under US law, a good-faith and thorough effort to discover the truth is a solid defence should you accidentally publish an actionable inaccuracy. No matter how solid your standards are, it doesn’t look great if you didn’t bother trying to contact the person involved.)

Checkers may discover hidden holes in a story, or garner perspectives that ought to be included. Most importantly, perhaps, this process, which is a kind of re-reporting, gives a fact-checker an opportunity to find out the basis of each statement of fact or opinion: is it personal experience, the pages of a half-remembered book, a third-hand rumour, or years of study? The value of a source, whether a person or a document, comes down mostly to their access to information, and to its quality.

Depending on the stakes — are we talking about what I ate for breakfast, or where I saw the crime occur? — and on what other sources are available, a checker may then need to seek corroboration or to do some reporting of their own. Finally, based on all this, they can decide what to say, and how: after a fashion, they decide what the magazine believes to be true.

Truth, in this sense, is sought and rendered, something produced by rigorous inquiry and informed consideration rather than something discovered. Many points, tweaked where necessary, can be stated as fact, but often a checker will want to insert a citation (‘according to…”) or present conflicting accounts. Tone matters, and may be used to indicate the level of confidence: a well-judged assertion may be one that leaves room for doubt. Falsehoods which reveal something about the speaker may have enough value to keep, so long as they are rebutted, but statements that are truly unverifiable, or clearly and unfixably specious, will typically be cut: deciding what not to publish is sometimes just as important as deciding what to keep in. In the landscape of a story, fact-checkers’ trails can often be followed along a path of hedges and denials, but an elegant fix may render the footwork behind it invisible. (Dispiritingly, checking tends to be at its most visible when it goes wrong, as when, despite Der Spiegel’s dozens-strong research department, a star reporter there recently turned out to have fabricated many of his stories.)

Subscribers to the New Yorker, of whom there were roughly 1.3 million at last count, seem to place a good deal of trust in this process. We know that they do because they’re so upset when we get something wrong. (Letter writers’ snide tendency to complain about failures of “the New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department” is surely a form of flattery.) Because the New Yorker, like many other publications, trades on its reputation for accuracy, readers can easily feel cheated, even betrayed, when an error slips in. This is not simply a commercial problem. “Trust,” as the philosopher Annette Baier once wrote, “is a fragile plant,” one that can easily be damaged by the kind of increased scrutiny or scepticism that a flaw, once noticed, tends to induce. Once the roots have withered, they can be hard to restore.

Trust is something that journalists ask for. It’s also something that they give. Just as readers learn about the world from the news, so journalists learn from their sources. Another philosopher, Neil Levy, points out that “much — perhaps most — of what we know, we know on the basis of testimony, and (except in some unusual cases) we acquire knowledge through testimony only when we trust speakers.” Most information comes to us from other people, whom we choose, deliberately or without thinking, to believe. As journalists, how and why we make those choices is particularly important. In the same essay, Levy writes that “trust makes us vulnerable,” and if this is the case for a writer, it’s doubly so for their reader. No reporter can avoid that vulnerability, but mediating it is essential to earning and keeping the trust of a reader. Journalists choose whom to trust on their readers’ behalf.

For journalists, as for anyone, there are certain shortcuts to trustworthiness, including reputation, expertise and transparency — the sharing of sources, for example, or the prompt correction of errors. Some of these shortcuts are more perilous than others. Various outfits, positioning themselves as neutral guides to the marketplace of ideas, now tout evaluations of news organisations’ trustworthiness, but relying on these requires trusting in the quality and objectivity of the evaluation. Official data is often taken at face value, but numbers can conceal motives: think of the disputes over how to count casualties in recent conflicts. Governments, meanwhile, may use their powers over information to suppress unfavourable narratives: in Hong Kong, “fake news” laws ostensibly aimed at misinformation threaten free expression; some see the same spectre in America.

While certain categories of information may come to be considered inherently trustworthy, these, too, are in flux. For decades, the technical difficulty of editing photographs and videos allowed them to be treated, by most people, as essentially incontrovertible. With the advent of AI-based editing tools, footage and imagery have swiftly become much harder to credit. Similar tools are already being used to spoof voices based on only seconds of recorded audio. For the average person, this might manifest in scams, but for a journalist, it puts source calls in question.

Technologies of deception tend to be accompanied by ones of detection or verification — cryptographic keys, for example, have long been used to verify identity online, and a battery of companies already promise that they can spot AI-manipulated imagery — but especially at a moment of rapid change, these remain deeply fallible. Though chatbots and AI-enabled search engines promise to help us with research (when a colleague at the New Yorker “interviewed” ChatGPT, it told him “I aim to provide information that is as neutral and unbiased as possible”), their inability to provide sourcing, and their tendency to hallucinate, look more like a shortcut to nowhere, at least for now.

The consequent problems extend far beyond journalism: election campaigns, where subtle impressions can lead to big differences in voting behaviour, seem increasingly vulnerable to deepfakes and inscrutable algorithms. Like everyone else, fact-checkers have only just begun to grapple with the consequences.

In such a landscape, it becomes difficult to know what is true, and, consequently, to make decisions. Trust and naivety can feel uncomfortably close. We live in complex societies, where the media often functions as “the expert system helping people navigate the social and political world.” If this system fails, and nothing takes its place, the consequences look dire. But failure — the endpoint of the story of generational decay, of gold exchanged for dross — is not inevitable. Fact-checking of the sort practised at the New Yorker is only one potential, highly specific and resource-intensive solution, but its relationship to the basic tenets of editorial good practice make it worth examining. It acknowledges the messiness of truth, the requirements of attention, the way we squint to see more clearly. It tells you to say what you mean, and know that you mean it. •

This essay appears in Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation, edited by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang, published this month by Monash University Publishing.

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Seventy-three seats wouldn’t automatically make Dutton PM — the Coalition needs seventy-six to govern in its own right — but if the Coalition secured seventy-three and Labor sixty-six then the opposition leader is more likely than Albanese to garner the extra three from the crossbench. (YouGov mistakenly said the number required was seventy-five.)

The Coalition currently has fifty-four seats in the House of Representatives and Labor seventy-eight. That leaves a crossbench of nineteen, including four Greens and six teals. Also known as “community independent” or “Voices of…” candidates, the teals include NSW MPs Sophie Scamps (Mackellar), Kylea Tink (North Sydney) and Allegra Spender (Wentworth), Victorians Zoe Daniel (Goldstein) and Monique Ryan (Kooyong), and Western Australia’s Kate Chaney (Curtin). We might also include in that group Helen Haines (Indi), successor to Victoria’s original “community independent,” Cathy McGowan.

North Sydney was abolished in last year’s electoral redistribution, reducing the number of teals standing for re-election to five (plus Haines) and reducing the number of members in the next parliament from 151 to 150; the abolition of Higgins (Victoria), a seat that Labor holds, is offset by the creation of the new seat of Bullwinkel (WA), a seat Labor is favoured to win.

WHAT THE ABC MISSED

The story the ABC missed — the big story missed by all the media — is that if the Coalition were to secure seventy-three seats, it would do so (on YouGov’s figures) without having won back either of the seats it lost to the Greens in 2022 (Brisbane and Ryan) or any of the seats lost to the teals. The crossbench would be reduced from nineteen to eleven, but the five teals would be returned, as would one of the Greens (Adam Bandt, Melbourne); the three other seats held by the Greens would be won by Labor.

While YouGov did note that it was projecting the Coalition to win “none of the seats taken by ‘teal’ independents in the last election,” it saw this as a failure for Mr Dutton and his colleagues rather than a conspicuous strategic success. Not winning any of these seats “suggests the Coalition is experiencing challenges in winning support from the higher-income, highly educated voters that dominate its former heartland seats in Sydney and Melbourne” was its only comment. This may be true; but it misses the point.

Dutton’s strategy of ignoring the inner-city seats in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth that the Liberals lost to teal or Greens candidates will have been vindicated — if not wholly then in large part. The corollary: members of the press gallery, and others, who declared — endlessly — that no such strategy could work would be proved wrong.

On YouGov’s projections, the Coalition would pick up just one seat the Australian Electoral Commission classifies as “inner-metropolitan” — Chisholm (Victoria) — a seat currently held by Labor. The Coalition’s other gains, again at Labor’s expense, would come from “outer-metro” seats — Werriwa (NSW), Aston (Victoria), and Boothby (SA); “provincial” seats — Macquarie, Paterson, Robertson, and Shortland (NSW); and “rural” seats — Eden-Monaro, Gilmore, Hunter (NSW), McEwen (Victoria), and Lyons (Tasmania). This would mean that most of the Coalition’s gains would come from the “outer-metropolitan” (three) and “provincial” (four) areas to which Dutton has tried to appeal.

The Coalition’s biggest gains would come in New South Wales, where YouGov expects the Coalition to pick up eight seats from Labor (while Labor easily claws back Fowler from independent Dai Le), with three expected to come from Victoria. The other states will see the Coalition pick up just two.

If this proves broadly to be the case, the electoral pendulum will prove a good guide to how many seats Labor loses (in net terms) but not a good guide to which seats Labor loses. The pendulum works not because swings are uniform — they never are — but because the seats that should have swung (given the size of the swing overall) but didn’t are offset, roughly, by the seats that shouldn’t have swung (given the size of the swing overall) but did. Since 1972, it has been ever thus.

Although YouGov had posted the results of its poll on its website at 11.48 pm on the preceding Friday, Briggs presented its findings as an “exclusive” — something that the ABC, he said, could “reveal.” The poll, conducted 22 January–12 February, appears to have been handed to the ABC in the hope that it could be run as “breaking news” while (incidentally) promoting the pollster’s brand.

The poll’s national score — the Coalition ahead, 51.1–48.9, on a two-party-preferred basis — wasn’t very different from what other polls had reported; if anything, it was less dramatic than either the RedBridge poll or the Morgan poll, both of which had reported, on 10 February, a 51.5–48.5 split. Compared to the 2022 election result (47.9–52.1), these polls showed a swing to the Coalition of 3.6 points.

Based on that pendulum produced by Antony Green, the ABC’s chief election analyst, YouGov’s two-party split put the Coalition in line to pick up seven Labor seats (net); but on the figures produced by RedBridge and Morgan, the pendulum had the Coalition picking up eleven Labor seats (net).

YOUGOV’s ALL-SEATS POLL VERSUS REDBRIDGE–ACCENT’S “KEY SEATS” POLL

Without the YouGov poll, Insiders very likely would have opened with a roundup of polling in the Sunday papers, something it likes to do. Had it done this, it would have splashed with the front page of Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph which carried James Campbell’s account of a RedBridge–Accent “rolling tracking poll” in twenty “key seats” — seven in New South Wales, five in Victoria, four in Queensland, and four in the three other states — the first in a series in the run-up to the election. A fortnight later, Insiders would splash with the second in the News Corp-commissioned series.

The RedBridge–Accent poll — a poll that didn’t use MRP — was one that Insiders chose to ignore. What “reveal” might this poll have delivered? Across the twenty “key seats,” it had the Coalition leading Labor 52–48 — a three-point swing since the 2020 election, when the Coalition trailed 49–51. The Coalition was “doing better” in the seven New South Wales and five Victorian seats than in the four Queensland seats it polled. In New South Wales, the Liberals led 53–47, in Victoria by 58–42. But with a sample size of just 1002 (fifty respondents, on average, in each seat), the margins of error would have been very large. How well the Coalition was doing in other states was not disclosed. To see just how likely — or unlikely — these figures were as a guide to the swing in either New South Wales or Victoria, readers needed some account of Redbridge’s track record or of Accent’s track record; none was offered.

What did other polling show? Here, the Guardian’s tracking of all the published polls offers a sobering contrast to the RedBridge–Accent estimates. In New South Wales as of late 2024, the Coalition led Labor by the narrowest of margins, 50.2–49.8; in Victoria, it led by a similar margin, 50.7–49.3. Even allowing for a shift to the Coalition since then, the figures for Victoria are difficult to credit.

What makes the twenty seats selected by RedBridge–Accent the “key” seats? “These are electorates,” Accent’s Shaun Ratcliff explained, that “provide a good representative spread of different parts of Australia” and “all the intel suggests could either change hands at the election, or are likely to be competitive. At the last election these seats had a two-party preferred vote of 51 per cent.”

Not all of this was true. A closer look reveals that the twenty seats include thirteen of the twenty-seven Labor seats where the Coalition needs swings of between 0.2 and 7.8 percentage points (only three require swings of one point or less) and seven of the twenty Coalition seats where Labor requires swings of between 0.04 and 6.1 points (only two require swings of less than one point). Being spread across the country didn’t necessarily make them “representative”; the proportion of “provincial” seats was twice as great as the proportion nationally. Beyond ensuring the selection was roughly isomorphic with the proportion of seats in each state, what “intel” informed the sorting process — twenty seats from a possible forty-seven on the pendulum — is unclear.

In their own way, the RedBridge–Accent results were just as remarkable as YouGov’s. In 2022, the Coalition’s two-party vote in the seven NSW seats polled by RedBridge–Accent was 48.2 per cent; the Coalition vote in the five Victorian seats it polled, was also 48.2 per cent. On these figures, there had been a 4.8 point swing to the Coalition in the NSW seats and a swing of 9.8 points to the Coalition in the Victorian seats — though these estimates may not be exact, given that some seats have new boundaries. The finding that Labor was in bigger trouble in New South Wales than in Victoria contradicted what YouGov was suggesting; in the five Victorian seats, YouGov estimated the Coalition’s support at about 53 per cent rather than 58 per cent. That the Coalition was “clawing back votes lost to minor parties and independents” (in Campbell’s words) also ran counter to YouGov’s findings.

Were the swings  recorded by RedBridge–Accent to be reflected statewide, the Coalition stood to gain five seats in New South Wales from Labor and ten in Victoria. While the shifts, as Campbell rightly observed, were “not enough to secure Mr Dutton the extra nineteen seats needed to win outright” — seven of the seats, he might have acknowledged, were (nominally) Coalition seats already — the swing “reinforc[ed] the prospect of a minority government.”

News Corp sees a minority government as the worst possible outcome of the coming election — worse, even, than having a majority Labor government returned. Happily, the poll appeared to be on News’s side. A minority government, Campbell added, was something “almost half the voters in key electorates agreed would be bad for the economy and people like them.” So, as well as keeping “readers in the know,” the results offered a way of mobilising them even if one had to resort to asking a double-headed leading question. And News had grounds for concern. In an Essential poll conducted three weeks later, opinion was divided over “the most likely federal election outcome”: 58 per cent tipped a majority Labor or Coalition government; 43 per cent, a minority Labor or Coalition government.

What made the YouGov poll newsworthy was not that it showed Labor losing its majority — something predictable from the moment it came to office, and shown by almost every poll for the best part of a year. Nor, as the RedBridge–Accent poll shows, was YouGov alone in showing the Coalition poised to form the next government, even if in minority.

What made the YouGov poll newsworthy was that it used multilevel regression with post stratification, or MRP, a technique for correcting model estimates for known differences between a sample and the population from which the sample is drawn, even when the sample is “highly unrepresentative.”

I explain MRP in more detail and look at YouGov’s track record using this technique overseas and in Australia, elsewhere in Inside Story this week.

THE PREDICTION PROBLEM: SEAT POLLS OR THE PENDULUM?

In “a close election like this one,” RedBridge director Kos Samaras is paraphrased as saying, “nationwide two-party preferred polls [are] not the most reliable tool for assessing the political landscape.” On his assessment, “tracking key seats offers a far more detailed and accurate picture of how parties are performing where it truly matters.”

The last “close election,” 2022, showed that this isn’t necessarily true. After the 2022 election, YouGov said its RPM poll had registered a national two-party vote of 52.2–47.8, something it hadn’t announced before. If this was what it showed, then anyone who consulted an electoral pendulum might have expected Labor to win seventy-six seats — an underestimate of one, not an overestimate (based on YouGov’s seat-by-seat polling) of three. In short, the national two-party vote would have been a better guide to the result than the seat-by-seat figures.

Seat-by-seat polls taken a long way out from an election are of limited value — and not only because things can change. (In 2022, late changes by voters seemed to have favoured come-from-behind independents at the Coalition’s expense.) Pollsters are forced to make too many assumptions, most obviously about the nature of the various contests before the parties or candidates have been announced. Respondents may find themselves choosing a party that won’t be on the ballot come May. Or they may hesitate to support a party — or an “independent candidate” — without knowing or being reminded who the candidate is, a process known in the trade as “prompting” or “aiding.”

Pushing their polls’ news value, especially when their brand is not well established, and determined to promote their polls as the best of the lot, pollsters are also open to other temptations. They will feel the urge to select measures of their records that flatter them (seat-shares rather than vote-shares, especially first preference shares rather than the two-party vote, and the proportion of all seats called correctly, as Labor or Coalition, even though most of these seats were never in doubt); claim to know which seats hold the “key” (a RedBridge–Accent conceit); call seats that are too close to call (YouGov called every seat, including those split 50-50); and assume their sampling of particular groups (YouGov’s coverage of Vietnamese and Hindi speakers in Fowler) is adequate.

Market research organisations are publicity seekers; the higher their media profile, and the stronger their claims to being prescient, the greater their chances of picking up lucrative contracts from corporates, governments and NGOs — including political parties, publicly funded.

To those wanting to conduct a poll, the absence of a media contract is not necessarily an impediment, especially when — thanks to the internet — the cost of entry to the industry has never been lower and the dissemination of the results never easier. While some are happy to conduct polls and publicise them through their webpage — YouGov’s initial move — market researchers increasingly conduct polls in the hope that their results will be accepted with gratitude by some media outlet, published prominently, and above all reported uncritically.

Such hopes are rarely disappointed. Polls, especially to do with elections, are newsworthy. To legacy media hard-pressed for resources, polls handed out gratis as exclusives are a boon. And few journalists, many of whom spend much of their time rewriting press releases, garnished with a couple of quotes from relevant players, have the skills — or, increasingly, the time — to do much more than spot the key finding (who’s ahead and who’s behind), note some of the other results (sometimes with an eye for the politics of their own outlet) and move on to stories that might require more effort.

Pollsters can then look forward to having their handiwork recycled by other media, picked up by politicians, and noted — again, largely uncritically — by bloggers and others trying to keep track of what poll has just been published and whether it says the same as some other poll published sometime before.

And the ABC? When it comes to taking in other people’s polls, the ABC and its very able data analyst Casey Briggs need to decide whether they are in the breaking news business — the “reveal” — or the news analysis business, reflecting in an informed way on what’s been published rather than allowing themselves, however unwittingly, to be publicity agents for the latest poll.

Taking a bit of time over this opens the possibility of spotting problems with the polls that an audience should be alerted to. It also allows for the possibility of informing the audience of a bigger story — one that the pollsters themselves may have overlooked. •

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YouGov first used MRP in Britain in 2017. It has since used the technique in Spain (2023), Britain (2024) and Germany (2025). Introduced to Australia by YouGov in 2022, the team that did it then — including Shaun Ratcliff (now at Accent) and Campbell White (now at Pyxis) — is not the same as the team (led by Paul Smith) that’s doing it now.

Polls that use MRP stand out from standard polls in three ways. First, they are based on large numbers — not the usual thousand or two. YouGov’s January–February poll had 40,689 respondents. But in arriving at “the best and most robust sample possible… to project the election” via modelling that explored “over 25,000 different possibilities,” only 8732 responses survived.

Second, MRP incorporates aggregate-level data (for the YouGov poll, electorate-level data covering age, gender, education, past voting behaviour, country of birth, and location) derived from the Census or the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Exactly which depends on the variables pollsters believe (rightly or wrongly) help shape the vote and the variables for which population-wide data are available; these data are not gathered from respondents because the number of respondents in each electorate is too small and what respondents report may be wrong or incomplete.

The third characteristic of an MRP poll is that it shows voting intentions (for YouGov, two-party preferred) seat-by-seat. Using these figures, pollsters can categorise the seats in any number of ways: “safe Coalition,” “likely Coalition,” “lean Coalition,” “tossup Coalition,” “safe independent,” “safe Green,” “safe other,” “tossup Labor,” “lean Labor,” “likely Labor” and “safe Labor” are YouGov’s chosen categories. The number in each category can be added up. Calculating the seat-shares for the Coalition, Labor and others can lead to discussions about possible outcomes — from majority governments to minority governments to hung parliaments in which almost anything might happen. It is the focus on seat-shares rather than vote-shares — the focus of other polls — that is most eye-catching about MRP.

MRP can be used to predict the likely outcome in seats in different parts of the country, in the “key battle-ground constituencies,” where boundaries were changed by the 2024 electoral redistribution, where the sitting member is retiring, and so on. These, however, are not things YouGov chose to pursue, at least not in its initial report of its January–February poll; a webinar is planned for 18 March.

CLASSIFYING SEATS AND PREDICTING OUTCOMES

The election, we now know, will be held in May. What do the seat counts in the YouGov poll show about the probable outcome had the election been held in February? To come to grips with YouGov’s figures we need to understand how it classifies seats — and how this differs from the way psephologists are used to seeing seats classified.

Seats classified as “safe” by the Australian Electoral Commission are those that would change hands on a swing of more than ten percentage points, those classified as “fairly safe” would require a swing of six to ten points, while “marginals” would be lost or gained on a swing of swing of less than six points.

Not so with YouGov. Most of the seats YouGov classifies as “safe” — on YouGov’s figures — would change hands on (further) swings of less than ten percentage points. No fewer than thirty-eight of the sixty seats classified by YouGov as “safe” for the Coalition require smaller shifts — typically, much smaller. For Labor, as many as forty-four of its fifty-one “safe” seats also require shifts of less than ten points. Of the seats it classifies as “safe” for the Coalition, YouGov has the Coalition ahead by just four points, 52-48 in two, Robertson (NSW) and Bass (Tasmania). Both seats, however, are regarded by the AEC as “marginal.” In three of the seats YouGov describes as “safe” for Labor — Hasluck (WA), classified as “safe” by the AEC; Corangamite (Victoria), “fairly safe”; and Hindmarsh (SA), “fairly safe” — Labor also leads by just four points.

Psephologist Malcolm Mackerras first used the two-party swing required for seats to change hands to rank every seat as either “safe,” “fairly safe” or “marginal” (concepts and intervals subsequently adopted by the AEC) in 1972. Every seat that required a swing of ten percentage points or more was regarded as “safe,” seats that required swings of 6.0 to 9.9 points were “fairly safe,” and seats that required smaller swings were “marginal.”

He noted, however, that in some cases categorisation could be misleading. The safety or vulnerability of seats might vary because of the strength or weakness of local members, the presence of a particular industry or of local “discontent,” demographic changes since the last redistribution, and so on. It followed that some “marginal” seats should be considered “safe,” and some “safe” seats were really “marginal.”

What YouGov understands by its own categories — “safe,” “likely,” “lean” or “tossups” — is nowhere made clear. But it appears to have collapsed into one the two things that Mackerras always sought to distinguish — the strictly numerical gap, on one hand, and the factors that might lead to a more nuanced appraisal, on the other — with the numerical gap not YouGov’s main consideration. Hence, its willingness to describe as “safe,” according to its polling, five seats where the gap between the two parties (or candidates) is as low as four percentage points (52–48); to describe not as “lean” to Coalition/Labor but as “likely” Coalition/Labor, seven seats where the gap between the two sides is just two percentage points (51–49); to describe as “lean” rather than “likely,” eight other Coalition/Labor seats where it shows a 51-49 split; to describe as a “tossup” the seat of Ryan where the ALP has a 52-48 lead; and so on.

In arriving at the number of seats the poll has the two sides winning, YouGov assumes that any seat that is “safe Coalition” (sixty), “likely Coalition” (five), “lean Coalition” (five) or even a “tossup Coalition” (three), is a seat the Coalition will win; and that any seat that is “safe Labor” (fifty-one), “likely Labor” (ten), “lean Labor” (four), or a “tossup Labor” (one), Labor will win. By this arithmetic, Coalition has seventy-three; Labor, sixty-six.

Why is “the most likely result” in the three Labor seats rated 50–50 — Macquarie (on a 6.3-point margin, according to the AES); Shortland (6.0); and McEwen (3.8) —  “Coalition tossups”? YouGov’s decision to call them for the Coalition matters. Were these seats to have been ignored — regarded as simply too close to call — the count would not have been seventy-three to sixty-six in favour of the Coalition but seventy to sixty-six, making the story’s headline problematic. If the “Coalition tossups” were regarded as “Labor tossups” then the seat count would slip back to seventy to sixty-nine, taking the headline with it.

As well as estimating the most likely distribution of seats, YouGov provides estimates (based on a 90 per cent probability) of the lower and upper limits of “the “true” party shares (and seat totals).” For the Coalition, the range is sixty-five to eighty seats; for Labor, fifty-nine to seventy-two. Lopping off seats from one side categorised as “lean to” or “tossups” and moving them to the other side proves to be a close proxy: sixty-five to seventy-eight for the Coalition; sixty to seventy-three for Labor. Alternatively, had YouGov considered every seat where the polling was at 50–50, 51–49 or 49–51 as the bottom of the range, then the lower limit for the Coalition would have been sixty-four (seventy-three minus nine) and the upper limit, eighty-two (seventy-three plus nine); for Labor fifty-seven (sixty-six minus nine) and seventy-five (sixty-six plus nine) respectively. These three forms of calculation, only one of which is YouGov’s, yield similar results.

Based on what YouGov thinks the “most likely” results, the Coalition picks up seats held by independents who had formerly been Coalition MPs (Calare, NSW; Monash, Victoria; Moore, WA) but not a single seat held by other independents. In the “non-classic contests” — contests where at least one of the last two candidates fighting it out is likely to be neither Coalition nor Labor — Labor is the only party predicted to make inroads — not only against the Greens in Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan but also against the (non-teal) independent Dai Le in Fowler (NSW).

YouGov cautions that in these seats Labor is only “slightly favoured.” Nonetheless, it has Labor ahead by twelve points in Fowler, eight points in Brisbane, six points in Griffith, and four points in Ryan. If having a lead of four to twelve points means a party or candidate is only “slightly favoured,” then the same might be said of no fewer than seventy-seven seats, or almost half the seats.

THE TRACK RECORD

How good is YouGov’s record? According to Patrick English, its UK-based director of political analytics, “YouGov’s approach to MRP modelling is market leading and has a proven track record of success including in recent British and Spanish national elections.”

Two weeks later, he would no doubt have added the 2025 German election, where YouGov’s final MRP model (in its own words) “called 91 per cent of constituencies [630 seats, under list voting] correctly.” Providing a figure for the number of constituencies (meaning “seats”) it had called “correctly” — the number in which it had picked the winner even if not the winning margin — has not been something YouGov has always done.

On most occasions it has only disclosed the difference between its estimate of the number of seats each party would win and the number of seats each party went on to win (a net figure). Always, or almost always, the number of seats that the pollster gets wrong based on a seat-by-seat comparison will exceed the net figure based on a comparison of the party-by-party totals. (This is true, even though YouGov’s method of calculating the net figure involves an element of double counting: underestimating one party’s vote share must involve overestimating the vote share of another),

In Germany, YouGov’s net error was 6.7 per cent but the seat-by-seat error was said to be 9 per cent. Whether the net error matters more than the seat-by-seat error depends on whether one is interested in a pollster’s ability to estimate total seat-shares or a pollster’s ability to pick the seat-by-seat results. (These are the two ways electoral pendulums can be used as well: to predict the net loss of seats, given the overall swing; or to see the seats that are most likely to swing, given the overall swing.)

In the 2024 British general election, YouGov’s prediction, based on 42,758 interviews in 622 seats (across England, Scotland and Wales, but not Northern Ireland), was that “Labour is set to win, and set to win big.” Labour did win and “win big”; every poll had expected that. But YouGov, in common with all the other polls, overestimated Labour’s lead: Labour finished ten points ahead of the Conservatives — less than the seventeen-point lead YouGov had predicted. It wasn’t the only poll to use MRP at that election. Of the others that did so, six had a bigger Labour lead — Survation and Focaldata (nineteen points), We Think (twenty), and Find Out Now and Electoral Calculus (twenty-three) — but two (More in Common and JLPartners) had a smaller Labour lead (sixteen points). On this measure, YouGov enjoyed more success than some but less success than others.

What about its seat success ? YouGov puts that at 92 per cent. This is based on adding up the number by which it overestimated the seats Labour, the SNP and the Greens would win and the number by which it underestimated the seats the Conservatives and Reform would win — fifty-two seats, hence the 92 per cent. In 2017, by the same reasoning, YouGov’s success rate was 93 per cent.

Again, the seat-by-seat errors were not released. No doubt some — perhaps most — will have been among the eighty-nine YouGov characterised as “toss ups” or “marginal” — meaning, here, that the party ahead in the polling had a lead of less than five percentage points.

In the 2023 Spanish general election, where YouGov became “the first pollster” in Spain to use MRP, YouGov appears to have done less well. Six days out from the election (in Spain, the publication of polls any closer to the election is prohibited), YouGov correctly predicted a hung parliament with the People’s Party holding a narrow lead. It also predicted the totals for each party — out, overall, by twenty-eight seats; in a parliament of 350 seats, this meant a net error of 8 per cent.

And in Australia — a precursor to which English did not refer? In 2022, when YouGov published its MRP with 18,923 respondents, the Australian, which had commissioned the poll, rolled out the headline “Labor to win modest majority with eighty seats.” This turned out to be too high: needing seventy-six seats, Labor won seventy-seven, giving it a very modest majority. The Coalition, “most likely” to win sixty-three, won fifty-eight; the Greens, four instead of one; and Other, twelve instead of seven. YouGov failed to pick the winner in sixteen seats (net), an error of 10.6 per cent.

Seat by seat, YouGov says it “called the winner of 92 per cent of electorates.” Unusually, this appears to be an actual seat count, not a net seat count. In a House of 151 seats, it called 11 seats incorrectly. This figure takes into account the six seats that in its print edition the Australian had labelled “too close to call” (seats it found were 50–50, two-party preferred) but which in its online view YouGov had said were “likely” to go to the Liberals in some cases or to Labor in others; two of these were called incorrectly.

A success rate of 91, 92 or 93 per cent — whether based on a party-by-party count or a seat-by-seat count — may sound better than a failure rate of 7, 8 or 9 per cent, even when the underlying reality is the same. But because most seats at an election are safe, their fate predictable, the success rate for YouGov polls may not be quite as good as it sounds, the failure rate worse than it sounds. If there are 150 seats, but only a third, for arguments’ sake, are at any risk of changing hands, then the failure to predict the outcome in eleven seats (as happened in 2022) might be better expressed either by saying that the poll had a 78 (rather than 93) per cent success rate (thirty-nine out of fifty) or a 22 (rather than 7) per cent failure rate (eleven out of fifty). Either way, these scores look very different from those based on the (tacit) assumption that outcomes in every seat are equally difficult to predict. •

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The program has always juxtaposed the trivial with the consequential, and here too it remains true to form. Targets so far this season include the Trump media circus, sensationalised reporting of anti-Semitism, the fallout from Seven’s decision to run horoscopes in its nightly news bulletin, and a proclamation on Sunrise that the true identity of Jack the Ripper is at last revealed.

Also true to form is the bold critiquing of ABC management, with the Antoinette Lattouf court case described as “one of the worst self-inflicted wounds at the ABC in recent memory.” Readiness to turn the searchlight onto the ABC has been a core tenet of the program since Stuart Littlemore first took the chair in 1989.

It’s an important tradition to preserve. In one of the program’s most audacious episodes, aired in November 2000, Paul Barry read out fierce media criticism of that era’s managing director, Jonathan Shier, whose lumberjack approach to staffing threatened the ABC’s capacity to fulfill its public responsibilities in news and current affairs. Then, in a no-holds-barred interview with chair of the ABC board, Donald McDonald, Barry asserted that Shier’s main achievements were to have increased the number of top managers on inflated salaries and run up a $3 million redundancy bill.

At the end of that program, Barry thanked viewers and hoped he’d be back next year. He wasn’t. He was “let go” and Shier axed the program, though it was to return seventeen months later, with David Marr at the helm, and in 2013 Barry himself was back. Shier, his position untenable, left the ABC at the end of 2001.

His was not the only scalp Media Watch could claim. After outing commercial radio hosts John Laws and Alan Jones for taking secret “cash for comment” payments from banks and major corporations in 1999, the program turned the heat on David Flint, head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, who had been responsible for the follow-up investigation in 2003. Sycophantic letters from Flint to Jones, sent during the course of the formal enquiry, were duly given the treatment by presenter Marr. Flint stood down from the inquiry a few months later.

No one could deny that these were matters of pith and moment, and if they collected detractors, it was because resolute presenters, backed by committed producers, were prepared to go into the fray against powerful adversaries. Some of the counter-attacks, though, hit home.

From the outset, Media Watch has had a problem with tone. Littlemore, equal parts journalist and barrister, fronted the camera much as he would a courtroom, with a straight face and clipped articulation, and chose his words from the kind of rhetorical treasury legal professionals have at their disposal. Over the nine years of his tenure he established a demeanour that effectively set off a class war.

Commercial broadcasters who were his prime targets gave as good as they got, losing no time in identifying their strategic opportunity. Here was the taxpayer-funded ABC, with its solid middle-class audience, sitting in lordly judgement over those who had to live and die by the ratings. “He hated my form of journalism,” recalled Derryn Hinch. “No tie, beard — personality based.”

Littlemore and his successors continued to dish out lofty contempt for “the pack of nasty bastards” at A Current Affair and their ilk, and the nasty bastards hit back at “a supercilious, holier-than-thou bunch of soy latte drinking poodle-owning skivvy wearers.” Presenters, chosen for the maverick streak they brought to the steely work of arbitration, featured the best of the counterattacks in montages.

When Daily Telegraph editor Campbell Reid sent in a dead fish by way of riposte to a Media Watch indictment, Marr held the exhibit up to the camera, pointing out that it was standard code for a death threat in mafia circles. Such stunts provided entertainment value otherwise lacking in the austere format of the program.

There was a macho element to all this, with its antithetical styles of combat — elegantly phrased contempt versus brass tacks insults — and it wasn’t until 2005 that Liz Jackson took the helm as the first female presenter. Jackson brought a warmer persona and greater concern with the social impact of journalists preying on easy targets  who had no ability to mount any kind of defence or gain redress.

Barry has defined the program for the past decade, combining forensic critique with gleeful mockery. That’s the Littlemore heritage, and it has a rusted-on following among ABC viewers, but I’ve found myself reacting against it increasingly in recent years. It comes across as glib and — yes, Derryn Hinch — supercilious.

Besser, a more robust presence, brings a track record of tough investigative journalism on urgent contemporary matters — housing, the environment, corporate corruption, the prison system — and he doesn’t have the look of someone who has spent most of his life behind a desk. He’s promised to “bring a blow-torch” to the industry, assisted by a new executive producer, Mario Christodolou, who also has a strong background in investigative journalism.

They acknowledge that investigative work is not the brief on Media Watch, but what is the brief? Talk of blow torches has a ring of empty bluster about it. The media environment has changed out of all recognition over the past twenty-five years, and the problems of the industry have become vast and complex in ways not anticipated in 1989.

Although we still need the major exposés to which the program owes its enduring tenure, the sillier gotchas are an indulgent waste of time. This is not Private Eye, and the level of wit doesn’t match the level of relish with which it roasts minor targets. Does it really matter if Sunrise makes dizzy claims to a scoop on the identity of Jack the Ripper?

There’s real work to do, work that requires updated thinking, with a significant change of format, and this should be an ABC priority. We need a longer program, with a more ambitious brief: to provide substantive insights into what we’re up against in an environment saturated with disinformation.

Journalists, with their hardwired notions of bias and “both sides” balance, are not equipped for when these terms have been weaponised by heavily funded influencers. A news headline can be biased by the terminology used, the way emphasis is accorded, the relative levels of attention given to political agencies. Glaring examples of the problem are to be seen and heard on the ABC itself every day of the week, especially in its reporting of the spate of critical elections held around the world in the past twelve months.

Elections have become dangerous moments in the lives of nations and in geopolitical dynamics. Extremist minor parties gain disproportionate coverage because they promise more drama and stir people up. Thinking it is responsible to give them equal attention may be the most irresponsible assumption a broadcaster can make.

Journalists need to be able to understand and communicate what is at stake, and although the ABC still has experienced people with the capacity to do this, it has far too many staff in significant roles who patently do not. And the public needs to know more about how news is researched and edited. How are presenters trained? Who decides on all-important headlines and lead paragraphs? What is the cumulative effect of these decisions?

If Media Watch can at least start tackling those questions, it may evolve into the program we need at this critical time. •

The post Pith and moment? appeared first on Inside Story.

McIntyre’s tweets stirred a frenzy of execration on social media, amplified by columnists in the News Ltd stable, into which was drawn communications minister Malcolm Turnbull, who called on SBS’s chief executive to take action. Next morning, McIntyre was sacked. In McIntyre’s action against SBS, alleging that he had been sanctioned for expressing a “political opinion” in contravention of the Fair Work Act, his solicitor, acting pro bono, was Josh Bornstein.

In the decade since then, Bornstein, a partner with Maurice Blackburn, has been a regular on this side of the barricades, identified with support for freedom of expression and a range of progressive causes. Most recently he was legal adviser to Antoinette Lattouf, that peculiar hill on which the ABC elected to die. In the interests of full disclosure, I also consulted him recently on a similar issue.

In fact, this is not Bornstein’s speciality: his background is in employment and labour relations rather than defamation law or civil liberties. Indeed, it is these specialities that inform Working for the Brand, his new book about a “corporate cancel culture” in companies and other institutional environments protective of their reputations.

Every organisation these days, willingly or otherwise, has a public profile and is thereby susceptible to the effect of external pressures on conflict-avoidant management. Unlike, for example, historian Timothy Garton Ash, whose Free Speech (2017) is conditioned by that writer’s experiences of totalitarianism, Bornstein positions his critique in the context of the neoliberal ascendant and the winnowing away of forces countervailing corporate power.

There is a contradiction at the heart of this. If corporate power is so unassailable, how come organisations are so easily spooked? Perhaps the answer is that corporate power is not uniform. You can be scabrous about Elon Musk on his own platform, now called X, and essentially shout into the void. It’s harder to look away if you’re a university administrator confronted by a News Ltd pile-on about an academic’s pro-Palestinian profile on social media.

Still, we might be talking about something that’s been around rather longer: the bureaucratic cast of mind that has always responded to disturbance by negotiation, negation and if necessary elimination. It was Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) who defined the corporation as “an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” If corporate mores have changed, then so have public behaviours. Time was when we scarcely knew the political or social views of our colleagues, or if we did we were in the habit of minimising or avoiding difference. Social media has placed in our hands very powerful, even compulsive tools of extraversion, and provided virtual galleries to which to play. It is not only organisations struggling to come to terms with the results.

In general, I am in sympathy with Working for the Brand. Bornstein writes fluidly, anecdotally, sometimes amusingly, occasionally urgently — his brush with a right-wing American provocateur who passed himself off as Bornstein in order to rally online haters is genuinely terrifying. He parallels the proposition articulated by Elizabeth Anderson, a philosopher at the University of Michigan, that the decline of organised labour and the triumph of ostensibly free-market forces has led corporations to constitute as “private governments.” These new overlords “impose a far more minute, exacting and sweeping regulation of employees than democratic states do in any domain outside of prisons and the military,” even if “market pressures, social norms, lack of interest and simple decency keep most employers from exercising the full scope of their authority.”

Bornstein notes that free speech is not absolute: the right is not even upheld by our Constitution:

The laws that restrict freedom of speech in Australia are extensive, and include those operating in the area of consumer protection against deceptive and misleading conduct, workplace bullying, electoral regulation, sexual harassment, anti-discrimination, copyright, confidential information, national security, privacy, obscenity, nuisance, grooming of children, treason and contempt of court. Overwhelmingly these curbs on speech don’t excite outraged calls condemning cancel culture.

Those curbs, moreover, are more than enough: organisations have no business adding to them.

The restrictions on speech and expression are not the product of a democratic, deliberative process; they are unilaterally imposed. Unlike carefully drafted legislation, the restrictions are deliberate vague and imprecise. An employee cannot possibly know the parameters of the rules. The effect is chilling. Nor do these curbs carefully balance freedoms and rights. Instead, the overwhelming imperative is corporate brand management.

Where Bornstein might have gone further, I think, is in assessing the digital hazard of the intensifying volatility of communications. As John Stuart Mill long ago observed, “An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor or that private property is robbery ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer or when handed out among the same mob in the form of a placard.” Social media has taken us right to the corn-dealer’s door.

I am old enough to remember when Twitter hove into view and reporters and columnists believed they had to be “on it.” Twitter was “great for breaking news”; Twitter would make us all “accountable.” The first was pure vanity — the idea that as a journalist you had to be on top of everything immediately. The second was utter nonsense — as if journalists were not plenty accountable already. In any event, the last people capable of holding journalists accountable were a self-selecting sample of news consumers, disinhibited by distance and often by anonymity, who already knew everything about everything.

Something else, too. Its effect were subtly coercive. The easiest way to burnish one’s brand on Twitter, it steadily emerged, was to reinforce followers’ prejudices. This would be rewarded with popularity and blandishments — a terrible thing for journalists, vain enough already. There remains a reluctance to acknowledge X’s performative culture: the craving it answers for approbation, the anxiety with which it encounters and even courts disagreement, and perhaps above all the self-dramatising exhilaration that arises from riding the tiger of public opinion.

This is what intrigues me, for example, about McIntyre. He was an experienced media professional; he was well outside his area of expertise; this was not a cause he had researched in any systematic way or to which he had meaningfully committed by joining an organisation or even signing a petition. The medium he chose — bald, unadorned and permanent, admitting of no qualification or context but inviting reflexively hostile comment — was wholly unsuited to complex and nuanced questions about rights and wrongs of war. His, then, was a wildly disproportionate response to seeing people spilling out of a pub on Anzac Day, and it was always possible it would invite a wildly disproportionate response along entirely foreseeable lines.

McIntyre should hardly have lost his job. Bornstein is surely right that, from a legal point of view, the journalist’s “view on Anzac Day bore no rational connection with his employment.” But McIntyre’s motivations are surely perplexing. Whose minds did he fancy he was changing? Would he have shouted his sentiments in the pub itself? The answers are surely nobody and no. McIntyre was briefly a cause celebre; then, as happens, people moved on. But the incident was the end not only of McIntyre’s job, Bornstein reports, but also his marriage. His Japanese wife left him: “She struggled to understand why her husband had provoked the controversy, and was angry with him for upending their quiet lives.” Something is at work here beyond the frank expression of a controversial opinion — an addiction, a fever.

Bornstein complains that the SBS code of conduct, like many such, was ambiguous, promising to protect McIntyre’s “right to make public comment and to enter into public debate in their personal capacity” with the caveat that “individuals should consider how their posts will be perceived by the community.” But whether McIntyre’s attention-seeking instincts would have been constrained by a stricter code is debatable. His provocation was not unwitting. He went very deliberately in search of praise and rage.

Organisations have never before had to deal with such unforeseeable and uncontainable impulses before. It’s hardly surprising they are bad at it. Nor am I convinced that this arises from any monolithic economic power. On the contrary, even large media organisations are today deceptively weak and self-protecting, overstimulated and under-resourced.

The old boss of the Herald and Weekly Times, Jack Williams, used to say that the only free newspaper was a rich newspaper. The modern media outlet, unsettled by fickle publics and exsanguinated by digital vampires, is a pale shadow of its former self, its pre-emptive bullying disguising its existential doubts. Anything funded by the public exchequer, meanwhile, knows the pressures this brings in an environment of straitened budgets and competing interests. Bornstein acutely observes the paradox of universities, where free inquiry is ostensibly protected and employment terms have never been more tenuous.

Bornstein sees a further tension in the modern phenomenon of the reputation-laundering “woke corporation,” pointing to “an inverse relationship between a company’s stated exemplary values, on the one hand, and its conduct, on the other.” Egregious examples such as Qantas notwithstanding, I’m not sure that the relationship is that exact; what companies have gained from their flirtations with social justice and public causes is frankly questionable; indeed, one already senses a fading fad.

Most consumers choose brands for very basic reasons: quality, reliability, convenience, perceived status, prior experience, word-of-mouth reputation. Brands help them save time by guaranteeing uniformity of outcome; brands offer recourse in the event of unsatisfactory product or service. The feel-good factor of espoused values can operate only at the margin. Examples such as Amazon and Uber, with their egregiously exploitative labour practices, fly in the face of the idea that consumers care about how companies work; they care only that they do.

Bornstein rightly grounds freedom of debate in the bedrock of democracy. But democracy is messy. The American journalist James Fallows once called it an iron law of public discussion that the other side enjoys all the advantages and is accorded media favouritism. Something of the same applies to the debates that swirl in the social media sphere. Your rightness is always self-evident; your rivals are always base, deluded, conspiratorial. Your side is always disciplined and organised; the other side is always an online mob.

Yet it is difficult to defend freedom of expression without recognising the rights of others to respond in kind. Why should people not complain to the ABC? Why should campaigners in a particular cause not get together, share their grievances and act in concert? On matters of fact, everyone should be vigorously checked; but we will not nurture a plurality of views until we allow for their coexistence. That places an onus on employers that, I suspect, very few would feel comfortable with — but, y’know, that’s why they’re on the big bucks.

The most disarming section of Bornstein’s book concerns his position on Israel Folau, the footballer whose homophobic sentiments on social media resulted in his sacking by Rugby Australia for breaching those clauses in his contract that required him to foster “a safe, fair and inclusive environment for all” and “use social media appropriately.” Bornstein observes how left and right swapped clothes on the matter:

Progressives who had previously condemned the sackings of employees for expressing dissident left-wing views demanded that he be sacked for breaking his employment contract. Conservatives who had previously campaigned for the sacking of the same left-wing dissidents discovered a new commitment to human rights discourse, and condemned corporate overreach.

Bornstein oozes healthy contempt for the Ethics Centre, the Sydney-based reputation launderer often brought in to sprinkle holy water on corporate expedients, which placed the burden on Folau to “accept (or not) the relevant conditions of employments.” This was, as Bornstein explains, “pure sophistry — a severe penalty dressed up as a ‘choice.’” He put his principles to a public test by defending the rights of someone he profoundly disagreed with.

I also criticised Folau’s sacking in a television interview for The Project, arguing that determining complex moral and philosophical issues, including the bounds of acceptable speech, should not be the remit of corporations, but rather was the role of democratically elected politicians. I found myself in uncomfortable company: arguing alongside right-wing politicians and hard-right religious groups. I was aware that their invocation of human rights and free-speech discourse was disingenuous, and I tried to distinguish my position from theirs. Nevertheless I was widely criticised and pilloried by parts of the left.

Of course he was, because just as my enemy’s enemy is my friend in these tribal times, my enemy’s friend is my enemy. But uncomfortable company is okay. Uncomfortable company is not to be scorned. Uncomfortable company is what democracy is all about. •

Working for the Brand: How Corporations Are Destroying Free Speech
By Josh Bornstein | Scribe | $26.99 | 304 pages

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He was not referring to the havoc last Tuesday at India’s Maha Kumbh Mela, when crowd control collapsed, thousands of shuffling worshippers tumbled onto each other and up to sixty people were killed and many more injured. He was talking about the Maha Kumbh of 1977, and he made his remark on the most auspicious bathing day of the festival — the same day as the tragedy at this year’s event.

The Maha Kumbh Mela is the six-week Hindu festival proclaimed by UNESCO to be “the largest peaceful congregation of pilgrims on earth,” held at Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) in Uttar Pradesh. An astrological formula — “when Jupiter is in Aries and the sun and moon are in Capricorn” — produces one every eleven or twelve years. Bathing at the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati rivers during this time washes away sins and promises escape from the cycle of rebirth.

Devotees claim the festival originated in “time immemorial,” and it certainly has a well-documented history going back more than 200 years. Once the British colonial bureaucracy arrived, the Maha Kumbh Mela became a happening that governments couldn’t ignore.

We know about the old Brahmin’s comment because he had befriended an ill-prepared academic pilgrim, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a professor of comparative literature at Jadavpur University in Kolkata and the recently divorced wife of economist Amartya Sen. After attending a conference in sunny, southern Hyderabad, she decided on impulse to return home via the much-talked-about festival. In her book The Holy Trail: A Pilgrim’s Plight, she explained how she embarked on an uncomfortable but deeply affecting experience.

“I uttered, ‘Jai Kumbh’,” she wrote, “and took a dip… the water was freezing… I tried to invite other thoughts. This was Triveni Sangam [the confluence of three rivers], the sacred spot;… if someone bathed here during the auspicious hour, one would find release from the bond of rebirth.”

Dev Sen’s newly acquired Brahmin “uncle” held her rain-sodden bag of clothes and handed her the damp bundle when she came out of the water after a few seconds. A veteran of Maha Kumbh Melas in 1954 and 1966, he had taken pity on a lone woman poorly equipped with sandals, a couple of sweaters, a spare sari and a shawl. It had been raining and the night temperature fell to about 10 degrees centigrade.

The intense pressure to make this year’s festival the biggest Maha Kumbh Mela ever — and thereby the biggest gathering of believers in the world — created huge risks. Organisers were expecting an almost incredible 100 million people to bathe in twenty-four hours. The bathing precincts extend about twelve kilometres on both sides of the river, but the most desirable spot is the “nose,” the point where the three rivers (two real, one mythical) meet.

The numbers game is not new, but 2025 is the first Maha Kumbh held while Bharatiya Janata Party governments and Narendra Modi reign supreme. The BJP saw this year’s festival as another building block in the grand façade of a Hindu-supremacist India. One estimate suggests the BJP state government invested $1.2 billion dollars in preparations, and the national government contribution is likely to be no less. Authorities expect the Kumbh to earn many times its cost through the sale of concessions and taxes on huge sales.

Billboards, posters and endless digital content on tens of millions of smart phones proclaim the virtues of the renewed Hindu India and the importance of Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Before this year’s festival began, BJP supporters praised the preparations for an enormous but safe event. They scoffed at the ineptitude of a non-BJP government’s management of the last Mela, in 2013. “How Mahakumbh 2025 Is Fixing the Mistakes of Mahakumbh 2013,” a sympathetic news site proclaimed.

After last week’s chaos and deaths, needless to say, the opposition quickly blamed the government for callous incompetence, especially for the very special treatment given to VVIPs — Very Very Important Persons. Ordinary folk shuffled in endless lines, too tightly packed to be safe, while VVIPs had a direct path to the choicest bathing site barricaded for them and their vehicles.

VVIPs are a reminder of the first Maha Kumbh Mela after independence in 1954, made memorable by a horrific stampede in which more than 350 people died. Vikram Seth devoted a chapter of his bestselling novel A Suitable Boy to the disaster. The newly independent government of Jawaharlal Nehru, also playing the numbers game, had aimed to use the Mela to promote its first Five-Year Plan and impending transformation of the country from poverty to prosperity. The Mela was to have an “educative” as well as a spiritual significance, with a publicity campaign “carried on in such a manner as to make even the uneducated understand the Plan.”

The inquiry into the 1954 disaster put the term “VIP” into Indian languages. Dignitaries, including the president and prime minister, ate a leisurely lunch while hundreds died in a human avalanche a few kilometres away. It was hours before they were aware of what had happened.

At the inquiry into the disaster, desperate officials explained their urgent need to make provisions for “VIPs.” The judge who headed the inquiry deplored the fact that “this unfortunate expression” had “gained currency” and was angered that officials had “allowed the use of, and even used themselves, the expression of ‘V.I.P.’” His outrage did little good. Within ten years, VIP was so overused that a new acronym, VVIP, had become necessary.

Numbers at the Maha Kumbh Mela have long been important for governments. In the nineteenth century, British rulers tended to encourage attendance because it enhanced revenue for the new railways and tax revenue from merchants who provided services.

In January 1942, though, with the Japanese storming through Malaya on the way to Singapore, authorities tried to discourage attendance by stopping the sale of railway tickets to Prayagraj for a month. The pilgrims came anyway.

The British governor of the province accepted what he couldn’t stop, came to the Mela and received “an address of welcome” from “the sadhus and mahants [holymen] of the various akharas [religious sects].” They declared that “the forces of right will ultimately triumph and we shower our blessings on the British and their allies for final victory.” An estimated 800,000 people bathed on that day.

The 1966 festival coincided with the conclusion of a war with Pakistan and the almost simultaneous death of prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had led the country through the war, and the arrival of Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, as the new prime minister. Millions of pilgrims that year also returned home to the uncertainties of the Bihar famine.

When Nabaneeta Dev Sen made her impetuous journey to the 1977 Kumbh, Indira Gandhi had been running her authoritarian “emergency” for seventeen months. About to call elections, she flew to the Kumbh to seek the support of the crowds and an assembly of holymen — as the British governor of UP had done in 1942. They presented her with a ceremonial shawl, but by the end of the year she had lost the election and spent a night in prison.

The deaths at this year’s Mela have been played down in Indian media. The largest-selling English print daily, the Times of India, editorialised that it was “important to keep this news in perspective” because “in a gathering as vast as Kumbh, some disorder is almost inevitable.” The paper pointed out that Alzheimer’s disease was the seventh most important cause of death worldwide but such deaths “never make Page 1.” A BJP spokesman agreed: “The tragedy… was most unfortunate” and “there will be criticism that one should take in one’s stride.”

In Chennai, the Hindu, a little bolder, published a piece that highlighted studies showing that when crowds reach a density greater than five people per square metre “the likelihood of death or serious injury is high.”

This year’s deaths have put pressure on the fifty-two-year-old Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Adityanath, who wears the saffron robes of a holyman, is seen by many as the eventual successor to the seventy-four-year-old Narendra Modi, but he has rivals as well as explicit political opponents. He sees “a conspiracy” in how the media — especially the foreign media — treated the deaths on 29 January, and sees the coverage as an effort to create “a global embarrassment” and “besmirch the glory of the event.”

In today’s world of disasters, he probably doesn’t have much to worry about. •

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Premièred in Manhattan in November last year, Anderson’s performance was revived in May and a live a recording released on YouTube. Following the American election the recording has gone viral. It does seem to capture the mood of a nation anticipating the arrival of an administration promising to disband most of the government structures it has inherited.

As the date of the inauguration looms, though, a curious distraction has emerged, jostling for prominence in news headlines and generating intense social media engagement. Growing numbers of the American public have started to wait for something else: an explanation. Why are large numbers of drones being spotted nightly by citizens of New Jersey and surrounding states, some apparently travelling in formation, some dipping to low flight paths, making them clearly visible above houses and roads?

“Everyone is asking for answers,” says New Jersey mayor Murello, who along with twenty-four other mayors from that state and governors from New York and Maryland converged across party lines late last week to demand an explanation from Pentagon representatives. They left frustrated, having been offered nothing more than evasive assurances. All Homeland Security would say was that the drones aren’t of foreign origin and don’t pose a threat.

That, as many commentators pointed out, doesn’t add up. If the government doesn’t know what they are, how can it be confident there is no threat? And if it does know but is choosing to leave the public in an information vacuum, it is opening the door wide to conspiracy theorists and other amateur sleuths. “The longer you go, the more outlandish people are going to start thinking,” as one New Jersey reporter put it.

Public concern has been building since the second week of November when accounts of large drones in the New Jersey skies were reported in USA Today. Witnesses included state law enforcement officers, who set up a program to monitor the activity.

With reports continuing to flood in, the Pentagon’s “nothing to see here” rang hollow. Video recordings showed craft flying over the Picatinny Arsenal and Earl Naval weapons station; others were reported hovering above coastguard vessels.

Last Friday evening New York governor Kathy Hochul ordered the temporary closure of runways at Stewart airfield due to drone activity in the airspace, issuing a statement that “this has gone too far.” A few hours later, reports of “heavy UAS [unmanned aerial systems] movement” led to a four-hour shutdown at the Wright Patterson Airforce Base in Ohio, a facility of critical importance for airforce command.

Considering the national security implications and the legitimate anxieties of citizens about a potential crash in their neighbourhood, social media dialogue in those first weeks was remarkable for its restraint. If it was a US security operation, why was this not being acknowledged? Was it a corporate data-gathering exercise? Was it a search for nuclear material that had somehow been dropped in the area?

Of course, there was also talk of UFOs, especially on X, but posts on Bluesky and Threads consisted mainly of people sharing accounts of what they saw and expressing mystification and exasperation with federal authorities for essentially giving the brush-off. The thought that witnesses might be dismissed as conspiracy nuts was in many people’s minds, causing outrage among those who’d made reports of craft hovering above their own houses at low altitude.

As the furore entered its fourth week on social media, scepticism was gaining the upper hand. A widespread awareness of disinformation campaigns has perhaps raised the bar: people don’t want to be taken for fools or be caught out scare-mongering when an apparent crisis turns out to be a nothingburger.

Political divisions along these lines have also started to surface in the past couple of days. Donald Trump pronounced his view that “something strange is going on” and that the drones should be shot down if they threatened national security, while vocal Trump critic Adam Kinzinger, a former Congressman with experience in the Air National Guard, put it all down to mass hysteria.

The Kinzinger view was reinforced by a claimed sighting from former Republican governor Larry Hogan, who videotaped “dozens of large drones” over his house in Maryland and posted the evidence on X, where it earned a community note pointing out that this was the constellation of Orion. Cue the satirists, who are having a field day suggesting that stars, regular planes and anything else with a legitimate presence in the air are cause for suspicion. People are looking at the sky a lot more than usual. Might that not be part of the problem?

At the conspiracy end of the spectrum, UFO controversies are active, though those with a seasoned interest in these phenomena are more likely to counsel their audience to practice critical thinking than launch into a sensationalist tirade.

Australian journalist Ross Coulthart, an advocate for the view that UFO sightings have been subject to cover-up, delivered a two-part report for the You Tube Channel NewsNation. His interview with journalist Katie Corrado, reporting from Picatinny Arsenal, was professional and informative. The word “alien” was mentioned only once, and in passing. Corrado, who had witnessed the fly-overs herself, showed no inclination to speculate along those lines. People were not rushing to explanation, she said, nor at this stage were they panicked. They were “unsettled.”

Coulthart followed up with two of his regular consultants, John and Gerry Tedesco, whose project Nightcrawler is an ongoing investigation of unexplained aerial phenomena, with state-of-the-art spectral equipment. In other words, they are professional UFO hunters. Had they been in touch with the FBI and Homeland Security over the situation in New Jersey? Yes, was the answer, “though there’s not a lot we can share publicly.” Their insider “contacts,” though, raised many questions to which they thought the public should be demanding answers.

“That is really alarming,” Coulthart said, adding that the level of ignorance admitted by official spokesmen was “breathtaking.” The way to open the door to serious UFO speculation is not to run Project Blue Book–style conspiracy narratives about hidden certainties, but to ramp up the uncertainty factor so that refusal to comment becomes an issue in itself.

On the other side of the UFO hypothesis is the counter-conspiracy theory of Project Blue Beam, which promotes the idea that phenomena designed to raise suspicion of extraterrestrial activity are actually a false flag used by governments to generate panic and distract public attention when critical agendas are in play. Proponents of this theory are strong advocates for their version of critical thinking, the premise being that the powerful agencies of Deep State are engaged in an enterprise of mass deception so constant that mental resistance is the challenge.

Among them is Chase Hughes — “I’m the guy that trains psy-ops” — who runs a YouTube channel purporting to educate the public on how to tell when they are being “prepped.” When the public feel threatened, the need for a saviour can be projected onto a political leader, who is then in a position to call for increased powers. It’s a gradual process, he emphasises, the first phase being to induce escalated levels of speculation, but without panic. That comes later. The government has a fully prepared plan, he insists, to stage a simulated UFO attack.

The Project Blue Beam narrative has been promoted by high-profile influencers from the Trump camp, including Alex Jones and Roseanne Barr, but is somewhat hard to reconcile with repeated and unequivocal statements from official quarters that these are normal craft, with regulation lights and signalling.

“The drones are coming,” declared late show host Stephen Colbert with mock seriousness at the start of his first monologue this week. Whatever may or may not be going in the skies over New Jersey and surrounding states, the reality is that some psycho-social phenomenon has arisen, itself calling for explanation. As to that, Laurie Anderson may be our best guide. An ominous sense that something is coming, something no one is fully able to account for, is spreading across the United States. •

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The mood music that earned Keir Starmer’s Labour Party vast success in July’s general election was artful to the max. Not least as it chimed with the nation’s scorn for the Conservative Party’s fourteen years in office. Labour’s administrative mastery is now total. Its initial 411 MPs out of 650 in the House of Commons insulates it from major challenge, if not parliamentary rebellion or defection when headwinds blow. A party long in opposition may outlast early follies in power, then rely on time and sonic-speed media to vaporise their memory. With five years at its disposal, a commanding government — arguably the first since Tony Blair’s in 1997 — can do much to embed its own worldview and subdue those of rivals.

But there was a catch. That music was almost too symphonious. The danger lay in voters appearing wholly to ingest it, thus luring Labour to break a cardinal rule: never believe your own propaganda. In Starmer&Co’s moment of triumph, a self-intoxicated party might have made a trap for itself.

Too sour a diagnosis? Perhaps. Yet given such clout, the ensuing months have been revelatory. Several blunders give a taste. A prolonged, bitter dispute inside Downing Street between rival chief advisers. An equally lengthy wrangle over lavish gifts by a titled Labour magnate to cabinet ministers, including Starmer himself. A furious reaction to the unheralded axing of most pensioners’ winter fuel payment. A bleak financial prognosis, on ceaseless replay, which spooked consumers and businesses alike. A mortifying falling out with a Dubai-based company on the eve of a major investment summit of which its owner was a guest. A spat with Donald Trump’s team after a senior Labour staffer invited party members to help Kamala Harris’s campaign in key states. A tiff caused by Labour’s sectarian plugging of the term “working people.”

Each imbroglio, devoured avidly (Mail, Sun, Telegraph, Express) or anxiously (Guardian, Mirror, Financial Times) across the media spectrum, threw doubt on the government’s core competence. An unwelcome glare landed on backstage players in the Labour family, opening new channels of inquiry. And Starmer himself began to draw criticism on his own flank.

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle, for example — a week after lauding a prime minister who “believes in the rule of law. It is his red line” — warned that the lack of “a fully functioning political [compass]” means Starmer “is now at risk of allowing himself to be defined in the long term by stumbles over short-term issues that he considers marginal.” “This professed storyteller in search of a story,” said a New Statesman editorial, appears “powerless to deliver the changes he promised.”

It’s true that colleagues’ fingerprints, not just the PM’s, were on several of these missteps. The influential chancellor Rachel Reeves, whose tax-raising, high-spending budget on 30 October was minutely calibrated to boost wage-workers and raid the better-off, had already plucked that £1.4 billion (A$2.72 billion) seasonal heating bonus, just as £11 billion (A$21 billion) pay settlements had been agreed with well-paid train drivers and (in future, at least) junior doctors, without moreover any productivity gains in the mix. The brief summit row had erupted when transport secretary Louise Haigh, backed by deputy PM Angela Rayner — trade union allies both — berated a UK arm of the Dubai outfit in disrepute over a 2022 “hire-and-fire” scandal. The US filing by Donald Trump’s team that accuses Labour of “illegal foreign contributions” amounting to “blatant interference” was sparked by an ambiguously worded email from Sofia Patel, the party’s operations chief. And the PM’s October surprise, a visit to Mar-a-Lago with foreign secretary David Lammy, was marred by retrieval of the latter’s serial online abuse of first-term Trump.

Some mistakes were principally Starmer’s. The sheer insistence of his message that hard times would precede any economic upswing was doleful enough; when repeated in his speech at Labour’s victory conference in late September, the reaction among the faithful was dismay. A nervous “reset” (another Starmer favourite) was quickly on track, first signalled by ministers’ alarmingly random mid-interview smiles. It was all too late. By November, when GDP of 0.7 and 0.5 per cent in the Conservatives’ last two quarters was followed by 0.1 per cent in Labour’s first, echoing months of anaemic market indicators, Labour’s self-created trap was in plain sight.

Here is how it works. Labour’s impressive media operation had in opposition long aimed torrents of vitriol at the floundering Tories. After gaining power, Starmer&Co sought to emulate its enemy’s post-2010 feat of blaming every tough decision on its disgraced predecessor. The big story now was to be the Tories’ bequest of a financial “black hole” that Labour initially put at £22 billion (A$42.7 billion) then, the more this figure was examined, blithely went on to double and even quintuple. But Starmer&Co, high on its own certitude, didn’t have the political skill to land the argument. Its model unravelled: less a Cameron–Osborne tribute act than the magician who smashed an audience member’s expensive watch before confessing “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the rest of the trick.”

A slow-motion PR fiasco

Yet even without the economic quarrel, the twin ballyhoos over freebies and office politics had long devoured the leftovers of Labour’s fleeting honeymoon. Each involved rolling revelations and fresh characters, perfect for the 24/7 cycle and morning splash alike.

From high fashion to Taylor Swift concert tickets, designer specs to madcap Manhattan weekends, the freebies squabble was a feast. (No illegality on anyone’s part is suggested, though a parliamentary standards inquiry is under way). The donors were pro-Labour tycoons, principally the media owner Waheed Alli, ennobled in 1998, who since 2020 had showered largesse on Starmer himself, plus seven future cabinet ministers, dozens of junior ones and MPs, London mayor Sadiq Khan, and the PM’s wife Victoria Starmer, a solicitor turned health worker, whose elegant outfits lent the billowing affair its “wardrobegate” moniker.

The PM, blinking through his costly glasses, at last faced scrutiny on his own account. His suits, executive box at Arsenal soccer club, family audience with Ms Swift and her momager, and £100,000 [A$190,000] from Lord Alli, were all tenderly barbecued, demoting even the sassy Rayner’s New York penthouse whirl to a side dish. Homely touches in a Covid-era speech filmed by the future PM (it was newly reported) at Alli’s Covent Garden mansion now looked guileful. Rosie Duffield, an MP long at odds with Starmer, resigned over the evidence of “sleaze, nepotism, and apparent avarice,” alluding here to his son’s extended stay under Alli’s roof while preparing for school exams.

Thus unfurled a slow-motion PR fiasco of its own, timing and conduct fusing in a lethal stiletto effect. Bad enough was the lurid clash between pinch and luxury, far worse the reek from that cherished English vice, hypocrisy. Again, Starmer’s Labour had spent years excoriating in lurid terms the manifold failings of its Conservative opponents. Every discharge made palpable that these failings were seen in moral as much as political terms. Labour’s own diversions may still be at the foothills of preceding scandal. But they look grubby. No wonder, as reported by More in Common’s pollster Luke Tryl, that “freebiegate” (a runner-up in naming rights) “undermined trust” in the government and even — horror of horrors — elicited from the public a “they’re all the same” sentiment.

By contrast, the Number Ten kerfuffle had less spectacle, a smaller audience, but more dramatic tension. Access was the combat zone, leaking the weapon, power the prize. The feud pitched chief-of-staff Sue Gray, a proficient career civil servant of Irish parentage who had investigated Boris Johnson’s “partygate” disgrace before advising Starmer, against head of strategy Morgan McSweeney, a shrewd Ireland-born, London-based strategist whose years battling Labour’s far-left and promoting the centrist Labour Together project led to a pivotal role in Starmer’s long march to Downing Street.

In elevated terms, their conflict might be viewed as part of an inevitable tension in democratic governance between official and sectional interests. At root, it came down to the positioning of desks (if never to “deskgate”). Gray took the brunt of the leaks: over her controlling style, intriguing mid-career break in Northern Ireland, and salary, which outranked the PM’s even as she reportedly set those of younger office “spads” (special advisers). The attrition lasted for thirteen post-election weeks before McSweeney was given her job, Gray’s dubious consolation a sinecure as chair of the broadened Council for the Nations and Regions, a cross-UK body with no formal powers, which she eventually decided (having missed its first meeting) not to take up.

Throughout a drifting office war without evident leadership from the top, disquiet about Starmer had rumbled. Never exactly popular, his net pre-election rating of –21 had turned to a peak +11 on the morrow, before sinking in an October poll to –38 (though November saw an uptick to –25).The election analyst John Curtice, now comparable in esteem to David Butler, refers to the PM’s “weak political antennae” and “apparent inability to articulate a clear vision of the kind of country he wants to create.” But Labour remains all-powerful, and Starmer (in the damning words of Max Hastings, enjoining support) “the prime minister we’ve got.” He’s not going anywhere. So what will become of him?

A singular politician

The gradualism of Starmer’s rise may hold a clue. His long stint as a lawyer with a particular focus on human rights saw him become director of public prosecutions (2008–13), knighted in 2014 (though he doesn’t insist on the title), and nominated for the ever-safer seat of Holborn & St Pancras in central London before being election its MP in 2015, when, after five years of centre-right coalition, David Cameron’s Conservatives won outright over Ed Miliband’s Labour.

In the next, Brexit-dominated half-decade, Starmer the trenchant “remainer” served as shadow Brexit secretary under left-populist (and long-term EU opponent) Jeremy Corbyn. When the latter’s quixotic bandwagon lost big to Boris Johnson’s Tories in late 2019, Starmer’s pitch for the leadership of a party still steeped in Corbynism saw him scoop up Labour’s pro-EU centrists while tacking left against two further-left rivals. It was enough for a decisive win.

Starmer’s career, until the age of fifty-one, was thus in law, not politics. Law’s codes, mentalities and languages have shaped his professional being. It’s natural that the experience provides a bank of cognitive wealth in the new sphere, and good that a frequently heard complaint in Britain (“many politicians have never had a proper job”) does not apply to him. In part this informed the praise he received for a forceful response to the days-long eruption from 29 July of anti-immigrant rioting and looting in patches of urban England. Many culprits’ notably swift and hefty prison terms were welcomed as broadly as the rioting was condemned. A saving grace is that no one was killed.

Making room for the new arrivals meant the graduated early release of more than 3000 inmates from a decayed, overcrowded estate (a handful jeering “vote Labour!” as they were raced off in high-end cars), but even this could act as a validation of Labour’s all-purpose case that the Tories had left “chaos” in their wake. Yet the riots, which followed the death by stabbing of three little girls at a Taylor Swift dance party in Southport, a resort town in northwest England, also revealed a potential downside for the PM.

That Starmer is “lawyerly” doesn’t count: it would be like saying Trump is “controversial” or Putin “conspiratorial.” What might count is the idea of law that seems to underlie his response to the crisis: in the looser sense as a proprietorial shield to burnish in the dispensing of justice, rather than as a common inheritance; in the tighter as a tool for co-partisans to secure particular social outcomes (a tendentiously defined version of social harmony, for example), in a way moreover that is prepared to suppress needed information and thus democratic debate.

If that point admittedly deserves much fuller treatment, a by-product of Starmer’s legal background may safely be counted a definite flaw in the political arena. This most diligent and meticulous of leaders is a weak persuader. True, his diction is fluent. But his voice is droning, his language trite, his rhetoric vapid, his speeches hackneyed. So perfect are his evasions as interviewee as to be almost a work of art. “Weighed down by the banal literalisms of a legal mind,” says the New Statesman’s Finn McRedmond, rare in having noticed Labour’s “language problem.”

All this may not be unconnected to his default tone, peevishness, even when under only light pressure. Starmer has an unusually overt sense of his own rectitude. At parliament’s Prime Minister’s Questions, he would whack the boy-scout Rishi Sunak with an “I’ll not take lectures from…,” and now the classroom minx Kemi Badenoch with a condescending “one thing I learned from being opposition leader…,” every last consonant sounding tetchy. Oh, lighten up, man! But already I can hear Sir Keir in my ear: “Britain needs a serious politician for serious times…”

Well, they all want to be thought serious. None more than Gordon Brown or Theresa May, who were just inept. Here there is a genuine deficiency. As part of its repertoire of skills, the modern PM’s job compels the incumbent to be a motivator. This means performance of a kind. Think actor, tour guide, or even… top barrister or judge. The very high-minded Starmer resists this aspect; he’s disdainful of the PMQ argy-bargy (unaware they all are?). But if he doesn’t try, or tries and is poor at it, this will further impair his chances of policy success.

To be fair, he has made something of an effort, of two kinds. One is an oft-told story crafted around his awkward relationship with his father (whose trade escapes me) and his mother’s illness. The other is to seize any opportunity to showcase himself as an ultra-fanatic of a north London soccer club. One nadir came at PMQs on 16 October when Starmer congratulated the new England soccer manager, saying: “I won’t hold his old job against him, but I wish him well in the new one.”

This mystifying comment, it turned out, referred to the new manager’s previous role in charge of a south London soccer club, a rival of the north London soccer club. What larks! Except always-on soccer chat (I call it footblah) also works — for a networked male clerisy in tech, media, policy, finance and law — as instant signifier: of the fellow fan (always “passionate,” of course) and banter merchant. To a party leader required to humanise by exhibiting a personal quirk, soccer is thus now supreme. Yet it’s odd that all the PM’s compulsive Arsenal (for it is they) footblah doesn’t make him seem any more plausible a figure. Maybe that’s because Starmer’s attempt at lightening up comes over as uber-conformist, even ingratiating.

Or perhaps more that he seems low on a faculty defining of a vital intellect, namely imagination (a case made by the feminist writer Joan Smith, and again Finn McRedmond.) The interior life Starmer has shared is meagre and reports of it vague, though on the venerable radio show Desert Island Discs in 2020 the “castaway” sensibly chose a detailed maritime atlas as his allowed book, a football as his luxury, and a Beethoven sonata as his favourite music.

Starmer’s emphatic sense of self (“I know who I am”) and acute protective screen deter most inquiry. His manuals on human-rights law may be the truest guide to his exact and methodical mind. From day one, the image of a busy and purposive figure (“a government in the service of working people”) has been visible in a domestic carousel of speeches, site visits, regional gatherings, NHS staff tête-à-têtes, policy announcements. Sixteen foreign trips to date encompass NATO and Commonwealth summits, European Union and member-state bilaterals, Baku’s COP29, Rio’s G20. The statesman PM visibly enjoys both the gladhanding and the sermonising. No one, to my knowledge, has yet called the style “presidential,” even during endless talk of “the first hundred days,” but that may come.

Such is the persona which — along with luck, which every aspiring leader needs — propelled this capable and collegiate man to the top job. Now he’s there, he’s enjoying himself: in charge, doing the job, a jet-setter, never off the screens. Criticism is “water off a duck’s back.” The aforesaid flaws haven’t touched him. He’s in for the long haul.

And yet. Asked in Rio on 19 November by Sky News’s Beth Rigby what might be his “lasting mark” as against the three “consequential” post-1945 PMs — Attlee’s welfare state, Thatcher’s enterprise, Blair’s modernisation — Starmer began and ended his answer with “I want working people to be better off,” the coda his petulant “… and I make no apology for that.”

The PM’s pledge on 5 July that “especially if you did not [vote Labour], I will serve you” is long annulled. The state “that will tread more lightly on people’s lives” a phantasm. Governance by sundering is under way, guided to the max by micro-polling in Labour’s new constituencies. The election campaign, when Starmer decreed “country first, party second,” is aeons distant. The social contract is frayed, the political contract broken. Keep half an eye on that trap after all. •

The post The Keir Starmer conundrum appeared first on Inside Story.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t the greatest headline. The paper’s infamous “Headless Body Found in Topless Bar” was always going to be tough to beat. But it was a classic Murdoch moment. It revealed not only his lifelong obsession with gossip and scandal but also the pleasure he gained from bursting the bubble of the powerful and famous. It also showed just how much he loved rolling up his sleeves and being part of the action of making the news.

The New York Post wasn’t Rupert Murdoch’s first acquisition in the United States, but of all the American media outlets he’s purchased it is arguably the most important. It was where he refined his version of tabloid journalism for the American market. It was his entree to the Big Apple, where much of America’s media was headquartered, and meant he got noticed nationally. And it was the forerunner of Fox News and the complement to his later purchase of the Wall Street Journal, which meant it was where he learnt how to wield power in the United States.

So it’s no surprise that Murdoch is all over Paper of Wreckage, Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo’s new history of nearly fifty years of the Post, from 1976 to the eve of Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024. What is unexpected is that the book’s methodology — it’s based on 240 interviews with insiders and close observers — has created a repository of revealing Murdoch anecdotes probably only exceeded in size by the evidence to Britain’s Leveson inquiry into phone hacking.

Paper of Wreckage charts how a Democrat-leaning paper once owned by New York socialite Dorothy Schiff morphed into an organ of propaganda, scandal and retribution. It covers the period between 1988 and 1993 when Murdoch was forced by media ownership rules to relinquish the Post in order to create Fox as America’s fourth national TV network. And it details how Murdoch was allowed to buy the paper back after its interim owner, Peter Kalikow, was driven to bankruptcy.

Somehow Mulcahy and DiGiacomo have managed to wrangle all those voices into a coherent and compelling narrative. They have kept the main events in sight — mayoral races, the big stories, the influence of Trump and #MeToo — while taking lots of side trips down dark Manhattan alleyways to reveal crime and scandal and even the workings of the local Mafia.

The Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801. Yes, that Alexander Hamilton. It was the Evening Post back then, and it was still an afternoon paper when Schiff bought it in 1939. As a liberal Jew, Schiff was in sync with her mostly Democrat audience, albeit with some quirky habits. For example, when she appeared in the newsroom she was often followed by her chauffeur carrying her minuscule dog. (Meryl Streep’s character in the Devil Wears Prada was apparently based on “Miss Schiff,” as she was known despite churning her way through four marriages.) One of the book’s interviewees, former senator and NBA basketballer Bill Bradley, says he paid attention to what was written in the Post back then because Schiff treated the paper like a public service.

All that changed when Murdoch arrived. He was keen to make his mark in America, where he’d already bought a couple of newspapers in San Antonio, Texas, that weren’t strategically useful. When he settled on the deal, he set to work quickly. As the Post’s film critic, Frank Rich remembers, “Copy was being butchered. There was a kind of Hitler marching into Poland atmosphere.” It turned from what reporter Marsha Kranes described as “a writers’ paper,” where the words reporters wrote made it to print, to a paper in which the pages were planned and everyone “had to write to fit.”

Australian reporter Jane Perlez was already at the Post when Murdoch arrived. She had worked at the Australian under the small-l liberal editor Adrian Deamer until Murdoch fired him in 1971. Perlez says she loved the Post under Schiff. She got to do everything, from covering political conventions to writing literary interviews. When Murdoch turned up, her colleagues looked to her for answers. “What sort of owner would he be?” they asked. She tried to be upbeat because she didn’t want to crush their hopes, but as soon as Murdoch walked in she knew “the game was over.”

While one Aussie left, lots of others arrived, and almost none of them emerge from this book looking good. It’s safe to say that Murdoch’s first editor, Ted Bolwell, had very few friends. Interviewees describe him as truculent, arrogant, surly, red-faced, ghastly, terrible, “a disaster from day one,” vile, “a crazy person” and “a fucking idiot with an unbelievable temper.” Reporter Cheryl Bentsen recalls he had a curly perm and wore platform shoes, “which everybody found hilarious.” Bureau chief George Arzt remembers Murdoch telling him that Bolwell was a brilliant editor. “I didn’t want to tell Murdoch the guy’s nuts.”

Apart from Murdoch, the most famous Australian was Steve Dunleavy, the legendary drunkard who seemed to attract and repulse colleagues in equal measure. He broke rules, disregarded ethics, slept with half the newsroom and connived his way to get access to interviews. But for all his faults, says reporter Hal Davis, “he knew how to inspire his reporters. He had charisma and could be very persuasive.” Reporter Richard Esposito says that “Steve was a master of tabloid journalism. Drunk or sober.” According to associate editorial page editor Eric Fettmann, “his strength as a journalist was his tenacity, his willingness to do anything for a story. And his weakness was his willingness to do anything for a story.”

Then there was editor-in-chief Col Allan, recruited in 2001 from Sydney’s Daily Telegraph where his leadership style had earnt him the nickname Col Pot, a reference to the murderous Cambodian dictator Pol Pot. He was in charge of the Post for fifteen years and then, from 2019–21, was the paper’s “editorial adviser.” Interviewees acknowledge he “had cash register instincts for what people wanted to read and how stories were to be played” and even his critics admit he gave the paper “clarity and a road map” for covering 9/11, the city’s biggest-ever story. But they also claim Allan, who was madly pro-Trump, “would kill his grandmother for a story” and “was a miserable human being.”

Unlike Murdoch, Allan agreed to be interviewed for the book. His comments could be described as self-evident, because the racy, polarising pages of the Post had already spoken for him, but he does reveal what drove the paper’s coverage. For example: “I happen to believe in grudges. I happen to believe in getting square. I’m not one of these guys who likes to turn the other cheek and walk away. People fuck me I’m going to fuck them. It’s as simple as that. This is not small-town Tennessee here.”

Paper of Wreckage reinforces just how much Murdoch loves the gossipy, sleazy and cruel world of tabloid journalism. And it shows how the ethos he largely created had a real effect on both the paper and its people. Feature writer Joyce Wadler remembers sitting in the stairwell in tears because of what was happening to the paper she loved. “I was very happy until Murdoch came in. I could see the stuff I held dear — which was respect for writers, respect for facts — was going. They were chopping up stories and rewriting them, and they were uglifying the universe.”

Reporter Leslie Gevirtz recalls “there were certain tropes you followed. Every co-ed was pretty. Every cop was a hero. Every bad guy was a bad guy whether they were a bad guy or not.” Murdoch threw out traditions. It was okay to break embargoes in order to beat the main competitor, the Daily News. Reporters learnt that the game had changed, the norms were gone. Their job was to get the story first.

Murdoch was often directly involved. In March 1977 reporter Cheryl Bentsen was visiting Washington DC when members of an Islamist group took over the headquarters of the Jewish B’nai B’rith organisation. They killed two people and took more than a hundred hostage. Doing her best on deadline, Bentsen made some calls and phoned through what she had. The next day the front-page article had her byline but none of the words were hers. “It was filled with all kinds of made-up interviews as if I had gotten some hot scoop and had interviewed hostages and nurses. I was absolutely stunned.”

Demonstrating the value of the book’s approach, Bentsen’s account is verified by the next interviewee, former desk editor David Rosenthal, who witnessed what happened to the story back in the newsroom: “Murdoch came in himself at about 3.30 in the morning. We were all doing rewrites of wire stories and making calls. It was a scary situation. He ripped up every piece of copy and rewrote the front-page story himself. He also wrote this inflammatory headline (“WE’LL BEHEAD THEM”). He sat there at the desk, jacket off, with his suspenders, his tie loosened, banging out take after take on an old Underwood. We were all wondering, ‘What the fuck is he writing?’”

If this is true — and no one’s disputed it — it would be grounds for immediate dismissal for a reporter at any respectable newspaper. It’s the sort of behaviour associated with the infamous fabulist Jayson Blair who was drummed out of the New York Times for concocting quotes from bogus interviewees. At the New York Post, the proprietor, no less, is accused not only of committing this sin but also of signalling to his staff that it was okay to do likewise. As Rosenthal noted, “It wasn’t Kansas anymore. Everybody realised it by the next morning.”

There are other moments of dubious morality, such as the one recalled by David Schneiderman, the editor-in-chief of Manhattan’s counterculture paper Village Voice, which Murdoch also owned briefly. He remembers a meeting at which Murdoch, out of the blue, started boasting about the time he had hired somebody to spy on the owner of Britain’s Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, and his girlfriend. “He was getting a huge kick out of telling stories about spying on these guys,” Schneiderman says, “and then he would let them know what he had found out, just to say ‘leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone.’” It’s an observation hidden among many in this book, but it’s profound given everything we now know about phone hacking.

Employees like the Australian assistant managing editor Wayne Darwen took their cue from Murdoch. “He knew what a story was, and he knew how to tell it and how to sell it. And those who worked for him, who became loyal Murdochians, developed that same attitude. It didn’t matter if it was Ted Kennedy or Richard Nixon. If there was a scandal, it’s going out there, and you’re going to show no mercy. Don’t let anything get in the way of a good story.”

Having co-edited an oral history of newsroom culture myself, I know it’s difficult to get past the tales of chain-smoking drunkards behaving badly on deadline. It’s hard because the stories are often compelling and they’re told by lifelong storytellers whose work connects them with interesting people.

Nevertheless, I was searching for something more in this book. I was after the insiders’ inner thoughts, not just their colourful anecdotes. I wanted them to admit that what they did wasn’t always right — that sometimes it was just plain wrong. And I wanted to know what effects their work had on their targets, because often they humiliated people and prevented civil discourse about really important issues.

Maybe this was too much to ask. The culture at the Post wasn’t reflective. Most of the time, reporters were too anxious about their next story to think very deeply about the one they’d just written. As city hall politics reporter Tara Palmeri says, “I always went out on a story with a knot in my stomach, worried that if I didn’t bring back the goods, I was dead to them.” When reporters are desperate there’s not a lot of empathy for the subjects of their stories. They become collateral damage in the relentless grind of daily tabloid journalism.

Sometimes this seeming lack of empathy surfaces in throwaway comments. Palmeri, for example, admits she loves covering scandals. Darwen says writing the paper’s incendiary headlines is “like a game.” So the book leaves the critique largely to outsiders — people like New York human rights lawyer Ronald Kuby, who makes the point that “cute and clever” headlines don’t wash away the paper’s “race baiting” or “insistent demonisation of black youths” or “excusing of police brutality year after year.”

Paper of Wreckage covers young Donald Trump, the wannabe New York developer and media-driven narcissist. We see his interactions with reporters as he climbs the ladder and builds his brand. But the book doesn’t do justice to his first term in the White House or the 6 January insurrection or his four years in exile, probably because the insiders with the most to say are still working on the paper and therefore less free to speak openly, let alone critically.

Mulcahy and DiGiacomo do make clear the extent to which Col Allan shaped the paper’s pro-Trump coverage. On one occasion Allan even wore a MAGA hat in the newsroom. Mary Trump, niece of Donald Trump and author of the critical Too Much and Never Enough, concludes the Post was “the paper that gave him the most flattering and divorced-from-reality coverage.”

The book’s excellent treatment of events tends to taper off in the last hundred pages. It doesn’t mention Florida governor Ron DeSantis, even though the Post touted him as the future Republican nominee in November 2022 with the glowing page one headline “DeFUTURE.” Likewise, it barely covers the Covid pandemic, which had a devastating effect on New Yorkers, though one interviewee, Bill Bigelow, does draw a straight line between Murdoch and the most tragic effect of Trump’s first presidency.

Bigelow’s observation is not just a damning indictment of the paper’s coverage of one story but of Murdoch’s entire American endeavour: “Without Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post, there’s no Fox News. And without Fox News, in my estimation, there’s no Donald Trump, and without Donald Trump we don’t have all those people dead from Covid.” •

Paper of Wreckage: An Oral History of the New York Post 1976–2024
By Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo | Atria Books | US$32.50 | 592 pages

The post Uglifying the universe appeared first on Inside Story.

Dozens of those airmen and sailors would be showered with honours for their heroic, ill-fated efforts — two of them receiving the Victoria Cross, the highest honour of all. But time and again the ship Winston Churchill branded “The Beast” had evaded its hunters, sometimes seriously wounded but never vanquished.

On that November day a crew of young Australian airmen suddenly found themselves at the centre of an event that would trigger jubilation across the English- speaking world. They were the first to witness and record the sinking, and the ones who brought home the news.

Bruce Buckham, a twenty-six-year-old BHP clerk from Penshurst in Sydney, was captain of a Lancaster bomber crew, all of them Australians save for their Scottish flight engineer. They had been handpicked to carry the cinecamera men who recorded the final three raids against the Tirpitz, which was sheltering in the supposed safety of the Norwegian Artic at the limits of the operating range of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. On the final raid, they flew forward with more than thirty other bombers — half from the legendary 617 “Dambusters” Squadron RAF and the rest from 9 Squadron RAF.

Codenamed Catechism, the operation had been launched just after midnight on 12 November 1944 when a reconnaissance Mosquito aircraft returned to report that while weather conditions over Tromsø were poor, they were showing signs of improvement. Two hours later the waves of Lancasters, most of them two tons overweight with extra fuel and their special 12,000-pound “Tallboy” bomb loads, lumbered into the air from several RAF stations across the far north of Scotland. Six Australian pilots had joined the raid along with another ten Australian flight crew.

Buckham and his crew were delayed almost an hour by the icing of their aircraft in the sub-zero temperatures on the ground at Lossiemouth airfield, but quickly made up time. After turning out over Moray Firth, the main force Lancasters from Lossiemouth set course northeast for the Norwegian Sea flying at 1500 feet. After several hours they turned eastwards towards the Norwegian coast, maintaining their low altitude. After crossing the coast and climbing rapidly to clear the mountains, the bombers crossed into Sweden and then headed north, hugging the border to the rendezvous point at Akkajaure, a large reservoir 150 miles south-southwest of Tromsø.

James Brian “Willie” Tait, the highly decorated commanding officer of 617 Squadron and leader of the raid, would marvel at the spectacle as they approached Tromsø. “The sun was resting on the horizon, so the snow-covered mountains were turned pink in its light,” he later recounted. “The sky was cloudless, the air calm and the aircraft rode easily without a bump to disturb the bomb aimer’s sights. We sighted the Tirpitz from a range of at least 20 miles, lying squat and black among her torpedo nets, like a spider in a web; silhouetted against the glittering blue and green waters of the fjord and surrounded by the beautiful hills. Down below everything was quite still. The whole scene — water, mountains and sky — blazed in the cold brilliance of the Arctic dawn.”

Buckham flew close to Tait’s Lancaster as they moved in on the target. “There was Håkøya Island, a large snow-covered mound in the middle of Tromsø Fjord, and there, anchored in the tranquil waters, was the huge shape of the Tirpitz,” he recalled. “We still had about fifteen minutes to fly and vast explosions were occurring in the middle of and all around our loose gaggle of aircraft. Tirpitz was firing her fifteen-inch main guns at us with short-delay fuses. As we got closer, we came under fire from the ship’s secondary armaments, as well as fire from the shore batteries and two flak ships. Things were getting hot!”

Buckham flew in at 6000 feet as Tait and the others lined up to do their individual bombing runs, but he soon found this was “too unhealthy” and so descended to about 2000 feet and shot up the German shore batteries lining the fjord and one of the flak ships. “The bombers were right overhead now,” he later recalled, “doing a perfect run with bomb doors gaping wide open and the glistening wing of the huge 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs suspended. Now they were released.”

Tait was the first to release his Tallboy. Moments later, five other Lancasters released their bombs, including the crew of one of the other Australian pilots, William “Bunny” Lee, who would report at the later operational debriefings that Tirpitz was obscured by smoke just after his bomb was released. “Our bomb went straight down into the centre of the smoke,” he said. “All bombing we saw appeared very well concentrated and firing from the ship ceased after the first bombs went down.”

Another of the bombers in that wave was also piloted by an Australian, Arthur Kell: “We bombed along the length of the ship turning to starboard and running in on the bows. Our bomb, which registered a hit or a very near miss, fell in the centre of the smoke coming up from just in front of the superstructure.” Yet another Australian, John Sayers, was the last of the 617 Squadron pilots to bomb: “We followed our bomb down nearly to the ship when it was lost in smoke. It was either a hit on the bows or a very near miss.”

As the following aircraft from 9 Squadron flew closely in the wake of the 617 Squadron Lancasters, the fate of Tirpitz was sealed. The crews could not believe their good luck — the weather had held, the smokescreen pots protecting the battleship had not been activated and, most crucially, a feared German fighter squadron based nearby had failed to scramble in time to intercept the attackers before they had bombed.

On the water, Armageddon had arrived. In a later detailed account of what unfolded, the Tirpitz’s most senior crew member to survive the attack, Alfred Fassbender, recorded that “a stick of bombs” had fallen inside the battleship’s net enclosure.

There were two direct hits on the port side, one on the aircraft catapult and one abreast of B turret. Seconds later, Tirpitz began listing to port. As the first bombs hit, damage control parties were ordered to correct the trim by flooding. Soon the list increased to 30 to 40 degrees and Robert Weber, the former executive officer who had taken over command of the ship just eight days earlier, ordered the evacuation of the lower decks. Less than five minutes later, the list increased to 60 to 70 degrees, then the 700-ton Caesar gun turret exploded and arced upwards before plunging into the water. Soon after that, Tirpitz capsized, trapping hundreds of men beneath the upturned hull.

As the last of the bombers completed their runs and headed back out of the fjord to begin the long flight home, it was still not certain to the attackers that Tirpitz was finished. Buckham’s Lancaster, now alone, held back as they continued to watch and film while the first German fighters finally were scrambled.

“We descended to 200 feet and flew over it, around it, all about it, but still she sat there,” he recalled. “After about thirty minutes we decided to call it a day and headed back out to the end of the fjord. Just then my rear gunner, Eric Giersch, called out, ‘Skipper, I think she’s turning over.’ I turned to port to take a look and, sure enough, she was listing over at an angle of 70 to 80 degrees. So back we went.”

As Buckham swept in at about fifty feet above the water he could see German ratings jumping into the water. “Then we watched with bated breath as the ship heeled over onto her side, ever so slowly and gracefully, leaving her red hull gleaming in the morning sunshine. It was the third time we’d knocked the Tirpitz about, but this time we had finished her.”

An estimated 1700 crew were aboard Tirpitz that morning, about 700 others having been transferred to shore-based work. Within two hours, 596 men had made it ashore or been rescued from the water. A desperate struggle unfolded as teams tried to free those trapped in air pockets inside the wreck, a task hampered by the lack of acetylene torches to cut through the thick steel plates. Over the next two days, just eighty-seven men were recovered before it was estimated that the last oxygen had expired.

The final death toll was reckoned to be 971, including Captain Weber and almost all of his officers, many of whom were trapped inside the armoured control room where he had gathered them to direct the defence of the ship. Captain-Lieutenant Fassbender would be awarded the German Cross in Gold for his bravery during the desperate final moments of Tirpitz.

By the time they returned home, Buckham and his crew had been flying for fourteen hours and nineteen minutes – with Buckham the sole pilot at the controls the entire time. But there would be a further drama before they were safely down. As they began their return journey, the crew had felt and heard a tremendous crash. It was only as they prepared to land that they saw their starboard main wheel hanging down, the engine nacelle panels flapping loose and a gaping hole in the wing. A later investigation would reveal that a flak shell had passed through the undercarriage bay, travelled between the Number 1 and Number 2 fuel tanks and exited through the wing, miraculously without exploding. Buckham was forced to land on one wheel.

Buckham’s crew were the last of the raiders home, but because they had lingered over the target long after the other bombers had departed Norway, they carried the first confirmation that Tirpitz had indeed finally been sunk — and the spectacular film evidence to prove it.

The Bomber Command leadership decided to delay the announcement of the sinking to allow time to review the footage of the attack before conveying the dramatic news to Churchill who, in turn, briefed King George VI. They also wanted time to maximise the impact of their stunning strike against the Germans in the newspapers and on radio, in Britain and around the world.

Buckham and rear gunner Eric Giersch were woken early the morning after the attack and ordered to head into London for a press conference at the Ministry of Information and a round of interviews with the BBC. Back in Australia, Bruce’s wife Gwen received a phone call from an uncle who worked at an air force base in Sydney. Until then, Gwen had no idea what her husband was doing in England, apart from serving as a pilot with a Bomber Command squadron. They had not spoken since he left Australia two years earlier. They wrote regularly to each other, but Bruce would not and could not talk about his day job.

“My uncle had heard on the radio that the Lancasters had bombed the Tirpitz and some of the planes were missing,” Gwen Buckham recounted. “He rang to tell me to listen to the six o’clock news. He didn’t know what Bruce was doing but just knew that he flew Lancasters. I said, ‘What’s the Tirpitz?’ I didn’t even know that! He said, ‘It’s the battleship, you nong, the German battleship.’ Then I really began to get worried.”

The entire family tuned in to the BBC world service that evening. “They announced that it was London calling from the BBC and then told about the raid on the Tirpitz,” Gwen recalled. “They didn’t mention about anybody not getting back so that was good. After they talked about what had happened, the announcer said, ‘I am now interviewing one of the pilots who took part in the raid — Flight Lieutenant Bruce Buckham.’ I nearly fell off my seat! I couldn’t believe it… That was the first time I had heard his voice since he had left for Europe.”

There was another false alarm for Gwen Buckham a short time later, when a telegram arrived at the family home in Penshurst. Often a telegram would be the first news of the death of a loved one.

“The telegram boy came down the street and my father was in the garden at the time. The boy had a telegram for me, and I just froze. Dad said, ‘Give it to me, I’ll open it.’ He stood there and read it aloud, ‘Congratulations are extended to you by the Minister for Air and the Air Board on the award of the Distinguished Service Order to your husband Flight Lieutenant B.A. Buckham in further recognition of his gallant service.’ Then a great feeling of relief and rejoicing came over us. Most of all, it again meant that he was alive.”

When the news of the Tirpitz sinking finally broke, it made headlines around the world. The dramatic pictures adorned front pages of the Fleet Street press and the newspapers back in Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald of 15 November 1944 splashed with: “800 OF CREW LOST WITH TIRPITZ: Last Nazi Battleship Destroyed.” As well as providing still photographs, the 700 feet of spectacular film footage shot from Buckham’s aircraft would feature in newsreels screened in cinemas around the English-speaking world. •

The post Targeting the Tirpitz appeared first on Inside Story.

Just before the election, I received an ominous invitation to meet with the Canberra Times’s general manager, who had returned from a board meeting with a message for me about the election coverage. I immediately assumed that my editor’s prerogative to determine the paper’s editorial position was about to be revoked by the bosses in Sydney.

I was wrong. The message from Sydney was that the Canberra Times was free to endorse either John Howard or Kevin Rudd with just one stipulation — John B. Fairfax had declared that I must make a choice; it was not acceptable for the paper to sit on the fence. His logic was, in my view, impeccable: newspapers were constantly making editorial pronouncements on the work of politicians and governments, how could they not take a considered position on the crucial question of who was best placed to lead the country in the next parliamentary term?

I was reminded of Fairfax’s intervention by the controversy in recent days over the decision by both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to abruptly abandon their editorial boards’ plans to endorse Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The outcry stirred memories of a mostly lost era in which big newspapers dominated the media landscape and their owners exercised extraordinary power.

Despite their protestations to the contrary, both papers’ owners appear to have blocked the Harris endorsements for fear of a commercially costly backlash from Trump if he returns to the White House.

The LA Times was bought in 2018 by biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, a transplant surgeon who built his $US11 billion fortune after developing Abraxane, a breakthrough drug for treating lung, breast and pancreatic cancer. He claimed his decision to stop the Times endorsing either presidential candidate was an altruistic one driven by his desire not to exacerbate the already deep political divisions in the United States.

Soon-Shiong’s position didn’t wash with thousands of readers who cancelled their subscriptions, the 200 staff members who signed an angry petition and the three members of the Times editorial board who resigned after pointing out that the paper had a long history of endorsing a preferred candidate in presidential elections and a long history of editorial disapproval of Donald Trump. Critics of the decision suspected that the owner might again be courting a post in a future Trump administration, as he had unsuccessfully done after Trump’s 2016 election, or perhaps safeguarding the commercial interests of his vast pharmaceutical empire.

The Washington Post’s owner, Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos, also sought to cloak in high principle his decision to block the Post editorial board’s endorsement of Harris. After 250,000 subscribers cancelled, several staff resigned and twenty columnists signed a statement accusing him of abandoning “the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper we love,” Bezos doubled down by criticising the standing of newspapers.

In a Post op-ed headlined “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media,” Bezos delivered a sermon about collapsing public respect for journalism, said presidential endorsements created a perception of bias and trashed his own brand by claiming a lack of credibility “isn’t unique to the Post.”

But former Post columnist and editor-at-large Robert Kagan spoke for many when he said, “We are in fact bending a knee to Donald Trump because we are afraid of what he will do.” He noted that a few hours after the Post announcement officials from Bezos’s Blue Origin aerospace company met with Trump. Blue Origin has a multibillion dollar contract with NASA.

Critics also pointed out that during the Trump administration, Amazon sued the government after alleging it had blocked a $10 billion cloud-computing services contract with the Pentagon because of Trump’s anger over coverage in the Post. Very unflattering comparisons were made between the actions of Bezos and the Post’s legendary publisher, Katharine Graham, who defied threats from the Nixon administration and fearlessly published the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate revelations by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Australia hasn’t been immune to this kind of controversy. In 2004 the Age created an outcry when it endorsed John Howard for another term in government despite a long history of editorial criticism, particularly of the Howard government’s harsh treatment of asylum seekers. Staff alleged that the paper had been ordered to back Howard by then Fairfax editorial director and later ABC boss Mark Scott, a claim strongly denied by editor-in-chief Michael Gawenda.

By the 2007 election Australia was ready for change after more than a decade of Howard’s leadership and Kevin Rudd scored a resounding victory for Labor. Rupert Murdoch’s Australian endorsed Rudd, backing Labor for the first time since it supported Gough Whitlam in 1972, as did the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

To the consternation of its largely progressive readership, the Age declined to back either side. Andrew Jaspan, the Englishman recruited from a Sunday tabloid in Scotland to edit the paper after Gawenda’s departure, declared that it was not the paper’s role to “tell you who to vote for” while denying this amounted to sitting on the fence. “We actually have pretty good relations with both sides and my view is that the job of the paper is to retain good relations with both sides,” Jaspan told ABC Radio.

In the early days of Australian newspapers, it was inconceivable that an editor or publisher would decline to take a clear stand ahead of an election. The editorial — as its formal title, the leading article or leader, implied — was the most important article published and the primary means by which newspapers asserted their authority and shared their undoubted wisdom.

The Age, once the most powerful paper in the country, had been dubbed “the Australian Thunderer” with good reason. When the Age thundered, federal and state politicians would quake. In the early decades after its founding in 1854, governments rose and fell at the whim of publisher David Syme.

“For more than a quarter of a century he selected every Victorian premier and almost every cabinet minister,” wrote Syme’s biographer (and long-time leader writer), Ambrose Pratt. “But that was not all. Before each general election was held, the ministry of the day invariably submitted for his examination the list of… candidates, and he only gave the party support to the men he approved.” Syme’s great grandson, Ranald Macdonald, who became a reformist managing-director of the company in the 1960s, has described his ancestor as vituperative and vindictive and his style of publishing as “autocratic and disturbingly powerful.”

In the early 1970s, when the fabled Graham Perkin edited the Age, the leader writers’ room was a hallowed enclave at one end of the editorial floor. Each afternoon the eminent gentlemen (women were yet to crack the veneer panelling) would march in earnest procession to Perkin’s office where the great issues of the day would be debated exhaustively before a consensus was reached or Perkin had resolved any differences and set the paper’s position. While few people might ever read them, the leaders enshrined the paper’s policy on any given issue; when that policy shifted, the change had to be persuasive, well-argued and consistent.

While that tradition might survive on some of the great American and British newspapers, it has mostly vanished in Australia. The Age largely abandoned the field — and in the view of many its proud history of intellectual leadership — when it decided last year to run editorials only on weekends or occasionally when the spirit moved its editor.

And the time when newspaper editorials might have impacted election outcomes is a distant memory. The modern-day impotence of Melbourne’s once top-selling and influential Herald Sun was laid bare in its abiding hatred of former Victorian premier Dan Andrews. At three consecutive state elections, the “Hun” campaigned relentlessly and editorialised passionately against Labor. At three consecutive elections Andrews won handsomely.

Part of the decline of the editorial has been the struggle for editors to find staff with the skills, commitment and time to be good leader writers, while sometimes struggling with their own capabilities. At one stage, the Sydney Morning Herald was forced to outsource some of its leader writing, including engaging the late Peter Cole-Adams, a Melbourne-based former senior Age editor and foreign correspondent. When asked what the job entailed, “PCA” memorably declared: “I write what the editor would think if the editor could think.” •

Since this article was published the Nieman Lab has reported that an astonishing two-thirds of major American newspapers aren’t endorsing a presidential candiate this year.

The post Leaders and leaders appeared first on Inside Story.

If we could wind back the clock we would almost certainly use regulations to try to strike a balance between free speech and toxic speech, assuming we could agree on which was which. We would probably try to keep the main engines of social media in public hands, perhaps by funding the world’s public broadcasters to own and develop platforms, apply their usual editorial standards and invent new ones to fit the purpose.

Or perhaps we would choose to contain the harm by killing social media at birth. But that would mean losing its benefits: the flow of information across borders, the self-help support groups, the pleasant community chat on Facebook, the way that issues like domestic violence and Indigenous disadvantage have been made more visible.

Of course, we had neither foresight nor the necessary tools and powers when social media was invented.

In their extraordinary new book, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, New York Times journalists Kate Conger and Ryan Mac chronicle the history of a key social media platform, Twitter. But their work also illuminates a broader narrative. Social media was founded and moulded by men-children. Yes, social media’s inventors were very clever, and they made many things we now take for granted. They seemed idealistic about the public conversation, but their naivety meant that their idealism didn’t survive encounters with reality. Fundamentally, they played with powerful things because it was fun, at least in the beginning, because it made them rich, and because they could.

Conger and Mac’s title is of course a reference to Twitter’s distinguishing feature in its early days — the 140-character limit on length. But it also points intentionally at the limitations of its creators and owners.

Mainly, Character Limit is about Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 for US$44 billion, larger than the GDP of Jamaica or Senegal. He then mismanaged the business so badly that by February this year it was worth just $11.8 billion — 27 per cent of the purchase price. In the process he damaged not only himself but also his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX.

But the story of character limitations begins much earlier, with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder. Dorsey mismanaged Twitter partly through indolence and partly because he was preoccupied with his other invention, a payment platform called Square, which has helped even the smallest of traders to eschew cash.

Musk was an early chief executive of a rival platform, PayPal, before its founders pushed him out. “X” — the name he has imposed on Twitter — is a reference to his ambition since those days to create a social media platform like China’s WeChat, an all-encompassing “app for everything” through which users conduct every aspect of their lives. WeChat is a social media platform, a banking app, a telco, a broadcasting medium and one of the most powerful mass surveillance mechanisms ever invented.

Twitter was vulnerable to Musk because Dorsey had allowed it to grow without working out a way of making it pay. After Musk made his $44 billion offer the board briefly explored other options, but the company’s tanking revenue figures made it an unattractive proposition for investors. Having decided that Musk’s offer was the best way out of a bad situation, the board’s main challenge was making sure he stuck to the deal. Dorsey, no longer chief executive but still on the board, effectively colluded with Musk in secret, betraying the shaky trust of his colleagues.

Those who followed these events at the time will know that Musk repeatedly and slanderously attacked the management and board as he tried to back away from the deal, asserting that they had misled him about the number of “bots” on the platform and other issues. In truth, he had refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement during what should have been the due diligence process. He nevertheless signed documents which, subsequent events demonstrated, he barely understood.

Even for Musk, then the world’s richest man, the purchase price was challenging. To raise the equivalent of a fifth of his own net wealth without selling Tesla shares (and tanking the price of his best-known asset) he had to seek loans and partner investors, loading Twitter’s already shaky balance sheet with debt.

To tell its bleak yet fascinating story, Character Limit draws on more than a hundred interviews, along with a wealth of private tweets, text messages, emails and content from Twitter’s Slack channel. Some of this material comes from the many court filings in the forest of litigation surrounding Twitter, but other material was clearly leaked. The authors have gained extraordinary access, and the results are devastating to Musk’s reputation, and to Dorsey’s.

The result more than compensates for some irritating stylistic features — redundant personal descriptors, non sequiturs and breathless prose. For the most part this is a great story well written.

In essence, Musk destroyed Twitter by loving it too much. As one of its most enthusiastic users, he assumed everyone felt much as he did and would therefore be prepared to pay to use it. He could then shuck off pesky advertisers with their concerns about reputational damage.

He started by proclaiming himself a free speech absolutist but quickly began throttling speech he didn’t agree with and promoting increasingly right-wing views. In one of the saddest and most revealing stories in the book, Twitter engineers created a special piece of code, “author-is-elon,” to make sure that Musk’s tweets were promoted on the platform. Musk had been angered that a tweet about a Super Bowl event by Joe Biden had racked up more views than his own, despite Biden having fewer followers.

Musk’s bizarre behaviour since taking over Twitter has included a trip to Sacramento in the dead of night, accompanied by his cousins and armed with a pocket knife, to disconnect a data centre he was impatient to close down as a cost-saving measure. A series of rapid sackings meant that managers no longer knew which of their team members were still on staff. At times, the company was barely operating.

As the 2022 midterm US elections approached, Musk pushed his remaining staff to extraordinary lengths to launch Twitter Blue, the service that would allow people to buy the famous blue tick of verification. He was warned about the likelihood that impersonation and misinformation would affect the election. (The FBI was concerned enough to issue warnings and ask questions about how identifies would be verified.) Nevertheless, he pushed on.

At the last minute, after weeks of warnings, one brave executive asked Musk if he wanted to be blamed for the election outcome. Amazingly, he had to ask the date of the election. “It’s in two days,” he was told. Musk paused. “Oh, I didn’t realise.”

The launch was delayed, but nevertheless Twitter Blue was a disaster. A fake O.J. Simpson confessed to murder; a fake senator Ted Cruz declared a fondness for eating babies. More seriously, the pharmaceutical company Ely Lilly appeared to announce insulin was free, forcing the real company to put out an announcement to correct the record. Its stock dropped by 5 per cent.

Advertisers were horrified. If something wasn’t done, Nike warned, it would never advertise with Twitter again. So, after just twenty-four hours, Musk got the engineers to turn off Twitter Blue. (It was later relaunched, but never got the number of takers Musk had predicted.)

Executives were meanwhile leaving rather than risking criminal penalties because they were required to sign off on audits they had no way verifying thanks to the staff cuts and the resulting chaos. As Musk abandoned offices to save on rent, and at the same time insisted employees work in the office, facilities broke down. In New York, the stench of overburdened toilets overwhelmed the office and cockroaches flitted in and out of the drains. In San Francisco, employees took to running to nearby cafes to use the bathroom; if they wanted to use the ones in the office they had to bring their own toilet paper.

As Twitter lurched and sometimes broke, Musk ran a poll asking users whether he should step down as chief executive, promising to abide by the results. When 58 per cent of more than 17.5 million accounts called for him to resign, it brought on a mental health “episode” that some described as “the throes of a manic event.”

All this raises the question of how Musk was able to succeed with Tesla and SpaceX. Although the detail of his other businesses is beyond the scope of Character Limit, Conger and Mac nevertheless offer an explanation. Tesla and SpaceX were built in Musk’s image, they say, but with people and processes in place to manage the boss and his shifting demands.

Musk simply didn’t intervene in them as much, or in the same way. He loved Twitter — sometimes tweeting “like a twelve-year-old off his Ritalin.” He spent his days fixated on the company, monitoring his own tweets and those of others in real time. “There was no buffer, just him banging his head against the wall day after day to solve a business problem he had created for himself.”

The authors conclude that Musk has turned Twitter — or X, as it is now called — into “a harsher and much more cynical” social media platform. “One of the most important modes of global communications has become practically unrecognisable and now serves the interests of one man,” they write. “What was once called the digital town square is becoming Musk’s mirror.”

Describing Twitter as one of the most important modes of global communications might seem like an overstatement. After all, it has never been the world’s biggest social media platform, nor anywhere close. That achievement is Facebook’s, followed by Google’s YouTube and Facebook’s Instagram.

But Twitter was important as a hub of political speech — a place where journalists, politicians, academics and those who followed them could exchange information and argument in real time. It was also a powerful reporting medium for journalists.

Long before Musk was on the scene, Jack Dorsey was changing Twitter’s maintenance schedule to make sure it could be used by demonstrators in Iran’s Green Revolution. Then National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin used Twitter during the Arab Spring to communicate with protesters in the Middle East and verify eyewitness accounts from the front lines, mostly while he was on his iPhone in the United States. It seemed like the dawn of a new kind of reporting that could tap into the wisdom of the crowd and become self-policing and self fact-checking.

I used Twitter myself to report from Melbourne’s Flemington public housing estate when the state government locked down its 3000 residents without warning during a Covid outbreak in July 2020. Prowling the estate, I was receiving tips from the residents locked in their flats, first-person accounts from police via direct messages, and inside information from public servants. Thanks to what the media and communications academics would call the affordances of Twitter, I was able to serve all this up in 140 characters or less as a constant, community-engaged and -informed news feed.

Some things changed for the better as a result of those tweets.  Within the community of locked-down people, the police and public servants charged with confining them, the neighbours and the families a conventional newspaper article would not have had anywhere near the same impact. It was the minute-by-minute reporting and community commentary that lent my work its power. Only social media could have done it. In fact, I think only Twitter.

Long before Musk came on the scene, people inside Twitter were struggling to strike a balance between enabling free speech and reducing harms. Conger and Mac detail insiders’ heroic efforts to decide when to label unreliable tweets by public figures or even to ban users altogether. Attempts were made to automate regulation, but the most important decisions had to be made by real people in real time.

On election day 2020, Twitter had a team tracking misinformation and voting results around the clock. As it became clear that Biden was going to beat Trump, nearly 40 per cent of Trumps’ tweets received labels warning that their content “might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”

Later, as rioters approached the Capitol on 6 January 2021, Dorsey took a call from Vijaya Gadde, his heroic corporate lawyer and the woman responsible for making the tough judgements. Trump was tweeting up a storm, and each tweet seemed to be manifesting in real-world violence.

Dorsey was on Tetiaroa island in the middle of the south Pacific. Gadde, who had been sleeping in the office as she and her team wrestled with events and Twitter’s role in them, was recommending that Trump’s account be suspended. But who were they to censor @realdonaldtrump, a sitting president? Could they? Should they?

Dorsey eventually agreed to allow Gadde to lock Trump’s account for twelve hours. Even world leaders, he tweeted, “are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence.” Trump was eventually banned from the platform for repeatedly violating its rules.

Dorsey signed off on these decisions but simultaneously hung his executives out to dry. “A ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation,” he tweeted — but whatever made him think they could do that?

The Trump ban “broke Dorsey,” write Conger and Mac. “Twitter wasn’t an idyllic, free and open town square… It was like he was the kid who built the robot, which then destroyed the world.” Gadde, meanwhile, had to have security guards at her home as “free speech enthusiasts” blamed and doxed her.

Character Limit makes clear that is nearly impossible to patrol a social media platform for harm in real time, even with automated technologies and thousands of employees and content moderators. Regulators should know this. If they don’t, they should read this book.

Despite all the bad decisions and the chaos, some important ideas, and even possible solutions, emerge from the Twitter story.

At one stage, just before the Musk takeover, then chief executive Parag Agrawal (chosen and then betrayed by Dorsey) came up with an important concept. Speech should be free, he said. It was a human right. But “reach” was a privilege. It should be earned.

He developed “Project Saturn,” named after the planet’s concentric rings. Users who adhered to Twitter’s guidelines and standards would occupy the inner circle, their Tweets privileged and promoted by the algorithm. Poorly behaved users would be relegated to an outer circle, with less promotion. All this would be transparent: users would be told why they had received their ranking, and how that could improve it.

Under this system, Trump’s repeated breaches would have put him in the outermost circle at the time of the Capitol riots. His tweets wouldn’t have been shared or promoted. People would have had to seek him out rather than finding him in their feeds. But he wouldn’t have been banned.

Thanks to Musk’s takeover, Project Saturn never developed beyond a concept. Yet surely this idea — free speech as a right, reach as a privilege — remains an important conceptual distinction as we wrestle with the consequences of the all-pervasive capacity to publish.

The great benefit of social media is that conversations previously confined to a few individuals become visible, potentially globally. And that’s also its great downside. Toxic players, braggarts, mad people and schoolyard bullies are amplified and empowered. And that’s before you get to child exploitation material and violence, both of which litter X.

As it stands, it is not clear that social media can be controlled — even by the people like Musk who own it. They are indeed destroyed by their own robots.

But we are not determined by technology. We create it, and we should decide how to use it. In the coming decades, a firm conceptual grasp of why we value free speech, and the relationship between speech and reach, is surely part of the way forward. •

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
By Kate Conger and Ryan Mac | Cornerstone Press | $36.99 | 480 pages

The post Musk’s mirror appeared first on Inside Story.

The elderly mogul’s dynastic ambitions were on spectacular display last week when the New York Times revealed he was seeking to alter the “irrevocable” voting rules of the Murdoch Family Trust. This move not only surprised media-watchers around the world but also shocked the three people most affected — his children Prudence, Elisabeth and James. It showed yet again that Rupert wants to control his business from beyond the grave, and points to much sharper faultlines inside the family than previously thought.

Last November, as the Times revealed, Rupert initiated legal action to change the rules governing the trust, which holds the Murdoch family’s share of Disney, Fox and News Corps shares. Drawn up in 1999 during his divorce from Anna, it was his estranged wife’s attempt to guarantee the inheritance of her three children, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, along with that of Prudence, Rupert’s only child from his first marriage. Its aim was to protect the four offspring from any future actions by his new wife, Wendi Deng. Later, Rupert’s children with Wendi (Grace and Chloe) were added as financial beneficiaries but without voting rights.

The Trust currently gives each of the four children one vote and Rupert four, together with a guarantee he can never be outvoted. After his death each of the four children will have an equal say.

The Times’s great revelation was that Rupert is attempting to put his chosen successor, Lachlan, beyond any challenge from the other three. His justification is that the viability of the company rests on its right-wing appeal and the other three would dilute or endanger that appeal.

It is an unusual, probably unique, legal argument. It requires a judge to rule on the contrasting commercial benefits of different editorial stances and formulas. Most of the attention will be on Murdoch’s Fox News, but the empire also includes newspapers in Britain and Australia as well as the United States. It is asking a lot of a judge in Nevada to decide whether greater editorial integrity and pluralism would help or damage the profitability of the New York Post, the London Sun and the Australian.

The Trust can only be altered if all its beneficiaries would benefit. With the other three children contesting the move, Rupert must convince the judge that three adults of healthy mind and body don’t know what is best for them and their wishes should therefore be overridden.

My guess is that he will fail.

The key conflict Rupert is trying to neutralise is between Lachlan and James, who reportedly have not spoken for five years. To the extent that the conflict stems from political differences, James appeared for a long time to be the greater villain. In order to advance News Corp interests in China he was an apologist for Beijing; he claimed that the BBC’s power was a threat to democracy; he equated anyone who believed in media regulation with creationists; he oversaw the company’s British operations while the News of the World was energetically phone-hacking and told several lies in his own and the company’s defence. And he did all of this with a maximum degree of abrasiveness.

Now, though, he is the good guy. One turning point came when, after 2017’s notorious neo-Nazi rally in the US city of Charlotteville, Donald Trump declared there were some very fine people on both sides. James was appalled at how Fox News played down the remark. “There are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists,” he said in a statement, and donated a million dollars to the Anti-Defamation League.

James and his wife Kathryn also feel strongly about the challenges of global warming and find the Murdoch media’s coverage of the issue infuriating. And they believe Fox News should have taken a stronger stance against Trump’s abuses of democratic processes. These views put James on the outer with his father and older brother.

While the conflict between Lachlan and James is intense and probably irreconcilable, Elisabeth’s and Prudence’s views have been less clear. But thanks to Rupert’s initiative any fluidity will now almost certainly solidify into opposition to Lachlan. Even at a personal level he is now clearly estranged from these three offspring, none of whom attended his wedding in June.

Apart from his conservatism and willingness to preserve the right-wing appeal of the editorial products, what leadership credentials has Lachlan displayed? Michael Wolff, who had more access to the Murdoch camp than any other biographer for his 2008 book The Man Who Owns the News, and whose contacts have clearly continued, had no time for Lachlan or James. For Wolff, relations with the sons “was a shadow that hung over Murdoch’s entire management team. It engaged the time and the futures of every key executive: how to handle, accommodate, and survive Murdoch’s detested children.”

In the same vein, Wolff says that “there were no illusions about Lachlan’s general business muddle, indecisiveness, and dependence on his father’s views; nor was there any rosy way to mask James’s temper, in-your-face certainties, and inability to play nicely with others.”

According to Wolff, Lachlan was only a part-time presence at Murdoch HQ. Fox News’s star host, Tucker Carlson, who was reputedly very friendly with him, “was more than a trifle concerned that his boss — and protector — was spending most of his time continents away, as well as underwater, instead of on the job.”

Fox News’s biggest crisis in recent years has been the successful defamation action by Dominion Voting Systems, the computer system widely used in US elections. Having broadcast many stories baselessly claiming the company was involved in an anti-Trump manipulation of votes, Fox News was forced to settle for one of the biggest defamation payouts in history, US$787.5 million.

The defeat was not only very expensive, it was also deeply embarrassing. The discovery process showed just how dishonest key executives and journalists had been, highlighting the huge gap about what they privately believed and what they put to air.

Fox News’s response — led by Viet Dinh, a Lachlan appointee and friend — was clumsy, and for a long time clearly underestimated the size of the threat. Months in, a nonchalant Dinh said the action was not on his list of top twenty worries. Soon after the record settlement, Dinh left the company. Looking back on this catastrophe, and examining the depositions and internal communications, it is hard to see any single act of leadership that Lachlan undertook.

The issue is not simply the skills of Lachlan or James; it is the impact of a hereditary elite on other senior staff. In 2011, at the height of the phone-hacking scandal, Rupert declared that the News of the World accounted for just 1 per cent of a global business with a total of 53,000 employees. Since the profitable sale of many assets to Disney in 2019 and other cutbacks, staff numbers would have fallen by more than half. The idea that not one of those tens of thousands of people is best to run the show — that the job should instead come as a birthright — is at least a century out of date.

Talented managers who did much to improve the company’s performance — beginning with Bill Diller, the primary builder of the Fox TV network in the 1980s, who wanted a share of ownership that Murdoch refused to give up — left because no matter how well they performed they faced an impenetrable ceiling.

That ceiling only exists because of Rupert’s iron grip. Decades ago, when he needed to raise capital but didn’t want to dilute control, he engineered an issue of non-voting shares. Such shares are against the spirit of the sharemarket, where governance should align with ownership, but they are not uncommon. Those who bought the non-voting shares in the Murdoch empire did so with their eyes open, seemingly happy to see its patriarch exercise control.

The result is that the Murdochs control around 40 per cent of the voting stock in the two main Murdoch companies, News Corp and Fox Corporation, but own only around 20 per cent of the total stock. On several occasions shareholders have attempted to abolish this dual-share structure, but so far they have not gained majority support. If an attempt were to succeed, the Murdochs’ control would be halved.

Shareholders are showing signs of becoming more active. When Rupert and Lachlan moved to re-merge the two companies in October 2022 they met strong resistance, and abandoned the effort the following January.

Rupert has the prestige of the company founder, the leader who built the empire. His successor will not have that aura. With management facing significant challenges in both companies, shareholders are likely to become increasingly impatient.

The focus of attention since the Times disclosures has very much been on the Succession-like family drama and the counterproductive overreach of a nonagenarian. But that focus may be too narrow. We may also be seeing the first signs that this multinational corporation’s time as a family company is coming to an end. •

The post Empire of the son appeared first on Inside Story.

The new Nine was the only company in Australia with assets in almost every medium. It owned — and still owns — the most profitable TV network; the streaming service Stan; some of the nation’s most respected news mastheads, in the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review; and a majority stake in a talk-radio network with number one stations in Melbourne and Sydney, since converted to full ownership.

But it soon became clear this was less a merger than a takeover. Nine’s Hugh Marks got the top job as CEO. In most such mergers the chair would usually then come from the other side of the deal. But despite being the more experienced media operator, Falloon missed out and Nine’s Peter Costello became chairman. The result was a board divided into Fairfax and Nine factions.

Also behind the scenes, a long-term cultural problem was rumbling on. The TV newsroom — run by director of news and current affairs Darren Wick, a network veteran — was an unhappy place for some women. That would eventually hit the public domain, but not yet.

First came Hugh Marks’s exit. His timing, if not his decision, was precipitated by Nine’s biggest rival, News Corp. In November 2020, the Sunday Telegraph revealed that Marks was in a relationship with one of his subordinates, Alexi Baker. During a fractious meeting that weekend, the board was divided over how to handle the issue. Marks decided to announce his resignation.

Selecting his successor was similarly divisive for the board. The Fairfax camp wanted Chris Janz, the talented publishing executive who in 2017 had rebuilt the business model of the Age and the SMH and saved the mastheads from going online-only. Costello, though, was a fan of Mike Sneesby, who had successfully launched Stan in 2015 as a joint Nine–Fairfax venture before their merger.

There was no obviously correct choice. Janz had had little to do with TV; Sneesby was thin on the publishing side. Sneesby won out, and was revealed as Marks’s replacement at a press conference in Studio A of the company’s new headquarters in North Sydney in March 2021. To the outside world, Nine was flying; its market capitalisation had just passed $5 billion for the first time.

But the manoeuvrings on the board had continued. Two days before the announcement, deputy chair Falloon’s position was weakened by a damaging leak to the SMH. Falloon was facing an internal investigation over his son’s use of a corporate golf membership. Then, as Sneesby and Costello prepared for their first press conference together, a new piece from SMH columnist Elizabeth Knight highlighted what she described as “a fractured board.”

When I was able to get in the first question at the Studio A press conference I addressed it to Sneesby: “I read in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning that the board is currently ‘fractured’. I can’t think of many examples where a CEO has succeeded unless they’ve had the support of a united board, so I’m wondering what sort of support you hope to receive from the board of Nine?”

Costello jumped in. “I’ll answer that question. The board is not fractured, and the board is totally behind Mike Sneesby. This is a decision of the board and he will have every support of the board.”

Later in the twenty-two-minute press conference, Costello added: “I want to make this clear. There is only one corporation here. It’s the Nine Entertainment Corporation. Every person is a director of that corporation. There aren’t two corporations. There’s one corporation and we all owe our obligations to the shareholders of that corporation as directors of the board and of course to the employees.”

Even Falloon’s retirement from the board a year later, effectively ending the Fairfax era, didn’t remove all the divisions. But they did go quiet.

For the next three years, the only thing approaching a significant strategic move by Sneesby and his board was to sign a long-term rights deal for the Olympics. Rumblings suggested that Sneesby wanted Nine to buy an outdoor advertising company but was unable to convince the board. Otherwise, it felt as though the company was treading water. There were no more big transformative deals.

Sneesby’s timing in taking on the new job had initially seemed perfect. The publishing operation’s profitability had been boosted by the big licencing deals extracted from Google and Facebook in 2021. And the Covid lockdowns had created a captive TV audience in what proved to be free-to-air televisions’s final hurrah.

By 2023 though, gravity began to kick in. TV audiences began to fall, particularly among the young. As the cost of living started rising, nervous marketers dialled back and Australia went into an advertising recession.

Free-to-air television bore the brunt of it. In most months the TV advertising market was more than 10 per cent lower than in the previous year. It was reminiscent of the terrible numbers newspapers had seen during their existential crisis a decade earlier.

Nine’s share price began to sink. Having hit an all-time high in November 2021, it lost a third of its value over the next six months as the market factored in the coming advertising recession. Then, early in 2024, the market began to realise that even as advertising recovered, the money was not coming back into television. It was going to the global platforms. The problem wasn’t just cyclical — it was structural.

To add to the pain, Netflix, Amazon’s Prime and Paramount Plus all announced they were launching their own advertising tiers, creating more direct competitors for television.

Nine’s share price began to fall some more. By April, it had halved from its $5 billion peak. This week the company’s market cap fell to $2.2 billion, the lowest point since the share market crashed at the beginning of Covid in March 2020.

Unhappy shareholders mean embattled boards and nervous executives. Last month, a sharemarket problem became a boardroom crisis when Darren Wick’s departure opened up what eventually became a flood of allegations about his behaviour.

News Corp titles did much of the initial running, with reporting across Sky News, the Australian and then, decisively, the Daily Telegraph, which splashed with “Nine’s Wicked Ways.”

Belatedly, the SMH joined the chase with Kate McClymont — whose #MeToo stories tend to stand up when others fall over in defamation cases — weighing in with a piece headlined “Former Nine News Boss Darren Wick Accused By Staff of Drunken, Lecherous Behaviour.”

Damagingly for Nine, the coverage alleged that management had been aware of staff complaints about Wick’s alleged behaviour but not acted on them. Worse, the Australian reported claims that staff who reached settlements with Nine were required to sign non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs.

Sneesby’s email to staff resorted to tortured language as he tried to distance himself from the scandal. “As CEO at Nine,” he wrote, “I have never signed any NDAs for any employee relating to a complaint or behavioural issue. In particular, I did not sign any NDAs with Nine staff in relation to Darren Wick’s alleged behaviour.”

As Crikey put it: “Which is so far from being definitive it’s not funny. Of course Sneesby hasn’t signed any NDAs. He’s only been CEO since mid-2021. And why would a CEO sign an NDA? That’s wholly unnecessary — the head of the legal department or the head of HR, at best, might sign it. Whose signature adorns the gagging mechanism is irrelevant — it’s whether it exists that is the problem.”

Next came news of complaints about a friend of Sneesby, Adrian Foo, who headed publicity at Stan. According to the Australian Financial Review, Foo was able to take a $150,000 redundancy payout and leave before the complaints could be investigated.

When Nine announced an external investigation into the issues around newsroom culture it appeared to have won a little breathing space. But then came last week’s disastrous confrontation at Canberra Airport between Costello and the Australian’s Liam Mendes. As Mendes peppered him with questions, Costello appeared to barge him to the ground. Mendes captured the moment on his phone and on a GoPro video camera.

Soon there was more tortured language from Nine: “In the course of filming the chairman while walking backwards, the journalist collided with an advertising placard and fell. At no point did the chairman strike the journalist.”

But from the moment the footage went live last Thursday night, it was clear Costello would have to resign. The boss of a company that employs journalists cannot be in the business of knocking them to the ground, no matter how irritating they are.

Costello lasted until Sunday night. For a second time, News Corp had taken down a Nine boss.

The result was a battlefield promotion for deputy chair Catherine West — at least for now. West was reportedly one of Nine’s directors who were made aware of concerns in 2019. And this week Capital Brief reported that West had “pressured” the SMH to amend Elizabeth Knight’s 2020 reporting on board divisions — a bad look for a company that publishes under the slogan “Independent. Always.”

Nine is in a bad way. An under-pressure CEO and chair. A TV market in structural decline. A three-year deal with Facebook coming to an end. The company’s next financial update to the market in August will be a brutal one.

The crisis is far from over. •

The post Walking backwards at Nine appeared first on Inside Story.

Why Huhne, some readers might have wondered, and why then? What was newsworthy about the private behaviour of a newly appointed minister in the Conservative-led coalition government — a man “not famous enough,” according to the reporter involved, for the story to run when it had first been unearthed a year earlier? No evidence was put forward that the affair was affecting Huhne’s performance as an MP. He hadn’t misused public funds or abused his parliamentary position. None of the people directly involved had gone public.

The key to this mystery lies six months earlier, in January, when Huhne called for a judicial inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World. His call came after the Guardian exposed how the Murdoch paper had hired four private investigators who then used illegal methods to seek out embarrassing information about celebrities and other public figures.

The News of the World’s editor at the time of the hacking was Andy Coulson, who was now working for soon-to-be-prime-minister David Cameron. “Very damaging for Andy,” wrote Fred Michel, a lobbyist for Murdoch’s News Group, to the paper’s latest editor, Colin Myler. “We need to get Chris Huhne.” “Totally,” replied Myler.

How they “got” him was by publishing the story of his affair. In essence, the Murdoch press’s response to an accusation of hacking was to hack the accuser and eventually unearth his affair. “To do this,” wrote journalist Nick Davies earlier this month in the highly regarded British magazine Prospect, “the paper hired three private investigators who specialised in using unlawful methods to get access to confidential information and paid £2600 to a former police officer, Derek Webb, who ran undercover surveillance on Huhne for a total of eleven days that June.”

What made Huhne’s misdeeds more newsworthy than other MPs’ peccadilloes was that he was seen as an enemy, and therefore deserving of public humiliation.

A decade after the News of the World revealed his affair, Huhne came into receipt of information about how the paper had pried into his private life and decided to sue. He was successful, and in December last year, in a confidential settlement, he accepted a six-figure sum from News.

The story of the News of the World’s attack on Huhne is part of a blizzard of new information and allegations about News’s hacking, surveillance and cover-ups revealed by Davies in Prospect this month.

It was Davies who wrote the 2010 Guardian story that prompted Huhne’s call for an inquiry. The article, and Huhne’s response, posed an obvious threat to News’s interests by showing that the hacking was much more widespread than had been thought.

Four years earlier, News of the World reporter Clive Goodman and private detective Glenn Mulcaire had been arrested for hacking the phones of princes William and Harry. They had pleaded guilty, apologised and been sent to prison. The company’s public position was that the hacking was entirely the work of a single rogue reporter.

News bought the silence of both convicted men by promising them jobs after their incarceration. But when the paper reneged by firing Goodman after he went to jail, he threatened to reveal all. News then paid him a lump sum of £243,000 — quite an amount for a rogue reporter.

The Murdoch empire was determined to contain any fallout from the convictions. By the end of the decade, though — and despite the reluctance of politicians, the police, and most of the media to pursue the scandal — keeping a lid on it was becoming more difficult. Then, in July 2011, the Guardian published another Nick Davies story, this time reporting that the News of the World had hacked the phone of a young kidnapping victim, Milly Dowler. The outcry was immediate, widespread and intense.

Within weeks, an extensive advertising boycott had forced the paper — more than a century old — to close, and Rupert and James Murdoch had been summoned to appear before a parliamentary committee. Politicians of all persuasions denounced the company’s behaviour.

The renewed scandal came at a particularly bad moment for Murdoch. Soon after Cameron was elected prime minister, News had launched a bid to increase its stake in the satellite broadcaster BSkyB from 39 per cent to 100 per cent. The government seemed set to approve the bid. But once the Milly Dowler scandal blew up all three of the biggest parties — Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat — opposed the move in parliament and News Group withdrew. The parliamentary inquiry finished with a bang by concluding (along party lines) that Rupert Murdoch was not fit to exercise stewardship over a major international company.

Under pressure, Cameron appointed judge Brian Leveson to chair a wide-ranging committee of inquiry. Leveson’s inquiry sat for nine months, heard from 337 witnesses and received statements from 300 others. A year after his hearings began in November 2011 Leveson issued a four-volume report running to almost 2000 pages. As he himself said, it was “the most public and the most concentrated look at the press” Britain had ever seen.

Police launched a massive criminal trial. Of the eight defendants, the two most prominent were senior News Group executive Rebekah Brooks and editor-turned-adviser Andy Coulson. The trial ended in June 2014 with Coulson going to prison, six other defendants having pleaded guilty, and Brookes and one other defendant acquited.

This public climax was followed by several much lower-profile criminal cases. Essentially, though, “normality” had returned. Cameron rejected Leveson’s calls for the press to be accountable to a statutory authority and the scheduled second part of the inquiry — to look in detail at News Group and its web of contacts — never eventuated. On the surface, Murdoch had escaped with only temporary embarrassment.

But while the scandal barely figured in subsequent coverage, the action continued beyond public view. In Prospect, Nick Davies reveals that around 1600 people claiming to be victims of phone-hacking (including Hugh Grant and the Duke of Sussex) have brought actions against News Group — at a cost to the company, so far, of around £1.2 billion in payouts. Nearly all these cases were settled with confidential payouts. Almost none of them received prominent coverage in the media. News Group has been able to limit the reputational damage, but at a huge financial cost.

Given the industrial scale of the law-breaking (their principal private investigator/phone hacker Mulcaire alone had targeted 6349 people), the company didn’t have much choice. But it is now paying a high price for activities conceived when Murdoch’s British tabloids were still highly profitable. The circulation of the Sun, the cash-cow that paid for the company’s expansion in the 1980s, had fallen from close to four million in 1990 to less than 1.2 million in 2020, when it instructed the Audit Bureau of Circulation that its sales figures would now be confidential.

The paper’s online readership increased, of course, but without preventing grave damage to the bottom line. The paper’s losses over the last five years add up to £515 million. Phone-hacking litigation cost it £128.3 million in 2022 and a still substantial £51.6 million last year.

Now, despite all the company’s expensive containment efforts, this long-running scandal is threatening to enter a new phase. While the settlements have been confidential, the discovery processes in these 1600-plus cases have put mountains of material on the public record, all of it ignored by most of the media but explored in Prospect by Davies. Material from police files and company records — emails, call data, payments to private investigators, minutes of meetings and voicemail messages — has filled gaps, fuelled new allegations and opened up new questions.

One new source of information is the record of the thousands of calls — most far too brief to be an ordinary conversation between a journalist and a source — made from “hub numbers” at News’s East London headquarters. The use of a hub of this kind makes the identity of individual callers impossible to determine. Although the company vehemently denies it, these were most likely phone-hacking exercises — attempts, successful or not, to listen to the targets’ voicemail messages. Some 222 such calls were made from the hub to Huhne’s mobile phone.

The new disclosures also give more precision and detail to the long-suspected concealment and destruction of evidence by News Group. In September 2010, when actor Sienna Miller was charging that News had illegally tapped her phone, her lawyer advised the company that it must preserve any evidence relevant to the case. This seems merely to have hastened a process of destruction that was already under way.

The previous November chief executive Rebekah Brooks had directed News technicians to “eliminate in a consistent manner… emails that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation.” In the months following Miller’s lawyer’s letter the company destroyed nearly thirty-one million emails. Many of these could be retrieved from backups but at least nine million were never recovered. All the journalists involved in reporting on Miller had their computers destroyed.

Similarly, nearly all the email and paper records of private detective Glenn Mulcaire’s work were deleted. Although the detective worked for News Group full-time for six years, Murdoch executives eventually told police they had only sixty emails and a single piece of paper related to his employment there.

A pattern of minimal cooperation was implemented from the highest levels. “The Murdoch company,” writes Davies, eventually “surrendered to the police a thumb drive that it claimed contained all the emails; it was encrypted; the company refused to help to decrypt it; and it has never been opened.”

Likewise, “the new material discloses that police seized 125 items used for office storage and placed them all in a secure areas under the supervision of two senior Murdoch execs. Several weeks later detectives found that only 117 items remained. Eight filing cabinets belonging to Myler and another editor had been removed. They have never been recovered.”

The scandal’s initial focus was on the invasion of privacy and the hurt caused to people by the tabloids’ ruthless pursuit of sensational stories and competitive advantage. The evidence brought together by Davies indicates the Murdoch organisation was also using criminal methods to smear political opponents and gather political intelligence. In these cases, the aim was not to get stories but rather to advance the company’s corporate interests by targeting MPs and other public figures seen as hostile.

The new evidence shows that more than 1500 hub calls were made to sixteen Liberal Democrat MPs who had criticised News Group, while the two most outspoken Labour MPs — Tom Watson and Paul Farrelly — had respectively 176 and 162 calls. The two MPs also allege their landlines were bugged.

The illegalities lasted longer than initially thought, continuing unabated even after the scandal broke. On 19 July 2011 Rupert Murdoch told a House of Commons committee that he was “completely and deeply sorry” for the hacking and he would do all he could to prevent it happening again. Yet at that very moment, the hub data suggests that his organisation was eavesdropping on several members of the committee.

In recent years several politicians have launched cases against News. So far Liberal Democrats Chris Huhne, Adam Sanders and the estate of former leader Charles Kennedy have made confidential settlements. Several other prominent Liberal Democrats (Vince Cable, Norman Lamb, Tim Farron and Evan Harris) and Labour figures (Paul Farrelly, Andy Burnham and Peter Mandelson) have actions pending. Charges by Prince Harry are scheduled to be heard in court next year, while former prime minister Gordon Brown has requested that Scotland Yard investigate News Group illegalities against him.

The significance of Davies’s revelations — which are denied by News — would of course need to be tested in court. As he writes, “It will fall to the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service to check the reality of the new evidence, to decide whether any of it is strong enough to warrant opening an investigation and, if so, whether it would be right to bring any charges against any of those alleged to be involved in unlawful behaviour.”

Perhaps this longest-running of scandals still has a few more twists and turns. •

The post Hacking’s victims fight back appeared first on Inside Story.

The title of his previous book, 2014’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, is another. There, he recounted his experiences as a television producer in Russia between 2006 and 2016, the formative period of the “post-truth” era. In Russia, a president was “turning politics into a reality show, remaking authoritarianism with the logic of twenty-first-century entertainment.” In America, a reality TV star was on his way to the presidency.

Pomerantsev was born in Kyiv in 1977. His parents had fled Russia to escape a KGB crackdown after they were discovered to be reading the wrong things. A few years later the family was in London, where he went to school. His return to Russia in 2001 was prompted partly by a wish to explore an identity he had left behind, but he took with him an instinct for the political dangers of messing with reality.

This is Not Propaganda is addressed to a world in which mass persuasion has run rampant, “where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied.” His latest book, How to Win an Information War, released this month, completes what may be seen as a trilogy, but shifts the focus from those who create and promote the war against truth to the public who are its conscripts.

His central concern is that there seem to be no effective strategies for countering disinformation. Media outlets that identify with democratic principles and offer detailed factual coverage of events fail to reach audiences that have become wedded to sensationalised narratives and conspiracy theories.

On an urgent quest for antidotes that might actually work, Pomerantsev lights upon the story of Sefton Delmer, who spearheaded a bizarre and alarmingly effective British counter-propaganda operation during the second world war. Alarming because it was morally anarchic, flouting every ethical principle of public broadcasting. But weren’t the Nazis already doing just that?

That was the point. Delmer grasped the essential principle at the heart of all propaganda, which is mirroring and reversal. His capacity “to reimagine himself as others, become the enemy, climb inside their minds” arose from formative experiences not unlike Pomerantsev’s own.

Delmer’s parents were Australian. His father Frederick, an English literature scholar, had taken a professorial position in Germany by the time Sefton was born in 1904. As a ten-year-old schoolboy in Berlin at the outbreak of the first world war, he found himself torn between conflicting identities: the English-speaking outsider viewed with suspicion by his peers; the child stirred by collective exhilaration at national anthems and marches.

Things came to a head when Frederick was interned as an enemy alien. Following his release, the family fled to England, where Sefton found that, having stepped through the mirror, he was now a “German” outsider at school. In 1928, as an Oxford graduate, he decided to exploit his dual identity by returning to Berlin as a correspondent for the Daily Express.

With a novelist’s flair for scene-setting, Pomerantsev evokes the milieu of the Weimar republic, with its heightened and conflicting energies. Violent skirmishes broke out in city streets between communists and far-right nationalists. Storm troopers mixed with gender-crossing cabaret artists at all-night parties. Newspapers with extremist headlines poured off the presses. Hysterical posters depicted the ravening monster of inflation. In Delmer’s own words, the place had everything a tabloid foreign correspondent could wish for: “sex, murder, political intrigue, money, mystery and bloodshed.”

In this melting pot of identities, extreme and performative personae could be adopted and exchanged to suit the shifting cultural tides. Delmer engaged in the shape-shifting himself by mingling with experimental cabaret artists, some of whom were to become future collaborators.

In his role as correspondent, he cultivated the emerging leaders of the Nazi movement, winning the confidence of Erich Rohl, commander of the Storm Troopers, who allowed him to attend an inspection posing as his aide de camp. Delmer was enough of an insider to be included in Hitler’s national campaign tour following the Nazis’ loss in the 1932 election, and reported first-hand on the surging tide of mass hysteria.

Delmer was not just reporting, Pomerantsev stresses, he was also subverting. But he played the insider role so convincingly that British intelligence officers, suspicious of where his allegiances lay, opposed his requests to join. It was not until September 1940, when the British were clearly losing the war of the airwaves, that he was approached to return to England and attempt what he had been trying to convince them he could do.

Radio propaganda was proving one of the most effective weapons in the German arsenal, and like the blitzkrieg bombs it was aimed directly at civilians. William Joyce, a member of Oswald Mosely’s British fascist movement who achieved notoriety under the nickname Lord Haw Haw, had gone to work for Goebbels’s propaganda ministry in Germany.

Joyce had come up with the idea of a program to be broadcast into Britain in which actors impersonated English working men. Their talk of how “the bosses” were deliberately delaying their response to air-raid sirens to get more hours of productivity was designed to provoke social division and erode support for the war effort among the working class. British ratings for the program had grown to alarming levels.

Put in charge of a small team of writers, researchers, technicians and performers at a country estate in Bedford, Delmer set about outplaying the enemy at their own game. Pomerantsev does a fine job of exploiting the spy-thriller aspects of the story, and it comes as no surprise when we learn that one of Delmer’s collaborators in the new enterprise was James Bond creator Ian Fleming. They shared a flair for personae that Delmer saw as a kind of secret weapon.

Watching the German crowds stirred to fanatical enthusiasm (“fanatical” was a term of approbation in the Nazi vocabulary) he realised they were involved in a kind of role-play. Intense as it was, role-play was an engagement with limits. At some point, you would drop it, and perhaps exchange the role for another one. If he was right, Hitler’s supporters were not rusted on and, given sufficiently convincing provocations, could be turned.

Having diagnosed the Nazi appeal from within, Delmer’s team copied its key elements: the obscene insults, sado-masochist energies, paranoia and insatiable need for vengeance. And pornography. It was here that Delmer crossed the line, but where the strategy really gained traction. Officers in London began to balk at the graphic images and salacious, cruelty-laced narratives purporting to document the activities of decadent Nazi commanders.

Ratings, though, were Delmer’s unassailable defence. By the end of the war, audience numbers for the BBC’s German-language broadcasts were estimated at between ten and fifteen million a day, up from a million when Delmer joined the service in 1941.

If dramatisation could work to create hysterical euphoria, Delmer believed, it could also be deployed to introduce the seeping toxin of demoralisation. He had an enduring fascination with the psychology of Hitler’s followers and his focus was always on the person on the receiving end of diatribes that outdid the rhetorical extremism of the Nazis themselves.

As the geopolitical propaganda wars heat up, threatening to derail American democracy and end the sovereignty of eastern European nations, what does this history have to teach us now? That is Pomerantsev’s question, and it burns with his own involvement in the Ukraine resistance.

On a mission with journalist colleagues to document war crimes in 2022, he visits Bucha, the site of some of the worst atrocities of the invasion. During thirty-three days of Russian occupation, one in ten of the residents who had failed to evacuate in time had been killed. Many who survived had been raped and tortured. He goes on to Kharkiv, where his grandmother lived through the Stalin-engineered Holodomor (famine) in the early 1930s; now the genocidal onslaught is happening again, this time with bombs and tanks and propaganda.

Russians immediately denied the attacks or accused Ukraine of committing them, or sometimes both. “It never happened, and it was their fault,” is typical of the messaging. They have adopted techniques of scrambling and inversion cut and pasted from the Nazi playbook, says Pomerantsev.

Kremlin-promoted narratives have gained currency not just in Russia but also within the American right and the British left, and in many European countries where political cohorts are opposed to their governments’ support for Ukraine. If we don’t get smarter about the nature of the propaganda war, Pomerantsev warns, we’re going to lose. What he means is that we are faced with the loss of shared ground in truth and reality.

This is where Delmer’s story has currency. Aside from some extreme tactics that should not be replicated, he offered insights that have enduring relevance. Principal among these was an awareness that political alignments of the most intense kind are performative: people are attracted to a role in a drama, especially one that gives them a sense of belonging.

But the roles we adopt are not who we are, which is why so many fanatical supporters of Hitler peeled quietly way after a few years. The same thing is happening with Trump followers, if not in sufficient numbers to dispel the prospect of another Trump presidency.

The more we become aware of political role-play as such, the greater the chance we will resist being conscripted blindly as part of “a mass coordinated show.” Awareness creates critical distance, and critical distance is where propaganda goes to die. •

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler
By Peter Pomerantsev | Faber | $49.99 | 304 pages

The post The propagandist appeared first on Inside Story.

It was quite a shock for the former Macquarie Group chair, one-time partner in the big Sydney law firm Allens, member of numerous business and artistic boards and recipient of the Order of Australia. A surprise, too, for other members of the board, who included a host of eminent Australians drawn from diplomacy, intelligence, business, academia and politics — not to mention the organisation’s blue-chip corporate sponsors, including BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and PwC.

The tabloid report, followed two days later by an attack in the conservative magazine Quadrant, was also the first indication for McCann’s Sydney-based organisation — the research institute China Matters — that its funding was being terminated by the federal government departments that had supported it financially since its founding five years earlier: Prime Minister and Cabinet, Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence, Home Affairs, Industry, Innovation and Science, and Attorney-General’s. To further hobble its work, China Matters was to lose its tax-deductible status for private-sector donations.

“It was a victim of a new sort of policy of completely shutting down all conversation about Australia–China relations that didn’t accord with the then government’s position,” says Michael Wesley, deputy vice-chancellor of Melbourne University and China Matters board member. “It was a deliberate silencing of an organisation that was committed to facilitating a diversity of opinion and a genuine multisectoral discussion and debate about Australia’s relations with its major trading partner.”

It has taken a while, but Scott Morrison’s former government eventually achieved that objective. Last week, China Matters announced it is shutting down. Its executive director, internationally known China politics scholar Linda Jakobson, has returned to her native Finland after ten years in Australia.

The institute’s offence was to advocate a more nuanced response to China’s energetic program of spending and diasporic string-pulling, which aimed to build its influence abroad. Examples cited by the News Corp tabloids included China Matters’s alleged urging of Australia to join Xi Jinping’s $1.5 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (despite the organisation having declared it “does not have an institutional view” on the issue) and its “pushing back” against the foreign influence legislation introduced by Malcolm Turnbull in late 2017. The tabloids’ article included “demonstrable falsehoods and defamatory insinuations,” McCann wrote at the time, but his protestations fell on deaf ears in the government.

China hawks were ascendant in government and the media, unleashed by the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan and Beijing’s clumsy handling of the epidemic. Scott Morrison was in weekly phone contact with Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, a fellow Pentecostalist. Foreign minister Marise Payne had cast doubt on whether China could be trusted to trace the virus’s origins, and Morrison said an international inquiry should have “weapons inspector powers,” by which he meant that Chinese sovereignty should be overridden.

When leading business figures, among others, pointed out that this kind of language was sure to draw retaliation, hawkish commentators turned on them. Peter Jennings, then heading the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said they “have to understand the national interest is more important than a handful of wealthy businessmen continuing to make themselves rich dealing with an authoritarian China.”

The Sydney Morning Herald’s international and political editor, Peter Hartcher, described iron-ore tycoon Andrew Forrest as a “craven character” who had “chosen to campaign for a foreign authoritarian political movement” and “made the case for Australia to surrender.” Nine’s political editor at the time, Chris Uhlmann, said that “business captains and university chiefs have shown they can’t handle the truth. As long as the rivers of gold flowed, they were happy to urge silence…” But “silence means consent,” declared Uhlmann, including to the “imprisonment of a million Uighurs in Xinjiang.”

Events turned out as the government’s critics predicted. China cut back some $20 billion in non-strategic annual imports from Australia, including wine, beef, timber, barley and lobsters, with severe impacts in Australian regions. In response to an aggressive federal police raid on four official Chinese media correspondents, Beijing’s state security agency detained Chinese-Australian journalist Cheng Lei (who ended up being jailed for three years).

When I approached key figures in the Morrison government who are likely to know how the decision to punish China Matters was made, none was willing to comment (if they replied at all). The funding cut took away nearly half of the organisation’s funding.

Money has certainly been part of the reason for the closure, Jakobson told me from Helsinki. But by the time Labor came to power the institute had decided not to attempt to have the grant and tax break restored. The system of departmental grants had changed by then, and regaining tax deductibility would have been a “tedious, long and costly process,” she said.

Instead, the board decided to wind up and put remaining funds towards a fellowship program in the Australia–China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney. The hope was that “there might be some really worthwhile, savvy, smart, dedicated Australians wanting to devote their careers to understanding what’s going on in the PRC.”

The China Matters story is likely to figure in the current review of federal government funding to national security–related research and education, commissioned by the prime minister’s department in early February. Heading the review is University of Queensland chancellor Peter Varghese, a former head of Foreign Affairs and one-time director-general of the Office of National Assessments.

“These programs deepen public discussion, strengthen partnerships, and inform policy debates on national security matters,” the announcement said. The review would look at whether they remain “appropriately aligned to Australia’s national interests and strategic circumstances,” examining the performance of funded institutes over the past five years, and making recommendations “to assist [government] agencies conducting relevant activities while achieving value-for-money, administrative efficiency, and appropriate levels of governance, accountability, probity and transparency.”

The announcement had scarcely any general media coverage but did cause a brief buzz in Canberra security circles. Some instant commentary saw it as a “Get ASPI” exercise — a reference to the hawkish Australian Strategic Policy Institute, led for many years by Jennings.

“The announcement of a review last week by Peter Varghese is widely anticipated as a move in preparation for defunding ASPI,” wrote Labor official turned consultant Cameron Milner in the Australian.  “Such a decision should terrify all those worried that we’re not spending enough, not worrying enough and not preparing enough to defend our island continent.”

By defunding ASPI, Milner said, the government would be caving in to China’s so-called “fourteen demands,” as China hawks call the list of bilateral irritants handed to an Australian journalist in 2020 by a Chinese embassy diplomat — one of which was hostile scrutiny of contentious issues like the treatment of the Uyghur people — by a partially Australian government-funded institute, meaning ASPI.

ASPI’s prominence among Canberra voices raising alarm over China has certainly drawn criticism from quarters that would have appreciated China Matters’s approach. Concern was maintained when Jennings was replaced as ASPI’s head just before the 2022 election by another China hawk, Justin Bassi, who had been Marise Payne’s chief of staff when China Matters was defunded.

Two years into the Albanese government, ASPI no longer seems especially out of line with the stance of foreign minister Penny Wong and defence minister Richard Marles, who have been striving to balance diplomatic courtesy towards Beijing with support for closer alliance with the United States and large defence investments against a perceived Chinese threat. Nor can one imagine Varghese lending himself to any retribution, if that was the review’s aim.

Varghese has meanwhile been getting around the national-security think tanks and academic institutes. Although they number about fifty, he will probably concentrate on the top ten or so that get about 80 per cent of the government funding. They would include ASPI, the United States Studies Centre at Sydney University and two Australian National University outfits, the National Security College and the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.

Those he’s spoken to think he will develop a set of principles to govern how the government funds strategic policy work rather than trying to prescribe what areas should get priority over others, which will change over time depending on trends and challenges.

As foreign affairs secretary, Varghese put funding into China Matters. Last year, introducing a China Matters oration by Kevin Rudd as University of Queensland chancellor, he made his feelings clear about the defunding decision. “China Matters knows that to understand China is not to endorse its policies,” he said. “By ceasing its funding the previous government apparently believed the opposite. This, despite the fact that China studies in Australia is going backwards.”

For her part, Jakobson hopes Varghese will recommend longer-term funding of key research institutes. “There has to be a willingness by the federal government to fund good strategic research which is not tied to three reports, two briefings and one conference a year, to give you an example of one of our contracts,” she says. “That’s not the way a genuine think tank can work. It can’t all be project-driven. It wears everyone out. There’s too many deliverables for the amount of money that’s being brought in.”

An endowment system would be better, she says, as was seen in the large sums the US Studies Centre received from the Howard government and Rupert Murdoch, and the Lowy Institute from property magnate Frank Lowy. “There has to be at least five-year if not a ten-year basic, foundational funding for a specialised institute like China Matters, which provides very specialised expertise on one country, a very important country.”

Jakobson sees a gap re-emerging in how Australia understands the People’s Republic of China. The Australia–China Relations Institute at UTS focuses on the bilateral relationship and the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World looks at a wide range of Chinese culture, she says. “But they don’t produce deep policy analysis of what’s going on in the PRC, which is what from the very beginning I saw Australia had a dire need for: to understand the drivers of what’s going on and why China’s making the decisions they are making.”

No doubt Peter Varghese is keenly aware of this gap. Meanwhile, the man whose government defunded China Matters, Scott Morrison, pursues his new post-parliamentary career as a defence industry consultant in partnership with Mike Pompeo. •

The post Think-tanked appeared first on Inside Story.

Trump’s business reputation was already far from pristine. He and his businesses would eventually be party to a total of more than 4000 legal actions, exceeding all other leading property developers combined. He would file for bankruptcy — for himself or various of his entities — no fewer than six times. When he was divorcing his first wife Ivana, he planted news stories designed to humiliate her, some of which made the front page of the New York Post and estranged him for a time from his three eldest children.

Over the decades after their first meeting both Murdoch and Trump became better known and more influential. Murdoch’s founding of Fox News in 1996 gave him a much higher national profile; its chief executive for the first twenty years, Roger Ailes, a man who combined heavy involvement in Republican politics with a strong background in television, quickly built the network into a force on the national political scene. On NBC, meanwhile, Trump had huge success with his fifteen-season reality TV series The Apprentice, which launched in 2004.

Once Barack Obama became president, Trump was given a Monday morning call-in slot on Fox News’s Fox and Friends: “Bold, brash and never bashful,” the promo proclaimed, “the Donald now makes his voice loud and clear every Monday on Fox.” It was in that slot that he baselessly propagated the “birther” claim that Obama wasn’t American-born and was therefore ineligible to be president. In just two months during 2011, Fox devoted fifty-two segments to Obama’s “foreign birth”; and in forty-four of these the claim went completely unchallenged.

At some point Rupert and his third wife Wendi became friendly with Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, whom Murdoch helped mentor. In 2015, though, when Ivanka told Murdoch that her father was truly going to run for president, Murdoch “dismissed the possibility out of hand,” journalist Michael Wolff writes in his 2023 book, The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire.

Nor in the early days of Trump’s candidacy did the relationship run smoothly, at least in Trump’s eyes. At the first debate among Republican contenders in August 2015, hosted by Fox, one of the network’s most prominent anchors Megyn Kelly asked Trump about his misogyny: “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ slobs and disgusting animals.” When Trump responded after the program with a similarly nasty and misogynist attack, Ailes stayed silent and his deputy Bill Shine directed other anchors not to speak up for Kelly. Fox News PR eventually issued a single statement in her defence.

Rupert was more forthcoming. Trump was getting “even more thin-skinned,” he tweeted, adding that “friend Donald has to learn that this is public life.” A few months later, in February 2016, Trump accused Fox of not wanting him to win and Murdoch of rigging a survey of voters. “Time to calm down,” tweeted Murdoch, adding that if he was running an anti-Trump conspiracy then he was doing a lousy job.

Despite his complaints, Trump was receiving much more coverage than the other Republican candidates on Fox News. He and Ailes were in close touch throughout the primaries, and the network fell loyally in behind Trump’s candidacy once it was clear he was going to be the Republican nominee.

Even up to the election, according to Wolff and other observers, the relationship was unequal. At his post-victory party Trump “was on tenterhooks waiting for Murdoch,” writes Wolff. “‘He’s one of the greats,’ he told his guests… ‘the last of the greats. You have to stay to see him.’” Murdoch seemed to be in shock when he eventually arrived, “struggling to adjust his view of a man who, for more than a generation, had been at best a clown prince among the rich and famous.”

Ailes, who had seen the relationship up close, told Wolff that Trump “would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.” Later, Ailes said that he and Trump “were really quite good friends for more than twenty-five years, but he would have preferred to be friends with Murdoch, who thought he was a moron — at least until he became president.”

Although he was more favourably disposed towards Trump than many others, Ailes had few illusions about his capacities: “Donald? He’s Richie Rich. He’s richer than you but he’s not smarter than you — in fact, he’s clearly a dumb motherfucker, I say with all due respect. He is so dumb. But smart is what people hate.” Two weeks before his death, Ailes observed that Trump “won’t have any idea how to run the government, nor care, but he knows how to pull every fucking string in television.”

Trump’s elevation to the presidency created a unique relationship with Fox News. In Wolff’s words, “The Trump White House was a Fox White House.” Researching his book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, journalist Brian Stelter identified twenty people who moved from Fox News to the White House between 2017 and 2020.

Initially the Fox–White House relationship was one of mutual convenience, possibly containing some degree of personal admiration. Murdoch and Trump, who were in frequent phone contact, each put their own gloss on it. “Murdoch, who had never called me, not once, was now calling all the time,” said Trump, while Murdoch complained that he “couldn’t get Trump off the phone.”

Many at Fox News had direct personal relations with many at the White House. Perhaps the most interesting was between Trump and Sean Hannity, a Fox News anchor who had long been Trump’s “go-to guy at Fox.” They were on the phone almost every day — so much so that Wolff describes Hannity as “Trump’s closest confidant, his chief adviser.” Trump lavished public praise on Hannity, one night even claiming on air that he had postponed a call to Chinese president Xi Jinping in order to talk to him.

Trump’s relationship with Fox News was unique in another way, too. He spent more hours each day watching the network than any previous president spent looking at TV, and seemed to rely on it for information more than on his officials’ briefings. One night in February 2017, Trump made a seemingly bizarre comment about Sweden that flummoxed Swedish officials. It turned out that Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program had featured an obscure conservative filmmaker pushing the idea that a Swedish crime wave was being fuelled by lax immigration policies. It was a self-affirming feedback loop of misinformation.

Trump “grew more and more intolerant of any accurate reporting on Fox and raged against the reporters,” writes Stelter. “For Trump it was never enough. Rupert recalled that Trump once told him, of Fox, ‘You’re 90 per cent good. That’s not enough. I need you 100 per cent.’ Rupert claimed that he replied, ‘Well, you can’t have it.’”

In 2020, with Murdoch now living in semi-isolation in England to minimise his risk of catching Covid-19, the telephone relationship all but ceased. When Trump played down the risks of the pandemic, Stelter writes, Murdoch warned him to take it seriously: “You better be careful, it’s a big deal.” Well, Trump responded, “some people say that.”

Fox supported Trump strongly in the 2020 election, but the relationship was on a downward trajectory. A bizarre moment in the developing conflict came on the night of the 2020 election when Fox News’s “decision desk”  was the first to say that Joe Biden had won Arizona. The call provoked an enormous and puzzling controversy. Before the election, Fox News had joined with Associated Press in developing what they thought were better ways of projecting outcomes. According to the journalists directly involved, this was what allowed them to be first on the night. But their call provoked extreme anger in the White House, which urged Fox to reverse it, and also among many Fox viewers, who saw it as a betrayal.

The fact that the call proved to be accurate was no defence. What should have been a triumph for Fox was seen even by their own management as an embarrassment. Two months later, the two journalists most directly involved no longer had jobs at Fox.

In The Fall Wolff says that Trump saw the Arizona call as “the tipping point in his relationship with Fox. Murdoch, he understood, not without justification, was out to hurt him.” This is a nonsensical proposition at several levels. Most basically, Murdoch was not involved in the call and only learnt of it after it had gone to air. The ongoing disputes overlook the fact that the call had no substantive impact: voting had finished, so no votes were affected and nor was the counting of votes.

Wolff makes Murdoch’s disillusion with Trump abundantly clear. At various times, he called Trump an “asshole,” an “idiot,” a “fool,” “plainly nuts,” and someone “who couldn’t give a shit,” “had no plan,” “just wants the money,” is “crazy, crazy, crazy” and “a loser.” “Of all Trump’s implacable enemies,” writes Wolff, “Murdoch had become a frothing at the mouth one.”

Rather than give reasons for Murdoch’s views, Wolff seems sometimes to regard them as symptoms of senility. “A close Murdoch confidante…,” he writes in The Fall, “described Murdoch’s loop of Trump obsession as possibly ‘early dementia-like.’ Murdoch could not get off the subject.”

The reasons for Murdoch’s disenchantment were substantial. He was appalled at Trump’s incompetent and irresponsible response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He didn’t believe Trump’s claims about a rigged election. (As early as 8 November, an editorial in his New York Post urged Trump to stop the stolen election rhetoric.) And, like many others, he was outraged by the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 and by Trump’s encouragement of violence. Soon after the attack, Stelter reports, Murdoch told Fox Corp board member Paul Ryan that he wanted to make Trump a non-person on Fox.

But Murdoch found that divorcing Trump was much more difficult for Fox News than his own divorce from Jerry Hall. Trump’s continuing court cases and his pre-eminence in Republican politics made it impossible for Fox to treat him as a non-person. Moreover, Murdoch encountered considerable internal resistance. Hannity, one of the network’s biggest stars, exclaimed, “Fucking no Trump… You want to tell me what Fox is without Trump?,” and, on another occasion: “There’s only one reason I’m here now and that’s to protect Donald Trump.”

Murdoch’s stated wish also ran directly against his top management’s concerns that ratings would plummet if they did not fall in behind Trump. This obsession with ratings meant that short-term considerations were always paramount. The cynicism and evasions of Fox News’s senior managers was eventually exposed by Dominion Voting Systems’s legal suit against the network.

As the primaries for the 2024 election loomed, Murdoch’s early embrace of Ron DeSantis turned into a disaster. The Florida governor’s credentials as a culture wars protagonist were strong, and some saw him as Trump without the baggage, but he instead proved to be Trump without the charisma, or the populist touch, or the support.

Trump, now near-unchallenged within the Republican Party, was not inclined to kiss and make up. He boycotted Fox’s staging of debates and mounted a stream of invective against them. Privately he was scathing of Murdoch, who at ninety-two had just announced his fifth marriage. “Only one reason why: prove you can still fucking do it even though everyone knows you can’t,” he claimed. “It’s a fake news marriage.”

I should conclude with a confession. After Trump’s victory in 2016, I wrote an article for Inside Story, most of which covered Fox’s performance and problems in the lead-up to the presidential campaign. I finished by suggesting that Trump’s election could be a pyrrhic victory for Fox. I noted how the network’s ratings declined during George W. Bush’s presidency, especially in its final year, and suggested that if and when Trump’s political fortunes fell, Fox News would also be in trouble.

I was wrong. I was still focused on the old mainstream media and the old politics. I severely underestimated how successfully Trump could shift the blame for his multiple failures, at least to the satisfaction of his core supporters. Nor did I fully grasp just how niche-driven Fox’s programming strategy had become. Its ratings were not sensitive to shifts in mainstream opinion; rather they relied on keeping faith with Trump’s core.

How will the Murdoch media approach the 2024 election, and what role will its ninety-three-year-old “semi-retired” “chairman emeritus” play? Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party means that many of its candidates and apparatchiks have to face a loyalty test by embracing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. With one party strongly committed to a baseless fiction, the election presents unique challenges for all the news media, but especially for a network whose ratings are tied to whether it satisfies Trump’s constituency.

No doubt Rupert was and is keen to divorce Donald, but Trump looks likely to get custody not only of the Republican Party but of Fox News as well. •

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While not mentioned by Schudson, nothing spoke to the rise of “objective journalism” more clearly than the rise of “scientific” polling: the attempt to document “the voice of the people” based on interviews that, in principle, gave every citizen an equal chance of being heard, of saying what they had to say, via questions free of bias, that bane of objectivity.

George Gallup, a figure central to the spread of polling, presented poll-takers, in his polling manifesto The Pulse of Democracy (1940), as people “moving freely about all sorts and conditions of men and noting how they are affected by the news or arguments brought from day to day to their knowledge.” Gallup took this model from James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888), but his own polling, with its set questions and predetermined response categories, was far removed from the kind of observation Bryce favoured

In reality, Gallup followed a news-making model — the model exemplified by press conferences and media releases, where news is made for the press without being controlled by the press. Gallup not only created news, controlling what was asked, how it was asked and when; he also syndicated his results to a broad range of newspapers. Having his polls published by papers whose politics ranged widely shored up his claims to objectivity.

A parallel existed with the Associated Press, America’s first wire service. Since it “gathered news for publication in a variety of papers with widely different political allegiances,” Schudson notes, “it could only succeed by making its reporting “objective” enough to be acceptable to all its members and clients.”

While servicing a diverse range of outlets was central to Gallup in America, this is not what happened in Australia. When Keith Murdoch introduced the Gallup Poll here in 1941 he made sure that the company he set up to run it was controlled by his own Herald and Weekly Times and its associates in various states. Although Australian Public Opinion Polls (“The Gallup Method”) was notionally independent, executives from the Herald and Weekly Times, including Murdoch, could (and did) influence the questions Roy Morgan, APOP’s managing director, asked, including whether they should be repeated from poll to poll.

Whereas the American Gallup boasted subscribing newspapers that were Republican (as Gallup himself may have been), Democrat and independent, none of the newspapers that subscribed to the Australian Gallup Poll are likely to have ever editorialised in favour of federal Labor; for many years, Morgan himself was an anti-Labor member of the Melbourne City Council.

Much of the polling done in America and later in Australia, however, fits a third model: things that the press creates either directly (in-house polling; for example, of a newspaper’s own readers) or indirectly (by commissioning an independent market research firm to ask questions on the newspaper’s behalf). Media products that fit this category range from Clyde Packer’s creation of the Miss Australia contest in the 1920s (also copied from America) and the Australian Financial Review’s endless business “summits” in the 2020s, to the media’s ubiquitous sit-down interviews with politicians and celebrities. This is now the dominant model.

Creating news is the surest route to having an “exclusive” and creating “product differentiation.” If the “exclusive” is produced often enough, is highly valued, and prominently flagged — polling is now featured on the front page — it becomes a way of building “brand loyalty.” Newspapers that regularly commission polls from the same source, or that have a regular but non-financial relationship with a pollster, hope for all of this. Media that don’t commission their own polls — television and radio, especially — are often happy to recycle polls published in the press.

Brand loyalty is a way of building a readership. When it comes to polling, it generally means not citing polls generated by competing brands — especially polls that could raise doubts about one’s own polls. Where different polls produce different — even conflicting — results, this usually means that the rules of objectivity that require journalists to confirm their stories using more than one source are readily abandoned. While some newspapers are more brand-focused than others, journalists consulting their own polls and not others has become standard practice.

In polling, the strength of any brand — the reputation of the poll — depends on the prestige of the news outlet that publishes it. It also depends on the poll’s record, and that record is assessed against the few objective measures that exist: election results and referendums.

Polls that score well on these measures are more likely to be trusted on things other than the vote. That, at least, is the hope of the companies that poll for the press or have their polls publicised by the press. Companies involved in the prediction business try to ensure that their polls come as close as possible to predicting the actual vote — closer, certainly, than any of their rivals.

What pollsters hope to be trusted on, as a result of the accuracy on these measures, is everything else they do for the press — notably, reporting on the popularity of party leaders and taking “the pulse” (as Gallup liked to say) on issues of public policy. More than that, they are after a spillover or halo effect for their market research businesses more generally; financially, this is the point of involving themselves in the not particularly lucrative business of predicting votes. Trust is important because what companies report on matters other than the vote typically cannot be checked directly against any external measure.

Absent any objective check, there is always a risk of polling that panders, consciously or otherwise, to the client’s agenda or the pollster’s preferences. Against this happening, the guardrails erected by industry bodies like the relatively new Australian Polling Council or the old (Market) Research Society are either weak or non-existent — the APC mostly concerned that pollsters explain their methods and post their questionnaires online, a very welcome development but one that stops well short of setting wide-ranging standards in relation to the questions members ask; the Research Society mostly concerned to reassure respondents about the way polling companies protect their privacy.

Newspoll — and other polls

Enter Newspoll, a brand owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Established for a high-end newspaper, the Australian — whose news and views are seen by some as exerting an out-size influence on conservative politics — Newspoll can claim a record of predicting national elections second to none.

In the course of conducting its most recent poll — a fortnightly event that usually grabs the headlines for what it has to say about national voting intentions, leadership satisfaction and preferred prime minister — Newspoll raised the issue of nuclear power. “There is a proposal to build several small modular nuclear reactors around Australia to produce zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired,” Newspoll told respondents (emphasis in the original). It then asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?” Respondents were invited to select one answer: “Strongly approve” (22 per cent); “Somewhat approve” (33 per cent); “Somewhat disapprove” (14 per cent); “Strongly disapprove” (17 per cent); “Don’t know” (14 per cent). In short: 55 per cent in favour; 31 per cent against; 14 per cent not prepared to say either way.

As Newspoll might have anticipated on an issue as contentious as this, its question generated controversy. Unimpressed, the economist John Quiggin proposed — tongue-in-cheek — a quite different way the question might have been worded: “There is a proposal to keep coal-fired power stations operating until the development of small nuclear reactors which might, in the future, supply zero-emissions energy. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?”

A question on nuclear power could have been asked in any number of ways: by putting the arguments for and against nuclear power; by taking the timeline for getting nuclear power up and running and comparing it to the timeline for wind + solar + hydro; by asking who should pay (governments, consumers, industry, etc.) for different forms of energy with zero emissions, and how much they should pay; by qualifying the “zero-emissions” solution with some reference to the waste disposal problem; by omitting the words “small, modular” — not just descriptors but, potentially at least, words of reassurance; and so on.

Different questions might still have produced a majority in favour of nuclear energy. A question asked for the Institute of Public Affairs by Dynata, in April 2022, on whether Australia should build nuclear power plants to supply electricity and reduce carbon emissions,” found a majority (53 per cent agreeing), and an even lower level of opposition (23 per cent).

As with Newspoll, the IPA poll raised considerations that invited an affirmative response: “small modular,” “zero-emissions energy,” “on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired” (Newspoll); “to supply electricity,” “reduce carbon omissions” (IPA). Not a single consideration in either poll might have prompted a negative response.

The high proportion in the IPA survey neither agreeing nor disagreeing (24 per cent) — an option Newspoll didn’t offer — allowed respondents who actually had an opinion to conceal it, Swedish research on attitudes to nuclear power suggests. So, while the level of opposition recorded by the IPA might have been higher without the “easy out,” the level of support might have been higher too.

Other questions about nuclear power failed to attract majority support. Asked in September by Freshwater “if Australia needs nuclear power” (the precise question was not published), and presented with a set of response options similar to those offered by the IPA, 37 per cent of respondents supported nuclear power and 36 per cent opposed it, 18 per cent saying they were “neutral” and 12 per cent “unsure.” Apart from coal (supported by 33 per cent), every other energy source received wider support: hydrogen (47 per cent), natural gas (56 per cent), offshore wind (58 per cent), onshore wind (61 per cent) and solar (84 per cent).

Asked in the same poll whether “Australia should remove the ban on nuclear power development,” 44 per cent agreed. But asked whether they agreed or disagreed that “Australia does not need to generate any energy from nuclear power,” 36 per cent disagreed. Similarly, no more than 35 per agreed that “the federal government must consider small nuclear modular reactors as part of the future energy mix” — a much lower figure than Newspoll’s, even if the question isn’t necessarily better.

Freshwater also asked respondents to choose between two trade-offs: “Australia builds nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are replaced earlier” (44 per cent chose this one) and “Australia does not build nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are extended” (38 per cent); 18 per cent were “unsure.” Respondents opposed to both coal and nuclear power were left with only one place to go — “unsure.” But on the poll’s own evidence — 33 per cent supporting coal, 36 per cent supporting nuclear — the figure of 18 per cent appears to underestimate this group considerably.

Another question on nuclear power, this time asked by RedBridge, is said to have shown a 35–32 split over “the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy need.” As yet, however, neither the question nor any figures have been posted on its website.

Yet another question, asked in February by Resolve for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, also failed to show majority support for nuclear power. Told that “there has been some debate about the use of nuclear power in Australia recently” and asked for their “own view,” respondents split four ways: “I support the use of nuclear power in Australia” (36 per cent); “I do not have a strong view and am open to the government investigating its use” (27 per cent); “I oppose the use of nuclear power in Australia” (25 per cent); and “Undecided” (15 per cent).

In reporting this “exclusive survey,” David Crowe, chief political correspondent for the two papers, made no reference to the Newspoll published the previous day. This, notwithstanding that in reporting the Resolve poll Crowe gave pride of place to “mining billionaire” Andrew Forrest’s attack on the Coalition’s nuclear policy — a policy the Australian suggested had received a “boost” from the Newspoll. Nor did Crowe refer to any other poll.

On one reading, most respondents (61 per cent in the Resolve poll compared to 39 per cent in Newspoll) had “a strong view” (the respondents who declined to say “I do not have a strong view…”), those without “a strong view” either being “open to the government investigating” the use of nuclear power or “undecided.” More likely, the question didn’t measure how strong any of the views were — some of those without strong views being “open to the government investigating its use,” others joining those who harboured strong views (respondents Resolve didn’t directly identify) to indicate either their support or their opposition to nuclear power.

Effectively, the Resolve poll rolled three questions into one — one, about support or opposition to nuclear power; another about the strength of these opinions; and another about “the government investigating” the “use” of nuclear power. But since responses to one of these questions would not necessarily have determined responses to any other, Resolve’s shortcut obscures more about public opinion than it illuminates; a respondent with a strong view, for example, might still have been “open to the government investigating its use.”

In October 2023, Resolve asked another question — this one reportedly commissioned by the consulting firm Society Advisory, and run “exclusively” by Sky News. The result suggested a degree of openness to nuclear power that was even higher than that indicated by Resolve’s poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Asked if “Australia should rethink its moratorium (ban) on nuclear power to give more flexibility in the future,” half (49 per cent) of the respondents were in favour, less than half that number (18 per cent) were against, opposition to “flexibility” requiring some strength, with an extraordinary 33 per cent “unsure” — a sign that this question too was a poor one.

Not only do answers depend on the question, they also depend on the response options. In an extensive survey — not just a one- or two-item poll — conducted in October–November 2023, the British firm Savanta asked respondents “to what extent, if at all,” they supported or opposed using nuclear energy “to generate electricity” in Australia? While 40 per cent said “strongly support” or “tend to support,” 36 per cent said “strongly oppose” or “tend to oppose,” 7 per cent said “Don’t know,” and 17 per cent said they “neither support nor oppose.”

As with the Resolve poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Savanta’s response options — which included “neither support nor oppose” — reduced the chance that its question, however worded, would yield a majority either in favour of nuclear energy or against it; almost as many opposed nuclear energy as supported it, a quarter (24 per cent) choosing to sit on the fence. In the Newspoll, where 55 per cent approved and 31 per cent disapproved, there was no box marked “neither approve nor disapprove.” If there had been, then almost certainly Newspoll would not have found majority support either.

The Savanta survey also shows what happens to support for a single option — here, nuclear power — when respondents are given a range of options. Asked to think about how their “country might shift its current energy generation mix” and given a list of five alternatives, only 23 per cent nominated “nuclear energy”; 41 per cent, almost twice as many, nominated “large-scale solar farms.” Of the rest, 15 per cent nominated “onshore wind farms,” 6 per cent “gas carbon and storage (CCS),” and 4 per cent “biomass from trees.”

Newspoll made no attempt to ascertain whether the public had heard of “small modular nuclear reactors” much less what the public knew about such things. In the Guardian, the proposal was described as “an uncosted Coalition thought-bubble”; in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, former deputy Reserve Bank governor Stephen Grenville noted that there were “just two operational SMRs, both research reactors” and that work on what “was expected to be the first operational commercial SMR” had “been halted as the revised cost per kWH is uneconomic for the distributors who had signed up.” Elsewhere, an academic specialising in electricity generation described SMRs as “not, by any stretch of the imagination, what most people would consider small.”

On what the public knows — or, more accurately, on how much it thinks it knows — the Savanta survey is again useful. When asked what they had heard of nuclear energy, few (8 per cent) said “I have not heard about this energy option” or “don’t know.” But just 18 per cent said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a lot about how it works.” Most said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a little about how it works” (41 per cent) or “I have heard about this energy option, but don’t know how it works (33 per cent).

In a poll conducted by Pure Profile, reported in May 2022, 70 per cent said they didn’t understand “the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.”

… and the Australian

Keen to publicise the result of its Newspoll — a result the paper openly welcomed — the Australian’s reporting of the poll and its commentary around it was tendentious.

The distinction between respondents’ having a view and their having a “strong” view was one it mostly ignored or fudged. The paper’s political editor Simon Benson, reported in Crikey to be “responsible” for the poll, ignored it. He repeatedly represented “majority” support as “strong” support. The fact that pollsters themselves regularly make this mistake shouldn’t make it any more acceptable. If support is a metre wide, it isn’t necessarily a metre deep.

The headline in the print edition — “Powerful Majority Supports Nuclear Option for Energy Security” — fudged the distinction. In itself, 55 per cent is not an overwhelming majority; in 2017, same-sex marriage was supported in the nationwide “survey” by 62 per cent. In itself,  55 per cent is hardly a “powerful” number — one that politicians ignore at their peril; in the lead-up to the same-sex marriage decision, both John Howard and Tony Abbott made it clear that they wouldn’t consider anything less than 60 per cent in favour to be a number that the parliament would have to heed. Had 55 per cent (not 36 per cent) “strongly” approved nuclear reactors, the Australian would have had a defensible case. But even in polls that offer a binary choice, “strong” majorities are rare.

Rather than representing a “powerful majority” in favour of the “nuclear option,” Newspoll’s figures might equally be said to show that most respondents (61 per cent) did not feel strongly one way or the other — a majority that the Australian would not have wanted to call “powerful.”

A highlight, Benson argued, was the fact that respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four — “the demographic most concerned about climate change” — was the demographic most likely to support nuclear power, 65–32. “There is no fear of the technology for most people under 40,” he concluded. This line was one that impressed shadow climate change and energy minister, Ted O’Brien, when he discussed the poll on Sky News.

It also resonated with opposition leader Peter Dutton. Attacking the prime minister for being out of touch with public opinion, which he was reported to have said was “warming to nuclear power,” Dutton noted that nuclear power was “supported by a lot of younger people because they are well-read and they know that it’s zero emissions, and it can firm up renewables in the system.”

The news that “NewsPoll [sic] showed a majority of young Australians supporting small-scale nuclear power generation,” even prompted a discussion of the pros and cons of nuclear power — not the pros and cons of the polling — on the ABC.

But eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds as the age group most favourably disposed to nuclear power is not what Essential shows, not what Savanta shows, and not what RedBridge shows. In October’s Essential poll, no more than 46 per cent of respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four supported “nuclear power plants” — the same proportion as those aged thirty-six to fifty-four but a smaller proportion than those aged fifty-five-plus (56 per cent); the proportion of “strong” supporters was actually lower among those aged eighteen to thirty-four than in either of the other age-groups.

In the Savanta survey, those aged eighteen to thirty-four were the least likely to favour nuclear energy; only about 36 per cent were in favour, strongly or otherwise, not much more than half the number that Newspoll reported.

And according to a report of the polling conducted in February by RedBridge, sourced to Tony Barry, a partner and former deputy state director of the Victorian Liberal Party, “[w]here there is support” for nuclear power. “it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.”

In the Australian, the leader writer observed that “public support for considering nuclear power in Australia is rising as the cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge becomes more real.” But Newspoll had never sought to establish what respondents think are the “cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge” so it could hardly have shown whether these thoughts have changed.

Benson’s remark, on the Australian’s front page, that the poll showed “growing community support” for nuclear power was also without warrant; “growing community support” is something that the poll does not show and that Benson made no attempt to document. Since the question posed by Newspoll had never been asked before, and since polled opinion is sensitive to the way questions are asked, “growing community support” is one thing the poll could not show.

Subsequently, Benson cited Liberal Party polling conducted “immediately after the [May] 2022 election loss” which “had support at 31 per cent.” The question? Benson doesn’t say. Is it really likely, as Benson believes, that in a “short space of time,” as he describes it — less than two years — support for nuclear power could have jumped from 31 per cent to 55 per cent? The considerable shift in polled opinion on same-sex marriage that Wikipedia suggests happened sometime between 2004 and 2007 is hardly likely to have happened since 2022 in relation to nuclear energy.

Peta Credlin, Australian columnist and Sky News presenter, argued the growing-support line by stringing together: a poll conducted in 2015 (by Essential, though she didn’t identify it as an Essential poll), which had support at 40 per cent; the IPA poll (which it was safe to name) from 2022, which had support at 53 per cent; and the Newspoll, which had it at 55 per cent. Not only was each of these conducted by a different pollster, hence subject to different “house effects”; each had posed their own question.

Had the Australian wanted to see whether support really was growing it might have considered re-running one of the questions it had asked years before — or, preferably, re-run more than one. But perhaps the point of the polling was not to show that support was growing but to create the impression that it was growing — that it had a momentum that might leave Labor, “in its fanatical opposition to nuclear power,” as Benson wrote, stranded on “the wrong side of history.”

This was not the first time the Australian has interpreted the results of a Newspoll as heralding a turning point on this issue. In 2007, shortly before prime minister John Howard announced that the Coalition would set up a nuclear regulatory regime and remove any unreasonable impediments to the building of nuclear power plants in Australia, the Australian told its readers that there had been a “dramatic shift” in support for nuclear power. The basis of its claim: questions asked by Newspoll — two in 2006, one in 2007. (In those days Newspoll was a market research company, not a polling brand whose field work had been outsourced first to YouGov and more recently to Pyxis.)

The questions asked in 2006 were not the same as the question asked in 2007. In May and December 2006, Newspoll told respondents: “Currently, while there is a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney used for medical and scientific purposes, there are no nuclear power stations being built in Australia.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against nuclear power stations in Australia?” The majority was against: 38–51, in May; 35–50, in December.

In March 2007, Newspoll changed the question, and framed it quite differently: “Thinking now about reducing gas emissions to help address climate change,” it asked, “are you personally in favour or against the development of a nuclear power industry in Australia, as one of a range of energy solutions to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?” On this, opinion was fairly evenly split: 45–40. The majority were not against; in fact, there was a plurality in favour. The Australian’s interpretation: in just four months, Dennis Shanahan and Sid Marris concluded, the attitude of Australians to nuclear energy had “dramatically reversed.”

Not so. After commissioning Newspoll to ask the 2006 question again, in April 2007, the Australia Institute found that the level of support for “nuclear power stations being built in Australia” was 36 per cent (35 per cent in December 2006), the level of opposition was now 46 per cent (previously, 50 per cent), and the “don’t knows” were now 18 per cent (previously 15 per cent). In short, whereas opposition had exceeded support by fifteen percentage points, 50­–35, it now exceeded support by ten points, 46–36 — a decline of five points, but no reversal, dramatic or otherwise.

This time around, both the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald have asked questions similar to the one Newspoll asked in February, but in polls of their readers not in a public opinion poll. Asked, in July 2023, whether Australia should “consider small nuclear reactors as one solution to moving away from fossil fuels?,” the Financial Review’s readers favoured “consider[ing]” the idea, 58–30. Asked, in July 2023, whether “small nuclear power reactors should be part of Australia’s energy mix,” the Herald’s readers opposed the idea, 32–55. Even if these questions had been included in national polls, the Australian might have baulked at citing the results of either, since it would have given oxygen to another brand.

There is evidence of a growth in support for nuclear power between June 2019 and March 2022, but there is no convincing evidence that points to “growing support” in the two years since. When the Lowy Poll asked respondents, in March 2022, whether they supported or opposed “removing the existing ban on nuclear power,” 52 per cent said they supported it, an increase on the level of support in March 2021 (47 per cent). And in September 2021, when Essential asked respondents whether they supported or opposed “Australia developing nuclear power plants for the generation of electricity,” 50 per cent said they supported nuclear power, a sharp increase on the level of support (39 per cent) it reported in June 2019. However, when Essential asked the question again, in October 2023, the level of support hadn’t moved.

The only evidence for a recent shift comes from Resolve. In October 2023, when Resolve first asked the question it asked in February 2024, 33 per cent (compared with 36 per cent in February) supported “the use of nuclear power” and 24 per cent (23 per cent in February) opposed it. (Nine Entertainment appears not to have previously published Resolve’s result for October.) Its February poll represents an increase of four percentage points in the gap between the level of support and the level of opposition, from nine points to thirteen.

But a shift of four points is well within the range one might expect given the vagaries of sampling — the “margin of error” that pollsters regularly parade but just as regularly ignore. Non-sampling error — a much bigger problem than pollsters acknowledge — also might have played a part, especially given a question as complex and confused as the one Resolve asked. Errors of both kinds are compounded by the widespread use by pollsters of opt-in rather than probability-based panels.

Jim Reed, who runs Resolve, is reported as saying that voters “were increasingly open to the potential of nuclear power now the Coalition was advocating for existing technology in large-scale plants.” According to Reed, support has “swung towards at least openness to nuclear power.” But Nine did not reveal what change, if any, Resolve had detected since October in the number without “a strong view” and “open to the government investigating its use (27 per cent in February).” Support, Reed added, was “weak… at the moment simply because people aren’t being asked to approve an actual site.” Even if he had measured strength, which it appears he hadn’t, one could equally imagine support becoming weaker, not stronger, once voters were asked to “asked to approve an actual site.”

What sort of voters did he think were now supportive or at least “open’? “We’ve got a new generation of younger people who are quite positive towards nuclear power,” Reed said. Was this “new generation” evident in October or did it only become evident in February? If it was evident in October, was it responsible for February’s four-point shift? Nothing in what Nine published allows us to say.

While Reed restricted himself, largely, to interpreting the actual data, in the Australian the commentary strayed much further. It wrote, for example, of “the costs and risks of renewable energy” having “become clearer.” But it offered no evidence that those costs and risks had become clearer to the public — not surprisingly, since these too were things about which Newspoll had not asked.

Leveraging the Newspoll result to predict that “most Australians would back a move to small scale nuclear power,” the headline in the online edition of the Australian ignored another distinction — not between strong and weak opinion but between polls that showed un-mobilised opinion and polls that showed mobilised opinion; so, too did Sky News. Any “move to small-scale nuclear power” would be politically contested, and once contested opinion might shift.

Subsequently, Benson ventured a more sober assessment of the Coalition’s prospects of carrying the day. “For Dutton to win the argument,” an argument that would take “courage” to mount, “any Coalition energy policy must be framed in a cost-of-living context that can demonstrate how nuclear power will deliver cheaper and more reliable power into the future,” he wrote. For Dutton to position nuclear power as “a central component” of his energy policy, Benson declared, was “as big and brave as it gets.”

Others went further. In a rare note of dissent within News Corp, James Campbell, national weekend political editor for Saturday and Sunday News Corp newspapers and websites across Australia, called the idea of Dutton “going to the next federal election with plans to introduce nuclear power” as “stark raving mad.” One thing the Coalition should have learnt from the Voice referendum was that “support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition.” And, he added, “there’s the unity problem. Do you really think Liberal candidates in ‘tealy’ places are going to face the front on this?”

Benson, meanwhile, had back-tracked. Pointing again to the distribution of opinion among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds, he advanced a quite different assessment: “the onus is now on Labor to convince Australians why we shouldn’t have nuclear power.” Chris Kenny, the Australian’s associate editor, thought “the nuclear argument could play well in the teal seats where there is an eagerness for climate change and a high degree of economic realism.”

If Benson was right the first time, however, and the Coalition needs to take care over how it frames the debate, then the Savanta data suggest that it may face a few challenges. Asked what impact nuclear energy would have on their “energy bills,” about a third (35 per cent) of its respondents said it would make their bills “much cheaper” or “slightly cheaper,” less than a third (28 per cent) thought it would make them “much more expensive” or “slightly more expensive,” but more than a third (38 per cent) said they either didn’t know or thought it would make “no difference.”

In the Essential poll, conducted around the same time, respondents saw little difference in “total cost including infrastructure and household price” between three energy sources: “renewable energy, such as wind and solar” (38 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 35 per cent, the “least expensive”), nuclear power (34 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 34 per cent, the “least expensive”), and “fossil fuels, such as coal and gas” (28 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 31 per cent, the “least expensive”).

Supporters of nuclear energy may also have to address some of the concerns Benson didn’t mention. In the Savanta study, 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (45 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (32 per cent) about “waste management”; 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (47 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (30 per cent) about “health & safety (ie. nuclear meltdowns, impact on people living nearby)”; and 56 per cent were either “very concerned” (23 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (33 per cent) about the “time it takes to build.”

In another poll, this one conducted by Pure Profile in the first half of 2022, respondents were asked how they would feel if a new nuclear power station were built in their city. Around 50 per cent said they would feel “uncomfortable,” more than a quarter “extremely uncomfortable”; just 7 per cent would have felt “extremely at ease.”

It would be reassuring to think that any newspaper that wanted its polling taken seriously would need to commission better polling than the polling the Australian was so keen to promote. But the Newspoll results were taken seriously by a rival masthead. “The Newspoll published in the Australian,” the political editor of the Australian Financial Review, Phillip Coorey wrote, “found there was now majority support for the power source.”

A week after its poll was published, and its results — with a nod to the Coalition — described as “powerful,” the Australian’s front page led with another “exclusive,” this time courtesy of the Coalition: its “signature energy policy” to be announced “before the May federal budget” would include “a plan identifying potential sites for small nuclear reactors as future net zero sources.” The following day, Benson wrote that Newspoll had “demonstrated strong support for the proposal that Dutton is working on announcing soon.” But the policy Dutton was working on, apparently, was not the policy Newspoll had tested. “The Coalition energy plan,” Benson revealed the same day in another front-page “exclusive,” was “likely to include next-generation large-scale nuclear reactors — not just the small-modular reactors.”

A newspaper that has a position on nuclear power and thinks of polls as an objective measure of public opinion should make sure that the questions it gets (or allows) pollsters to ask, and the results it gets journalists to write up, look fair and reasonable to those on different sides of the debate. In effect, this was the discipline George Gallup placed on himself when he signed up newspapers with divergent views.

Even if a newspaper wanted to use its polling to gee-up its preferred party, it might also think about using its polling to identify some of the risks of pursuing a policy it backed — risks that no party wanting to win an election could sensibly ignore — not just the opportunities to pursue that policy.

Whether Michael Schudson left polling out of his account of objectivity because it didn’t fit with his argument about objectivity as an ideology, or because he didn’t think it a part of journalism — neither journalism nor market research being a profession in the sense that law or medicine are professions — or simply because of an oversight, is unclear.

Better, more comprehensive, polling wouldn’t end the political debate or the debate about the objectivity of the polls. Nor should it. Nonetheless, it might be a good place from which to progress these debates.

Of course, for those who don’t want to foster a debate about the policy or about the polls, any plea for do better is entirely beside the point. •

The post Nuclear power, Newspoll and the nuances of polled opinion appeared first on Inside Story.

January’s rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts announcement — warmly received in voterland, it seems, and made an ostentatious meal of by the opposition — has turned a new page. Now the political class has all but unanimously declared the return of the prime minister’s mojo. Albanese is in control again, looking and acting confident. But the Dunkley by-election on 2 March could change all that, of course, potentially dramatically.

So what’s the point of these incessant, whiplash-inducing analyses of how the parties and leaders are “travelling”? At core they must be about the next election; they can have no purpose otherwise. But once we’ve voted, this term of government will be viewed through the lens of the 2025 result and all today’s twists and turns will be forgotten. The caravan will move on to how the next election is shaping up.

One popular school of thought sees the media’s incessant horse-race adjudications as self-fulfilling. It is in a party’s interests to be described as being on track for electoral victory because the happy vibes will help it get there. With apologies to Sting, I don’t subscribe to this point of view. The narrative certainly influences reality, even around the edges of opinion poll results, but its effects on elections are usually minor and unpredictable.

The idea matters a lot to politicians and their staffers, though, partly because many of their jobs are dedicated to generating good reviews and partly because those reviews can ultimately affect their professional survival.

Peter Dutton, who was always facing a battle to remain Liberal leader for the full term, went into the summer break looking rather happy, but now he’s biting his nails about Dunkley. Albanese, who as prime minister enjoys more institutional fortification, would be harder to shift in the event of a bad result, but government MPs and staffers still imbibe the commentary. No leader enjoys forlorn troops and nervous backbenchers.

Judgements about how the participants are travelling are largely driven by opinion polls — and most of all, far ahead of the others, by Newspoll in the Australian. The tendency reached a nadir of sorts back in 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull talked about Tony Abbott “losing” all those Newspolls. (Albanese borrowed that formulation on the ABC’s 7.30 this month to point out his government has never “lost” one.)

The first Newspoll of 2024, in early February, found 62 per cent believed the government “did the right thing” by rejigging the tax cuts, with just 29 per cent saying they “should have kept their promise and implemented the tax cuts without changing them.”

Voting intentions and personal ratings were virtually identical to Newspoll’s final 2023 survey, which is widely seen as evidence the government didn’t “take a hit” for breaking that election promise. Along with the problems the decision caused (and will continue to cause) for the opposition right through to the next election, and along with the fact that the government was taking control of its destiny, the figures were enough to make it a “win.”

Just between us, though, Labor was a bit lucky with Newspoll’s phrasing. The fact that the changed policy represented the breaking of an ironclad, repeated promise was hidden in one of the responses, the one very few people nominated.

When another pollster, Redbridge, conducted a big survey at about the same time, it posed several questions about those Stage 3 tax cuts. The first (on page 21) simply asked if the government should stick to its repeated promise not to change them; it received a slight plurality in support of sticking with the cuts designed by the Coalition. The second (page 26) described the reported changes and asked about approval; this time the rejigged policy received large support, rather like that found by Newspoll.

All these pollsters’ questions are valid; the point here is that different wording can produce different headlines. A Newspoll question that resembled Redbridge’s first one would have generated very different perceptions about how the changed policy had been received by punters.

Redbridge also found a decrease in the government’s two-party-preferred support from 52.8 per cent in December to 51.2 per cent in February. Yet despite this “swing” the survey was reported very positively for the government in News Corp tabloids. Perhaps it can be difficult to break from the press gallery consensus.

Note that the prime minister is a bare relic of the figure, a year ago, who could do no wrong. How might voters have reacted if he’d announced these changes back then? He might well have taken that “hit” from those sky-high poll numbers. We’ll never know.

Broken election promises are as old as politics itself. From electors’ point of view Albanese is now just another politician; perhaps he had already become one last year. All prime ministers end up like that. “My word is my bond” is henceforth a punchline, like “Honest John” Howard in a previous era.

Like his predecessors, the prime minister is relying on the allure of incumbency: yes, I’m less than honest at times but I get the job done; I make the hard calls for the nation, and that’s what matters.

He even trotted out, also on 7.30, the sense of “trust” reclaimed by both Howard (in 2004) and Gillard (2012). “Australians,” he told Sarah Ferguson, “can trust me to be prepared to have the strength to take the right decisions that are needed.”

It was an overly long sentence, with spits, starts, lulls and twists, but he got there eventually. Rather like the government’s path to Stage 3 Mark II. •

The post How’s he travelling? appeared first on Inside Story.

We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priest. Practice and policy. Show me the church manipulated the systems so that these guys wouldn’t have to face charges. Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again. Show me that it was systemic, that it came from the top down. We’re going after the system. I think that’s the bigger story.

The team, led by Walter Robinson, kept digging and eventually revealed not only the shocking extent of the abuse but the lengths to which the church hierarchy went to protect the abusers. The team’s 600-plus stories during 2002 eventually led to the resignation of Boston’s archbishop, Bernard Law.

The dramatisation of these events, Spotlight, was released in 2015 and won the Academy Award for best picture. Perhaps even more than All the President’s Men, it is a film that makes journalists feel proud of what their work can achieve.

Less than a decade later, though, Spotlight feels like a relic from a bygone era. Since 2015 the size and influence of the legacy news media have diminished markedly within a media ecosystem in which the majority of people in the United States and Australia get their news from social media.

As Brian Stelter documents in his books Hoax (2020) and Network of Lies (2023), news from established outlets like the New York Times sloshes around the internet alongside the toxic swill from Fox News and elsewhere. This tsunami of news and opinion is further polluted by torrents of misinformation and disinformation on social media, whether it’s about vaccines, the 2020 US presidential election or the Voice referendum.

Into this changed, and changing, environment comes Collision of Power, Baron’s memoir of a forty-five-year career in journalism that took him from the Miami Herald via the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times to eleven years editing the Boston Globe and eight years as executive editor of the Washington Post. He stepped down from that last posting, aged sixty-seven, in February 2021.

Baron has spent his entire career in newspapers and is resolutely old school in his belief in the continuing value of public interest journalism and orthodox notions of journalistic objectivity. Collision of Power reads as something of a collision between the world he grew up in, inspired by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1970s reporting on Watergate for the newspaper he eventually edited, and a world in which countless journalistic disclosures about Donald Trump’s manifest unfitness for office made not a jot of difference to his supporter base.

Does this mean Baron’s memoir should be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the dinosaurs of print? Well, unlike many journalists’ memoirs, this one is not marinated in tales of derring-do and all-night drinking marathons. Baron spent most of his career as an editor rather than on-the-road journalist and his book is all about the work.

I only know that Baron rarely drinks because he said so after winning the 2016 Christopher Hitchens prize, and then only to compare himself with the famously lubricated Hitchens and make a larger point — that they might have approached life differently but they shared the same journalistic values. But he does wryly acknowledge the accuracy of Schreiber’s portrayal of him in Spotlight as “humourless, laconic, and yet resolute.”

The three main threads running throughout Collision of Power are flagged in its subtitle: “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.” Baron was appointed executive editor of that newspaper in 2013, a time when Donald Trump’s name was still good for a laugh, courtesy of Barack Obama, at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. He stepped down the month after Trump left office still proclaiming he had won the previous November’s election.

Baron reflects that the Post, like the rest of the mainstream news media, had underestimated Trump’s appeal to many Americans. After the 2016 election he resolved to devote more resources to getting reporters out across the country to tap into ordinary people’s experiences and concerns. He also concedes that the Post put too much weight on Hillary Clinton’s slipshod secrecy about her emails during her presidential campaign.

Before the election, Baron and his journalists had learnt how Trump dealt with the media — how he alternated between feeding them stories and gossip, as he had done for years as a New York property developer, and threatening to cut off access or, worse, if he became president, change the libel laws to make it easier for public figures to sue journalists. As Trump railed about “the fake news media” and levelled personal insults at individual journalists, Baron stressed that “We’re not at war with the administration. We’re at work.”

The “work” was published continuously, including in a multi-authored book, Trump Revealed, that covered many aspects of the candidate’s life, from real estate to allegations of sexual harassment, and from his business ventures to his television career. The newspaper’s fact-checking unit tracked Trump’s runaway capacity for exaggeration and deceit, finding that during his presidency he told 30,573 lies.

When the Post’s David Fahrenthold decided to test Trump’s self-seeded reputation as a philanthropist, for instance, he found fallow ground. The Trump Foundation had received US$5.5 million but claimed to have pledged US$8.5 million to various causes. Notoriously, one donation made by Trump was for a portrait of himself that Fahrenthold’s citizen sleuths on social media found in his Florida golf resort. Fahrenthold also broke the story of the notorious Access Hollywood tapes.

Throughout the Trump presidency, the Washington Post and the New York Times competed hard to break stories that would hold Trump and his staff to account. The sheer number of important disclosures they made is easy to forget, partly because there seemed no end of chaos in the Trump administration and partly because no matter what Trump did he was exonerated because the Republicans had the numbers in the Senate. Almost without exception, they refused to examine issues on their merits and voted out of blind, fearful loyalty to Trump.

Baron’s careful recounting of the many scandals of the Trump administration is both a salutary and a dispiriting experience for the reader. Salutary because we may have forgotten how damaging Trump’s presidency was to so many (remember the one million–plus US deaths from Covid-19?) and dispiriting because he continues to evade responsibility for his actions.

As Trump heads towards the Republican nomination for the 2024 election, the various court cases brought against him are mired in process, delays and appeals. Baron’s memoir reminds us that it was the Post’s reporter Amy Gardner who broke the story that led to one of the most serious post–2020 election cases: how Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, received a phone call from Trump urging him to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the southern state.

According to the recording Gardner obtained, Trump said to Raffensperger: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Trump faces thirteen criminal charges for trying to undo the Georgia result.

Baron’s acute awareness of the threat posed by a second Trump presidency explains why he feels compelled to go over events in such detail. What he doesn’t reflect on is how and why Trump has been able to recover from the ignominy surrounding his 2020 loss. It is a commonplace of commentary to say that Trump’s rise is a symptom of disease in the Republican Party. But has there ever been a symptom so potent and deep-seated, given that the Republican Party is now the Trump Party in all but name?

The media’s role in aiding and abetting Trump’s rise from the ashes of 2020 is something Baron could also have reflected on. Trump is an attention magnet, and the news media has been unable to resist the pull of a figure who sees politics in the hyperventilating, hypermasculine style of pro wrestling. Unable but also, perhaps, unwilling: Les Moonves, the chairman of the CBS television company, infamously said in 2016 that Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

The evidence is in on the “may not be good for America” part, so it is truly galling to see the news media rushing to cover Trump’s every recent move in classic horserace style. Left behind at the starter’s gate is context, history or a strong enough sense of the grave risk to democracy.

As New York journalism professor Jay Rosen says, the organising principle for the news media as it covers the 2024 presidential election should be “not the odds, but the stakes.” That is, “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy, given what’s possible in this election.” He points to a 2023 piece by Brynn Tannehill in the New Republic as an example of “stakes commentary” whose analysis is both plausible and terrifying. It’s well worth reading.

Collision of Power’s second thread is Jeff Bezos’s surprise purchase in 2013 of the Washington Post from the Graham family, which had owned it since 1933. Like many other media outlets, the Post was struggling to adapt its business model to survive commercially in the digital media age.

One of the world’s richest men (he was worth US$25 billion at the time), Bezos bought the paper out of his own pocket for US$250 million rather than through the company he founded, Amazon. According to Baron, he did so out of a commitment to sustaining public interest journalism.

Bezos’s motivation and plans for the paper attracted a lot of scepticism at the time. Why would a leader of one of the global tech behemoths that had laid waste to the print media’s business model want to buy one of these financially ailing newspapers? Would he allow the Washington Post to report without fear or favour on Amazon, especially given the company’s long history of stonewalling journalists probing its hostility to labour unions, to take one example among many? Would he be an interventionist proprietor?

Soon after buying the paper, Bezos met staff in the “windowless, cavernous and thoroughly charmless ‘community room’” next to the newspaper’s auditorium and fielded questions, including one from famed veteran investigative reporter, Bob Woodward: “How and why did you decide to buy the Post?” (“Hardball,” cracked another journalist.) Bezos answered that he had asked himself three questions before making the decision. Was the newspaper an important institution? Yes, of course. Did it have a future? Yes, in the right circumstances. Did he have anything to contribute, especially as he lived on the opposite coast, in Seattle? Yes, he could provide “runway”; that is, long-term investment that would allow time for experiments to succeed or fail.

And on the question of the newspaper’s coverage of him and his company? “Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.” According to Baron, the newspaper did just that. Its resolve was tested in 2019 when the National Enquirer revealed Bezos had been conducting an affair with a media personality, Lauren Sánchez, including sending her “dick pics.” Baron says the Post covered the issue professionally but acknowledges it could not quite nail down whether the National Enquirer’s story was a political hit job.

The Enquirer, known to be close to Donald Trump, is a supermarket tabloid that engages in “catch and kill”: using a legally enforceable non-disclosure agreement, it buys exclusive rights to “catch” the damaging story from an individual before “killing” it for the benefit of a third party. Trump had been pursuing a vendetta against Bezos and what he called “the Amazon Post.”

On the question of proprietorial interference, though, Baron is adamant: “Bezos never interfered in the Post’s journalism during my seven years plus under his ownership, even if coverage of Amazon put the company in an unfavourable light. For all the speculation that Bezos would use the Post to exercise influence, I never saw any evidence he had or would. I got the sense Bezos relished the challenge of turning around the Post.”

Not that Bezos initially understood exactly how journalism is produced. Like Fred Hilmer, the management consultant who was Fairfax Media’s CEO between 1998 and 2005, Bezos was, and is, obsessed by metrics. He wanted the newspaper’s online website to devote more of its resources to “aggregating” other outlets’ stories into shorter pieces with clickbait headlines, and he wanted each story done in fifteen minutes.

Baron could see the idea’s commercial savvy — it was a “bargain-basement way to profit off the work of others” — but found it intensely annoying that the readers he wanted to consume the newspaper’s original reporting would be drawn in by these “digital gillnets.”

Bezos separated journalists into two categories: those whose work had a “direct impact on the product” (reporters) and those who had an indirect impact (editors). Hire more of the former and fewer of the latter, Baron was told, but he resisted. He believed good editors were essential to “directing and coordinating coverage and ensuring that it meets our quality standards.”

Baron tussled with Bezos on these issues throughout his tenure. He came to appreciate Bezos’s genuine insights into improving the company’s efficiency, and he welcomed Bezos’s commitment to deepening and broadening coverage by hiring more journalists. The number of political journalists at the paper doubled during Baron’s time there, and before the 2016 election an eight-person “rapid-response investigative team” was established. In time, improvements in how the paper’s stories were packaged and delivered to readers reaped rewards in both reach and subscription numbers.

Bezos also came to appreciate the particular role newspapers play in society and the particular culture a newsroom needs if its staff are going to publish stories that anger and upset powerful people, including presidents. When Ben Bradlee, a legendary predecessor of Baron who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, died in 2014, Bezos was not planning to attend the funeral until he received an email from Bob Woodward reminding him not only of Bradlee’s importance in the paper’s history but also that he was “the soul of the institution that’s now yours.” Bezos attended, and afterwards described it as an “awakening” for him.

The new owner imbibed the example of Katharine Graham, publisher between 1963 and 1991, whose steadfast support of the paper during Watergate earned her the ire of the Nixon administration, which planned payback by encouraging its allies to challenge the licences of the Graham family’s television stations.

Trump initially tried charming Bezos before asking him to use his position to secure favourable coverage. When Bezos rebuffed his demands, Trump launched a ferocious campaign against Amazon. He claimed the company should pay higher postal rates for its goods and more tax — a bit rich coming from someone who had boasted about not paying much tax.

Partly because of Amazon’s public unpopularity, many underplayed what Trump was doing. Baron, however, cites a 2019 article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine: “The story here is almost certainly a massive scandal, probably more significant than the Ukraine scandal that spurred impeachment proceedings. Trump improperly used government policy to punish the owner of an independent newspaper as retribution for critical coverage.”

Running alongside commercially oriented discussions are sharpening challenges to Baron’s sense of journalistic ethics. In the third thread in Collision of Power he discusses his stewardship of an important newspaper during what has been, and continues to be, a difficult period for the news media. He illustrates the challenges with detailed accounts of the cases of Wes Lowery and Felicia Sonmez.

Lowery won a Pulitzer for his reporting on police shootings in 2015; Sonmez was a breaking news reporter. Both fell foul of the newspaper’s social media policy by tweeting their views on various controversies, including Trump’s racist comments about four progressive congresswomen of colour (Lowery) and sexual assault allegations against high-profile sports stars and other journalists (Sonmez).

Lowery left the newspaper and began speaking out about what he saw as the bankrupt nature of objectivity in journalism. Last year he wrote a thought-provoking essay, “A Test of the News,” for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he highlighted how journalists from diverse backgrounds are feeling increasingly frustrated and disenchanted by how news stories are chosen and framed from what Lowery sees as a predominantly upper-class, white, male perspective.

The lack of diversity in American (and for that matter Australian) newsrooms has been a problem for many years. In 1971, according to the American Journalist Project, just 3.9 per cent of those working in newsrooms were Black. By 2013 the percentage figure had still only nudged up to 4.1.

Journalistic objectivity has also been the subject of controversy for many years. Historically, journalists and editors liked to think their decisions about news selection were arrived at dispassionately. At best they were discounting, and at worst they were oblivious to, the values — personal, cultural and ideological — underpinning their decisions. Even the language of the newsroom, with its talk of “a nose for news” or, more formally, “news values,” gives the game away. Whose nose, what values?

Behind the cloak of objectivity are hidden all sorts of journalistic shibboleths. The horserace coverage of electoral contests, for instance, has been analysed in the academic literature since at least 1980, but the news media seems unable or unwilling to recognise the problems of reporting politics as if it were a sporting event.

Another example: people in positions of power and authority, especially presidents and prime ministers, are accorded at least 50 per cent of space in news items simply because of their status. When an allegation is made against them, they must be asked for a response. When president George W. Bush built the case — spurious as it turned out — to invade Iraq in 2003, he was able to game the journalistic requirement for balance. Donald Trump, of course, has pushed that game several moves down the board.

Objectivity in a scientific sense is unattainable. Journalists are human beings. The news media industry’s relentless pushing of the idea that news reporting can be objective has simply sent an open invitation to everyone to play spot the bias.

What journalists can and should pursue is an objective method of verification, as is cogently outlined in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s essential guide, The Elements of Journalism. At its simplest, this means seeking out all perspectives on an issue, especially a contentious issue, and reporting viewpoints dispassionately. Drawing on a range of views blunts a journalist’s tendency to serve up their biases or simply opine.

That doesn’t mean accepting any and every view. As the quote variously attributed to Jonathan Foster and Hubert Mewhinney has it: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”

First published in 2001, Kovach and Rosenstiel’s book has been revised three times to keep up to date with trends and debates, including on newsroom diversity. They cite a Black business executive, Peter Bell, who says arguments for greater diversity in newsrooms presuppose that all Black people or all women think alike. “What is the Black position on any given issue? The answer, of course, is that there isn’t one.”

Conversely, a Black journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, says the rage she feels about racial injustice drives her reporting. Rather than the word objectivity, she talks about meticulous research, evidence and transparency as guiding principles that strengthen her storytelling.

For Kovach and Rosenstiel, “Independence from faction suggests there is a way to produce journalism without either denying the influence of personal experience or being hostage to it.” As much as greater diversity along racial, gender or gender-identity lines is needed, they argue that newsrooms also need intellectual and ideological diversity.

In 1971, 26 per cent of American journalists identified themselves as Republicans, 36 per cent as Democrats and 33 per cent as independents. By 2013, the number of Republicans had dropped to 7 per cent while the number of Democrats had fallen slightly to 28 per cent and the number of independents had risen to 50 per cent.

In practice, according to Kovach and Rosenstiel, this means “on the crush of deadline, journalists often expect everyone in the newsroom to think the same way rather than embracing debate inspired by personal background… It has been safer to default to a vision of journalistic consciousness that pretends politics doesn’t enter into it.”

Baron, for his part, supports the need for greater newsroom diversity and has seen the benefit of journalists using social media for their work. But he is also a socially conservative person for whom the story is what matters, not him or his opinions. As much as anything, that was what he disapproved of when Lowery (whose work he greatly admired) took to Twitter.

This is a valuable book by a self-effacing but outstanding editor. It is no small irony that, having been inspired by the newspaper’s Watergate reporting, Baron seems blind to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the first newspaper journalists to become celebrities. It was their book, All the President’s Men, and the film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (with Jason Robards as Bradlee) that created the Watergate legend.

The horse known as the unheralded journalist has long since bolted. The doors of the stable containing the social media horse were also flung open several years ago. The question now is whether media outlets and their journalists can find the balance between opinion and reporting and between free speech and company loyalty. •

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post
By Martin Baron | Flatiron Books | $74.99 | 548 pages

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There was no fraud. The postmasters’ lives were destroyed because of faults in the Post Office’s Horizon computer network. But much like Australia’s robodebt system, Horizon was regarded as infallible. Attempts to raise the alarm were ignored; people who sought help were hounded for non-existent debts. As in Australia, those whose lives were turned upside down struggled to gain the attention of established media outlets; it was individual journalists and smaller publications that kept digging and probing, and refused to accept Post Office spin.

It wasn’t until January this year that prime minister Rishi Sunak conceded it was one of Britain’s greatest-ever miscarriages of justice. He has committed his government to a “blanket exoneration” of hundreds of wrongfully convicted individuals and promised them “at least £600,000 in compensation to rebuild their lives.”

Three compensation schemes have already been set up and around one hundred convictions overturned by appeal courts. A public inquiry led by a retired High Court judge began hearings in February 2021 and is likely to continue at least until September this year. In the meantime, many former postmasters remain destitute or seriously out of pocket. They are waiting not only for redress but also for the full truth about what went wrong in the executive ranks of the Post Office.

While details continue to dribble out, so far no senior managers have been held to account, though former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells has offered to hand back the CBE she was awarded in 2019.

Vennells said she was “truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted.” Whether or not Vennells loses her gong is up to King Charles. The union representing Post Office employees reckons if she were truly remorseful then she’d offer to repay her performance bonuses as well.

Solicitor Neil Hudgell told a January hearing before the parliament’s business and trade committee that the Post Office spent £100 million “defending the indefensible” through the courts yet he has clients who are still waiting on reimbursements of a few hundred pounds. He said the contest between postmasters and Post Office was characterised from the start by an inequality of arms. “You are facing this big beast in the Post Office, with all the machinery that sits behind it,” he added. “You have some poor person who is being accused of doing something hideous who does not have that.”

On top of the financial losses comes the psychological toll. Hudgell says his firm has more than a hundred psychiatric reports for clients diagnosed with depressive illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia. At least four former postmasters are thought to have committed suicide, and more than thirty have passed away while awaiting justice in their cases.

The saga goes back to 1999, when the Post Office began rolling out a new computerised accounting system to its thousands of branches and sub-branches, many of which operate as franchises run by subpostmasters. Essentially, the subpostmasters are independent contractors delivering services under an agreement with the Post Office. Many also operate a shop, cafe or other small business on the side.

As in Australia, people go to their local post office for much more than stamps and parcels. Branches offer banking and bill payment services, and handle applications for passports and other critical official documents. Subpostmasters play a central role in villages and small towns. They are often trusted as advisers and confidants, especially for older, less digitally connected citizens. To be accused of putting their hands in the till was a mortifying experience.

The new Horizon computer system, developed by Fujitsu, was meant to make it easier for postmasters to balance their books. But problems were evident from the start. In 1998, Alan Bates invested around £60,000 to buy a shop with a post counter in the town of Llandudno, in north Wales. After Horizon was introduced, discrepancies quickly appeared in his accounts, and Bates found himself £6000 short.

“I managed to track that down after a huge amount of effort through a whole batch of duplicated transactions,” he recalled. Meticulous record keeping enabled Bates to show that the problem lay with the computer system and was not the result of carelessness or fraud. Still, in 2003, the Post Office terminated his contract, saying £1200 was unaccounted for.

Unlike other postmasters, Bates was not prosecuted or forced into bankruptcy, but the injustice and the lost investment cut deep. Post Office investigators insisted that he was the only subpostmaster reporting glitches with the computer system, but Bates was certain that there must be others. He was right. RAF veteran Lee Castleton challenged the Post Office in court after it suspended him over an alleged debt of almost £23,000. In the first instance, the Post Office failed to show up at court and he won. Months later, the Post Office raised the case to the High Court. Castleton represented himself, lost, had costs awarded against him and was rendered bankrupt.

Castleton managed to convince a young journalist at the trade publication Computer Weekly to investigate. Rebecca Thomson found six other examples of people who’d been accused of stealing from the Post Office, including Alan Bates, who had tried a few years earlier to interest the same magazine in his case.

National newspapers and broadcasters failed to pick up Thomson’s 2009 story. “It really did go out to a clanging silence,” Thomson told the Sunday Times in 2022. “I was super-ambitious, and I was disappointed and a bit confused about the fact that there had been so little reaction to the story, because I still continue to feel like it was incredibly strong.”

What Thomson achieved, though, was to confirm Alan Bates’s hunch that he was not alone. Bates reached out to other subpostmasters in Thomson’s story and discovered they’d been told the same thing as him: no one else has had a problem with Horizon, you’re the only one. This Post Office mantra was a bare-faced lie.

Bates and his newfound allies founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance with the aim of “exposing the failures of Post Office, its Board, its management and its Horizon computer system.” Their campaign for truth and justice is the subject of the four-part television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, starring Toby Jones as Alan Bates, that aired on British TV in January.

The series put the scandal and the ongoing public inquiry firmly back in the headlines (Rishi Sunak’s belated response to years of revelations came a few days later) but it would not have been possible without fourteen years of dogged, dedicated journalism. Since Thomson broke the story in 2009, Computer Weekly has published about 350 follow-up articles on the issue. Separately, freelance journalist Nick Wallis has pursued the story since 2010, at times relying on crowdfunding to finance his work.

In 2010, Wallis was working at a local BBC radio station when a flippant response to a tweet put him in contact with Davinder Misra, the owner of a local cab company, who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Seema Misra had been convicted of theft and false accounting and sentenced to fifteen months jail. The Post Office claimed she had misappropriated almost £75,000 from her branch in West Byfleet in Surrey.

With roots stretching back to 1660 and the reign of Charles II, the Post Office is in many respects a law unto itself. It doesn’t have to jump through the hurdles of police investigations or case reviews by a public prosecutor to launch prosecutions. It has huge resources to employ top silks to represent it. Against its might, people like Seema Misra didn’t stand a chance.

Unaware at the time of Thomson’s article in Computer World, Wallis decided to investigate. He has been writing and broadcasting about the Post Office scandal ever since. He has been a producer, presenter or consultant on three episodes of Panorama, the BBC’s equivalent of the ABC’s Four Corners, he has written a book, The Great Post Office Scandal, he made a podcast series, and he maintains a website dedicated to continuing coverage of the story.

Wallis also acted as a consultant on Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He told the Press Gazette he was “blown away” by the program and what it had achieved. Yet he stressed that it is Bates and the other postmasters who should take the credit for getting the scandal into the open and convictions overturned.

Seven screens Mr Bates vs the Post Office in Australia this week. If you can put up with the ad breaks, the series is well worth watching. It’s an engaging, heartwarming story of decent, ordinary folk standing up against the powerful and the entitled and eventually winning against the odds. If you want to understand the story more fully, though, and to hear directly from those most affected — people like Alan Bates, Seema Misra and Lee Castleton — then I’d recommend The Great Post Office Trial, Nick Wallis’s podcast for BBC Radio 4. It’s a compelling tale that shows what good journalism can achieve. •

The post Lost in the post appeared first on Inside Story.

Here’s how the press conferences would work. The summit would break in the early hours of the morning and hundreds of journalists would rush to their home country’s briefing room to receive their quotable quotes. Interpreters would scramble; the basement’s unflappable audiovisual team would swoop into action. As twenty-eight heads of government or state took to their podiums, the biggest show in Brussels would reach its climax amid a frenzy of mostly upbeat activity.

Twenty-seven press conferences would follow a similar script. The leader would tell journalists that, yes, negotiations had been tough but middle ground had been found (the passive voice was perfect for EU leaders not wanting to lay blame or take responsibility). If a deal had ultimately been struck it had been in the name of European solidarity. The message was reliably similar: you don’t always get what you want, but it was worth the compromise.

The British press conferences were very different. It was as though Cameron had attended a meeting in a parallel universe. The unelected bureaucrats had tried to put one over on Great Britain, the prime minister would tell us. But fear not — the ever-vigilant British government had seen through the ruse and stepped in to stop another case of continental thieving. And before you had time to take it in, Cameron would move on to domestic affairs, making a point of only taking questions from British journalists and speaking straight down the camera into the houses of the British public. Then he’d skedaddle — no conciliatory statement, no acknowledgement that this political union had brought years of peace, prosperity and a sense of democratic purpose that would have been unthinkable in the Europe of the early postwar era.

As an Australian in Brussels, I didn’t have a horse in this race. You could be objective about the European Union’s achievements without believing that Britain needed to be part of the project. But you could be under no misapprehension that the over-the-top Euroscepticism of British politicians was inflicting real damage. The repeated assertion that the EU was inherently undemocratic — ignoring its directly elected parliament and a European Council made up of twenty-eight democratically elected heads of state or government — was simply untrue. Why would he say that? Britain could have argued that it didn’t agree with the political direction of the EU without suggesting that it was unrepresentative and illegitimate.

Cameron’s decision to take a baseball bat to the EU at every opportunity may have made good political sense and no doubt played well with the popular press that brought the narrative of thieving continentals to the masses. But when it came time to back-pedal and tell voters that, all things considered, Britain was better off as part of the EU, Cameron lacked the credibility to pull it off. The narrative he had built couldn’t be demolished overnight.

I may not have had a stake in this fight, but I was intrigued to observe the Cameron narrative as it weaved its way into Australian reporting on this issue. It wasn’t so much the Euroscepticism that was percolating into the writing of Australia’s London-based European correspondents, but a broader misunderstanding of where to place the EU on the political spectrum.

The British conservatives’ political spin was that the EU was supported by urban, progressive, not-quite-British types — what Theresa May later referred to contemptuously as “citizens of nowhere.” It was a political narrative that put the EU on the left and, by implication, all opposition to the EU on the right in the political firmament. This was a preposterous reimagining of the political reality of continental Europe and one that any observer on the Brussels side of the English Channel would have seen through. Yet conservatives in Australia appeared to lap it up. The fake narrative was there for all to see in the recent Spectator article by Tony Abbott, in which the former prime minister supported not just Brexit, but a no-deal Brexit.

Of all the misunderstandings our European correspondents could have assimilated from their London vantage point, the notion that the EU is something “of the left” is possibly the most pernicious. On the continent, where most of the bloc’s 512 million people lived, the political atmospherics were quite different.

Both European liberals and conservatives — in fact, any centre-right party outside the populist or neo-fascist mould — tend to be pro-European. On the mainland, big business loves a single market, while free marketeers applaud the EU’s largely successful attempt to break down the anticompetitive residues of an old Europe dominated by guilds and vested interests. The EU itself, through its consistently pro-market executive, has pushed member states towards free-trade agreements, including a deal with Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and a range of regional groupings — not to mention the now almost-abandoned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the United States. When France’s gilets jaunes protesters take to the streets they are fighting president Emmanuel Macron’s pro-European liberalism, in the sense of classical liberalism.

In fact, strands of the European left have often expressed ambivalence about the liberalism that underpins the European project. The EU hostility expressed by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which harkens back to before the 1980s, is arguably more recognisable to a continental European. The school of thought that suggests the EU is merely a construct of the forces of global capital — a view popular among supporters of Italy’s Five Star Movement, say, or Greece’s Syriza — doesn’t take long to bubble up to the surface.

Europe’s competition commissioner, the Danish liberal Margrethe Vestager, may be applauded when she takes on American tech giants, but she’s viewed with disdain by many for her role in fighting national governments as they pick industry winners, meddle with the economy and attempt to violate the EU’s tough rules banning state aid. Northern European states — in particular the Netherlands and Britain — are reliably blamed for promoting economic liberalism within the bloc, and old-school European lefties either despise the EU outright or regard it with extreme scepticism. Europe’s left was Eurosceptic from way back, before Cameron was born.

So, how did we fall for it? Why would Abbott and others on the right of Australian politics take sides against the pro-market, liberal EU?

Australian journalists need to take some responsibility for this state of affairs. Covering European news from London by repurposing Reuters copy without spending time in Frankfurt, Strasburg, Brussels or Paris was never a good look. But now, with Britain heading for the door, covering European affairs from London is even harder to justify. With the French–German relationship central to the power play at the heart of the bloc, eastern European EU members and Baltic states at the centre of geopolitical struggle with Russia, the Nordics providing increasingly attractive models of governance, and Italy and Spain still reeling from the implications of corruption scandals, you can’t afford to get your news through the filter of the London press.

A post-Brexit world requires a better, more nuanced understanding of EU affairs. It’s time for Australian journalists to go continental. •

The post The enemy within appeared first on Inside Story.

In 2008, Michael Wolff published a book called The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch. Wolff had benefited from far greater access to Murdoch and his family than any of the magnate’s earlier biographers. He taped more than fifty hours of interviews with Rupert himself, spoke to all immediate family members, and put questions to senior company executives.

In an article in GQ three years later, Wolff revealed that he received this level of cooperation because Murdoch and others close to him didn’t want Murdoch’s legacy “forever yoked” to Fox News and its powerful head, Roger Ailes. The biography would be a weapon in the “increasing war” against Ailes. Wolff acknowledged that he had made “a devil’s bargain not to talk to Ailes.”

It is plausible that Murdoch’s inner circle was disillusioned with Fox News and Ailes. Rupert’s main focus during 2007, dwarfing everything else, was his long-cherished dream of owning the Wall Street Journal, and he was keen to ease fears among the paper’s board members that he would dumb it down.

Moreover, Fox was on the losing side of the election that swept Barack Obama to victory. Even before his inauguration, the network was abandoning professional standards, becoming more propagandistic and, as the election had shown, increasingly out of touch with majority opinion. Fox went on to nurture and support the extreme-right Republican faction, the Tea Party, even helping it appeal for funds. It aired the groundless “birther” theories that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president.

Yet the only member of the family to publicly express any criticism during this period was Murdoch’s son-in-law, Matthew Freud, husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, who said in 2010, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corp, its founder and every other global business aspires to.”

Those comments were immediately and forcefully disowned by Rupert, and he subsequently gave Ailes a large bonus and a pay rise. Any lingering internal disillusion with Fox News was snuffed out by the results of the 2010 midterm elections, in which the Republicans gained an extra sixty-three seats in the House of Representatives, the biggest success of its kind since 1948. Fox News hosted a televised victory party with many Republican candidates and officials. Never again during Ailes’s tenure were there internal rumblings of any significance.

While Murdoch’s defence of Ailes at the time may have been a commercial necessity, he never in subsequent years showed any inclination to distance himself. In 2016, following Ailes’s resignation in disgrace after allegations of sexual harassment, Murdoch had the chance to change the network’s approach, as his son James was reportedly urging him to do. Instead, he kept change to the minimum. “We’re not changing direction,” he said a few months later. “That would be business suicide.”

But if Murdoch’s aim was to enhance his own legacy, then selecting Wolff as authorised biographer was wrong-headed in every respect. Wolff — once described in the New York Times as “a prime piranha in the Manhattan media pond” and by high-profile magazine editor Tina Brown as “the sour savant of American media” — had demonstrated much greater skill at tearing down reputations than at building them up.

Wolff’s main attempt to distance Murdoch from Fox News comes in the last few pages of the book when he suddenly asserts that the Murdoch children, his wife Wendi Deng Murdoch and even Murdoch himself were all “liberals,” a term he conspicuously fails to define. The claim is made without elaboration or any evidence (except that some of them supported Obama). It is a lame and unconvincing note to end on.

Rupert was widely reported to dislike the book. Ailes, on the other hand, had no reason to be disappointed. Wolff notes several times that the one person in his employment whom Murdoch never interferes with is Ailes. He even says Ailes is “possibly the one man of whom Murdoch is afraid.” Going further, he claims that Murdoch had “a crush on Ailes. For a very long time, having dinner with Ailes is the most galvanising thing in Murdoch’s life — it makes him feel in the game, it’s pure pleasure.” There’s more: “Murdoch backs [Ailes] all the way” because of Fox News’s success.

Whoever suggested Wolff could write a book distancing Murdoch from Ailes must have been unaware of just how strong the relationship between Ailes and Wolff already was. Wolff describes how he got to know Ailes in 2001:

I’d written something about him that he didn’t like, but then he invited me to lunch. At that first lunch I thought, Oh my God, this is gold. First thing, he’s incredibly knowledgeable about the media business, insightful about everybody, couldn’t stop talking. The gossip flowed in a non-stop way, and I took every opportunity in the subsequent years to sit down with him. So we became friends.

Wolff had another blockbuster success in 2018; again his degree of access was marvelled at, and again Ailes played a central part. Fire and Fury was probably the biggest-selling book on the early years of the Trump presidency. At the book’s centre is an individual who is intellectually, emotionally and morally unfit to be president. Wolff’s access to Trump’s staff and his revelation of their intensely negative view of the president are the book’s core.

Even before it was published, Fire and Fury created a furore. When Trump threatened to sue Wolff for defamation and invasion of privacy, the publisher simply brought forward the release date. High sales were guaranteed.

Graydon Carter, ex-editor of Vanity Fair, summed it up: “The mystery is why the White House let him in the door.” Once again Ailes figures prominently. According to Wolff, Steve Bannon and Ailes were guests at Wolff’s home for dinner in January 2017, and Wolff suspected that Ailes told Bannon that Wolff was someone he could trust. Up until his death Ailes was a “terrific source” for Wolff, who also had many conversations with Bannon. His closeness to the two men opened other doors.

Now Wolff has published The Fall: The End of Fox News — and the hero of this book is, yes, Roger Ailes. Ailes is an absentee hero: forced to resign from Fox News in 2016, his departure sweetened by a US$40 million payout, he died after a fall in 2017. But not only is he the most quoted figure in the book, he sets the standard by which others are judged and inevitably found wanting.

For Wolff, Ailes was the key to the success of Fox News: his “bravura leadership” created “brilliantly marketed and packaged news for the better part of twenty years.” Moreover, “the ousting of Roger Ailes in July 2016 presaged the end of Fox and conservative media’s industry dominance.” Ailes was “a sui generis talent [and] without him the playing field was suddenly level.”

This last claim proved inaccurate. For the four years of the Trump presidency — the years following Ailes’s departure — Fox had bigger audiences and more influence than at any other time. The direct line into the White House gave the network a centrality in the news mix that it had never enjoyed before.

Since Trump’s defeat, the network has hit much rougher times, and a lack of leadership, vision and strategy has become more obvious. The certainties of the Ailes era are being recalled nostalgically. But it is far from clear how Ailes would have responded. Would he have peddled election fraud to please the audience’s prejudices? Would he have responded differently to the Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit, which produced the biggest corporate defamation payout in American history?

Or are the network’s problems simply the result of his successors’ lack of ability? Ailes’s widow Beth is in no doubt. Wishing her husband a happy heavenly birthday last May, she said, “It took you twenty years to build Fox News into the powerhouse that it was and only six years for the Murdochs to wreak havoc. Rupert thought he could do your job. What a joke. He has the chequebook but could never come close to your genius.” The Murdochs “weren’t born here and don’t have the same pedigree” as Roger.

Wolff is also dismissive of the Murdochs. Rupert is too old, is often disengaged for long periods, and isn’t capable of sustained leadership. Lachlan and James — Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, according to Ailes — are even worse. Lachlan “is so absentee, fundamentally, living in Australia and running an American company,” more interested in spearfishing than running the company, incapable of making decisions. James, who left the company in early 2018, is aggressive and arrogant, and becomes furious when anyone contradicts him; his empty rhetoric about making Fox a force for good has no business sense or strategy behind it. The other key managers, both of the business and its journalists, lack vision, courage and ability.

Wolff was approached a decade and a half ago to write a book that would distance Murdoch from Ailes. In the latest book he has come full circle, a spear carrier for the Ailes legacy, and part of that involves demeaning the Murdochs. •

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Michael Wolff, prolific chronicler of American media mega-trends, wrote a book about it, Autumn of the Moguls. Network TV was a mess, he said. The music business was a mess. Jayson Blair’s saga of journalistic fraud at the New York Times had left Arthur Sulzberger Jr “not at all a sun god, but merely a mogul manqué.” A “countdown” was under way for ageing Rupert Murdoch at News Corporation, Sumner Redstone at Viacom, Michael Eisner at Disney. Barry Diller was giving the media industry “the finger,” leaving behind his “old mogul life” in charge of a Hollywood studio and TV network to concentrate on a company that owned Expedia, Ticketmaster and other digital businesses.

The idea resonated strongly in Australia. Rupert Murdoch had started out there a long time ago and now dominated the commercial media scene with another elder, the third-generation Packer mogul, Kerry. When Kerry died in 2005 and son James sold the family’s cherished television business, the forecast for moguls looked on target, though not especially astute given the older Packer’s heart had stopped once before.

Moguls generally, though, were hanging on. “Self-made” media boss Kerry Stokes was now being described as a mogul, having taken control of the Seven Network in the 1990s and then added newspapers when cross-media ownership rules were relaxed in the 2000s.

In America, the autumn proved long. There is still enough life in Murdoch moguldom for Michael Wolff to have published another book about its impending death, The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire, just the other day. While Redstone did finally die, Eisner’s successor at Disney, Bob Iger, stayed and stayed, buying and buying. He stepped down, only to be called back as CEO last year. Tech titans Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos added “media” to their realms, Jobs through his own investment in Pixar and Apple’s pioneering plays in digital music, movies and television; Bezos by acquiring the Washington Post and founding Amazon Studios and Prime Video.

Then, a year ago, the CEO of another Silicon Valley giant decided to buy one of the town squares of online speech. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter might be going as poorly as AOL/Time Warner, the fin-de-siècle merger that Wolff thought marked “the beginning of the end” and the start of “a new phase, a whole new era, of resistance and revision.” But it happened, Twitter continues to exist, though with a new name and direction, and Musk is still in charge, behaving much like those mercurial, autocratic moguls of old. Obituaries are being written for the company and the deal, but so too is a new book about Musk. It devotes a lot of pages to the Twitter/X saga and its content-moderation challenges, and it is written by no less than the biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger: Walter Isaacson.

Media moguls don’t endure merely because particular men live long: they all die in the end. Nor do they survive because the specific media technologies they happen to control turn out to be attractive to users, although that helps: some moguls have been good at parlaying control of one medium into dominance of another, from radio and newspapers into television; from movies to programming for TV, video cassettes and DVDs; from free-to-air broadcast television to multi-channel cable and satellite subscription services. Not even the propensity for some with fortunes from other fields to crave power over a society’s messages can fully explain the dogged durability of media moguls.

Moguls endure because their ranks are constantly replenished by a culture that craves them and because storytellers find subjects to satisfy the hunger. Exactly which of society’s messages constitute “media” has proved malleable. Of newspapers, news and information, Wolff wrote in Autumn, “If you knew anything about anything, you understood them to be not just equivocal businesses but plastic concepts. They were in transition and if you weren’t ready to be part of that transformation you and your business would die.”

More broadly, he thought a mogul was “an adventurer, a soldier, a conqueror, even a crusader, and, yes, a saviour, willing to march off and take territory and subdue populations and embrace the unknown and do whatever was necessary to do to make the future possible ― no matter what the future was.”

That is the kind of person Walter Isaacson saw in Elon Musk — pioneer of Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla — and it was why he wanted to write about him. He had seen the type before. Steve Jobs, too, was a man with huge ambition and capacity to direct the building of new products and experiences, to transform the lives of the people who used them and the industries that created them. Jobs is referred to several times in Elon Musk, and it is clear that Isaacson sees the two in a similar frame. They are heroes standing in the way of American Decline, outsized personalities who think big and take risks while controlling every detail. They stamp themselves on their enterprises and outputs. Their personal quests, he thinks, shift the nation and the world.

Musk agreed to let Isaacson “shadow” him for two years, and Isaacson tells us what he saw and heard. With Musk’s encouragement, he interviewed “friends, colleagues, family members, adversaries, and ex-wives” as well, and he tells us what they told him. This method makes it a book in two parts.

In the first part, the biographer is assembling evidence about things that have already happened. A lot of this is familiar from other works about Musk, especially the amateur psycho-sleuthing about a brutal upbringing and possible Asperger’s producing a ruthless guy who struggles with empathy but dreams big, drives people hard, sometimes sleeps in his own factories, and achieves the impossible over and over again. Ashlee Vance and Tim Higgins have covered this and it is not clear that Isaacson adds much to their excellent work beyond the constant presence of Musk’s own voice.

Once Isaacson is there himself from 2021, in the thick of the unfolding events, the second part of the book becomes a different exercise. The biographer is now a witness to the roiling present, not an inquisitor about history. How reliable a witness is for the reader to judge, but we are there for the thrilling ride. Isaacson becomes part of Musk’s family, a trusted confidante. He is in Musk’s house, his car. He receives messages from him at crazy hours about really weird stuff. He offers advice, judges Musk’s moves.

While he is doing all this, he gets lucky. Musk, already a mogul, decides to buy Twitter. Is this “media”? If so, Michael Wolff’s autumn is over. Elon Musk is going to become a media mogul in front of Walter Isaacson’s eyes.

Or is it the other way around? Is it Musk who has got lucky? With his road-tested storyteller in the passenger seat, his every word, every angle, every image, will be recorded, stored, shaped. A book, half-written already. What better time for “an adventurer, a soldier, a conqueror, even a crusader, and, yes, a saviour” to march off and take media? •

Elon Musk
By Walter Isaacson | Simon & Schuster | $59.99 | 670 pages

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Early in that decade the first-born of the children who made up the postwar baby boom began to challenge their parents with slogans like “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Those parents — retrospectively labelled “the greatest generation” for having endured the 1930s depression and the second world war — had come to regard their kids as lazy and spoilt.

As the children born in the 1940s became thirtysomethings and the youth revolts of the 1960s faded away, the generation gap was mostly forgotten. Its revival in the 1990s came in a quite different context. By then, the lazy equation of “boomer” and “young person” was clearly obsolete.

The members of the post-boom cohort, who became known as generation X, were seeking to make their way in the world but found their way blocked by the much larger generation above them, who occupied all the desirable cultural niches and weren’t planning to move on any time soon. Mark Davis’s Ganglands: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism was one of the earliest expressions of this frustration.

Davis’s work was well received in Australia. But the terms of the debate were set in the United States by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their bestselling book, Generations. As well as making the now-standard claims about the characteristics of the boomers, Strauss and Howe theorised that major events caused generations to cycle through four different types: idealist, reactive, civic and adaptive.

Strauss and Howe’s model was initially accepted uncritically. This mode of classification was a boon to marketers and lazy journalists, functioning largely as a more respectable form of astrology. Rather than engaging in tedious discussions of economic and foreign policy, for example, presidential campaigns could be discussed in terms of the generations to which the contenders belonged.

Pushback came soon enough, not least from me. (Disclosure: the fact that my cohort, generation Jones, 1954–63, isn’t recognised in standard generational classification predisposes me to dislike the entire generational punditry genre.) In a piece written in 2000, I made a number of not entirely original observations:

• Claims about generations are often restatements of longstanding clichés about the laziness and irresponsibility of the young or the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old. Demographers distinguish these “age effects” (as well as “time effects,” the influences that affect all age groups) from the “cohort effects” specific to those growing up during a depression, for example, or a long postwar boom.

• Differences associated with race, class and gender are mostly more significant than those associated with birth cohort. Donald Trump might share a birthday with a Black woman paid the minimum wage to clean one of his hotels, but that doesn’t mean they have any significant experiences in common.

• The boomer generation is particularly problematic because the demographic event after which it is named doesn’t match the cultural events with which it is associated. At one end, many of the leading figures in boomer culture were actually born during the war years — in other words, before the boom. At the other end, those born after 1954 were too young to experience either the full employment of the postwar economic boom or defining cultural events like the Woodstock rock festival or the fights over conscription and the Vietnam war. Barack Obama (born 1961) is classed as a boomer, but his political awareness was shaped by the presidency of Ronald Reagan (whom he saw as a role model) rather than that of Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon.

• More generally, the typical gap of fifteen to twenty years between their oldest and youngest members means that generations are too big for any real commonality of experience.

As criticisms of this kind multiplied, generational analysts lost credibility, though very slowly. It was only in May this year that the Pew Research Center, widely seen as an authoritative source of survey findings, conceded most of the points made above and announced that its audiences “should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens.”

Nevertheless, the generational bandwagon rolls on. A new arrival is Jean Twenge’s book Generations, whose title recycles Strauss and Howe’s though she rejects a good deal of their analysis. Twenge adopts a narrative format to apply the generational frame to Americans born in the last one hundred years, beginning with the silent generation (born 1925–45) and ending with polars, her own term for children born since 2013.

Twenge avoids some of the pitfalls discussed above. Most importantly, she pays attention to the distinction between age effects, time effects and cohort effects. She compares the experience of different generations at the same age, and tries to take account of long-run trends like the rise of computers. She uses long-running data sets such as the Panel Study on Income Dynamics to assure consistent comparisons of different cohorts at the same age.

This approach yields some interesting insights. For example, the silent generation married and had children earlier than any previous or subsequent generation, and had more children per family. One interesting implication of early childbearing is that most of the later boomers were the children of parents from the immediately preceding generation, the silents, unlike the more common gap of two generations between parents and children.

Another, not particularly startling, observation is that boomers have been bigger consumers of alcohol and recreational drugs than any other cohort. That phenomenon has continued from the upsurge in youthful drug use in the 1960s to the present day. Younger generations like the millennials and gen Z are more abstemious, perhaps as a result of a lifetime of exposure to messaging about the dangers of substance (ab)use.

More fundamentally, Twenge makes the point that technological change has different impacts on different age cohorts. One claimed effect is increased individualism, though this ignores how the once widely held admiration for “rugged individualism” is now rarely heard in the United States.

Twenge is on stronger ground when she discusses the slower life trajectory created by two things: the need for young people to spend more time in education in a technologically complex society, and the longer life spans enabled by improvements in health. These changes inevitably alter the timing of the processes that define generations: leaving the parental home and forming new households, entering and leaving employment, old age and death. While they don’t really follow generational boundaries, they provide a useful narrative device.

Twenge concedes a related point. “It’s also true that generations are sometimes too broad: those born ten years apart but within the same generation have experienced a different culture,” she writes. “Still, too many micro-generations would be confusing and would make it harder to discern broad generational trends.”

Familiar analytical problems remain. Like nearly all generational analysts, Twenge consistently downplays the importance of class. This passage is truly striking:

The charming novel Nine Ladies, by Heather Moll, imagines the aristocratic Mr Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice time-travelling from 1812, when race, gender, and class were destiny, to 2012. He’s of course amazed by smartphones, airplanes, and restaurants, but the advice the born-in-1987 version of Elizabeth Bennet gives him the most often is, “Remember, treat everyone equally.” Equality is one of the unifying themes of cultural change over the last one hundred years, making it one of the unifying themes of generational change.

This claim would have been unremarkable if it had been made in the 1950s, when America was a proudly middle-class society. But the rise in inequality and the decline in social mobility have been central to the disasters that have befallen the US polity in the last few decades, culminating in the emergence of Trumpism.

Turning more specifically to generational analysis, there is the problem that the demographic baby boom from 1946 to the early 1960s does not match cultural and economic history, which shows a sharp break at the end of the postwar economic boom in the early 1970s. Economically and culturally, as I pointed out back in 2000, the Vietnam generation has a lot more in common with the “baby busters” (the last of the silents, born during and just before the second world war) than with baby boomers:

[M]ost of the cultural icons of the Vietnam generation were actually born before 1945. Obvious examples are the Beatles and Rolling Stones, not to mention James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Throughout the 1960s, rock music was made by the children of the baby bust, who were in the fortunate position of having the largest audience in history. Other members of the baby bust cohort took the chance to establish themselves as the social and political voice of youth, a position which they then sought to maintain well into middle age.

Twenge implicitly concedes most of this, noting that the last of the silents were anything but silent.

A more coherent generational analysis could be achieved by having the boomer generation born between the late 1930s and the mid 1950s, too young to have real memories of depression and war but young enough to come of age during the seemingly endless prosperity of the postwar boom.

Then, following the suggestion of cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, the rest of the (demographic) baby boom could be assigned to my cohort, generation Jones. The most appealing etymology for generation Jones is the slang term “jonesing,” referring to withdrawal after a drug-induced high. As summarised by Wikipedia: “Jonesers inherited an optimistic outlook as children in the 1960s, but were then confronted with a different reality as they entered the workforce during… a long period of mass unemployment.”

On this division, the remaining boomers would be a shrinking minority in their seventies and eighties, soon to pass from the scene altogether. And without the boomers, the journalistic generation game would cease to be of much interest.

Even in the toned-down version offered by Twenge and the Pew Research Center, generational analysis misleads more than it enlightens. For serious scholarly work, five-year birth cohorts, categorised by race, gender and class background, are much more useful. For entertainment purposes, astrology is just as good and less divisive. •

Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future
By Jean M. Twenge | Atria Books | $32.50 |  560 pages

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Like others, I often wonder why the ABC I have so enjoyed and relied on can be irritating and sometimes infuriating. If it was on the edge of a cliff, there are days I’d have given it a push. Often that’s when the ABC seems to have no idea what it’s doing or no idea why people use it.

I look at ABC websites that sometimes have PR blurbs presented as news content. I watch Insiders who insist on framing every issue with their personal opinion, the first-person pronoun in heavy employ. News programs give me convoluted versions of a policy or event’s implications, but nothing of the actual policy or event itself. Above all, streams of programming have themes but not surprises. Lots of answers. Too few questions.

Ms Doogue raised the possibility (I think) of the ABC’s irrelevance. It’s the question that all media have had to face since the distribution of content was inverted. What used to be a limited, controlled flow of information and entertainment is now a dispersed, popular network that is both ubiquitous and constant. Technology allows people almost anywhere to view, read or hear almost anything: from live news like the Georgia grand jury’s indictment of Donald Trump to the video replay of all twenty minutes of the Matildas’ World Cup penalty shootout with France. Commercial aggregators like Apple and Netflix offer seemingly unlimited choices. Very soon algorithms will interpret your question, search the digital universe and present you with a composed briefing (which may be what News Corp sees as the future for “news”).

Former BBC director-general Mark Thompson, who was hired by the New York Times when it was mired in poor performance (and fixed it) and has now been picked to repair the ailing CNN, made a useful point recently. American television, he said, seemed to be stuck in the 1980s. With endless sources of opinion, what people really want is accurate and relevant news. Who’d have thought it?

Since the moment consumers began to find serious value in digital channels, the traditional media have been struggling — most often with their financial sustainability, but almost always with their direction and purpose. When the media most needed to revisit fundamentals, many leading players did the opposite — they chose the values that suited them.

Audience numbers are the traditional measure of media strength. Commercial media generally pursued large audiences to justify their advertising rates. The newspapers or broadcasters that captured the largest consistent audiences generally made the most money.

Digital media fractured that concept in two ways. Aggregators of audiences (Google, Meta) offered advertisers far bigger audiences than any incumbent — and did so at a fraction of the cost. Other digital arrivals (Netflix, YouTube) catered extremely well to particular interests and were able to commercialise that offering at a global level; driven by consumers, they turned media measurement on its head.

But much of the established media stuck with tradition and used raw, aggregate numbers to measure their performance. This is why a lot of news media gave away valuable content online, at least in the early years of the internet. More importantly, the measurement of digital traffic encouraged a trend towards crude preferences: by favouring content that drives traffic it promotes popularity over value. Commercial media that didn’t pursue inherent value struggled to get enough people to pay.

The logical endpoint for a content business chasing pure numbers is fairly obvious. Pornography, or its intellectual equivalent, gets eyeballs and doesn’t cost much. People like Tucker Carlson and Alan Jones — not to mention Rupert Murdoch — discovered this formula ages ago.

The ABC has a different problem. The people who pay for the ABC are taxpayers and the people who decide how much they pay are politicians. Why pay? Because Australians want and value a service that isn’t sustained by commercial means. That is, they want something that commercial providers don’t provide. So the ABC should have been better placed than commercial media to respond to a media environment driven more by value than by mass. Yet it seems to have fallen for the same error that its commercial counterparts did.

While ABC aggregate audiences are holding up, its own measures of value, still strong, are declining. But these data don’t tell the full story.

Digital media aggregated audiences but also disaggregated content creation. People who have common preferences and prejudices can stay in the lane they prefer. For a person interested in news, it’s bit like walking down a busy street and asking each person for an opinion. Or, for those who don’t like discordant views, like choosing only the news offered by one’s priest or football coach.

I would have expected the ABC to start dealing with the new environment by asking some very blunt questions. Like: why are we different? What is value for our constituents? How do we impose discipline on our work to deliver value to the people who pay for it?

Jeff Bezos was, I think, one of the first to align a media strategy closely with value. One of the interesting results, to my eyes, is that his Washington Post is much more about news — facts that inform — than its competitors are. Bezos measures everything, but his metrics are about value and how the people who pay judge value.

The ABC does a lot of things well, but it doesn’t do them consistently. I suspect the reason for that is the absence of discipline guided by a clarity about what its paying customers (taxpayers) value. A strong emphasis on news and facts, clearly presented, would overcome the natural tendency of traditional media towards celebrity thinking. (Seriously, do all those TV and radio folk really think people want their opinion on what the Reserve Bank does?)

The ABC could be more obviously bringing Australia into our homes. It could be more obviously filling gaps in the media. It could be asking really interesting questions — not gotcha questions — and providing really helpful information.

I fear the ABC will fail to win sustained support and resources because it didn’t ask the right questions about the new media environment. The main one being: what is value for Australian taxpayers? •

The post Asking the right questions about the ABC appeared first on Inside Story.

If Armstrong is ever to pursue such a possibility he could do a lot worse than take out options on two new books that tell the story of the original succession, when Rupert Murdoch inherited the keys to his media kingdom from his father Keith. Together, they not only provide a Succession-worthy dose of power plays and court intrigue; they also offer a profound insight into where Rupert Murdoch came from, what he would become and how he has shaped our world.

Walter Marsh’s Young Rupert provides a richly detailed and intricately interwoven close-up view of the young Murdoch on the make in 1950s Adelaide, building the business he inherited from his father. Media Monsters, the second volume of Sally Young’s exhaustively researched and endlessly fascinating history of the Australian media, tells that story in more condensed form but takes it further, as Murdoch extends his operations to the east coast, creates the Australian and throws all his weight behind the election of the Whitlam-led Labor Party in 1972.

The first succession, it turns out, involved at least as much Machiavellian intrigue, internecine struggle and human frailty as the present one; its consequences, it need hardly be said, are still being felt today.

The story begins, inevitably enough, with a very powerful man who, despite age and ailment, can’t bring himself to relinquish control. In 1949, Keith Murdoch was chairman of the board and managing director of Australia’s largest newspaper company, the Herald and Weekly Times, or HWT. There he had grown accustomed to unrivalled influence, claiming credit for the rise and fall of governments and prime ministers.

“I put him there and I’ll put him out,” Murdoch contemptuously said of prime minister Joseph Lyons in the 1930s. When Bob Menzies became prime minister for the second time he immediately sent Murdoch a note thanking him for using his newspapers to energetically campaign on his behalf. There was nothing self-effacing in Murdoch’s reply, which noted that the swing to Menzies was largest where his papers held sway.

But ill-health was catching up with Murdoch, forcing him to spend long periods away from the office. And so he announced a kind-of-retirement. While he would remain on as chairman, he was stepping down as managing director, charging one of his “bright young men,” Jack Williams, with responsibility for day-to-day affairs.

Except Murdoch couldn’t let go. He surrounded Williams with rivals, bad-mouthed him behind his back and sometimes to his face, and constantly interfered in day-to-day management. Williams had his faults, not least a serious drinking problem; one night he was arrested for urinating in Melbourne’s Alfred Place. But friends believed it was Murdoch who was driving Williams to drink.

The simmering tension between the chairman and his erstwhile protégé came to a head in late 1952 when Murdoch gathered together his fellow board members and persuaded them that Williams had to go. Having reclaimed undiluted control, Murdoch travelled out to his property on the Mornington Peninsula to spend the weekend.

And there he died. Within hours of the news, Williams had returned to the HWT offices where he ordered an engineer to blast open the now deceased chairman’s private safe. Armed with the revelations contained therein, he managed to persuade the remaining board members to reconsider their decision to terminate his own employment. At a hastily convened meeting he was reinstated — and the minutes of the previous meeting were expunged from the record.

For all that Keith Murdoch had refused, in the last years of his life, to let power slip from his hands at the Herald and Weekly Times, much of his energy had been focused elsewhere. As a minor HWT shareholder, he knew he would never be in a position to pass on the reins to his young son, Rupert. Thus he had devoted himself to building a media business of his own, one to which the laws of primogeniture would apply.

To set up his son’s inheritance, Murdoch had taken on substantial debt and a shady business partner, refusing to let his fiduciary duties to HWT shareholders stand in the way of securing the succession he cared about most. Or, as Young puts the matter bluntly, Murdoch “conned News Limited off [the HWT] for his son.”

Three years before his death Murdoch had told the HWT board that their position in Adelaide, where the company had effective control of both the city’s daily newspapers, was no longer tenable. In the wake of a royal commission into the press in Britain, monopoly power was under intense scrutiny. It would be prudent, he suggested, to pre-empt government intervention and offload one of their papers.

But Murdoch was less than candid about how such a move might benefit him personally. “When Murdoch told the annual meeting of shareholders in December 1949 that the HWT’s shares in News Limited had been sold,” writes Marsh, “he did not disclose that he was the purchaser.”

Murdoch’s extracurricular activities, as Marsh aptly describes them, were no secret by the time of his death. But his private papers revealed the full extent of these operations and the tremendous conflicts of interest they entailed. Like the secret negotiations Murdoch was conducting to defect from the HWT and merge his company with the owner of one of its main Melbourne rivals, the Argus. Or the fact that Murdoch’s partner in Queensland Newspapers, owner of the Courier-Mail, was none other than the underworld figure made famous by Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory, John Wren.

Jack Williams was back in charge, and one of his first tasks was to produce a glowing obituary for his mentor-turned-nemesis; he would also serve as a pallbearer at Murdoch’s funeral some days later. As Marsh wryly observes, “It’s hard to imagine any circumstances in which Sir Keith would have approved of this chain of events, but as Williams helped carry him from the church, he was in no position to object.”

Nor could Murdoch object as his old colleagues at the HWT sought to reacquire the company he had prized from it, News Limited. Barely had Keith been buried before his young widow, Elisabeth, was approached. The HWT, she was informed, was about to begin a Sunday edition of the Advertiser that would in all likelihood kill off News Limited’s Sunday Mail. Wouldn’t she prefer to sell first, they asked. Indeed, wouldn’t life be easier without the burdens of owning and running her late husband’s entire newspaper business?

Elisabeth didn’t take the bait. But — determined to clear the significant debt her late husband had racked up — she sold them the Courier-Mail. The young Rupert, who had hurried back from Oxford to claim his inheritance, was bitterly disappointed. “Cunning old bastards,” he called his dad’s former colleagues, but he must have recognised that his father was the most cunning of them all, and he was the prime beneficiary of the bastardry.

Thus Marsh and Young tell a story that revolves around not one succession but two — the fates of the very large business Keith Murdoch managed and the much smaller one he owned — and the conflict between the two. The resulting inheritance might have been smaller than both Keith and Rupert had hoped but, as Sally Young emphasises, it was nothing to complain about: three newspapers (the daily News and the Sunday Mail in Adelaide, and the Barrier Miner in Broken Hill) as well as a significant stake in the weekly women’s magazine New Idea, and a number of radio stations.

But young Rupert inherited more than assets with the potential to generate substantial revenue. He entered an elite club that exercised enormous control over Australia’s political and economic life. A large part of Sally Young’s achievement in Media Monsters is to lay bare the true extent of that power; in so doing she offers a profound insight into what Keith Murdoch really bequeathed his son.

As familiar as the troubling relationship between politicians and newspaper proprietors is, the effect of Young’s meticulous research is to surface details that still retain their power to shock (as well as containing remarkable contemporary resonances).

Witness the remarkable role of the press barons in the founding of the Liberal Party. In late 1944, Menzies was invited to dinner at the Melbourne home of a senior mining executive. In attendance were all the country’s leading media figures, including Keith Murdoch, Frank Packer and Rupert Henderson, manager of the Sydney Morning Herald. By the end of the evening, all those present had agreed to do everything in their power — which was considerable — to bring the Liberal Party into existence. “None of this secret compact was disclosed in the attendees’ respective newspapers,” Young sharply observes, “and nor is the remarkable dinner mentioned in official accounts of the Liberal Party’s history.”

The press proprietors collectively backed the party to the hilt over subsequent decades. Measured in terms of editorial support during federal elections, Australia’s daily newspapers supported the Liberals 90 per cent of the time during the fifties and sixties. But it’s the details of this cosy collaboration that are truly revealing. After the half-Senate election in 1953, Menzies sent a message to the editor of the Courier-Mail, Colin Bednall. “My dear Colin,” Menzies wrote, “I cannot go abroad without writing to let you know how much we have all appreciated the attitude of the Courier-Mail during the Senate campaign. No government could have asked for its case to be better or more enthusiastically presented.”

Menzies received an equally sympathetic hearing on radio. He requested, and received, extraordinary, unfettered access to the listening public through weekly ten-minute Man to Man broadcasts on forty stations across the country. The media barons hoped the opposition leader, H.V. Evatt, “would not complain or demand equal time,” Young explains. “He did both, but was ignored.”

The Liberal leader made sure these favours didn’t go unrequited, making a series of decisions that shaped the new medium of television in the interests of his powerful media allies. When he announced a royal commission into the introduction of television, the first commissioner chosen was the aforementioned Courier-Mail editor, Colin Bednall. Suitably stacked, the commission delivered predictably congenial recommendations, and Menzies did the rest to ensure the newspaper proprietors who already had a licence to print money would be well positioned to make even more.

The television market established by the Menzies government was at once highly concentrated and poorly regulated, lacking the pluralism and diversity of American television on the one hand, or the public service character of the British model on the other.

The UHF band already in operation in the United States could carry hundreds of television stations, including channels reserved for community groups and educational purposes; Australia opted for the much more restricted VHF band. In Britain commercial broadcasting took place under a public service model with similar obligations and programming standards to the BBC’s. In Australia, such regulation and oversight was successfully resisted, and private ownership of television transmitters made it practically impossible to revoke commercial television licences, and therefore to rigorously enforce any standards.

If blatant partisanship, the parlaying of political support into commercial benefit and the concomitant degradation of the public sphere would, in time, come to epitomise Rupert Murdoch’s way of doing business, what is remarkable in both Young’s and Marsh’s accounts is the extent to which he initially resisted playing this game. To be sure, he took to the role of publisher with gusto, fending off the HWT’s assault on his lucrative Sunday paper in Adelaide, acquiring Perth’s Sunday Times in 1954 (where he first exhibited his talent for tabloid sensationalism) and securing the license for the NWS-9 station when television came to Adelaide in 1958.

Marsh comprehensively establishes that Murdoch was always ruthlessly ambitious and that intellectual consistency was never really his thing (he believed in the benefits of competition as long as he was the beneficiary). But, for all that, the young magnate forms a striking contrast to his father, his contemporaries and, above all, his older self.

It may just be a historical curiosity that the young Rupert was an ardent socialist known as Comrade Murdoch at Geelong Grammar; that he installed a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford; or that he engaged in an admiring correspondence with Ben Chifley. But even after he had taken over the family business his politics retained a decidedly leftist hue. In Adelaide he hobnobbed with future Whitlam minister Clyde Cameron, and flirted with the Fabian Society. “He was much further left than me,” Cameron recalled in his memoir.

Even if Cameron exaggerated for effect, his recollection clearly contains a strong kernel of truth. Sally Young describes the Adelaide News in the 1950s as “the most liberal daily paper in the country, one with a social conscience that published very different views to the establishment Advertiser.” Similarly, in its early years the Australian was exceptional in its willingness to question conservative governments. It was the sole morning newspaper to editorialise against Australia’s commitment of troops to Vietnam. Then, of course, there was Murdoch’s energetic and enthusiastic campaigning for Labor in 1972, prior to his rejection of Whitlam and his long march to the right.

The most revealing insight into Murdoch’s politics in this period is found in Marsh’s rich account of the case of Arrernte man and itinerant carnival worker Rupert Max Stuart, sentenced to death in 1959 for the gruesome rape and murder of a young girl. In the wake of Stuart’s trial, Murdoch’s News ran a series of reports that brought the veracity and justice of the conviction into serious question. First, it was revealed that Stuart had neither translator nor legal representation on hand when he made a confession; then that it had been beaten out of him; and finally that he appeared to have an alibi. With financial support from the News, a concerned clergyman had tracked down Stuart’s former employer, now interstate, who testified that the convicted man was with him at the time the crime occurred. PRIEST: STUART HAS PERFECT ALIBI, ran the headline in the News, DELAY THIS HANGING.

South Australian premier Tom Playford announced a royal commission and a one-month reprieve for Stuart, and one British newspaper described Murdoch’s editor, Rohan Rivett, as the “Zola of South Australia.” But Murdoch’s convictions were about to be tested further, when the royal commission the News had done so much to establish ended in acrimony, with Stuart’s counsel, Jack Shand, walking out. COMMISSION BREAKS UP — SHAND BLASTS NAPIER, read one News headline; SHAND QUITS — “YOU WON’T GIVE STUART FAIR GO” blared another.

If, with the passing of half a century, these statements seem like a pretty reasonable rendering of what had transpired, that was not how they were received at the time. The News was deemed to have impugned the integrity of the court, and Rivett and Murdoch found themselves facing a series of libel and seditious libel charges. They stuck it out and, ultimately, the charges were dropped but only after a long, expensive and intimidating legal action. Meanwhile, Max Stuart’s conviction stood, and he served out a lengthy jail sentence (the question of his guilt remains murky). But his life was spared.

It’s impossible to absorb these events, also comprehensively covered in Media Monsters, without reflecting on the story of a similar — and similarly horrifying case — that occurred three decades earlier. On the last day of 1922 a twelve-year-old girl was found raped and murdered in an alley off Melbourne’s Little Collins Street. Soon a local publican, Colin Ross, was in the police’s crosshairs. The editor of the Melbourne Herald, Keith Murdoch, was thrilled: he had learned firsthand from his British mentor, Lord Northcliffe, what a good murder could do for circulation.

Under Keith’s direction, the sensational allegations against Ross were flogged for all they were worth, sales nearly doubled, and Ross — who was exonerated by DNA evidence seventy-five years later — was convicted and hanged. So notorious was the Herald’s commercialisation of the case that its new headquarters on Flinders Street, built in the years following Ross’s hanging, were long known as the Colin Ross Memorial. The Colin Ross Memorial was where the teenaged Rupert Murdoch would get his first taste of the newspaper business. It is difficult to believe the case was far from his mind as he campaigned against the execution of Max Stuart throughout 1958 and 1959.

For all that the Stuart case exhibited Murdoch’s long-lost idealism, it also taught the young proprietor a critical lesson about the newspaper business and the consequences of offending the advertisers who were his main source of revenue. With the case still in full swing Murdoch told Clyde Cameron, “I’m in a spot Clyde. Myers have phoned to say that unless we drop our campaign in favour of Stuart, they are going to withdraw all of their advertising from the News and that means a lot to us…”

In the short term, Murdoch withstood the pressure, but only weeks after the conclusion of legal action against the News, he sacked Rohan Rivett. Keith Murdoch had confidently predicted, a year before his death, that his then socialist son would “eventually travel the same course of his father.” This sacking was one of the first signs that Keith would in time be proved completely correct (with interest on top); it also indicated that Rupert had fully registered the true commercial consequences of his editor’s campaigns.

Around the same time, Murdoch learned an even more important lesson about surviving and thriving in a business in which the majority of revenue came from selling advertising, when he witnessed the spectacular failure of the Melbourne Argus. In 1949, the Argus’s editorial line had taken a sharp turn to the left, a marked departure from the arch-conservatism that had characterised the paper for most of the preceding century.

The shift from right to left was effected at dizzying speed and in the process the paper’s new British owners made a number of serious missteps. But, as Sally Young explains, when the Argus was shuttered in 1957 its audience had actually grown. The problem was that “advertisers had shunned the bolshy, down-market, more left-wing paper. That was the deathblow, rather than a loss of readers,” writes Young. “When the paper closed in 1957, it had 170,000 readers, and that was 42,000 more than the Age, and a higher circulation than five other capital city dailies had at that time.” The Argus failed because its moderate leftwards tendency attracted less pecunious readers who were less sought after by advertisers.

The case of the Argus is crucial to understanding the nature of the Australian press in Rupert Murdoch’s formative years. The ideological commitments of proprietors provides one explanation for the overwhelming conservatism of Australia’s newspapers, but not the only one. After all, the proprietors had to win a readership and this meant selling their papers to a nation that was roughly equally politically divided. Even at its high watermark in 1966, the Coalition’s two-party-preferred vote was only 57 per cent — evidence of a far more politically divided nation than its daily newspapers suggested.

What the Argus experiment clearly indicated was that the preferences of readers were of secondary financial importance to the preferences of advertisers for the attention of a particular type of reader — one with high disposable income. Left-wing working-class newspapers faced a structural obstacle: a lesson not lost on Rupert Murdoch who, Young notes, “would use the Argus as a cautionary tale. He said a lack of advertiser support killed it and only 5 per cent more advertising would have made a big difference to its future.”

In their seminal history of the British press, Power Without Responsibility, James Curran and Jean Seaton attribute a decisive role to advertising in determining the commercial viability of newspapers since the nineteenth century. And they also tell a story of central importance in the career of Rupert Murdoch: the strange death of a newspaper called the Daily Herald and its rebirth under a new name, the Sun.

The demise of the Daily Herald was similar in nature to that of the Argus, only amplified in scale and consequence. When it was shut down in 1964 its circulation was 1.26 million, greater than that of the Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined. Surveys indicated that its readers took in more of their paper than the readers of other major dailies — and felt more attached to it. Its problem? It ultimately couldn’t compete financially with rivals who enjoyed the favour of advertisers. The Daily Herald readership might have been very large but it was overwhelmingly working-class, with minimal disposable income, reflective of the paper’s radical politics, and thus relatively unattractive to advertisers. Despite obtaining 8.1 per cent of national daily circulation in its final years, the Herald received only 3.5 per cent of net advertising revenue.

A decade before its downfall, the Daily Herald’s owners had recognised that they faced a choice. Either they could go really mass-market and cater to the advertisers who were more interested in quantity than “quality.” To do this, the paper would have to shed its political identity, and associated coverage of union matters, and ratchet up the human-interest stories, cartoons and horoscopes. Or they could go for quality by focusing on attracting the young, affluent audience that advertisers were willing to pay top dollar for.

The rebranding of the paper as the Sun was a belated attempt to pursue this latter strategy, but its half-hearted execution lacked strong internal support. And so, in 1969, the floundering paper was offloaded to Rupert Murdoch. Unlike the previous owners, Murdoch decided to take the Sun down-market and brought an unabashed and unqualified commitment to doing so. “I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it,” was the edict delivered to the Sun’s new editor. Circulation doubled within twelve months.

Rupert Murdoch is, of course, far from the first person to cast aside youthful ideals in pursuit of profit and power, or to tread the path from rebellion to reaction, a journey abetted in his case by the coincidence of middle age with the global turn to neoliberalism. But if a person is ultimately an opportunist it pays to attend to the opportunities the world affords them. The young media mogul on the make was consistently confronted with a powerful set of commercial incentives that decisively shaped his course: avoid offending advertisers and maximise the audiences that advertisers are willing to pay for.

When Murdoch made his next big move, to the United States, he entered a media landscape that had been powerfully shaped by the same forces he had encountered in Australia and the United Kingdom. In the 2019 book No Longer Newsworthy the American media scholar Christopher R. Martin describes how postwar American newspapers became increasingly defined by the pursuit of high socioeconomic status readers, the kind advertisers desired. Editorially, that meant a declining coverage of industrial relations, and strikes in particular. And when strikes were reported, the framing shifted from open-minded engagement with workers’ demands to an increasingly dominant focus on inconvenienced consumers.

As reporters were taken off industrial relations beats, financial self-help columns and coverage of the stock market increased. And as the mainstream media stopped telling working-class stories, right-wing cultural warriors were only too willing to fill the vacuum, with figures like televangelist Pat Robertson and ultraconservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh stepping into the void — as, eventually, did Murdoch’s Fox News. But, says Martin, America’s “right-wing media complex got its start with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post in 1976.” •

Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire
By Walter Marsh | Scribe | $35.00 | 352 pages
Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires
By Sally Young | UNSW Press | $49.99 | 576 pages

The post The first succession… and its consequences appeared first on Inside Story.

Apart from its election record, which for the last thirty years has been the gold standard, Newspoll’s status derives from its longevity (Roy Morgan Research is the only polling brand that has been around for longer), where it is published (an upmarket newspaper read by most federal politicians, with an online presence featuring excellent graphics) and its frequency (unmatched). Poll addicts crave nothing more than a known quantity, easily accessible trend data and a regular fix.

It’s not just the percentages Newspoll generates that matter; it is also the way the Australian interprets the figures. How much the figures themselves matter, and how much the Australian’s interpretation matters, is difficult to say. Both are recycled by politicians and journalists, among others, without much thought being given to whether they make sense.

In the latest poll, conducted 12–15 July, Labor’s primary vote was down (from 38 per cent, 16–24 June, to 36 per cent), as was the Coalition’s (35 per cent to 34 per cent), but Labor’s two-party lead grew from 54–46 to 55–45 — rounded, as are all Newspoll figures, to the nearest integer. As Adrian Beaumont noted in the Conversation, Labor “may have been unlucky” in the rounding of the two previous Newspolls but it “was probably lucky” this time.

At the Australian, the judgement of long-time political editor Simon Benson was unequivocal. Focusing on the fall in Labor’s first-preference support rather than the rise in its two-party share, he declared: “Labor’s honeymoon is officially over.” “Officially”? It was as if Newspoll should be recognised as having the same sort of status as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, say, or the Australian Electoral Commission. If, as Phillip Coorey observed, “the latest Newspoll” was merely “the latest to declare the government’s honeymoon over” (it was the Australian not Newspoll that declared it) then it was uniquely the Australian that made it “official.”

Benson took it for granted that Labor’s “honeymoon” came to an end once its first-preference support declined to a post-election “low” by an amount Benson judged to be significant. No matter that this support for Labor was still well above the 32.6 per cent (primary) or 52.1 per cent (two-party) vote recorded at the May 2022 election. The “honeymoon” had ended, and that was now “official.”

An electoral honeymoon, unlike the real thing, can end it seems — or begin to end — at whatever moment a poll-watcher chooses. Last September, when Labor’s two-party support in Newspoll reached 57 per cent — just two points higher than its current level — and its primary support stood at 37 per cent (one point ahead of where it currently sits), Benson judged that “the electoral honeymoon for Anthony Albanese continues”; in the preferred prime minister stakes, Albanese (61 per cent) was well ahead of Dutton (22 per cent), figures virtually unchanged from July.

This year, at the beginning of March, when Labor’s two-party support was at 54 per cent (three points lower than it had been in September) but its primary support still on 37 per cent, Benson took it as “a sure sign that the romance of the honeymoon phase is coming to an end for the government.” At 54–28, the Albanese–Dutton head-to-head had changed as well, but not dramatically. By mid May, however, when Newspoll estimated Labor’s two-party support at 55 per cent (its current standing) and its primary support at 38 per cent (higher than its current 36 per cent), he wondered whether it was “now the beginning of the end of the government’s honeymoon”; head-to-head, Albanese was still ahead of Dutton 56–29.

The day after the Australian published Newspoll’s figures for July, Nine’s metropolitan dailies published the latest figures from their July poll, the Resolve Political Monitor. Resolve’s percentages read as if Labor’s honeymoon was still in full-swing: Labor on 39 per cent, not 36 (the Newspoll figure); the Coalition on 30 per cent, not 34 (the Newspoll figure).

Political polling is nothing if not competitive. Making its own call about the end of Labor’s honeymoon, Resolve was not to be outdone. In March, after his poll had produced exactly the same figures (39–30) it would produce in July, Resolve’s director Jim Reed took Labor’s fall from 40 per cent in his previous poll as “another confirmation that the honeymoon highs have come to an end.” In June, Resolve had Labor back on 40 per cent. What had previously been a “honeymoon high” was now a sign of something quite different; in May, after all, Labor’s support had been 42 per cent, two points higher. Resolve, the Sun-Herald reported, “had started noting declines in Albanese and Labor’s honeymoon ratings early this year.”

Clearly, the only rule these commentators seem to follow in declaring an electoral honeymoon to have ended is that the level of support for the government in the latest poll is lower than the level recorded in the immediately preceding poll. Neither absolute levels of support nor the longer-term record count. If subsequent support for the government rises and falls — even if it is to a level higher than the previous high — one can declare an end to the honeymoon all over again. Neither the rise nor fall need be outside the poll’s margin of error — a figure the Australian and the Nine newspapers parade endlessly but their commentary studiously ignores.

Poll-watchers who have insisted for years that the Australian interprets its Newspoll data to cheer up or cheer on the Coalition may have noticed that its reading of the latest Newspoll backed up the interpretation of the Fadden by-election offered by the Liberal National Party candidate in Fadden, Cameron Caldwell. The Australian gave Caldwell’s interpretation the hortatory headline, “Fadden result ‘shows the honeymoon is over for Labor.’”

As well as spelling the end of the honeymoon, the result in Fadden showed “concern over the Indigenous voice” to be “high,” Caldwell argued. Columnist Joe Hildebrand — a vocal Yes supporter — recycled and generalised Caldwell’s line in the Daily Telegraph: “It could not be clearer,” he wrote, “that voters are rewarding the Prime Minister for his moderate and centrist direction and punishing him for the one aspect of his government” — the Voice — “that has been cast by his critics as radical or woke.”

Perhaps voters in Fadden were concerned about the Voice. “Using Fadden as a trial run,” Coorey had written on the eve of the by-election, “Dutton is attempting to turn the Voice into a lightning rod for broader discontent with the government.” After the by-election, however, another senior journalist, Paul Bongiorno, was equally adamant that “Dutton didn’t push his opposition to the referendum in the campaign”; having “raised it in a doorstop a few weeks ago, he dropped it as the poll neared.”

How anyone could conclude that Dutton had succeeded in making the Voice an issue based on nothing more than the result in Fadden, neither the Australian nor Hildebrand explained. One needs survey data, not a set of electoral returns, to determine whether Caldwell’s claim has merit. Bongiorno reports Caldwell saying that “people raised the Voice with him quietly because they didn’t want to be accused of racism or prejudice if they raised it publicly” — raised with him, he might have added, because they assumed Caldwell would not have thought such concerns racist or prejudiced. But Coorey, citing another LNP source, discounts the idea that views about the Voice affected the result: “the Voice had little impact either way,” he reports.

Even if the Voice was not shifting voters against Labor, were voters shifting against the Voice? As luck would have it, Newspoll’s latest poll also included a question on “whether to alter the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice.” For the Yes side, the topline numbers brought no more cheer than Caldwell: Yes, 41 per cent; No, 48 per cent; Don’t Know, 11 per cent. The corresponding figures after the same question was asked three weeks earlier: 43–47–10.

The changes between June and July may have been small but they played to the dominant media narrative about the Voice: that support is declining; that No has now overtaken Yes; that the referendum, if not doomed to failure, is not on a path to success. In June, Benson had cautioned that it would be “foolhardy” to “make a call… four months out from polling day” (expected mid October), and that it was “not over yet for the voice.” Now, just three weeks later, with the margin between Yes and No growing from four points to seven — well within what the Australian describes as Newspoll’s “theoretical margin of error” — Benson concluded that “the voice referendum [was] in serious trouble,” support “gradually collapsing” with “confusion over the detail, the scope and the function of the voice… killing any goodwill many undecided voters may have had.”

More striking than the topline figures was a startling shift in the differences between women’s responses and men’s. The new poll reported a seven-point rise in support for Yes among men and a ten-point fall in support among women. Suddenly, from being more likely to vote Yes than to vote No (a six-point gap), women were more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a gap of eleven points) — a turnaround of seventeen percentage points. And from being more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a fourteen-point gap), suddenly men were almost as likely to vote Yes — a twelve-point change.

By any measure, these were remarkable changes. The movement of one-in-five women from the Yes column (48 per cent down to 38 per cent) to either the No column (42 per cent up to 49 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 13 per cent) in such a short time — and before the start of the formal campaign — is difficult to credit. The movement of one-in-ten men from the No column (52 per cent down to 47 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 8 per cent), while only half as big, also stretches credulity.

Since the shifts were in opposite directions, they largely cancelled each other out. Had the shift among either group been less dramatic, the topline results might have looked quite different. For example, if support among women had declined by no more than half as much as Newspoll reports, support for the Voice would have stood at 43 or 44 per cent and opposition at 45 or 46 per cent. This would have represented an improved result, not a worse result, for the Yes camp than Newspoll’s figures of three weeks before. What might the headline have been then?

When Newspoll asks about the Voice, Benson writes, “female voters have until now been significantly overrepresented among the undecideds.” Now, when Newspoll asks those respondents who initially say they “don’t know” whether they “approve” of the alteration to the Constitution, “which way they would lean if forced to profess a view,” things are different: “women voters are now significantly more likely to say No.”

Neither Newspoll nor the Australian is keen to disclose the patterns of response to the initial question — before respondents were leant on to choose Yes or No — in the last three polls. Benson failed to reply to a request that the Australian do so; YouGov, the British-owned firm that conducts Newspoll, said it “can’t really comment.” As a consequence, Benson’s account can’t be confirmed independently. Yet the rules of the Australian Polling Council, of which YouGov is a founding member, say that if “voting intention figures are published with the undecided participants excluded, the proportion who were thus excluded should be published.”

Why might women have moved from Yes to No? Benson attributes the shift to the “targeted campaign by the No camp.” Crucial to this was the fact that the government, “in its contortions over the voice,” had “vacated the field of talking to voters’ primary concern — the cost of living.” Noting that “any pollster… will tell you female voters are more highly attuned to cost-of-living pressures than male voters” — though “cost of living is by far the issue of most concern to a majority of all voters” — Benson insists this gave the No camp a “strategic edge.” The No campaign had also “spent significant funds directly targeting women.” This, in his view, “appear[ed] to have paid off.”

To have “paid off” to anything like the extent Benson implies, the No campaign would have needed not only to have targeted female voters but also to have done so across most of the social media platforms on which the No campaign’s advertising, coordinated by Advance Australia, has largely been conducted. But targeting of this kind is not what the evidence shows. An analysis of the three Facebook pages — Fair Australia, Not Enough, and Referendum News — that Advance Australia has been populating concludes that only one (Not Enough) was targeting voters in the two largest states.

If the other two pages were “essentially ignoring New South Wales and Victoria” — the two states where the majority of women (and men) reside — the No campaign can hardly have been reaching the majority of female voters. Moreover, while the ads on Referendum News skewed “towards a female audience,” the ads on the other pages skewed to different demographics.

Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that the No campaign did enjoy the kind of success Benson attributes to it, are we to conclude that as well as shifting women in extraordinarily large numbers to the No side, the No campaign — in a terrible own goal — also shifted a large number of men across to the Yes side? If not, what did shift these men? This is not a question Benson attempts to answer; everything he has to say goes to explaining why support for the Voice should be falling rather than why, among men, it might have risen.

The explanation for the “rise” in support among men may lie in nothing more profound than the vagaries of polling. Newspoll has asked its Voice question with its current response architecture three times (the first is here). If one looks at all three polls — not just, as Benson does, the last two — among men the Yes–No split is 45–46, 38–48, 45–47: it’s the second (June) poll, not the third (July), that is the odd one out. If the second poll underestimated support among men, the most recent poll may simply be correcting that.

Before the latest Newspoll, only one poll had ever reported finding more men than women in favour of a constitutionally inscribed Voice. Conducted in December 2022 by Freshwater Strategic, it showed only the narrowest of differences in support between men (51 per cent) and women (50 per cent); but even in this poll, more men (30 per cent) than women (22 per cent) were opposed. The most recent poll to use the same response architecture as Newspoll — a poll conducted by Essential Media (5–9 July), a week ahead of Newspoll — shows women (49 per cent) more likely than men (44 per cent) to support Yes, and men (47 per cent) more likely than women (40 per cent) to say No.

None of this appears to have registered at the Australian. For Benson, the referendum had “suffered a collapse in support among women voters,” with women “for the first time… now more likely than men to vote no, a central change to core support.” The precipitous fall in support among women was noted by the paper’s national editor, Dennis Shanahan. The story about a new gender divide got a run in an editorial on the day it broke, and another run the next day. Other outlets, too — seemingly less concerned with objectivity, which requires critical evaluation, than with neutrality, which requires no more than reporting what is newsworthy — reproduced the figures.

Could such a shift have happened? Bongiorno — another strong supporter of a Yes vote — thought it not only could have happened but had happened, even as he took out the standard insurance against being held personally responsible for his report. “If you can believe the opinion polls,” he reported, “regional Australia has gone very cold on the idea of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament.”

Perhaps Bongiorno also had in mind a poll published a couple of weeks earlier by the Canberra Times, not referenced by the Australian. The poll was conducted online by Chi Squared (the research arm of the Canberra Times’s owner, Australian Community Media) among readers of fourteen daily newspapers “serving Canberra and key regional population centres such as Newcastle, Wollongong, Tamworth, Orange, Albury and Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Ballarat, Bendigo and Warrnambool in Victoria, and Launceston and Burnie in northern Tasmania,” to which 10,131 readers had responded.

Chi Squared purported to show that “in the regions” the level of support for establishing the Voice (the question was not disclosed) stood at just 35 per cent. While this figure was not very different from Newspoll’s estimate, the “poll” was conducted from 16 to 26 June — at a time when Newspoll, using sampling techniques better suited to the task, not simply self-selection, was reporting a 40–51 split in the regions rather than Chi Squared’s 35–57. If regional opinion had shifted between June and July in the way Newspoll suggests, why might it have shifted? Benson doesn’t venture an answer; nor does Bongiorno.

“The bottom line,” says Benson, “is that the trend towards a No vote is increasing and it is expanding in the wrong demographics for the yes camp.” What the “right demographics” might be, he doesn’t say. The Yes camp needs a majority of the national vote and would be happy, one assumes, to accept contributions from all demographics. No demographic — certainly not women rather than men, or regional rather than metro voters — is “right” or “wrong”; if support is slipping, it is slipping largely across the board. To win, Yes also needs majorities in the majority of states; any four will do, though a victory in one or more of the bigger states will do more to secure a national majority vote than a victory in one or more of the smaller states.

To see whether the latest Newspoll has got things horribly wrong on the Voice — or whether, on the contrary, it should be recognised for being the first to detect an extraordinary change in the gender gap and a substantial expansion of the metro–regional divide — we will need to wait for the next polls, whether from Newspoll itself or from Resolve, Freshwater or Morgan.

Finally, a word about an unreported upheaval at YouGov. Between the June poll and the one conducted in July, virtually all of those working in the public affairs and polling unit at YouGov left; the departures included the head of the unit (and chair of the Australian Polling Council), Campbell White.

Did the number and quality of the personnel heading out the door have an impact on the analysis of the more recent poll? If the changes at YouGov have affected data quality or the quality of the analysis, and aren’t corrected, then — much like support for Labor or support for the Voice — Newspoll’s status in Canberra might slide as well. •

The post The “end” of Labor’s honeymoon and the “collapse” of women’s support for the Voice appeared first on Inside Story.

Ben Roberts-Smith was already the most famous and celebrated soldier of his generation. During multiple operational tours in Afghanistan, he had won the Victoria Cross, the Medal for Gallantry and the Commendation for Distinguished Service — making him the most highly decorated Australian serviceman since the second world war.

After retiring from the army in 2013, Roberts-Smith had done an MBA and traded his $120,000-a-year soldier’s pay packet for a $700,000 package as Queensland manager of the Seven Network. Venerated as an exemplary role model in war and peace, he was named Australian Father of the Year in 2013 and served as chair of the National Australia Day Council from 2014 to 2017.

During his research in Afghanistan and Australia, Masters had heard claims that Roberts-Smith was not quite the paragon of virtue that political leaders, powerful business figures and the Australian public had come to embrace. There were mutterings that he was a headstrong bully, that the circumstances in which he had won his medals were dubious and that he had been involved in multiple battlefield abuses. But there was nothing concrete.

The meeting in the privacy of the Hyatt Hotel rose garden had been arranged as an opportunity for the former soldier to rebut various criticisms being levelled by his old comrades, rather than as an inquisition. “While I was obliged to ask difficult questions, which is the job of a journalist, I was in a mood to mediate,” Masters, an admirer of Australia’s special forces and supporter of their engagement in Afghanistan, would write. But while Roberts-Smith had begun by revealing himself to be “articulate, measured and persuasive,” the conversation soon degenerated into anger and vitriol.

The war hero went to war on his accusers. He blasted some of the soldiers who had served with him as cowardly, incompetent and toxic. He said his critics were driven by jealousy and were smearing him with lies. He was “vicious” in his angry rebuttal of their accusations. As Masters later watched the two-metre-tall figure in the tailored business suit depart, he would reflect: “My overwhelming impression… was that Ben Roberts-Smith VC, MG was not behaving like a man with nothing to hide.”

A few days later, Masters received a late-night call on his mobile phone from an anonymous source on an encrypted line, who said: “He kicked this bloke off a cliff. As his face spun down, it smashed against the wall and his teeth sprayed out. The bloke who saw it can’t get the image out of his mind. He said he had to get away from Ben Roberts-Smith. It was not the first time he said this stuff happened. RS is a bloody psychopath.” After Masters pursued further details from sources, “the outline of a shocking story emerged, cruel to the point of abomination.”

He realised he was on the cusp of perhaps his biggest story since the 1980s, when he had exposed the French government’s involvement in the sinking of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior and revealed the police corruption in Queensland, helping to trigger the Fitzgerald royal commission. But the former Four Corners star was now a freelance journalist and writer with limited resources. “I needed an ally,” he would concede.

And so began one of the most formidable partnerships in the history of Australian investigative journalism — Chris Masters and the Age’s Nick McKenzie. Despite being thirty-three years younger than Masters, McKenzie had a CV to rival if not surpass that of the man who had once mentored him as a cadet journalist. After two decades of spectacular investigative journalism, McKenzie had won an unprecedented fourteen national Walkley awards for journalism and twice been named Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year.

Their six-year collaboration delivered a series of shocking revelations about the conduct of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan and a marathon defamation trial that ended last month with a finding by Justice Anthony Besanko in the NSW Supreme Court that Ben Roberts-Smith was a liar, a serial bully and a war criminal. Besanko found it was “substantially true” that the VC winner had been involved in the murder of four unarmed Afghan prisoners and civilians, had intimidated and threatened court witnesses to hide the truth, and had lied repeatedly in his sworn evidence.

Despite Roberts-Smith’s decision on Tuesday to lodge an appeal in the Federal Court challenging Besanko’s findings, the dramatic conclusion of the case has starkly framed the prospect of years of sensational war crimes prosecutions that are likely to shred the reputation of our armed forces at home and abroad and scar the Anzac mythology that has been a cornerstone of our national identity for more than a century. The failure of Roberts-Smith to hide what Besanko found to be true must give new impetus to the work of the Australian Federal Police and the Special Investigator appointed in the wake of the internal defence department inquiry into war crimes in Afghanistan headed by NSW judge and army reservist Major General Paul Brereton.

Brereton reported in 2020 that there was credible evidence that thirty-nine Afghan non-combatants had been unlawfully killed by or at the direction of Australian special forces, “which may constitute the war crime of murder.” His report identified twenty-five current or former Australian soldiers who were “alleged perpetrators — either as principals or accessories.” Brereton described one of the unspecified incidents he investigated as “the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history.”

Had Besanko found in favour of Roberts-Smith, it would likely have dampened if not derailed the cumbersome process of bringing appropriate criminal charges against those identified by the Brereton inquiry. It would have re-energised the many powerful voices who continue to argue that whatever happened in Afghanistan should be left behind in Afghanistan. And it would certainly have discouraged the media from further interrogating matters that might risk ruinous defamation costs.

Instead, the chief of the defence force, General Angus Campbell, this week declared that thoroughly investigating those Australian soldiers accused of war crimes in Afghanistan was “utterly critical” to Australia regaining moral authority at home and with its allies. Campbell, who deserves great credit for initiating the Brereton process in 2016 in the face of strong military and political opposition, told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s journal the Strategist that it was also imperative to deal more broadly with “the breadth of the cultural professional issues” that had been highlighted by the inquiry.

“Our operational capability is in large part about our capacity to win the friends and partners who will stand with us in conflict,” he said. “We need to be a force that people want to serve in, but also to join with in partnership across nations. We have never fought alone. We never want to fight alone. What a tragedy if because of real or perceived lapses in our military conduct we found ourselves alone.”

While the tenacious partnership between Masters and McKenzie secured victory in what became the biggest and, with costs now estimated to be as high as $35 million, the most expensive defamation case in Australian history, it would not survive the final reckoning. Their plans to jointly write a book about the saga unravelled. According to Masters, he and McKenzie “worked well together as investigators, but regrettably could not coordinate the writing” of a joint book.

That apparently amicable literary separation has now delivered two compelling accounts of the partnership that complement and illuminate each other — Nick McKenzie’s Crossing the Line and Chris Masters’s Flawed Hero. Both are powerful, passionate and often moving narratives infused with the personal impacts of fighting the most protracted and enervating journalistic battle each of them had ever experienced. Had they lost, it would have been a serious setback late in the illustrious career of seventy-four-year-old Masters. For Nick McKenzie, it would have been the end. He writes that he could not have coped professionally with the failure and, aged forty-one, would have quit journalism.

The two journalists reveal how perilously close they thought they came to losing. While they were sure of the accuracy of their reporting and the details of the atrocities they had helped to uncover, they concede that they faced an uphill battle proving it to the standard required for a defence of truth in a civil defamation case.

To succeed, it was essential to persuade soldiers who witnessed the abuses to agree to give evidence or, if they were compelled to appear, to tell the truth about what they had seen. When the case began, they were pessimistic about the prospects of persuading even those soldiers who were appalled by what they had seen and supported their reporting to willingly give evidence. They were sure Roberts-Smith had the upper hand at the start of the hearings and held it until close to the end.

Had the hearings not been delayed many months by the intervention of Covid, they felt it unlikely they would have had enough time to persuade reluctant witnesses to cooperate. But in the end, the defendants called twenty-one serving and former soldiers, and it was the compelling testimony of a number of them that ultimately defeated Roberts-Smith’s claims.

For both journalists it was, before the final victory, a deeply disillusioning experience. For Masters, who had spent decades working closely with special forces and growing to admire their dedication and professionalism, this was especially so. Beyond the shocking evidence of the multiple murders of unarmed prisoners and civilians, there was what Liberal MP and former SAS captain Andrew Hastie would describe as a pervasive “pagan warrior culture”: rookie soldiers “blooded” by being ordered to kill Afghan captives, “throw downs” in which radios or weapons were planted on the bodies of unarmed victims to pretend they were legitimate battlefield casualties, and “kill boards” kept by SAS units with targets of Afghans to be killed. “It amounted to a descent into the depravity we fight against,” writes Masters.

For McKenzie, seeking justice for the most famous of the victims became a driving force. Ali Jan was the innocent farmer and father of six who was visiting the village of Darwan in Oruzgan province to buy flour and a pair of shoes for his young daughter on 11 September 2012 — the eleventh anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks in New York — when Australian soldiers swooped on the village. Justice Besanko would accept the evidence of multiple witnesses that after he was handcuffed and questioned, Ali Jan was taken to the edge of a nearby cliff and kicked off by Ben Roberts-Smith, who later ordered the execution of the helpless and badly injured farmer.

In 2019 McKenzie travelled to Afghanistan to meet Ali Jan’s widow, Bibi Dhorko, who was desperately struggling to support her young family after the loss of her husband. “One of the soldiers who’d been at Darwan the day Ali Jan died told me something just before I made the trip to Kabul,” he writes. “I’d thought about it ever since. Ali had lived a relatively meagre existence confined to a few villages, a cluster of kin and a daily struggle to survive. Once the story of his death was exposed in our newspapers, it had viscerally exposed the barbarity of those few Australian soldiers who had gone rogue… In death, Ali had reinforced to my war-bitten source the sanctity of human life, even in conflict. This was why the laws of war mattered. Maybe that was Ali’s ultimate legacy.”

As much as the Roberts-Smith saga showed the best of Australian journalism through the determined work of our finest investigative reporters, it also showed the worst of Australian journalism in the outrageously partisan conduct of rival media organisations. They not only failed in their professional duty to help expose the scandal but also worked hard to undermine the credibility of the fine work done by McKenzie and Masters, gormlessly joining the Roberts-Smith cheer squad.

“I can’t say I handle well being beaten up by fellow reporters,” Masters writes. “My view is that there is a shared responsibility. We work first for the public, so there should be some shared values and purpose.” He derides in particular the reporting of the Murdoch press: “The Australian’s reporting on the war crimes now under scrutiny, and especially on Ben Roberts-Smith, was flimsy and partisan. Probably because they had not done the work, because they were incapable of catching up and had an ingrained oppositional stance to Fairfax, and because they could not resist the spoils of a drip-feeding by Roberts-Smith’s lawyers.”

The magnitude of Roberts-Smith’s fall from grace has been amplified by the heights to which he was elevated in popular perception, in large part a product of jingoistic and uncritical coverage in the popular media. Chris Masters dubbed him the Anzac Avatar — the superman soldier whose fame and legendary battlefield exploits made him the embodiment of Australia’s self-perception as a nation of rugged, fearless and independent individuals.

“Craving identity,” Masters writes, “Ben Roberts-Smith found the shape of who he wanted to be in the persona of the killing machine. The special forces operative, amped in popular media to superhero veneration, became a poster boy. We could not help ourselves. The seven-foot-tall and bulletproof Anzac avatar assumed that pedestal.” This, says Masters, is where it went “monstrously wrong.”

Ben Roberts-Smith was one of four Australians to win the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan. Why was he the household name when most Australians would be unaware of the three other Australian soldiers who also won the highest award for gallantry, let alone know their names? How many know the story of Trooper Mark Donaldson who rescued a wounded Afghan interpreter under heavy fire, or Corporal Daniel Keighran who drew enemy fire away from a wounded colleague, or Corporal Cameron Baird who was killed in action storming an enemy-controlled building?

While it was central to Roberts-Smith’s case to portray himself as the victim of a reckless media smear campaign, Masters points out that the complaints about the soldier “originated not from the pampered, irresponsible media but from battle-hardened colleagues.”

Both McKenzie and Masters argue persuasively that Australians rightly dismayed by the scandalous misconduct within the ranks of our elite forces in Afghanistan should be heartened by the fact that the truth would probably never have been revealed without the courageous stand of many decent and professional soldiers appalled by the actions of their comrades.

Says McKenzie: “It was the good men and the moral soldiers of the SAS who stood up and told the truth in court.” Masters writes: “There are soldiers in Australia’s Special Air Services Regiment who have moral as well as physical courage. While those who spoke endured condemnation from many of their brothers, it is hoped that some glancing consideration might be given to the probability that they saved their regiment. Had these revelations erupted as a scandal that was unforeseen and not self-reported, the SASR would have been lucky to escape disbandment.”

As Australia braces for years of traumatic testimony with the twenty-five potential war criminals identified by the Brereton inquiry facing prosecution, we might hope that the courage and decency of those who called out the renegades and forced the reckoning will be the narrative that begins to salvage the tarnished honour of our armed forces. •

Crossing the Line: The Inside Story of Murder, Lies and a Fallen Hero
By Nick McKenzie | Hachette | $34.95 | 488 pages

Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes
By Chris Masters | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 592 pages

The post Unfriendly fire appeared first on Inside Story.

At the beginning of April, when Newspoll last reported on support for putting a Voice into the Constitution, it estimated the level of approval at 53 per cent and opposition at 39 per cent; 8 per cent said “Don’t know.” Two months later, the corresponding figures are rather different: 46–43–11.

On the face of it, this looks like support has declined by seven points, the opposition has risen by four points, and the “Don’t knows” have gone up by three. And it looks like that’s the result of a couple of months in which the No side has campaigned hard and the Yes side has been on the back foot, with some of its erstwhile supporters either switching to No or putting off a firm decision and “parking” their vote, as Newspoll’s former boss Sol Lebovic used to say, under “Don’t know.”

Thus, Dennis Shanahan, in a comment for the Australian: “The latest Newspoll figures… suggest there is an across-the-board movement against the voice and a surge in uncertainty.”

Not so fast. There are two reasons for caution when comparing the June results with the April results: a change in Newspoll’s question and a change in what we might call, borrowing a phrase from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, its “choice architecture.”

The question: The Australian notes that the question asked in its latest poll is not the same as the question asked in its previous polls. The obvious implication is that its figures need to be interpreted with care.

In April, Newspoll explained that “There is a proposal to alter the Australian constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against this proposal?”

In its latest poll, Newspoll used a slightly different preamble: “Later this year, Australians will decide at a referendum whether to alter the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice”(with those italicised words underlined in the questionnaire). It then asked: “Do you approve this proposed alteration?” This made it “the first Newspoll survey to present voters with the precise question they will be asked at the ballot box when the referendum is held later this year.”

If the differences in the wording of the two questions explains, at least in part, the differences in the two sets of responses, it is not clear how it does. Did the reference to “recognition” deflate support? That seems unlikely: since “recognition” has wide public support, its inclusion is more likely to have boosted support than deflated it. Did the prospect of having to vote at a referendum boost opposition? Again, that seems unlikely, though at a time when voters may have more pressing things to worry about, it’s probably the better bet. Perhaps the heavy black underlining of the proposal caused concern.

According to a quote in the Daily Telegraph, another News Corp masthead, polling analyst Kevin Bonham believes Newspoll is “likely more accurate” than many other polls because it has been the first to use the exact wording of the referendum proposal. However commendable that might have been, we cannot assume that the wording necessarily makes a difference to respondents.

A polling purist might baulk at Newspoll’s switch from: (a) asking respondents whether they are “in favour or against” (balanced alternatives) a proposal to alter the Constitution to establish a Voice; to (b) asking respondents whether they “approve” this proposed alteration, with no balancing alternative (“disapprove”). It might also have been better practice to ask respondents how they intended to act (that is, vote) rather than how they felt (“in favour or against”; “approve”).

The choice architecture: What the Australian overlooks — and what Newspoll itself fails to note — may be something more important than the change in the question: the change in the poll’s choice architecture. In April, Newspoll not just posed a different question; it also offered a different array of response options: “Strongly in favour,” “Partly in favour,” “Partly against,” “Strongly against,” “Don’t know.” In its most recent poll, by contrast, the options offered to respondents were simply: “Yes,” “No,” “Don’t know” — a set of responses, it should be acknowledged, better suited to a referendum than the set Newspoll previously offered.

How might this change have affected the results? With a wider number of response options, the proportion that chose “Don’t know” was relatively small; in April’s Newspoll, it was 8 per cent, with the numbers in February (7 per cent) and in March (9 per cent) having been almost the same. Polls by other companies in February, March or April that offered the same sort of choices as Newspoll offered in its latest poll reported higher figures for “Don’t know,” just as Newspoll now does.

The assumption that we can compare polls that use different architectures (Yes/No/Don’t know as against Strongly in favour/Partly in favour/Partly against/Strongly against/Don’t know) simply by collapsing categories (Yes = Strongly in favour + Partly in favour) is mistaken.

It is difficult to say how much the change in the Yes and No responses can be explained as an effect of the change in the choice architecture. But this doesn’t leave us without any bearings. As we would expect, the “Don’t know” number in June (11 per cent) is higher than it was in April (8 per cent); the “surge in uncertainty” is therefore almost certainly an illusion — an effect of changes in the response categories.

If the “Don’t know” number is higher, then the Yes and/or No vote has to be lower. In this Newspoll, the Yes vote is lower but it is also lower than we might have expected on the basis of a switch in choice options alone. And the No vote, far from being lower, is higher.

Allowing for changes in the choice architecture, this suggests that, over the two months since Newspoll’s last survey, the Yes side has lost support and the No side has gained support.

This is hardly news: a tightening of the contest is what almost all the polling has shown for some time. The intriguing question is how much of a tightening would Newspoll have shown — with or without its new question — had it not changed its response options.

Nor is it news that fewer than half of those polled intend to vote Yes. Since March, none of the polls that use the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t know) — Freshwater, Morgan, Resolve — have reported Yes majorities. The only way of conjuring Yes majorities from these polls has been by assuming either that the “Don’t knows” won’t vote or that enough of them will vote — and vote Yes — to get the proposal over the line.

According to Simon Benson, who wrote the Australian’s main story, the Newspoll results “suggest the debate is now shaping up as one being led by elites on one side and everybody else on the other.” What this means is unclear. There are “elites” in both camps. But even if the “elites” were only on the Yes side, the polls don’t show “everybody else” on the other. Benson has reprised a dichotomy, pushed by some on the No side, without thinking it through. The poll results, he says, “stand as a warning sign for advocate business leaders that their customer base and employees may not necessarily be signed up to the inevitability of the referendum’s assumed success.”

Is the Australian’s clearest contribution to the debate its headline? In February, the website run by Fair Australia, the name under which senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s Advance is campaigning against the Voice, advertised its plans to “build an army of Aussies” to “defend our nation.” Now, told by the Australian that most “Aussies” don’t intend to vote Yes, the undecided may draw some reassurance that it’s okay to vote No. •

The post Losing ground? appeared first on Inside Story.

Why Hungary, and why now? A tagline revealed that Sheridan, the Australian’s foreign editor, is just back from a week as a visiting fellow at Budapest’s Danube Institute. What the newspaper didn’t tell readers is that this evocatively named organisation is funded by the Hungarian government (via its Batthyány Lajos Foundation) as part of its breathtakingly generous bankrolling of conservative institutes based in Budapest.

The job of these institutes is to host visiting fellows like Sheridan, often for months at a time, and run seminars, publish reports and periodicals, and generally promote what Orbán calls “illiberal liberalism.” (Orbán has also described Hungary as “the last Christian conservative bastion of the Western world.”) The Danube Institute alone publishes three journals, the European Conservative, the Hungarian Review and the Hungarian Conservative. Other Budapest-based institutes with government links include the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs.

Orbán’s largesse is no doubt part of the reason for the sharp rise in his stocks in recent years among English-speaking conservatives of a more hardline bent. But it is his record of four consecutive election wins since 2010 — however tainted by bribes, crackdowns and electoral tampering — that has become a talisman for those American conservatives who worry that real democracy will never guarantee them the power they want.

Prominent among Orbán’s beneficiaries is the American conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher, who crops up repeatedly in media coverage of Hungary’s cross-Atlantic appeal and has benefited from Danube Institute hospitality. Dreher is the thread running through Foreign Policy’s account of Orbán’s spending on the institutes, and he’s also the larger-than-life centrepiece of a New Yorker article investigating the appeal of Hungary’s authoritarianism for figures on the Republican right.

For Dreher, Orbán’s example is “so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” He was especially struck when Orbán told a group of visiting conservatives, “We hope you will think of Budapest as your intellectual home.”

Where Sheridan ignores Fidesz’s excesses, Dreher believes “we expect too much of these post-Communist countries if we judge them by Western standards of clean government.” He takes the credit for having persuaded Fox News’s then-presenter Tucker Carlson to broadcast a week’s worth of programs — even less critical of Orbán than Greg Sheridan’s piece — from Budapest in 2021.

But another figure also keeps appearing in the New Yorker piece. One moment he’s lunching in a bistro in Budapest wearing “a pin-striped suit and a tie from Liberty, the London clothier once favoured by Oscar Wilde.” Then he’s in his nearby office, assuring the magazine’s Andrew Marantz that the long wait for permission to attend the Budapest-hosted Conservative Political Action Conference is “merely an oversight.” (It wasn’t; Marantz’s request was eventually refused.) Then he’s on hand with an “Ah, good, you made it!” when Marantz slips into the conference reception at the five-star Párisi Udvar hotel. And then he’s there again, with a friendly slap on the back, when the reporter collars a spare conference pass.

This genial scamp is the eighty-year-old British journalist John O’Sullivan, who has been president of the Danube Institute since its inception in 2013. O’Sullivan has impeccable conservative credentials: he wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s and later helped draft her memoirs; he took over from William F. Buckley as editor of the New York–based National Review in 1990; he was editor-in-chief of United Press International and then executive editor of Radio Free Europe in the early 2000s.

But one job is missing from the New Yorker’s summary. During 2015 and 2016 O’Sullivan was editor of Quadrant — yes, Australia’s Quadrant — and since then he has been the magazine’s international editor. More than that, he appears to have stayed on as president of the Danube Institute throughout his editorship.

It’s strange thought: that this decades-old tribune of the Australian right, Quadrant, was being edited by an Englishman who also held the most senior position in a Budapest-based think tank funded by the Hungarian government. Did he continue to be paid by the institute? Did he spend much time in the Quadrant office in Sydney?

Quadrant hasn’t been entirely candid about O’Sullivan’s relations with the government of Hungary. When the magazine announced his appointment as editor in February 2015, his work at the Danube Institute was mentioned only in the past tense. I can’t find any instance where the dual role was made clear to readers during his editorship.

Even after he moved to the international editor’s job, his relationship with the institute barely rated a mention — even at the foot of a piece he wrote in September 2021 about Tucker Carlson’s “polite questioning” of Orbán (a good thing, in O’Sullivan’s view) — although he did fleetingly mention his work at the institute in a piece a couple of months later. This year the institute has cropped up a couple of times in O’Sullivan’s articles on general topics, but without any reference to its generous backer.

Other Quadrant contributors admire Hungary too (though not all contributors to O’Sullivan’s old magazine, National Review, do). Former Liberal frontbenchers Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer have all accepted invitations to speak at Danube Institute, and former diplomat (and Abbott adviser) Mark Higgie took up a fellowship there.

Unlike O’Sullivan, Sheridan is worried by one characteristic of Orbán’s Hungary: its hardline enforcement of immigration controls. But for the Australian’s foreign editor, “freedom” (whatever that means in a country fast slipping down the democracy rankings) trumps everything. Freedom, above all, from “coercive and ideological contemporary left-liberalism.”

Surely Australian conservatives haven’t caught the Hungarian disease from the more intemperate of their American counterparts? Maybe not all of them, but there are signs that Greg Sheridan has. Should he have mentioned to readers that the think tank that hosted his visit is funded by foreign minister Németh and his colleagues? I’d say so, but he obviously he sees the battle with left-liberals as so existential and so unequal that such niceties must be sacrificed. •

The post Dazzled on the Danube appeared first on Inside Story.

But Besanko’s incendiary finding early yesterday afternoon that Ben Roberts-Smith, the most highly decorated and revered Australian soldier since the Vietnam war, was “a murderer, a war criminal and a bully” — as the headline in the Age instantly trumpeted in victory — is a watershed moment for investigative journalism and, more profoundly, for our military forces, upon whose reputation much of our national self-esteem has been cultivated for more than a century.

Besanko ruled that Roberts-Smith murdered or was complicit in the murder of multiple unarmed civilians while serving in Afghanistan. He found, on the balance of probabilities, that Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed prisoner off a cliff in 2012 before ordering another soldier to shoot him dead. He further found that in 2009, the SAS corporal ordered the killing of an elderly man found hiding in a tunnel in a bombed-out compound and, during the same operation, murdered with a machine gun a disabled man with a prosthetic.

The decision was not a criminal conviction but a civil judicial determination of truth on the “balance of probabilities.” But the reputation of Victoria Cross and Medal for Gallantry winner Roberts-Smith lies in tatters, along with that of the Special Air Service Regiment with which he served, and the troubled Australian deployment in Afghanistan for which he was once a poster boy. And an air of grim foreboding hangs over the coming Afghanistan war crimes prosecutions in which Roberts-Smith is front and centre among many soldiers accused of grave abuses.

Roberts-Smith’s decision to sue for defamation must go down as one of the biggest own goals in history. As Age reporter Nick McKenzie pointed out after the verdict, the journalists had not wanted to go to court and neither had the SAS soldiers forced to give evidence against their former comrade. Roberts-Smith gambled that by taking defamation action he would intimidate and silence his media accusers. Instead, he simply amplified massively the damaging publicity in a case that dragged out over five years, thanks to Covid, and ended by vindicating his accusers.

Had Roberts-Smith simply professed his innocence and rejected the allegations in the Age reports, however damning they were, the media coverage would likely have subsided until the findings of the Brereton inquiry evolved into war crimes prosecutions, a process that clearly still has a way to run. At that point, if charged, he would have been judged alongside others accused of equally heinous crimes, with perhaps a better opportunity to introduce mitigating evidence and supportive witnesses — instead of flying solo into the sun in the civil courts.

Nine Entertainment, dating back to when it was known as Fairfax Media, has been rightly applauded for backing its journalists in this case. Had it lost, it would likely have been up for the bulk of the costs of the two legal teams — estimated at as much as $25 million — aside from any award of damages. (Another $10 million is estimated to have been spent by the Commonwealth on its representation in the case.) Even with an expected costs order in its favour, Nine is likely to finish out of pocket to the tune of several million dollars. But given the gravity of the matters at the heart of the stories, the company really had no choice but to stand and fight, for the sake of its own reputation as much as that of its star journalists.

The modern history of media defamation cases in Australia, including at Fairfax, has been mostly about negotiating early settlements and quick payouts to avoid the potentially crippling costs of going to trial and losing — a fact that often has only emboldened litigants whose misconduct was a proper target of journalistic investigation but who have plenty of money to stare down the media and muddy the waters with writs.

Had Nine lost to Roberts-Smith, the fallout would likely have been very serious for the future of investigative journalism in Australia. The huge financial toll would have made all publishers and broadcasters even more wary about tackling big stories challenging high-profile, well-resourced entities, more likely to fold than fight when their journalism was challenged legally, and probably less enthusiastic about investing the big bucks needed to employ and deploy good investigative journalists.

The decision in the defamation case has no formal bearing on the war crimes proceedings, which is why defence minister Richard Marles was able to escape yesterday with a brusque “no comment” on the civil matter when his office will undoubtedly be consumed with analysis of the fallout from the case. But the intense publicity surrounding the trial and its shocking conclusion will sharpen expectations of a timely and thorough interrogation of the conduct of Australian forces in Afghanistan, which is now a full-blown national scandal and an international embarrassment.

On the steps of the court after the verdict, Nick McKenzie — whose formidable career and reputation also hung in the balance with the trial’s outcome — rightly pointed out that the decision involved one soldier not his entire regiment, many of whose members had bravely spoken out about his conduct. “I’d like Ben Roberts-Smith to reflect on the pain that he’s brought on lots of men in the SAS who stood up and told the truth about his conduct,” McKenzie said. “They were mocked and ridiculed in court. They were bullied. They were intimidated.”

But with many other SAS soldiers under active investigation for murder and other very serious war crimes, and with the brutal and ugly culture of the unit drawn in graphic detail during the defamation hearings, the future of the SAS Regiment is in serious question if not untenable. It is painfully evident that much of the behaviour that led to the alleged atrocities thrived under an elitist and secretive code. Some SAS members were clearly emboldened to believe they could act with impunity and in defiance of international law.

The indications that multiple offences occurred over many years in Afghanistan calls into serious question not only the failure of the SAS commanders to maintain discipline but also the lack of supervision by the entire command structure of the Australian Defence Force.

Just as the misconduct of a minority has tarnished the reputation of the entire SAS and all those who fought with courage and dedication in Afghanistan, so too has that misconduct cast a shadow over the reputation of the entire ADF, its proud legacy in two world wars and multiple other conflicts, and its claim to be the repository of the hallowed Anzac spirit and a standard-bearer of the Australian character.

The problem has been compounded by sections of our defence establishment who have resolutely defended Ben Roberts-Smith and denounced the work of those journalists who dared to challenge his record, not least within the previous leadership of the Australian War Memorial. Most egregious among them was former AWM director and later chairman Brendan Nelson who, after the first reports appeared in the Age, accused the journalists of running a scurrilous and unfounded campaign against the SAS and Roberts-Smith in particular.

“Australians need to understand that we have amongst us a small number of real heroes and Ben Roberts-Smith is one of them,” Nelson declared. “I say to the average Aussie, if you see Ben Roberts-Smith, wave and give him a thumbs up.” When he appeared as a witness in the Federal Court two years ago, Nelson said he had been cautioned by a senior member of government about his effusive support for the soldier, and went on to say that he had rung Roberts-Smith after reading the story about him: “I told him I’d read the story, I knew it was about him. I told him that I believed in him. I was very sorry that such an article should be published about him.”

The $25 million question is how Ben Roberts-Smith will foot the bill for his and Nine’s costs in the likely event that the court orders him to pay. It has been reported that his boss and principal backer, Seven Network magnate Kerry Stokes, lent him $2 million to pursue the action against Nine. Stokes, who was chairing the AWM board when the case was launched, yesterday expressed disappointment with the decision and appeared to try to dismiss it as a disagreement between soldiers.

“The judgement does not accord with the man I know,” Stokes said. “I know this will be particularly hard for Ben, who has always maintained his innocence. That his fellow soldiers have disagreed with each other, this outcome will be the source of additional grief.”

It has been reported that the Stokes loan to Roberts-Smith was secured with his Victoria Cross medal. If so, this could well prove one of the worst commercial decisions in the shrewd businessman’s career.

As I have written previously, it would be politically and morally untenable for a soldier found to have committed murder to be allowed to keep a Victoria Cross — and an insult to the memory of all other VC winners. If Roberts-Smith’s right to wear the VC is revoked for dishonourable conduct, the medal will have little value beyond that of a historical curiosity, and certainly won’t be worth the $1 million-plus that Kerry Stokes has generously paid to acquire other Australian VCs for the AWM.

The court victory is another feather in the illustrious cap of veteran journalist Chris Masters but it cements McKenzie’s place as the pre-eminent Australian investigative journalist of his generation, if not all generations. Over two decades he has exposed a succession of scandals in Australian public, corporate and criminal life, but none more serious or consequential than the rot at the core of Australia’s armed forces. •

The post Murder he wrote appeared first on Inside Story.

Those words are a measure of how quickly the media landscape in Australia has changed. Today, such a thud would puzzle most of the target audience. For the remainder it would have a slightly embarrassing whiff of nostalgia.

Web-based news media has become the norm. The death of print has been predicted so often it has almost become a joke, but nobody doubts that hard-copy newspapers will end the second they stop turning a profit. That day grows closer as the generation that understood the significance of the thud on the veranda dies out.

Crikey, meanwhile, is in modest good health. It drew international attention late last year after Lachlan Murdoch sued over an opinion piece that described the Murdochs as “unindicted co-conspirators” in Washington’s Capitol riots. Murdoch abruptly dropped that action last month after News Corp’s depositions in Dominion’s case against Fox News attracted adverse publicity. Crikey claimed it as a win — not only for it, but for free speech.

Just three weeks earlier, Crikey had gone back to the future, appointing Sophie Black as editor-in-chief. Black is among the first journalists to have had a journalistic career entirely in online media — and mostly with Crikey. She worked there for ten years between 2004 and 2015, first as deputy editor, then as editor and editor-in-chief.

This time she replaces former Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Fray, who exited the Crikey job after, somewhat worse for wear, he heckled ABC award winners at the Walkleys, suggesting that Crikey had broken their story first. He followed that up with a tweet describing the ABC as a fraud, but later apologised for his conduct.

It was a striking display of a characteristic that Black acknowledges is “baked in” to the Crikey personality — its self-image as a perpetual larrikin outsider, of the media yet outside the media.

And yet, despite the successive waves of change that have devastated many newsrooms, and despite the flat spots, missteps and not-infrequent self-indulgence, Crikey is still with us — the idiosyncratic survivor of the new media age.

Why? And what happens next under its new editor-in-chief?

Mayne, a former media adviser to the colourful Victorian Liberal premier Jeff Kennett, founded Crikey in late 1999. The weekday newsletter had already become part of the undertow of public life when Beecher took over, serving a niche audience of politicians, investors, journalists and news junkies with a mix of insider gossip, comment, analysis and speculation.

Although most media outlets were making their content available online for free, viewing the web as little more than a promotional opportunity, Mayne had charged a subscription from the very beginning. Today that looks like a stroke of genius.

Beecher’s Private Media Partners paid just $1 million for the business: a small amount but a significant milestone, for this was the first time an internet-based news service had changed hands for real money. Google had only just established itself as the world’s dominant search engine. Nobody had heard of social media. Facebook and Twitter only became accessible to the public the following year.

This was the time of the brave little blog-based startups, many of them not-for-profits run on a wing and a prayer and the enthusiasm of their founders. There was On Line Opinion, New Matilda, Tim Dunlop’s Road to Surfdom and group blogs including Club Troppo and Catallaxy.

A rhetorical battle of “bloggers v. journalists” was raging, with some suggesting that web-based citizen journalism would make professionals redundant. Few foresaw that the live blog would instead be taken over by mainstream media and become a staple, reinforcing the place of established mastheads at the centre of public dialogue. Independent bloggers mostly faded away, were recruited by the mainstream or switched to Twitter. Crikey lived on.

So what has changed since Black last worked for Crikey in 2015? “Less than you’d think,” she tells me. Some contributors — Guy Rundle and Bernard Keane among them — have been at Crikey for all of that time. Their combined output would, if grouped together, make several thick books.

As for the Lachlan Murdoch imbroglio, both Keane’s column that provoked the writ, and the way the publication handled it were “emblematic of what Crikey is about,” says Black. “A great cracking story for us is one that reveals the way power works in this country, and this was a story we were at the centre of.”

Murdoch accused Crikey of using the case to get publicity and subscribers. Private Media’s chief executive, Will Hayward, puts a different slant on it. “I thought the worst thing that could ever happen was that he sued us, we lose and no one cares.” Once the company decided to stand up to Murdoch and refuse to take the column down, he thought it was essential to “go big.”

Crikey took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times urging Lachlan to follow through on his threats and issue a writ. The battle immediately became international news, and the Australian media — which prefers to ignore Crikey — had to report it too.

Black acknowledges a “Lachlan bump” in subscriptions but says they had already been growing over the previous three years. That’s the amazing thing: Crikey is actually doing quite well, in a niche kind of way. It has been doing quite well for some time.

When Black left in 2015, subscriptions seemed to have hit a ceiling of around 12,000. Nothing the team did resulted in any further growth. Today, though, around 26,000 people pay $199 a year (with some getting discounts on that) to access the email newsletter and website.

Hayward won’t disclose profit figures but agrees that a back-of-the-envelope calculation of around $5 million annual revenue is in the ballpark. “A bit less than that because some subscriptions are discounted.”

But the dream of selling advertising on the basis of a small but influential audience has receded. Today, more than 95 per cent of Crikey’s revenue comes from subscriptions. Advertising is almost non-existent.

And the “Lachlan bump”? Around 5000 more people have subscribed since Murdoch sued. On top of that, a GoFundMe appeal to help cover legal costs raised $588,735 from 6700 donations. The court is now deciding whether that amount should be deducted from Crikey’s costs before Lachlan has to pay its bill. Crikey would prefer the money go to the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, and for Lachlan to pay full tote odds.

Financially, in other words, the bump was substantial but not game-changing. More important, perhaps, was the reinforcement the case gave to what Crikey likes to think of as its unique cultural position.

As a result of the growing subscriber numbers, says Black, Crikey is better resourced than it was when she was last editor. She reckons she has at least two more staff reporters to work with, bringing the editorial staff — including Black and Gina Rushton, who edits day to day — to seventeen. There is also a healthy budget for freelance contributors, though Black won’t say exactly what they pay. (Apparently not everyone gets the same rate.)

Since 2015 the wider world has changed too — as has social media. Staff reporter Cam Wilson “can write almost full-time on the phenomenon of fringe groups and conspiracy theories online,” says Black. “That has really struck me in terms of a marker of time and how much things have accelerated and changed.”

Day to day, the Crikey content is still divided between analysis, news reporting and obstreperous — and often long-winded — opinion. There is certainly more original content these days. Investigations editor David Hardaker has broken stories about Scott Morrison’s QAnon mate — before Four Corners covered the same ground — and Hillsong’s finances.

This week, climate editor Emma Elsworthy has explained the extent to which environment minister Tanya Plibersek is constrained by legislation in approving coalmines. In previous weeks, reporter Maeve McGregor has given a very different slant to reporting on the inquiry into the prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann.

Last year, Guy Rundle’s take on the death of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching was not only a tour de force of lyrical reporting but also the media’s only attempt to thoroughly explain the factional background to allegations she had been bullied.

All this is content you wouldn’t read anywhere else. And yes, there has also been gratuitous and overly long pontificating and over-hyped stories. But those are hardly unique faults.

And yet Crikey could so easily have failed. Before Black left in 2015, she was editor-in-chief not only of Crikey but also of a raft of small, online-only specialist publications started by Beecher in what Black today describes as a “fail fast, throw it up and see what works model.” There was a property newsletter, a daily arts review, a women’s issues newsletter and more. Most of them comprehensively failed.

The only survivors are Crikey itself, the Mandarin, which specialises in public service news, and SmartCompany, which targets entrepreneurs. According to Hayward, the three titles each account for about a third of Private Media’s profit/loss result, but Crikey is by far the biggest employer of journalists.

Perhaps the highest cost of the failed ventures was in opportunity. When they launched, Crikey had online-only news publishing to itself, and a subscription model the mainstream outlets were only just coming to terms with. The Guardian soon arrived in Australia, as did the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail and youth-oriented Vice Media, which licensed its Australian web operation to Nine and a television channel to SBS.

If Beecher had invested in Crikey at that time rather than diverted energy into short-lived niche publications, it might have mounted more serious competition to the newcomers. Instead, for a long period, Crikey languished while the Guardian established itself and went from strength to strength. “I think that folding some of [the niche outlets] was an acknowledgement that Private Media needed to be more focused on the things that worked,” says Black. “I think it was stretched too thin.”

And yet BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post are now gone from the Australian scene. Vice Media filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States earlier this month, having made almost all of its Australian staff redundant in 2020. And Crikey is still with us.

These days, Private Media Partners is owned by a spider’s web of small shareholdings, including former employees, the publishing company Allen & Unwin, and the family of Beecher’s co-founder in Private Media, the late Di Gribble. The biggest investors include John B. Fairfax, once the proprietor of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and Cameron O’Reilly, son of media magnate Tony O’Reilly. Beecher is the largest shareholder with about 40 per cent, owned directly and through family companies.

Beecher is, in Black’s words, “very much chairman of the board” and not a visible presence in the newsroom most days. Stephen Mayne, best known these days as a shareholder activist, is no more than an occasional contributor.

On the day Murdoch dropped the case against Crikey, says Black, the most powerful feeling in the newsroom was relief. “It had been a lot for the reporters and those involved to carry.” Now she wants to capitalise on the experience. She sees “a real opportunity coming off the back of what’s happened with Murdoch to crystallise a sense of independence.”

She won’t be drawn on differences in style between her and her predecessor, Peter Fray — nor on the circumstances of his departure. But others observe that she lacks the braggadocio of old-school editors. “She is born of new media,” says one. “And that’s a very different vibe. It’s a more democratic vibe.”

She conceives Crikey as “almost like an old-fashioned campaigning newspaper, sitting outside media and observing it. I think that’s a pretty invaluable space that we’ve carved out over twenty years. It has been there since Mayne started it, and it means you kind of get to have your cake and eat it too.”

Years ago, Crikey was refused permission to go into the budget lock-up because it was not “real media.” It was there this year, but still treated very much as a poor relation. Crikey doesn’t get the “drops” of news stories and documents from the powerful, says Black.

“But I don’t think that’s a bad thing for the most part. It means we do things like the Murdoch campaign, like the fantastic campaign that Crikey ran on Scott Morrison’s lies. There’s an edge there. There’s a freedom where we are unimpeded in so many ways. And I think that lies at the heart of what makes Crikey unique and invaluable and what makes it so much fun.”

So what lies ahead? “We’ve got a subscription base who are invested, literally, in our independence and in supporting stances like the Murdoch case,” says Black, “and we want to feed that interest by continuing to cover issues around the public interest, free speech, freedom of information, and the way defamation law is weaponised in this country consistently and rigorously.” •

The post New media’s idiosyncratic survivor appeared first on Inside Story.

Politico’s Jack Shafer suggested it was Murdoch rather than the Dominion Voting System company that had somehow emerged the winner, despite the size of the payout. This is what News Corp does to make messes disappear, he wrote. “A hundred million here, a hundred million there, might crimp your finances, but in the Murdoch universe, paying such settlements is just the cost of doing business Murdoch-style.”

The company’s history does suggest settlements are part of the Murdoch modus operandi. As Shafer noted, News paid $US50 million to women who suffered sexual harassment at Fox, another $US15 million to an employee who complained of wage discrimination and $US500 million to a competitor in three separate actions over allegations of anticompetitive behaviour. Of the numerous other payouts, many are subject to non-disclosure agreements. And then there’s the invasion of privacy and other unethical conduct exposed by the hacking scandal in Britain, which the company tidied away by settling with legions of people.

But the Dominion case is different. The quantum of the payout — $US787.5 million, or half the company’s annual profit — is off the scale. It dwarfs the total amount paid during the hacking scandal and is generally seen as the largest defamation payout ever, by anyone, anywhere.

And this could be just the beginning. Another voting company, Smartmatic, is suing Fox for $US2.7 billion and has made allegations similar to Dominion’s. If it also settles for half, then Fox can kiss goodbye to the rest of the year’s profits and much of next year’s as well.

Then there’s a derivative case in which some of the “60 per cent of shareholders who aren’t Murdochs” are suing because they claim Fox board members and managers left them exposed to financial loss. The shareholders will allege that Fox decision-makers failed, despite numerous warnings, in their fiduciary duty to stop the on-air lies. Several cases are likely, all with eye watering amounts at stake. There’s also speculation the company will struggle to find insurance cover in future, or that its premiums will become prohibitively expensive.

The settlement has been a huge news story across the nation’s rival, and often tribal, TV networks. If the coverage I’ve seen is any guide, Murdoch isn’t having a great time in the court of public opinion either. On the relatively progressive MSNBC network, presenters were lining up all day to kick Fox and its on-air presenters, but especially Rupert Murdoch.

The most scathing attack was meted out by one of the network’s hosts, Lawrence O’Donnell, who delighted in pointing out that Murdoch “surrendered today like you have never seen him surrender before.” he claimed that in any other company the boss would be kicked out for the “stupidity” Murdoch had displayed.

O’Donnell argued that Murdoch had failed to provide the most basic oversight, such as insisting hosts issue the magic words “if that’s true” when discussing contested claims on air. He also accused Murdoch of mismanaging the Dominion law suit. If the company was always going to settle, he asked, why didn’t it do so before the chief executive and the most controversial on-air hosts were forced to go on oath and hand over their phones.

On this point, other commentators expressed gratitude to Dominion for pursuing the case long enough to force Fox to disclose all those internal emails and memos. Some even argued this was central to Dominion’s strategy; that it was a kind of gift to the nation and proof that Fox’s behaviour had undermined democracy itself.

The pre-trial documents remain on the public record and will continue to provide fodder for Murdoch-watchers for years to come. They’ve already revealed dozens of embarrassing details, such as high-profile Fox presenter Tucker Carlson’s passionate hatred of Trump despite his on-air adoration. They reveal the cynical culture and radically populist agenda inside an organisation that’s often captive to its own audience’s prejudices.

Over at Fox there’s been barely an on-air mention of the settlement. It was given perfunctory treatment when the network’s media reporter read a corporate statement that ended with the claim that the settlement “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” The statement also said, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

Back on MSNBC, contributors were quick to point out that an acknowledgement is not the same as an admission. In fact, the statement was little more than an allusion to the fact that judge Eric Davis had already ruled that Fox’s coverage was full of falsehoods. Davis was so convinced that he also ruled this conclusion couldn’t be disputed in the trial.

Observers noted that an acknowledgement also falls a long way shy of an apology, and it quickly became apparent that Fox wouldn’t be issuing one. An intriguing question is how much extra cash News handed over to Dominion to avoid having to say sorry. One suspects quite a lot: when you think about it, an appropriate apology would be quite a mouthful. To do justice to the matter it would have to say something like “Sorry for lying, systematically and knowingly, while trashing the Dominion business and amplifying the conspiracy theories of a president trying to overturn a democratic election and incite insurrection.” I suspect News would pay a lot of money to avoid saying that out loud.

Despite the cost, there appears to be little hope that Fox will change its ways anytime soon. On the day after the ruling, Tucker Carlson was hammering on about the same old issues — the spread of trans culture, the failures of the Biden administration, perceived security threats, the culture wars. As usual, no progressive voices were on hand to temper the fear-mongering. So perhaps Shafer is right? The business may have been bruised, but the business model is still intact.

Since I started writing this article we’ve discovered what the case means for Crikey and the lawsuit brought by Lachlan Murdoch against the Private Media masthead. You may remember that Lachlan’s case centres on Crikey’s decision to publish, and then re-publish, an article that claimed the Murdochs were the “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 6 January uprising in the Washington.

The Dominion case exposed the weakness of Murdoch’s argument. Fox chose not to defend the claim that it knowingly and repeatedly published false information and conspiracy theories that favoured the side advocating an uprising. To be clear, the United States is one of the toughest jurisdictions in which to bring a case against the media. It wasn’t enough that Fox was consistently wrong, Dominion had to prove actual malice by demonstrating a wilful motivation to damage Dominion through its falsehoods. The discovery process revealed that even with that protection Fox would be hard-pressed to defend itself.

The resulting trove of internal Fox documents was a boon for Crikey’s lawyers, who had to make the much stronger case under Australian defamation law that Fox made a concerted effort to undermine public confidence in the election result, contributing to the uprising. We’ve all seen what’s in the memos, and so has Lachlan Murdoch. This morning he bowed to the inevitable. •

The post Bruised but not yet beaten appeared first on Inside Story.

Petty in the Australian, 25 March 1967. Flinders University Museum of Art

In a cross made of newsprint, the words on the upright are Ho Chi Minh’s and those on the crosspiece are Lyndon Johnson’s. You can imagine the indigestion at the breakfast tables of a still very white Australia when politicians’ words burdened a shockingly Vietnamese Christ on a modern via dolorosa. It isn’t pretty or funny, but it is morally and intellectually arresting. It has historical and symbolic depth as well as contemporary bite.

If you’re looking for ground zero of the idea that cartoonists are “of the left” in Australia, Petty’s stint at the Australian during its first decade is it. He sided with the little guy, then asked how the system worked to keep him little and the usual suspects (captains of industry, financiers, the military industrial complex) big. His cartoons can be busy because he thinks in systems and mechanisms and wants to make them operate more fairly and generously.

Petty was always inclined to treat politicians more as lackeys of vested interests and playthings of historical processes than as proper villains in their own right. This, I think, made him deeper than most other cartoonists or, indeed, most other satirists. I put no statute of limitations on this view. Juvenal looks like a grumpy whinger with a brilliant turn of phrase by comparison. Bill Leak could play the man superbly in his caricatures and punchlines, but the shafts of lightning didn’t shed consistent light on Australia as it is, and as it could be.

Petty’s cartoons did just that. The critique changed with the times, as the times demanded, but the golden thread of wanting a better, fairer, more intelligent and independent nation never disappeared into the fabric of daily affairs. On my first visit to interview him in the late nineties, he pointed me to a cupboard where there were “a few pictures of mine.” It was less than a dozen — Petty visited the past often to learn lessons, but never to dwell there. He lived for tomorrow’s paper, and the current art project.

He came a long way from a fruit farm in Doncaster as a child of the Depression, but he never lost the practical attitude to problems and sense of guiding purpose. Every cartoon asks something like “How do you fix this bloody thing, and get it to do what we want?” More or less sequentially, his satire had four great themes.

I have already illustrated the first — the horror and stupidity of war, particularly the Vietnam war. He had been to London and witnessed the collapse of Empire made explicit in decolonisation and the Suez Crisis of 1956. He returned to Australia via Southeast Asia in time to be cartooning during the death of Kennedy, the resignation of Menzies and, most importantly, the incremental decision to join the United States in Vietnam.

Rupert Murdoch’s adventure in national influence, the Australian, was in its initial (wildly) progressive phase, and Petty was its standard-bearer. He was half a generation older than baby boomers threatened with conscription and increasingly inclined to flood the street with moratoria. He also blew up the pomposity of Anzac Day in 1969 with a dismembered soldier’s corpse from the actual war diverting a pious procession of “lest we forget.”

Meanwhile, the Coalition governments were deteriorating comically, and Petty especially “owned” the image of Billy McMahon as a hapless, vainglorious fool with very big ears:

Broadsheet, November 1972. National Gallery of Victoria

It’s funny, in a bitter kind of way, how often people have had recourse to the “worst PM since McMahon” trope in recent years. I wonder if Morrison has reset the clock on that one.

In a series of cartoon books as well as at the Australian, he sought to shape the rebirth of interest in national character and destiny in the dawning post-British age. In the heroic age of this project, the hero — and the exemplar of Petty’s second theme — was Gough Whitlam:

The Australian, 14 November 1972.

The fulfilment of the dream of an open, egalitarian and cosmopolitan Australia under Whitlam was messy and exciting — Petty even donated a logo to the 1974 election campaign. The big hump in his career was when the dream collided with the first of several stages of reaction to the dismissal at the end of 1975. Malcolm Fraser wrongly assumed that normal postwar boom conditions would return with sensible chaps back in the big white cars, a trick Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison tried in recent years with even less success.

Petty spent the second half of his life exploring his third and fourth themes, a long, intelligent dissent from this “Lucky Country” mentality and from the Reaganite confidence in market forces that came in its train. He never tired of showing how and why the economy should serve human needs and desires rather than its own geometry of indices. And he was farmer’s son enough to recognise that you have to protect long-term interests from human rapacity. Two cartoons, from 1977 and 2015 respectively, show that you can be right a long time as a satirist and not necessarily be attended to:

The Age, 30 April 1977.

The Age, 17 August 2015.

When the Age suggested that he stop cartooning in 2016, at the ridiculously premature age of eighty-six, he was annoyed and disappointed. He lived for the work, and kept drawing anyway, right up to the last months. He understood ideas and the weight of the past, but it was the next paper, the next crop, the next generation that always mattered most. His optimism was informed by clear-eyed experience but was also incredibly robust.

What would he say to the nation today? With his genius for being stern yet quizzical, I don’t think he’d mind having this cartoon thrown back into the current debate over what it is to be a proper nation, one true to its past, present and future:

The Age, 20 April 2015.

Though he is gone now, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to look again into the satirical mirror he held up to us for so many decades. We might see something we could fix. •

The post Petty’s golden thread appeared first on Inside Story.

Although the Murdochs strongly supported Trump during his presidency, and although the audience for their American media tended to be pro-Republican, they were ready to face facts after the election-night count. Fox News’s chief political correspondent, Bret Baier, saw “no evidence of fraud. None.” Murdoch’s New York Post urged Trump to accept the result. His “baseless” stolen-election rhetoric “undermines faith in democracy and faith in the nation,” said the paper.

Along with the Associated Press, the network had made an early call for Biden in the crucial state of Arizona on election night. It proved to be the right call, but it infuriated the Trump camp as premature, if not wilfully wrong.

As we now know from internal documents obtained by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its legal action against Fox News, key Fox figures were already railing against what they saw as an audience-alienating decision on election night. “We worked really hard to build what we have,” high-profile anchor Tucker Carlson wrote on 5 November. “Those fuckers” — senior editor Bill Sammon and reporter Chris Stirewalt, who had decided to call Arizona for Biden — “are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”

“The audience feels like we crapped on [them],” wrote Scott, “and we have damaged their trust and belief in us… We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.” Sammon and Stirewalt were soon forced out of Fox, not for making a professional error but for their “arrogance” and for damaging the “brand.”

The clashes continued. On the night of 12 November, Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted that “top election infrastructure officials” had found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” An indignant Tucker Carlson wrote to his colleagues: “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck? … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Again, Scott took the same line. Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this,” she wrote, “and if this gets picked up viewers are going to be further disgusted.” By morning Heinrich had deleted the tweet. (The New York Times later reported: “While she removed a tweet in which Mr. Trump had tagged her colleagues Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, she posted the same fact check in response to a different tweet from Mr Trump that made the same false claim but did not tag her colleagues.”)

Fox’s White House correspondent Kristin Fisher got similarly short shrift when she fact-checked fraud claims by lawyer Sidney Powell and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was immediately told by phone that higher-ups were unhappy and she needed to do a better job of “respecting our audience.”

Respect was suddenly Fox’s word of the moment, Fox’s prime-time anchor Sean Hannity was arguing that “respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical. Fox has spent the last month spitting at them.” For outsiders, though, nurturing the audience’s delusions and punishing staff who behave professionally might seem a strange sort of respect.

In the early days after the election, when Fox seemed ready to accept the result, the network’s rating began declining. It was “getting creamed by CNN!” wrote Murdoch, but much more troubling was the number of viewers who were switching — with Trump’s encouragement — to upstart rivals on their right, Newsmax and One America News.

On 9 November Trump retweeted a series of stories from Newsmax claiming election fraud. Three days later his attacks on Fox escalated in a flurry of tweets encouraging viewers to switch to other networks. By the end of that day, Fox stocks were down 6 per cent; by mid November the network’s daytime audience had fallen from a pre-election 2.4 million to just 1.6 million, and its prime-time audience from 5.3 million to 3.5 million. Newsmax’s viewer numbers increased sixfold, from 57,000 to 329,000.

Fox News had become prisoner of the monster it had created. An audience fed on fantasies couldn’t face the new reality. “To be honest,” one producer said, “our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.” A network executive conceded that “conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled viewer is looking for.” Commercial profitability and professional integrity were pulling in opposite directions.

This was the moment when management announced its dramatic pivot. Scott called 9 November, six days after the election, “Day One” and committed the network to pushing “narratives that would entice their audience back.” She was, she said, “trying to get everyone to comprehend we are on a war footing.” Two themes figured prominently in subsequent Fox News internal communications: “brand” and “respecting the audience.” Both would override accuracy and other professional scruples.

The on-air results of Scott’s directive were dramatic: by the end of the second week after Fox News had called the election for Biden, it had “questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it at least 774 times,” according to Media Matters for America. Off-air, Fox News’s chief financial officer reported on 8 December that Fox’s “ratings momentum has been extraordinary [and] it is feeding absolutely into advertising strength.” Scott was rewarded with a multi-year extension to her contract.

Newly focused on promoting claims of electoral fraud, the network’s primary targets were Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, the two companies that provided electronic voting equipment for the election. Powell and Giuliani were the Trump associates most vigorously accusing the companies of having conspired to alter the election results.

Powell asserted that Trump had won not just by hundreds of thousands but by millions of votes shifted in Biden’s favour by Dominion’s software. “It’s really the most massive and historical egregious fraud the world has ever seen,” she said. Her dramatic claims had audience appeal. When research showed that viewers were switching to Newsmax specifically to watch her as a guest, Hannity brought Powell onto his program.

Giuliani was equally emphatic: Dominion’s machine “was developed to steal elections.” Dominion was “an organised criminal enterprise… started in Venezuela with Cuban money.” The intemperance of his language was no barrier to repeated appearances on Fox.

Of the several Fox presenters who took up the theme, the most extreme was Lou Dobbs. “Read all about Dominion and Smartmatic voting companies and you’ll soon understand how pervasive this Democrat electoral fraud is,” he tweeted, “and there’s no way in the world the 2020 presidential election was either free or fair.” It was “an electoral 9/11 against the United States, with the cooperation and collusion of the media and the Democrat Party and China.” “It is a cyber Pearl Harbor,” he added. “We have technical presentations that prove there is an embedded controller in every Dominion machine.”

Even the Trump campaign distanced itself from the seemingly unhinged Powell and Giuliani. Trump ally Chris Christie called Powell a “national embarrassment” and Trump’s legal team thought Giuliani was “deranged.” Although the Trump campaign disavowed Powell on 22 November, she and Giuliani continued to appear on Fox for several more weeks.

Even after the 6 January attacks on the Capitol, Fox continued to host guests who claimed the election was stolen. On 26 January Carlson interviewed My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell after he was banned from Twitter for promoting lies about Dominion and the election. Lindell repeated those lies without any challenge from Carlson. Not coincidentally, Lindell is one of Fox News’s biggest sponsors. According to Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Lindell “pays us a lot of money.” “It is not red or blue, it is green” — it is about money rather than politics — he agreed when questioned by Dominion’s lawyers.

Given the frequency and severity of the attacks on Dominion, the company’s decision to sue Fox News came as no surprise. Dominion also sued Newsmax and its three most prominent accusers, Powell, Giuliani and Lindell. (The other voting machine company, Smartmatic, has also sued Fox News.) The fallout has already been spectacular. Dominion has gained access to thousands of internal Fox News documents revealing extraordinary cynicism and hypocrisy among executives and producers.

A media organisation can’t successfully be sued for defamation by a public figure in America unless malice can be shown, and any effort to do that usually relies on inferences and indirect evidence. Not in this case: “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”

The contrast between what the Fox News personnel were saying to each other and what they were saying on air was stark. Disparaging descriptions of Powell, Giuliani and other fraud-pushers — “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails,” “crazy,” “absurd” and “shockingly reckless” — figure frequently in their internal communications, but didn’t stop “really crazy stuff” (in Murdoch’s words) being put to air. Commenting on one program, Fox president Jay Wallace observed that “the North Koreans do a more nuanced show.”

Not a single Fox witness testified that they believed the allegations about the voting-machine company to be true, according to Dominion’s account of the deposition evidence. Fox’s internal fact-checking department, the Brainroom, also said the claims against Dominion were wrong.

“Sidney Powell is lying; she is a complete nut,” Carlson told his fellow prime-time anchor Laura Ingraham. “No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” “Nut” seems close to the mark: in an email to Maria Bartiromo, whose show she had appeared on several times, Powell said her source of information on Dominion was a person who described herself as “internally decapitated,” capable of “time travel in a semi-conscious state” and able to speak to “the Wind” as “a ghost.” Apparently this raised no red flags at Fox.

These internal communications provide excellent ammunition for Dominion, and there are further reasons why the company is likely to receive extremely high damages. Most defamation cases involve a single article or a short series by a small number of individual journalists, whereas this one involves a blizzard of segments over several months.

Dominion’s suit focuses on twenty statements across six Fox programs. It argues that “literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility — from the top of the organisation to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves — acted with actual malice.”

Likely to add to the damages is the fact that Dominion communicated 3600 times with Fox during the broadcasting of the contentious segments in order to correct facts. Most importantly, it sent an email titled “Setting the Record Straight,” and a series of updates, to more than ninety of Fox’s reporters, producers and anchors.

Nineteen of the twenty statements were made after Dominion alerted Fox that they were lies and pointed the network to the correct information. But Fox kept defaming Dominion and failed to respond to demands for retractions. “To this day,” says the company, “Fox has never retracted the false statements it broadcast about Dominion.”

While most defamation cases focus on damage to the plaintiff’s general reputation, Fox’s claims went further, undermining Dominion’s very existence as a commercial entity. The company’s business relies on a bipartisan acceptance of its integrity and reliability. Since the Fox News onslaught, several of its contracts have been challenged by Trump Republicans. All Fox’s claims about its audience size and influence are now being used as evidence of the damage done to Dominion.

“As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved,” says Dominion, pointing to threats to its employees and the extra security it has been forced to employ.

Fox also showed a corresponding lack of interest in reporting developments counter to the narrative pushed by Trump and his allies. Unmentioned went the fact that Dominion machines are used in twenty-eight states — including battleground states Florida and Ohio, which Biden lost. On 11 November, for instance, Sean Hannity told his audience that the hand recount in Georgia would help resolve questions about Dominion. When the count was completed later that month and the governor of Georgia declared the voting machines had been accurate, Hannity was silent.

The Dominion lawsuit has also ushered in a new phase in the Donald Trump–Rupert Murdoch relationship. The mutually convenient bromance of 2016–20 is long gone. Murdoch’s American newspapers have consistently editorialised against Trump’s claims of a rigged election. The Wall Street Journal declared the charges against Dominion baseless. After the midterm Congressional elections, in which the candidates Trump most closely embraced performed poorly, the Journal called him an electoral liability. The New York Post was much cheekier, with a front-page caricature of Trump as Humpty Dumpty under the headline “Trumpty Dumpty.”

The initial cache of documents released by Dominion late last month showed that Murdoch thought Trump’s claims of fraud were baseless and that he strongly disapproved of them. Ironically, of course, it was one of his organisations, Fox News, that did most to give those baseless claims political currency. In mid December Fox reported a poll saying 70 per cent of Republicans thought the election was rigged because of voter fraud. Without Fox’s intense coverage, we can only guess how much lower that percentage might have been.

The revelation that Murdoch disapproved of Fox’s coverage in principle but encouraged it in practice shows him to be a hypocrite. But the stark contrast between on-air and off-air views also raises crucial questions about how other Fox personnel saw their responsibility. At one stage, Carlson texted Ingraham: “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” It is as if Carlson thought he had to be a passive cipher for Powell and Giuliani’s views, however mistaken. When Maria Bartiromo’s producer was asked “If someone says something untrue on one of your shows, do you think that it’s important to correct it?” she simply replied “No.”

As a result of Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Trump discovered that after the 6 January Capitol riot Fox News’s owner aimed to make Trump a “non-person.” His response was characteristic:

If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged and Stollen, then he and his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS [Republicans in name only] should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding and abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS.

Much more will emerge when the court case begins in Delaware on 17 April. Apart from the huge sums of money involved, the case raises fundamental issues about the health of American democracy and the responsibilities of the media. “These lies did not simply harm Dominion,” the voting-technology company argues. “They harmed democracy. They harmed the idea of credible elections. They harmed a once-unshakeable faith in democratic transfers of power.”

Fox News was a crucial ally of Trump in his attempt to reject the election outcome, and many of the radicals who stormed the Capitol on 6 January would have viewed the claims of electoral fraud broadcast repeatedly on the network. It is this association that Crikey’s Bernard Keane probably had in mind when he attributed to the Murdochs part of the blame for the riots, an assertion that prompted Lachlan Murdoch to sue under Australian defamation laws.

Never has a court case in Delaware been more keenly watched in two Sydney law chambers than Dominion’s will be. •

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The two fifty-five-minute programs that make up India: The Modi Question contain almost nothing that has not been known in India for years. But the BBC’s involvement brought the stories to a global audience.

Part one unfavourably portrays Narendra Modi’s role as chief minister in the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat state in 2002. It includes awkward and embarrassing videoclips of Modi’s speeches and interviews at the time. Part two focuses on the unenviable human rights record of Modi’s national government, and especially its treatment of India’s Muslim minority of close to 200 million people, or around 14 per cent of the population. The Indian government has banned the showing of the first but not the second part.

The documentary was immediately denounced by the Indian external affairs ministry for “the bias, the lack of objectivity, and frankly a continuing colonial mindset.” The documentary, the ministry’s Arindam Bagchi added, “is a reflection on the agency and individuals that are peddling this narrative again.”

Not surprisingly, the ban on part one led to curiosity in India about what it contained. Illegal showings were organised, and zealous police clashed with student groups screening the documentary in universities.

A month later, on 14 February, the national government’s income tax authorities began what became a three-day “survey” of BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai. It was not a “raid,” officials emphasised; “raids” happen after dark.

The survey, said the authorities, was the culmination of a longstanding investigation into the BBC’s alleged “deliberate non-compliance with Indian laws including transfer pricing rules and diversion of profits illegally.” Four days after the survey, authorities let it be known that “the income/profits shown by various group entities was not commensurate with scale of operations in India.” The BBC was reported to be waiting for an official notification of the charges.

For people whose memories extend back to 1975 a sense of déjà vu kicked in. The BBC was expelled from India in the first month after prime minister Indira Gandhi proclaimed an “emergency,” arrested political opponents and introduced censorship of the press. “Indira is India and India is Indira,” her supporters chanted, as she and her younger son attempted to build a personality cult around the prime minister. In India today, it is hard to look, listen or read without encountering prime minister Narendra Modi’s image.

The notion of a conspiracy against India had gained momentum earlier in February when the US financial firm Hindenburg, which specialises in short-selling, released a damaging report on the vast corporate structure of Gautam Adani, one of the richest men in the world. Adani and prime minister Modi are both Gujaratis, and their rise to international prominence in the past twenty years has coincided.

This epic has a long way to go, but listed shares in Adani companies have lost a lot of value, and Gautam Adani’s close connections with the prime minister have given the opposition in India’s parliament the first opportunity in years to challenge the government convincingly. Portions of speeches in parliament attacking the prime minister were ordered expunged from the record by the speaker.

The Adani group issued a 400-page rebuttal claiming the Hindenburg report was “a calculated attack on India, the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions, and the growth story and ambition of India.” Its rhetoric projected the Adani business empire as a symbol of India.

The most recent feather-ruffling came on 16 February when billionaire George Soros said, in the course of a long address, that the troubles of the Adani group and its links to the prime minister and his government might “significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms.”

Soros’s remarks, declared an Indian magazine that supports Modi’s government, “largely validate the existence of a larger conspiracy to derail the Modi government.” Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar, visiting Australia, described Soros as “old, rich, opinionated” and “dangerous,” and pointed out that India’s years under colonial rule had alerted it to the dangers of “outside interference.”

When Indira Gandhi was directing her “emergency” fifty years ago, the bitter experience of colonialism and the dangers of the “foreign hand” were frequent themes.

The flutter over the recent affronts to prime minister Modi and to India have been interpreted in two very different ways. At one pole, a respected and reflective columnist saw the possibility that “the first cracks” were appearing “in the hegemonic empire Modi and his BJP have built.” An activist who is also a serious electoral analyst had already calculated that a BJP victory in next year’s national elections could be difficult given the strength of local parties in many of India’s twenty-eight states.

At the other interpretive pole, the recent incidents are seen as opportunities for India to show its muscle and strut its stuff. According to pro-Modi figures, the “Western democracies” need a growing India more than India needs them — for economic and strategic reasons. Underlining India’s ability to wield economic and strategic influence, they point out that two Indian airlines have ordered almost a thousand passenger jets from Boeing and Airbus, and India is seen as a key element in making the Quad — an alignment of the United States, Japan, Australia and India — a significant entity.

The way to deal with the BBC, a BJP supporter noted, was not with clumsy denunciations and tax surveys. Rather, “the Indian diaspora” in Britain should be encouraged to join the movement to defund the broadcaster “unless the BBC gets out of bed with… left-liberals and Islamists of various hues.” A vast, influential diaspora with Indian roots was something Indira Gandhi didn’t have. Rishi Sunak and others should be expecting calls. •

The post Ruffled feathers or straws in the wind? appeared first on Inside Story.

We all know that polls taken years before an election are poor predictors of voting intentions. Unforeseen events will occur, of course, but it’s also unrealistic to expect all voters to know what they’d do under the suddenly posed hypothetical: “If an election were held today…”

As the actual vote approaches, polls get better, especially when the question becomes “How will you vote on Saturday the Xth?” (These days the question is tweaked to take account of what is increasingly a weeks-long voting period.)

Things are trickier when a referendum is being discussed. Nearly everyone knows what an election is. But what proportion could immediately describe what a referendum actually is? What about words like “enshrined,” “Indigenous Voice” and the “Constitution” itself?

Way back in 1987, a Newspoll found that only 54 per cent of respondents “knew that Australia has a written Constitution.” In 1992 a Saulwick poll put the figure at 67 per cent. More recently, in 2021, the Constitutional Values Survey found a much higher 83 per cent answering affirmative to the easier statement, “had heard of the Australian Constitution.” And the proportion who could describe how the document is amended? We have no idea.

Americans are more likely to know about their founding document, and it’s possible Australians are more aware of America’s too. Its clauses (particularly its amendments) feature regularly in international news, commentary and popular culture. (America’s, unlike ours, is amended by majorities of federal and state legislatures.)

Until this year the Voice to Parliament was largely a preoccupation of the political/academic/media class. A little over half the respondents to this 2021 survey, for example, had never heard of it.

Given all these uncertainties, springing a benignly described question on an unsuspecting citizen isn’t going to produce a reliable indicator of people’s eventual voting decision. So it’s little wonder early polls on referendums have a history of being wildly wrong — much more wrong than voting intentions ones. But they too become better predictors as the day approaches.

(The 2017 marriage equality survey would also have suffered from the evolution of the question’s meaning, but to a much lesser extent. It was not intended to change the Constitution, and the “vote” was just another survey, labelled as such, voluntary, filled in at home — and by three-quarters of respondents, it turned out, during the first week of the official campaign. Like the 1999 republic referendum, it dealt with a familiar, long-discussed topic, but without the earlier one’s constitutionally ordained, and fatal, requirement that a specific model be approved.)

The last time a Labor government held a referendum — a midterm set of four questions — was in September 1988. Shadow cabinet voted to support two and oppose two, but the party rooms overturned them and the Liberal and National parties campaigned energetically against all four.

Triumphantly as it turned out; what the Hawke government saw as a set of proposals so inoffensive it would slip through unharmed became the worst-performing in referendum history. The cause was not helped by a High Court finding that some of the government’s info-ads had broken the law.

In the final six months of that campaign, polled support halved, from the high 60s and low 70s to the 30s. Party-support surveys have been known to shift by several points over similar periods, but nothing approaching 30 per cent. The actual survey questions have disappeared into the ether, and they would have changed over the months, but the early ones (to take one of the four proposals) might have been along the lines of “Do you support recognising local government in the Constitution?” To which a reasonable answer might have been “Sure, why not, it makes sense.”

By referendum day, after an all-singing, all-dancing campaign, the act of voting had become more complicated for the one-in-three voters who ended up “changing their mind.” From their point of view, the question might have become “Exactly why does this government want to change the Constitution?”

From there, the questions would have multiplied: “We’ve survived this long without this change, why do it now? This important document should not be tinkered with lightly; I read somewhere it will create a lawyers’ picnic. And the taxpayer dollars to do all this” — $30 million–plus was bandied about then; for the Voice the popular estimate is $200 million — “would have been much better spent elsewhere. And it wouldn’t hurt to remind this rather arrogant and complacent government who’s in charge.”

During 2022 and 2023 the main Voice polls have measured expressed opinions about “support/in favour” rather than voting intentions for a referendum held either “today” or later in the year. The wording will change later in the year, but these are the reported questions for recently released surveys.

Essential asks: “As you may be aware, there will be a referendum held later this year on whether a Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be enshrined in the Constitution. Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Newspoll, in the Australian: “There is a proposal to alter the Australian Constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. Are you personally in favour or against this proposal?”

Resolve, in Nine papers: “The new federal government has committed to a referendum — a national vote — on whether to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution. You will be asked to vote on this change to the Constitution in the next year or two, and voting is compulsory. Given this, do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Resolve’s reported “next year or two” and “new federal government” look like gremlin-induced remnants of 2022 polls. Apart from that, its wording seems best because, while rather long and laborious, it doesn’t assume people know that the Constitution can only be amended by popular vote, or what a “referendum” is. But still, like the others, it’s different from a standard political poll because it doesn’t ask about voting intention.

So there’s variety in pollsters’ questions, much more than is found, again, in party-support polls. Referendum polling seems an even less exact science than general election polling. Despite that, though, the polls are all recording similar levels at the moment: around 60 per cent support once you exclude undecideds and/or push them to choose.

(That Resolve survey was taken in two portions. The first in December found 62 per cent net support, while the second in late January, after opposition leader Peter Dutton had launched his quasi-No “confusion” campaign and the topic started featuring heavily in the news, had it lower, at 58 per cent.)

Obviously the surveys taken in the final week of the campaign will more resemble each other and be very different from those above. They’ll ask people how they voted if they’ve done so already, or how they intend to vote. They’ll all be pretty close to the final result. (Even a 2019-sized poll fail will appear respectable unless the “error” happens to account for the difference between success and failure.)

Afterwards, accounts of the Voice referendum will describe a trajectory of surveyed “support,” but in reality the question respondents answer, from January to referendum day, will gradually have changed.

How meaningful are opinion polls purporting to measure support for inserting an Indigenous Voice to Parliament into the Australian Constitution? At the moment, barely meaningful at all. •

The post Just remind me, what is the Constitution? appeared first on Inside Story.

We find ourselves in the former group. We were deeply moved by the Netflix series, directed by the critically acclaimed American documentary film-maker Liz Garbus, and were absorbed by the book. It isn’t simply the human drama that gripped us, or our sympathy for Harry and Meghan. We also see significant implications for Australia in the way the debate over their actions has played out.

Any account of these recent events must begin with Princess Diana, for it is increasingly apparent that her rebelliousness lives on strongly in Prince Harry and is evident in Meghan’s attitudes and behaviour. When Diana was alive, many people saw her as the best thing going for a stodgy and rapidly fading royal family. What’s often forgotten is that before her death in August 1997 she had become a prominent social activist.

We were particularly struck by footage in the BBC documentary, Heart of the Matter, showing her walking in protective clothing through a recently cleared minefield in Angola earlier in 1997. “I’d read the statistics that Angola has the highest percentage of amputees anywhere in the world,” she explained to the camera. “That one person in every 333 had lost a limb, most of them through landmine explosions. But that hadn’t prepared me for the reality.”

We were also struck by another TV image: Diana sitting by the bedside of an HIV/AIDS sufferer in a hospital. During a visit to Cape Town to see her brother, Earl Spencer, in 1997 Diana had met with Nelson Mandela, who praised her dedication to helping those infected with HIV/AIDS. “We saw her sitting on the beds of AIDS patients and shaking hands with them, and that changed perceptions dramatically with regards to AIDS,” Mandela recalled. He also expressed his appreciation for Diana’s visit to children in Angola crippled by landmines, observing that she had helped inspire the campaign to destroy South African landmines.

An important feature of Diana’s social activism was its internationalism. As well as AIDS awareness and prevention, she supported charities and organisations committed to battling poverty and homelessness, visited charities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Nepal, India and other countries fighting leprosy, and opposed the stigma surrounding mental illness.

In the last year of her life, Diana began dating Dodi Fayed, an Egyptian producer whose well-known films included Chariots of Fire. Perhaps her attraction to an Egyptian man partly reflected a desire to extend her consciousness beyond England with an act of love that was also a rebellious act. After all, Egypt had been the scene of perfidies and infamies characteristic of the British Empire, especially the crushing (with the help of Australian soldiers) of the gathering movement for Egyptian independence in 1919.

The open grief of the British public after Diana’s death led us to believe that the tabloids had learned their lesson and would no longer harass, intrude on and exploit the royal family. We are astonished by our naivety.

Despite his decade-long career in the British army, Harry undoubtedly carries on his mother’s tradition of rebelliousness and internationalism. He is patron of a leading landmine-clearance charity, the Halo Trust, and has called for the world to become free of those weapons by 2025. Twenty-two years after Diana, he retraced his mother’s footsteps in Angola.

After walking along the suburban street that was once filled with explosives, he said it was “quite emotional” to retrace Diana’s steps “and to see the transformation that has taken place, from an unsafe and desolate place into a vibrant community of local businesses and colleges… I’m incredibly proud of what she’s been able to do and meet these kids here who were born on this street.”

A news agency photo shows Harry sitting beneath the Diana Tree, which marks the spot where Diana was pictured in the minefield. “Landmines,” he said, “are an unhealed scar of war.” In 2014 he had established the Invictus Games to support soldiers permanently injured in combat.

Harry and Meghan have also taken a leading role in drawing attention to the needs of people with mental illness. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, Harry revealed his own difficulties with mental distress while Meghan discussed her depression, experience of a suicidal state and the shocking refusal of the Palace to offer mental health support when she asked for it during her time in England. Under royal protocol, Meghan was compelled to give up her keys, passport and driver’s licence and only got them back when she returned to the United States.

In the same year, 2021, Harry and Oprah made a series of educational programs entitled The Me You Can’t See exploring mental illness and suggesting ways of alleviating it. In Spare, Harry provides considerably more detail about his struggle with mental illness over several years and how, in therapy, he finally came to terms with his mother’s death.

Throughout these years, the tabloid scrutiny of the couple was intense. In his interview with Oprah, Harry compared his relationship with Meghan to the hounding of his mother “while she was in a relationship with someone who wasn’t white.” He feared that history would repeat itself, that like Diana they would be “followed, photographed, chased, harassed” relentlessly. This fear, and the extent of the persecution of Meghan, is described in much more depth in both Harry and Meghan and, especially, Spare.

Among the key points to emerge in the Netflix series is the relationship between the tabloid press and “the Firm.” Harry’s explanation of how the London tabloids work with the royal family’s media staff to produce stories for the front page is dynamite; in his view it was the Firm as much as the tabloids who sought to destroy the Duchess of Sussex. The underlying racism of the tabloids and the royal family are laid bare.

Spare follows up with a great deal more detail on the toxic interdependence of the Firm and the tabloid media. We learn how the relationship between Meghan and William and Kate seemed to start well enough (William and Kate had loved Meghan in Suits) but soon deteriorated, going from one small conflict to the next.

For Harry, the problem of the British media and the royal family goes back a long way, to his mother’s death and the events preceding it. He is horrified that the paparazzi who chased her until her car crashed stood around photographing her, rather than trying to help, as she lay dying. He is shocked that no attempt was made to arrest the paparazzi involved, a failure he believes has only encouraged the tabloids to intrude into his own and his family’s private life.

Spare is, in fact, a great autobiography, a j’accuse that accumulates damning details to intensifying, almost unbearable effect until Harry and Meghan escape.

As historians, we were surprised by Harry and Meghan, which we hadn’t expected to be so thoroughly informed by recent historical scholarship. But the two people chosen as key commentators give a clue to its quality. David Olusoga, a professor of public history at the University of Manchester, has written, produced, directed or appeared in a string of TV documentaries, including Black and British: A Forgotten History and, most recently, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. Afua Hirsch is a journalist with the Guardian and author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. Between them, supplemented by archival footage and narrative commentary, they bring the British and world historical context to life.

In episode three of the series, Olusoga comments that “this little island off the coast of Europe was at the centre of the biggest empire the world has ever seen” and goes on to ask at whose cost, pointing towards Britain’s history of slavery. Hirsch comments that “Britain had a ‘deep south’ that was just as brutal, that actually enslaved more Africans than the United States of America did.” Britain’s deep south was the Caribbean, overseas, far away, “out of sight and out of mind.”

After an unseen narrator points out that slavery fuelled the early British Empire in North America, Hirsch says that the first-ever “commercial slave voyage conducted by Britain was personally financed by Queen Elizabeth I. And it continued to be financed by kings and queens, right up until its abolition.” Even in its abolition in the 1830s, Britain sided with the slave owners, many of whom were also members of the British parliament, by compensating them at huge cost.

Olusoga and Hirsch are drawing here on the scholarship of the Legacies of Slavery Project, based at University College London and led by historians Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland. The project’s extensive research has helped change British public awareness and understanding, and stimulated among historians a greater interest in the consequences of the end of slavery in the British Empire. Jane Lydon, Zoë Laidlaw, Emma Christopher and others have been tracing how, after abolition, people, ideas, and finance were transferred from the Caribbean to Britain’s settler colonies.  Australia was obviously among them, as recent research by Christopher and Lydon highlights.

Harry and Meghan also considers the more recent historical context. Olusoga draws attention to the migration of many Black and Brown people to Britain from the mid twentieth century — so much so that London “began to look, for the only time in its history, like it actually was the centre of an empire that was mainly made up of non-white people.” When Harry and Meghan became engaged, he says, the royal family seemed at last to have begun catching up with modern British society.

We see Harry and Meghan at a memorial service to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Stephen Lawrence, the eighteen-year-old boy killed by white racists. Only two of his attackers were ever brought to justice. Hirsch says that Harry and Meghan’s attendance was highly significant, speaking to “the pain that many people still feel as a result of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.”

Olusoga and Hirsch reappear in episode five to argue that the failure of the Palace to defend Meghan from press persecution was a huge disaster for the future of the monarchy. “Here was a woman,” says Olusoga, “who just looked like most of the people in the Commonwealth, and they somehow, for some reason, couldn’t find the capacity to protect her, to represent her, to stand by her, to take on vested power in her name, to fight for her.” For Hirsch, the departure of Harry and Meghan “felt like the death of a dream” that a truly inclusive Britain could form and flourish.

In Australia, coverage of the series and the memoir gradually shifted from a kind of can’t-watch-it, won’t-read-it scorn to a very mixed but more earnest consideration of the issues the series and the book raise. One of those issues is the future of the monarchy in Australia.

In Spare, Harry reveals a continuing interest in the Commonwealth, and especially the countries that still regard the British monarch as also their own. He writes about the outstanding success of his and Meghan’s royal tour of South Africa in September 2019, the first since that country returned to the Commonwealth in 1994. They were welcomed there as representing a new direction for the royal family and for the Commonwealth, and they both felt that in this shift they had an important role to play.

Yet the role of the monarchy in the Commonwealth has come into increasing question. The final episode of Harry and Meghan shows the monarchy in trouble in the Caribbean, as member nations continue to reject a past shaped by slavery within the British Empire. With reparations increasingly on the agenda, and aware of the royal family’s historical role in the system of slavery, some Commonwealth nations no longer want the British monarch as their head of state. Barbados declared itself a republic in November last year and Jamaica has declared its intention to become a republic by 2025.

What about Australia? What should our future relationship be with this dysfunctional British family? Does the Harry and Meghan story have any implications for us?

While the Australian republican movement has so far said little about the couple, commentary on their significance for an Australian republic has been growing. We agree with Jenny Hocking when she writes, “This now openly feuding family provides our head of state, imposed on us and fourteen other Commonwealth nations by dynastic succession and inherited title alone, in which we have no say and no relevance. It inevitably reignites questions about why Australia is still a constitutional monarchy.”

Apart from the difficulty in imagining a popular and workable alternative, one of the main obstacles to the move to a republic in Australia has been the popularity of the royal family. We grew up in that environment. John Docker remembers his English mother listening to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on radio. Ann Curthoys recalls keeping a scrapbook in 1953 of the coronation, as most schoolchildren did, and being one of the 50,000 schoolchildren marshalled in the Newcastle Showground to spell out Welcome (she was in the W) when the Queen and Prince Philip visited Australia the following year.

Lyndall Ryan remembers that the biggest event in her life until she started high school in 1955 was the Queen’s first visit to Australia in 1954. The Australian Women’s Weekly then kept her up to date on the royal family, and in particular their tours to other parts of the Commonwealth. She didn’t seriously consider becoming a republican until after the Whitlam government was dismissed by the governor-general on 11 November 1975, and until Jenny Hocking published The Palace Letters in 2021 she was convinced that the governor-general’s action had nothing to do with the Queen.

But republicanism has had a chequered history in Australia. It gathered increased support after Whitlam’s dismissal, reached a peak during the 1990s and subsided after the defeat of a referendum on the question in 1999. It has been undergoing something of a revival in recent years, especially as Queen Elizabeth’s reign was drawing to a close. Our prime minister is in fact a republican, though he is insisting right now that the matter of the Voice to Parliament, and indeed the Uluru Statement from the Heart generally, must take priority.

Alongside the essential debates over the Voice and a Treaty, it is time to step up public debate about Australia’s becoming a republic. Indeed, the question of the republic is not entirely separate from those debates: they are all part of a necessary reshaping of modern Australia. While Indigenous commentators have focused on the Uluru statement and its proposals, support has been evident for an Australian republic that truly recognises Indigenous sovereignty.

Harry and Meghan and Spare demonstrate with great clarity how the monarchy continues to be shaped by British history, British concerns and British symbolism, and not at all by Australian or indeed Commonwealth ones. The evolution of the monarchy as an institution is clearly outside our control and always will be. The tabloid British media have deeply compromised the monarchy and the royal family, and sections of the Australian media, especially those that are Murdoch-controlled, have too often joined in. With several Caribbean nations forging new republican paths for themselves, surely it is time for Australia to do the same. •

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That’s why it is especially noteworthy when an unsung backroom researcher steps into the limelight — not from the Parliamentary Library in this case, but from Britain’s equivalent. The person in question is Georgina Sturge, the House of Commons Library’s senior statistician, and she has just released a book about data — or, more specifically, about bad data and how it misleads.

Sturge’s book, Bad Data, has particular resonance for anyone (like me) who has spent many years peering into the sausage-meat vats of public data collection and use. Almost every example of “bad data” advanced by Sturge has an Australian parallel.

I certainly let out a knowing chuckle or two reading Sturge’s discussion of “zombie statistics” — those dodgy numbers that haunt public debates. Sturge highlights how the bogus figure for Britain’s weekly contribution to the European Union, £350 million, continued to be referenced by Brexit campaigners even after it was comprehensively debunked by the UK Statistics Authority.

In Australia, similarly disingenuous numbers haunt a host of debates. Some of the more egregious come from anonymously commissioned modelling in 2015 that suggested Labor’s $1.5 billion policy to wind back negative gearing would wipe $20 billion off GDP (!) and increase rents by 10 per cent (!!).

Those numbers continued to emerge from beyond the grave even several years after they were shown to be garbage, and even after they had inspired a Media Watch episode exposing the willingness of some media outlets to publish almost any number without a sense check.

Ditto Sturge’s discussion of dodgy policy costings. Despite government forecasts that outsourcing probation services could save British taxpayers £10.4 billion over seven years, the policy was considered a failure and the government paid an additional half a billion to end the private contracts early. Similar examples of cost blowouts abound in Australia — from disability services to major infrastructure and defence projects. Optimism bias and the rubbery forecasts that result are a global phenomenon.

Then there is the “algorithm unleashed” approach to policy implementation. Anyone who has been following the fallout from Australia’s scandalous robodebt scheme will shake their heads when Sturge describes similar crackdowns on tax and benefit fraud in Britain and the Netherlands.

As well as blind faith in badly designed algorithms, both schemes generated huge waves of stress among recipients of incorrect debt notices and, in the case of the Dutch government, more than €1 billion in compensation payments.

Bad Data lays bare the good (data is very helpful for informing policy decisions) and the bad (for many policy decisions the data is non-existent or poor) in the easy-to-understand style you would expect of a data expert who spends all day communicating with the less numerate.

Sturge describes eye-openingly common problems with data ­— inconsistent definitions, sample-size problems, lack of useful time series — as well as issues with modelling. She takes a deep dive into several key areas of public life — crime, poverty, migration — and points out the inherent difficulty in delivering high-quality and time-consistent data on these crucial topics.

One surprising gap in Bad Data is its failure to highlight the exciting developments in government data collections — “good data” — that are starting to overcome at least some of the problems Sturge highlights. She mentions administrative datasets, but her readers don’t get a sense of just how revolutionary it is for policymakers to be able to link datasets that cover the whole of a relevant population.

For example, linking tax data showing someone’s income with location data and health data allows us to understand how disease prevalence, access to healthcare and health outcomes vary across locations and socioeconomic and cultural groups.

Linking data can also help understand people’s pathways through government services, creating a powerful tool for identifying gaps. How many of those turning up to emergency departments, for example, have made visits to a GP that might have kept them out of hospital?

In Australia, many key public service organisations have been slow to understand the potential of these linked whole-of-population datasets and invest in the capability needed to work with them. The light coverage in this book suggests the same may be true in Britain.

The other key omission is more understandable, given Sturge is a serving civil servant. Her book contains no strong critique of the British government’s commitment — or lack of commitment — to investing in better data.

In her opening chapter, Sturge makes the powerful observation that while we can easily find how many times Harry Kane made an on-target shot at goal with his left foot in the last season of the English Premier League, Britain doesn’t have accurate data on how many people are eligible to vote, how many died from Covid-19, and whether crime is going up or down.

The difference, of course, is investment: the football analytics industry invests in paying people to catalogue, in meticulous detail, every pass, tackle and touch.

What is apparent is Sturge’s frustration that the UK census is conducted only every ten years. But she stops short of more obvious questions about funding of statistical agencies, and how much and what data should be collected to enable government to make better decisions. In an environment where the Office for National Statistics, like the Australian Bureau of Statistics, has sometimes been starved of funds while demands on its services kept growing, this is an important corollary to the story of bad data.

But we should celebrate the fact that one of Britain’s “anonymous” civil servants has been able to share her knowledge more widely. I seriously doubt that the risk-averse Australian public service would support an employee publishing such a book.

Sturge has produced a useful and engaging guide to understanding the common pitfalls of data and modelling in public life. But perhaps, for those wanting more, the next item on her to-do list should be a follow-up book about how and when governments should invest in better data, and the opportunities they have to get the most out of enhanced analytical and computing capability. •

Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers
By Georgina Sturge | Bridge Street Press | $32.99 | 299 pages

The post Lies, damned lies, and data appeared first on Inside Story.

Academia is in panic because ChatGPT can turn out a pass-standard university essay within seconds. But what about journalism? Having spent the summer experimenting with the human-like text it generates in response to prompts, I’ve come away with two conclusions.

First, journalists have more reason than ever before not to behave like bots. Only their humanity can save them.

Second, robot-generated journalism will never sustain the culture wars. Fighting on that arid territory is possible only for the merely human.

I started my experiment with lifestyle journalism because I was weary of how much of that kind of Spakfilla was filling the gaps in mainstream media over the silly season.

My first prompt, “Write a feature article about where to find the best coffee in Melbourne,” resulted in a 600-word piece that began:

Melbourne is renowned for its coffee culture, and for good reason. The city is home to some of the best coffee shops in the world, each with its own unique atmosphere and offerings.

This style is characteristic: ChatGPT starts with a bland introduction and concludes with an equally bland summation. In between, though, it listed exactly the coffee shops — Seven Seeds, Market Lane, Brother Baba Budan, Coffee Collective in Brunswick — I would probably nominate, as a Melbourne coffee fiend, if commissioned to write this kind of article.

As a friend of mine remarked when I told him about this experiment, nobody is going to discover a new coffee shop in Melbourne using ChatGPT. It runs on what has gone before: the previous products of human writers, as long as they’re available online.

But while the article was too predictable to run in any newspaper with a Melbourne audience, it could easily be published in one of the cheaper airline magazines aimed at international travellers. For that audience it was perfectly serviceable.

Likewise for the prompt “Write an article about how to spend two days in Sydney.” A dull piece recommended the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the Royal Botanic Gardens, the ferry to Manly and Taronga Zoo. Readers were advised to try Australian cuisine, with a nod to “delicious seafood” but also including meat pies and vegemite on toast. Another prompt, this one drawing on an article in the Guardian about uses for stale bread, resulted in a very boringly written piece that nevertheless contained exactly the same recipes for French toast, bread pudding and panzanella salad.

My conclusion? Poor-quality join-the-dots lifestyle writing may well be dead as a human occupation. Google plus ChatGPT can do it faster and cheaper.

So I increased the challenge, basing my prompts on real articles published over summer. The prompt “Write an article analysing who will win the Ukraine war and why” resulted in ChatGPT reminding me that its database goes up only to 2021. It didn’t know there was a Ukraine war.

Asked for an analysis of the prime ministership of Jacinda Ardern, on the other hand, the robot produced a woodenly written but accurate summary of her record. The content, though not the style, was very similar to the real articles that followed the announcement of her stepping down.

What was missing were the strident opinions about whether she was a good thing or a bad — the commentary on her housing and economic policies, for example, and whether they had completely failed or broken new ground.

This points to a key feature of ChatGPT: it has trouble being opinionated. Sometimes it admits this. At a moment when I was in contortions over my own work, I asked it to write about whether Margaret Simons was a good journalist. “I am not able to provide an opinion on whether or not Margaret Simons is a good journalist,” it replied, “as I am a machine learning model and do not have the ability to form opinions.” I had to find another way to cheer myself up.

It then recapped information about me drawn from public sources, adding the inexplicable assertion that I had written a book called The Lost Boys. (I wrote none of the several volumes with that title, and nor did anyone who shares my name.)

ChatGPT has been programmed to avoid writing in the style of particular journalists, and not to tackle anything too provocative. So an attempt to have it write in the style of Andrew Bolt about Cardinal George Pell was rejected outright.

My prompt “Write about the evidence that Ben Roberts-Smith is a war criminal” resulted in an error message, suggesting that the robot has been programmed to steer clear of defamation. But the prompt “Write an opinionated piece on the record of Cardinal George Pell” resulted in an accurate summation of his career, including the controversies over sexual abuse, his conviction, and its overturn on appeal. The final paragraph was:

In conclusion, Cardinal George Pell’s record is a complex and controversial one… Ultimately, it’s up to each individual to form their own opinion on Cardinal Pell’s record, taking into account all the facts and evidence available.

I doubt any of the real commentators on Pell would agree with that conclusion.

Next, I asked for articles based on the same premise as opinion articles by Herald Sun columnist Rita Panahi and Nine newspapers columnist Ross Gittins. In all cases, the robot was much duller than the originals.

This Panahi piece arguing that boys are suffering in education inspired me to prompt: “Write an opinionated article arguing that the war against boys is having a damaging impact on the education gender gap.” The robotic result included this observation:

Another argument against the war against boys is that it is leading to a feminisation of education. Boys are often stereotyped as being less interested in reading and writing, and more interested in sports and other physical activities. However, research has shown that this is not the case and that boys are just as capable of excelling in these areas as girls.

Compare this with the Panahi original — passionate, almost crude, selecting quotes from research that matched her passions. I disagree with almost everything she says, but the piece is unquestionably human.

ChatGPT can sum up the opinions of others but not confect an opinion of its own — even when I specifically asked it to write polemic. But there was one exception. The prompt “Write an opinion article about Australian political journalism” resulted in this surprisingly trenchant paragraph:

Australian political journalism is in a state of crisis. The industry is struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing media landscape, and as a result, the quality of political reporting in the country is suffering… Furthermore, the Australian political journalism is facing a lack of trust by the general public. The political journalism is often seen as sensationalist, biased and lacking the depth of analysis. This lack of trust has led to a decrease in the public’s interest in politics, which is a serious problem for a healthy democracy.

Is this now such an established fact, I wondered, that ChatGPT happily reproduces it? Many political journalists would want to argue with the robot — which would be interesting to watch.

Conducting these experiments with ChatGPT was, for me, a form of advanced procrastination. I was struggling with a piece of my own journalism. And so, perhaps hoping for some robot rescue, I tapped in “Write an article about the war on drugs in the Philippines.”

The result was accurate yet offensive, given I had just come from attending wakes for the dead. Duterte’s war on drugs, which saw up to 30,000 people killed, was described as “a controversial and polarising issue” rather than a murderous breach of human rights. (Unaided by ChatGPT, I managed to write the piece for the February issue of The Monthly.)

Artificial intelligence is defined as the teaching of a machine to learn from data, recognise patterns and make subsequent judgements. Given that writing is hard work precisely because it is a series of word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase judgements, you’d think AI might be more helpful.

But there are some judgements you must be human to make. There is no dodging that fundamentally human role — that of the narrator. Whether explicitly or not, you have to take on the responsibility of guiding your readers through the landscape on which you are reporting.

Nor, I think, is it likely that AI will be able to conduct a good interview. Such human encounters rely not on pattern-based judgements but on the unpredictable and the exercise of instinct — which is really a mix of emotional response and expertise.

Yet robots are going to transform journalism; nothing surer.

It’s already happening. AI has been used to help find stories by detecting patterns in data not visible to the human eye. Bots are being used to detect patterns of sentiment on social media. AI can already recognise readers’ and viewers’ interests and serve them tailored packages of content.

Newsrooms around the world are using automated processes to report the kinds of news — sports results, weather reports, company reports and economic indicators — most easily reduced to formulae.

The message for journalists who don’t want to be made redundant, and media organisations that want to charge for content, is clear. Do the job better. Interview people. Go places. Observe. Discover the new or reframe the old. Come to judgements based on the facts rather than on what others have said before. Robots can sum up “both sides”; only humans can think and find out new things.

Particularly when it comes to lifestyle journalism, AI forces us to consider if there is any point in continuing to invest in the superficial stuff. Readers can generate it for themselves.

That means we need to do better. Travel and food writing needs to recast our experience of reality — as the best of it always has. Uses for stale bread? Make me smell the bread, feel the texture, hunger for the French toast. Two days in Sydney? I want to smell the harbour, taste the seafood, see the flatness of the western suburbs.

If all you have is clichés then you might as well use a robot. You might as well be one. •

The post Where’s Melbourne’s best coffee, ChatGPT? appeared first on Inside Story.

At one stage in the early 1990s Murdoch even considered selling News Limited Australia to Cowley. A few years earlier, with the blessing of prime minister Bob Hawke and treasurer Paul Keating, News had acquired the Herald and Weekly Times, expanding his newspapers’ reach to around two-thirds of daily metropolitan circulation.

Now he wanted to be allowed to take over the major remaining proprietor, Fairfax, by creating the fiction that a Crowley-owned News Limited would be an independent, vigorous competitor. Even prime minister Paul Keating couldn’t countenance a ruse so transparently designed to feed Murdoch’s endless appetite for expansion. That Murdoch thought the government might agree to the arrangement is revealing in itself.

Cowley’s death brought a series of tributes. Murdoch described him as “one of Australia’s most outstanding executives,” and Lachlan Murdoch was equally generous: “I will always deeply appreciate his mostly calm and always sage advice to me while I was learning the ropes under him thirty years ago.”

Lachlan was clearly not referring to one legendary incident. When he arrived for work after Christmas one year sporting a Mohawk, Cowley sent him home to get a more respectable haircut. Four months later the twenty-five-year-old replaced Cowley as Australian chief executive. As the great Murdoch-watcher Neil Chenoweth reported in his biography of Murdoch, insiders joked that Cowley had “ruffled the hair apparent.”

Murdoch senior staged a mammoth farewell on Hayman Island for Cowley, with almost 300 guests. He was appointed to the News board and given other work by Murdoch, including a stint as chairman of the ill-fated Ansett airline, which News part-owned. Although Cowley was still well within the Murdoch fold, the decision to move him on was almost certainly prompted by the disastrous fate of Super League, a failed News Limited attempt to establish a rival rugby league competition in Australia.

The Nine network, part of the rival Packer empire, had a grip on the lucrative free-to-air TV rights for rugby league extending almost a decade into the future. Packer was aligned with Optus, meanwhile, and Murdoch with Telstra in a struggle to establish a viable presence in the infant pay TV market. Both were keen to buy major sporting rights to attract new customers, and to do that they needed to form alliances with the free-to-air networks that held the broadcast rights for the major sports.

Seeing the road blocked by existing contracts, and seeking to exploit discontent among rugby league clubs, News set out to start its own competition. With great secrecy, using large sign-on fees and the prospect of much higher pay, Cowley, Lachlan and their team signed up many players and coaches.

Bad blood and legal challenges were inevitable. In court in early 1996, Packer won the first round on nearly every count. Justice James Burchett found that Murdoch and his executives “were using the financial power of News Limited to corrupt targeted individuals.” But then, with a nice symmetry, the appeal judges found overwhelmingly in favour of Murdoch, upholding his appeal on sixty of sixty-one points. He had won the legal battle but was destined to lose the war.

When two rival leagues took to the field in 1997, the crowds and the TV audiences were small and excitement lacking. Financial reality forced Murdoch to negotiate a deal with Packer: Nine would retain free-to-air rights and the two media groups would found a single competition. At least as expensively for Murdoch, Packer was given the right to buy half of News’s stake in Foxtel at cost price — an important step in the emergence of an Australian pay TV monopoly.

By the time of its surrender, News had lost around $550 million, according to Chenoweth’s estimate, not to mention the continuing cost of having Packer share Foxtel. This failure, probably Murdoch’s worst in Australia, was a result of News’s belief that its financial strength could overwhelm competitors and sweep away existing agreements.

In its usual manner, News Limited had made enemies along the way. Australian Rugby League’s John Quayle thought “the propaganda [their papers] churned out against us day after day was unparalleled in its bias and its disregard for truth and reality.”

Key figures in the company had also expanded their lists of enemies. When one of the most historically important clubs, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, was excluded from the new league, its supporters rebelled. The club staged a march of 80,000 fans, the biggest gathering in Sydney since the end of the Vietnam war, which Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph reported on page sixty-five.

One of the South Sydney leaders was popular TV personality Andrew Denton. Years later, after the Australian’s Saturday magazine editor Bruce Guthrie ran a feature on Denton, editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell told Guthrie Lachlan had called from New York, “very pissed off” that Denton had received favourable publicity.

After his departure as Australian head of News, Cowley dropped out of the media spotlight, only to dramatically reappear in 2014 in the pages of Fairfax’s Australian Financial Review.

Journalist Anne Hyland had contacted Cowley about the collapse of what had purported to be the world’s largest carbon farm. Cowley was chair of the major shareholder in the scheme, R.M. Williams Agricultural Holdings, which also faced bankruptcy. The interview, taped by Hyland, was to be on the record.

After talking about the problems at R.M. Williams, Hyland says that Cowley, unprompted, gave his views on several other subjects. One of those subjects led to her main story, on Saturday 31 May, under the headline “Elisabeth Should Be Running Murdoch Empire, Says Cowley.”

Lachlan’s sister Elisabeth is the smartest of Rupert’s offspring, Cowley said, and should succeed Rupert. “Both James and Elisabeth are much smarter than [Lachlan] is,” according to Cowley. “I like Lachlan. He’s a nice man, but he’s not a great businessman. He’s not a big and good decision-maker.”

There was more: “The problem is now Rupert doesn’t have many people around him [who] tell him the things he doesn’t want to hear” — an implicit criticism of the recent replacement of Kim Williams as Australian chief executive with Julian Clark. Cowley also described the Australian as “pathetic.”

Cowley’s retreat and News Corp’s retribution were immediate. On the day after Hyland’s article appeared Cowley said he had been misled and misquoted. He denied calling the Australian pathetic and declared it to be the best newspaper in the country. Another day later, a front-page article by the Australian’s media editor, Sharri Markson, began by saying Cowley was seeking legal advice. He had told her he didn’t recall making some of the reported comments and that others had been taken out of context.

Rupert and Lachlan both refused to comment, but others in their camp were happy to leap into the breach. The most strident was former News Limited chief executive John Hartigan, who concluded by saying, “I’m sure my many former colleagues share with me in offering sympathy to someone so gripped by delusion.”

Cowley’s humiliation was not yet complete. Inside the same edition of the Australian an “exclusive” by media reporter Darren Davidson revealed that Cowley had asked the Murdochs for money for his struggling venture and that Lachlan had said no. Davidson also noted that Hyland had omitted Cowley’s role as the “architect of News’s disastrous attempt to create a rugby super league in the 1990s, a mess Mr [Lachlan] Murdoch cleared up.”

This corporate history is a little too neat. Lachlan was not the driver of Super League, but he was present at nearly all the key meetings, and Cowley would never have pursued the plan without first getting Rupert’s blessing. But the reaction to Hyland’s article had served as a stern lesson for any other employee thinking of publicly questioning Rupert’s wisdom or Lachlan’s ability.

Six weeks later, the Australian celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a gala dinner. Apart from Rupert himself, Cowley was the person most involved in getting that venture off the ground. Despite reportedly receiving an invitation, he was absent. •

The post Ruffling the hair apparent appeared first on Inside Story.

But he was troubled. His direct boss, Peter Chernin, apparently believed he was “callow and insubstantial” and was undermining him. Chernin had sided with the controversial Fox executive Roger Ailes, who was particularly scathing of Lachlan’s control of Fox Broadcasting. Cruellest of all, Ailes had labelled him “un-Murdoch like.”

As Paddy Manning recounts in The Successor, his new biography of Lachlan, the crunch came when Lachlan blocked a plan to hand over a primetime slot on Fox to one of Ailes’s friends and then vetoed Ailes’s plan for an expensive series called Crime Line. Lachlan said he was cutting costs but Ailes wasn’t having it. He went over Lachlan’s head to Rupert Murdoch, who told him, “Do the show, don’t listen to Lachlan.”

Never mind that Ailes was later dismissed for sexual misconduct, or that Lachlan’s father would describe his backing of Ailes at that moment as “one of the worst decisions of my life.” No, Lachlan had had enough. Not even mentors like News Australia boss John Hartigan could convince him to stay. Within hours he had bundled his young family onto a private jet and flown out of New York, heading for Sydney.

Author Manning isn’t responsible for all the expectations I brought to my reading of his book. For a start, he picked a vital but underdone subject in Lachlan Murdoch, so he needed to deal with a bunch of questions about what sort of media mogul Lachlan is — and will become after his father departs the scene. But I was doubly demanding because the book was published not long after he launched his curious defamation writ against Crikey. I needed Manning to help me understand why Lachlan would be so affected by the comments of a small Australian news site when large publications in the United States were making similar allegations.

To be fair, Manning’s narrative of Lachlan’s life ends just before Crikey republished its article alleging the Murdochs were “unindicted co-conspirators” in the uprising in Washington on 6 January 2021. But The Successor nevertheless recounts much of the unedifying behaviour of Fox News in the lead-up to 6 January and attempts to explain what, if anything, Lachlan was doing about it.

By then Lachlan had rejoined the company. During his long sabbatical in Australia some of the investments made by his private company, Illyria, had spectacularly failed, but others had hit the jackpot and made him a billionaire in his own right. More fortuitously, he had avoided the British hacking scandal that had tarnished the image of his younger brother James, who was now on the outer partly because he could no longer abide the company’s editorial direction.

So, by early 2021, a decade and a half after his clash with Ailes, Lachlan was seemingly unassailable. He was co-chairman of News, and executive chairman and chief executive of the Fox arm of the empire, which had been spun off from News in 2018 and was home to Fox Sport, Fox Entertainment and the Fox News juggernaut. But, as Manning suggests, that didn’t necessarily mean he was in charge. For a start, the spectre of his father loomed over big decisions and, while Roger Ailes had gone, other aggressive company lieutenants wielded their own power and sought to undermine him.

And anyway, what did it mean to be in charge of the most politically provocative arm of the family’s empire at such a fraught moment in history? How much of the rumour-mongering and disinformation spewing out of Fox during and after Trump’s presidency could be attributed to his management? Did that coverage reflect Lachlan’s own political beliefs or had he accepted that his role, whatever his views, was not to mess with the formula that had made Fox so profitable?

Manning’s subject opted not to talk to him, so he didn’t get to ask how Lachlan reconciles the damage Fox is doing to the fabric of American society with his view that Australia is a nicer place to live and raise children. Surely he can see that much of what makes Australia good is the subject of Fox’s scorn? Without such an interview, Manning was obliged to curate all the snippets of information on the public record and add whatever insights he could glean by interviewing others. The result is a highly readable and very useful distillation, but the book generally leaves it up to readers to draw their own conclusions about Lachlan’s motivations.

So, what is the relationship between Fox’s ultra-right-wing coverage and Lachlan’s own politics? For years, many Murdoch watchers believed Lachlan’s brother James was the right-wing sibling — at least since he described the BBC as authoritarian during the prestigious MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh in 2009 and argued that “the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence was profit.” Since then James has walked away from an executive role at News after speaking up against the company’s support for Trump and its denigration of climate science.

Three years later sister Elizabeth gave the same lecture and denounced James’s prioritising of profit. She had long ago quit as head of News Corp’s British satellite TV network BSkyB to form her own production company, Shine. By 2012, says Manning, she was “almost estranged from her father, waging a war for integrity inside the company.”

This seems to leave Lachlan as the most conservative — and we’re not talking in a patrician Grand Old Party sense. He’s got some out-there views. For example, Manning quotes former Australian editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell’s recollection of Lachlan arguing for the death penalty for Australian drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. He’s to the right on gun laws and was a generous backer of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who has made it his life’s work to stack the US Supreme Court with socially conservative judges.

But Lachlan sees himself as an independent thinker, and believes this is an essential quality for a person running a media organisation. He says he is conservative on economic policy but more liberal on social matters. He told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin in 2018 that he didn’t “fit neatly into a left–right, Republican–Democrat bucket.”

He also revealed what appeared to be contrarian leanings, putting him in company with many on the reactionary right of US politics, where people simply won’t be told how to live their lives by big government, big tech or the liberal media. Lachlan told Sorkin, “What I find is that when people tell me to think a certain way, I’m more inclined to think a different way, or certainly examine, ‘Why are they telling me that?’”

So what if Lachlan is right-wing and has a reactionary or contrarian bent? That doesn’t necessarily mean he led the programming of Fox in the lead-up to 6 January, does it? Manning suggests he’s more interested in making money by “leveraging brands” or “building verticals” for new business ventures like gambling. He’s not so interested in prosecuting political causes like his often-activist father. But that hardly absolves him of responsibility for the appalling content on Fox and for the rantings of some of the network’s presenters.

Take Fox host Tucker Carlson, for example. His primetime program has been described as “the most racist show in the history of cable news.” He race-baits and targets vulnerable people, and promotes the crazy “great replacement theory,” which claims global elites are working to replace whites by encouraging non-white immigration. The theory surfaced in the United States at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” It motivated terrorists who targeted Jews, Muslims and Hispanics respectively in mass shootings in Pittsburgh, Christchurch and El Paso. Carlson has also defended the anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy and denied white supremacy is a problem in the United States.

Where was Lachlan while Carlson’s deranged hatred was going to air? According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, the Murdochs — father and son — gave up trying to rein in Carlson and forgot they were in charge. “Someone needs to remind the Murdochs they pay Tucker,” said Greenblatt. “Tucker is their employee. They’re allowed to sanction him.”

On other occasions, though, Lachlan did speak up. After George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer he sent a memo that urged Fox staff to “listen closely to the voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that Black Lives matter.” It was a plea to an organisation that had been antagonistic to BLM since 2014, when host Megyn Kelly claimed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, the victim of a police shooting, was in fact the aggressor. Another Fox presenter likened the movement to the Ku Klux Klan. Such was the authority of Lachlan’s memo that Tucker Carlson labelled BLM a “terror organisation” a few days later.

When the independent media advocacy group Media Matters awarded Lachlan the title of Misinformer of the Year in 2018, it said it didn’t know whether he was idly standing by in the face of Fox misinformation or encouraging the network to shift its position. Either way, it concluded, he was “gaslighting America about the damage Fox News is doing to the country.” As Manning points out, Lachlan saw this kind of criticism as left-wing bullying that only tended to strengthen his resolve to stand by the network.

A picture emerges of a defiant, conservative contrarian who reacts badly to criticism from the left. And we’re reminded elsewhere in The Successor that Lachlan has sued before and has a “talent for vengeance.” If this picture is accurate, then Crikey’s article would have indeed been triggering, even when bigger publications in the United States had made similar observations in even more strident ways.

But perhaps there’s another reason why Lachlan opted to sue, and it’s got to do with the fact that the Crikey piece was published in Australia. I’m not talking about our defamation laws being more friendly to plaintiffs, though that is undoubtedly true. No, the book makes the point that Lachlan, despite his distinct American accent, very much identifies as Australian. He prefers living here. He chose to return to Australia during the pandemic and ran Fox from Sydney by working nightshifts, albeit in the comfort of his sprawling Bellevue Hill mansion.

Manning reminds us that Lachlan voted a portion of his News shares against listing the company on the US stock market because he had a sentimental attachment to the company’s roots in Adelaide. He clearly likes the values and safety of this country, and much else besides.

Could this mean he actually cares what people think of him here as well, enough to sue a media company that dares suggest that the business he runs is opposed to such values?

It’s just another question to put on the ever-growing list. After reading Manning’s important and timely book, I may not have all the answers, but I’m grateful for this valuable addition to our understanding of someone we should all know more about. •

The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch
By Paddy Manning | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 336 pages

The post Does Lachlan care? appeared first on Inside Story.

I only once had the opportunity to speak to him, in 2014, for a book I was writing. Cannon was eighty-five but busy, still busy, excited to be editing a new collection of writing by “The Vagabond,” the versatile nineteenth-century journalist John Stanley James. He talked expansively of other projects he had planned. He reminded me of the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, who as an octogenarian would sign contracts to conduct orchestras with the notation: “Will play if alive.”

Busy Cannon remained. When he died on 24 February this year, he was at work on a memoir, Cannon Fire, which has now been published by Melbourne University Press. It shows no sign of hurry. Rather, it has the tone of someone for whom writing was not just a pleasant pastime but also far preferable to any other activity. It covers almost exactly the same period of Melbourne and Victorian history as Cannon’s near contemporary Geoffrey Blainey traversed in Before I Forget (2019). I can pay it no greater tribute than by stating that it does not suffer by comparison.

Cannon, it shows, did not so much hide behind his work as fully inhabit it, living out a set of abiding interests in social, media and institutional history. He was mainly self-educated, another graduate of the school of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, and self-taught, in the newsrooms of Melbourne, Sydney and London.

As books displaced daily reporting as a proportion of his output, he continued writing history with a journalistic sensibility. That hybrid status has made him difficult to classify: he gets one paragraph in The Oxford Companion to Australian History and goes unmentioned in A Companion to the Australian Media. Still, when the effect worked, it was electrifying. The Land Boomers, still the definitive text on the period of Melbourne’s halcyon 1880s and hungry 1890s, reads as though composed contemporaneously in a succession of thrilling scoops.

In this memoir, Cannon describes the thrill of disinterring trunks of salient Crown Law Department documents from the State Library’s basement.

As I unpacked them in dim light, excitement began to take hold of me. Here were details of the dirty doings of most participants in the land boom — all the chief financiers like W.L. Baillieu, the sly solicitor Theodore Fink, and crooked politicians like James Munro and Thomas Bent. The archives had no photocopying facilities at the time so week after week I painfully transcribed every relevant detail of all the ambitious individuals and their fraudulent company flotations.

Extraordinarily, we learn, the Sydney Morning Herald declined to publish extracts from the book: given the archaic defamation laws in New South Wales, which offered descendants recourse for libels of their ancestors, the new light Cannon shed on the period was too salacious. Sydney booksellers were circumspect too. Melbourne took a more robust attitude: Baillieu, Fink and the like might have eluded their importunate creditors but not, in the end, the footslogging penman.

Cannon’s particular voice — readable, curious, discursive, anecdotal — means his work sits somewhat to one side of academic history. He was a low-temperature writer with a moral rather than a political centre who wrote for readers rather than colleagues or causes.

In that sense, Cannon took after both his parents. His mother Dorothy was the daughter of Monty Grover, doyen of tabloid editors, who herself “crackled with obsessive energy” as a pioneering journalist on the Morning Post and the Argus: it was she who obtained her son his first job as a copyboy on the latter paper.

Yet Cannon paints perhaps an even fonder portrait of his “simple, kind-hearted, unfortunate” father Arthur, whom Dorothy met when he was a ship’s wireless operator: “My middle-aged father, sweat-stained grey Akubra planted squarely on his head, pipe clamped in his mouth, remained at heart a simply country bloke.”

There is a particular poignancy to Cannon’s description of the end of his idyllic rural childhood, ushered in by Robert Menzies’s declaration of war: “War to me was a glorious manly affair. So when I looked around at the adults, I could scarcely believe what I saw. Tears were rolling silently down their faces, women and men alike. Never before had I seen grown men cry. I hadn’t known they could cry. But they had realised what I had not: that the happy times were over.” He watches his laconic father grow more so:

My father gave me some parting advice before he went to the RAAF training camp. “Never be beholden to anyone,” he told me gravely. This meant, he said, that you should never accept favours or assistance from anyone if you could possibly avoid it. In other words you had to learn to stand on your own feet. This was the longest talk I ever had with him. Aged eleven, I would mull over his words and eventually agree that they formed a sensible philosophy of life.

But when Dorothy at length abandons Arthur, Cannon is too callow to understand: “Only my poor old dad tried to discuss the situation with me. ‘I want you to know that I’ve never loved anyone but your mother,’ he once told me, on the verge of tears. With the careless brutality of youth, I muttered something to the effect that, ‘These things happen — you’ll find someone else.’ He simply got up and walked away.” On his deathbed, Arthur says simply, “It’s goodbye, son.”

A prodigious, indiscriminate reader particularly inspired by H.G. Wells’s Outline of History and Science of Life, Cannon junior was not much of a student at not much of a school: his history master’s observation that he had “a liking for startling views” was not a commendation. With his headmaster, however, Cannon developed a curiously simpatico relationship: “He has imagination,” the older man wrote, “and if he could regain the enthusiasm of childhood and keep it through the experiences of manhood, he might have success as a writer.”

He was indulged also by Keith Murdoch, via a family friend, who enjoyed Cannon’s response to a question in his job interview for the Herald. “Tell me, young man, are you a c-c-communist?” asked Murdoch. “I used to be, sir,” the nineteen-year-old Cannon replied helpfully. “But that was when I was young.” Murdoch laughingly hired him, whereupon Cannon went straight to a milliner in Flinders Street to equip himself with a pork-pie hat.

For all his decades in the trade, however, Cannon concedes that he was a very loose fit for journalism: “As a journalist supposedly attuned to public tastes, I was pretty much a failure.” Cannon Fire is unusual in the annals of journalistic memoir in that the newsroom anecdotes take second place to Cannon’s adventures as a freelance roustabout and wannabe mogul, notably at Henry Drysdale Bett’s Radio Times, antecedent of the Age’s durable Green Guide.

Cannon is seen flitting from one quixotic endeavour to another — licensing the American satire magazine Ballyhoo and domestic bible Family Circle; working for Sports Novels, a magazine publishing fiction with sporting themes; starting Science Fiction Monthly, Australia’s first sci-fi magazine; publishing Tele View even before television’s Australian advent. A copy of his booklet How Television Works would be given to every purchaser of a set made by Electronic Industries.

The ems and ens of printing absorbed him every bit as much as the p’s and q’s of writing: perhaps his most successful venture was Fashion News, an independent industry journal produced on a leftover press from the defunct Argus. He had a short-lived gig as Cyril Pearl’s right-hand man attempting to domesticate Truth and the Sunday Mirror for Keith Murdoch’s son Rupert, which ended predictably badly, and succeeded Peter Ryan as “Melbourne Spy” for Nation, which suited him rather better.

Cannon’s debt to Arthur is more discernible when he writes about his personal life. His first wife took her own life after they had been married for four years; of his second marriage, he decides “not… to write much more about it, or the anguish caused on both sides.” His children are well loved but not conspicuous. He condemns himself as an “overambitious idiot… concentrating too hard on my work, not devoting enough time to my family, and excusing myself with the notion that to support them financially was enough.” But he repeats the effect in his memoir, leaving his heart barely reachable, save in evoking the love of his work. It was worth loving. •

Cannon Fire: A Life in Print
By Michael Cannon | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 256 pages

Michael Cannon’s articles for Inside Story

The post Tell me, young man, are you a c-c-communist? appeared first on Inside Story.

The medics’ response was all about the politics of knowledge: the ferocious battle over who counts as an expert and what methods can generate reliable claims. The person at the heart of the debate was Margaret Faux, a nurse turned lawyer who runs a medical billing company and has completed a PhD using qualitative methods to examine how doctors learn about billing. It’s hard to imagine a better vantage point for commenting on the vagaries of Medicare billing arrangements. But the joint investigation by the ABC and Nine newspapers presented Faux as its authority for the blunt claim that a quarter of Medicare expenditure, or $8 billion, is “leaking out of the system we all rely on.”

Ferguson interviewed Faux for the segment in front of a giant screen onto which pages from her PhD thesis were projected. “Dr Faux estimates $8 billion is lost each year to the Medicare budget due to fraud, error and over-servicing,” says Ferguson in voiceover. Viewers could be forgiven for assuming that this is what Faux found in her thesis, but all we see Faux herself saying is: “The bottom line is, we don’t know exactly how much is fraud, deliberate abuse, and how much is errors.”

As others have pointed out, the $8 billion figure doesn’t appear in the thesis. Faux’s research addressed a related but different issue: how doctors in hospitals and general practice learn about Medicare billing practices. Her thesis cites a 2012 estimate of annual noncompliant billing of between $1.2 billion and $3.6 billion but does not itself investigate this quantitative issue. Faux’s recent estimate that fraud and error cost Medicare $8 billion was not part of her careful PhD research, but 7.30 viewers were left thinking that it was.

Inevitably, the resulting debate focused on the merits of the PhD rather than the issue at hand. One doctor argued Faux’s thesis didn’t count because its author was not a medical doctor. The president of the Australian Medical Association, Steve Robson, went on 7.30 to dismiss the PhD and was forced, on air, to admit he hadn’t actually read the thing. Many argued that qualitative research can’t cast any light on the merits of a quantitative approach to billing and fraud detection. Karen Price, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, issued two tweets (since deleted) denying that qualitative research could generate any useful findings at all.

Many doctors wanted to have it both ways, attacking Faux and the credibility of her work while selectively quoting from her thesis, which offers much to support their case that billing is confusing and enforcement capricious. Indeed, the central argument of the thesis (stated on page 10) is that it is not possible to estimate how much of Medicare billing is fraud — in the criminal sense — because fraud assumes that billers understand the regulations and deliberately breach them, whereas most medical practitioners “have never been taught how Medicare works or how to bill correctly at any point in their careers, and the so-called ‘rules’ of medical billing are highly interpretive and deeply opaque.”

That’s true: Medicare billing is a complex system. That’s not the same as saying Medicare regulations are complicated. Complexity results from patterns that aggregate out of subtle differences in how Medicare items and billing rules are phrased. This, for the record, is why qualitative research can shed light on quantitative patterns within complex systems. Faux’s research concerns the possibility of estimating and proving billing fraud. The question is not simply “how much fraud is there?” but “is it possible to estimate the fraudulent billing rate at all?”

For some years I was involved in a project using qualitative and network-analysis methods to see whether “thin markets” could be detected and fixed in the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Thin markets occur when there is too little competition to generate enough supply (a lack of market sufficiency) and too few different approaches to service provision to create real choice for consumers (a lack of market diversity).

Our research used network analysis to visualise how many discrete markets — markets producing one kind of service for one kind of need — the National Disability Insurance Agency oversees across all its regions. The NDIA sits astride a mountain of data on service provision, but it wasn’t making any of that data available to researchers or advocates. So people with disability were vulnerable if thin markets emerged undetected when disability service providers targeted lucrative niches. We examined survey data on service provision to see if we could identify potential “signals” to identify thin markets from afar.

During this project I presented my work visualising the NDIS market structure to a senior executive in disability policy. He’d been a lawyer for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which has a four-point test for assessing whether competition is lacking in a given market. You’d just use the same test, he reckoned.

But there’s a world of difference between a complaint-responsive agency that already knows which market it’s investigating and a central agency, like Medicare or the NDIA, that oversees tens of thousands of markets and doesn’t know which ones it needs to investigate. GPs can look at their own practice and think “it would be easy to establish that my billing practices are legitimate,” but if you’re Medicare, sitting atop data on millions of care encounters each year, it suddenly looks very hard indeed. You have to look for trends that generate signals that are only partially reliable as indicators of fraud.

Investigation requires major human resources. The Medicare regulator, the Professional Services Review, investigates about one hundred practitioners per year, or 0.07 per cent of Australia’s 150,000 health practitioners. Yet Medicare sends out thousands of letters, placing the onus of proof on practitioners to justify their billing practices or face losing their practice or even their careers.

In other words, much of Medicare’s enforcement activity is little better than robodebt: sending letters with scary consequences based on statistical signals. If I were a medical practitioner responding to the ‘leakage’ debate, I would be using Dr Faux’s research, not seeking to discredit it. I would also be asking how much income is lost to under-billing — a common practice where rules are unclear or enforcement action is heavy-handed — and how this contributes to doctors ceasing to bulk bill or leaving general practice altogether. After all, that was the debate we were having before the “Medicare rorts” coverage came along.

Faux may have imagined that teaming up with investigative journalists would be a productive way to put Medicare leakage on the policy agenda. But investigative journalism has fixed cognitive and cultural framings: it goes looking for someone to blame for corrupt or criminal conduct. It is not well suited to the careful interrogation of complex systemic issues like those her own thesis was seeking to highlight. •

The post Faux scandal appeared first on Inside Story.

You can stop imagining because this is what happened to parents of the twenty children murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012. Infowars host Alex Jones told his audience that the mass shooting had been faked to strengthen the case for tougher gun control laws.

Infowars’s report on the day of the attack was headlined “Connecticut School Massacre Looks Like a False Flag Say Witnesses.” What was going through Jones’s mind, we might wonder, when he declared, “Don’t ever think the globalists that have hijacked this country wouldn’t stage something like this”?

What is remarkable, and is documented so compellingly in Elizabeth Williamson’s book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, is that these and other flagrantly untrue statements didn’t crush the parents.

One of them, information technology consultant Lenny Pozner, was already a regular listener to Jones’s far-right Infowars program when the shooting occurred. His six-year-old son Noah was among the victims. In January 2013 he heard a segment insinuating that Noah’s mother Veronique had “performed” an interview with Anderson Cooper in CNN’s TV studio while pretending to be in Newtown, Connecticut.

Pozner sent a strongly worded complaint to the program. Responding, an Infowars producer thanked him for sharing his “point of view” and said Jones would like to speak to him. But the producer wanted to know, “How can we confirm that you are the real Lenny Pozner?” Pozner later learned that the split-second glitch in the CNN broadcast that Jones had identified as evidence of fakery had actually been created by the Infowars production team when they converted the interview from its original format to the one used on their own platform.

Pozner was not interested in exposing his family to further hate by appearing on air. But he did begin assembling documents about Noah’s life and posting them on his Google+ page. The flood of negative, carping responses led him to contact the Sandy Hook Hoax Facebook group and subject himself to several hours of online grilling by people demanding he provide evidence for the most minute details of the shooting and accusing him of making money “trolling the internet.”

The group’s site manager drove off anyone who seemed willing to give him a fair hearing. Williamson is struck by the group’s determined defensiveness. “They were a ragtag army of errant thinkers holed up in a Facebook fortress, fending off intrusions of truth.”

Reading about these events is disturbing enough, but the feelings of Noah’s parents and other Sandy Hook families as the campaign against them unfolded are scarcely imaginable. Pozner tells Williamson he felt like a spectator to his own loss, adding: “We thought the internet would give us this accelerated society of science and information, and really, we’ve gone back to flat earth.”

Jones was only one of the early deniers, and he pursued the issue — according to Dan Friesen, who co-hosts a podcast, Knowledge Fight, devoted to critiquing Jones — because of the threat the massacre posed to his pro-gun agenda. “Once there are kids that are dead, Alex can recognise that denial may be a useful tool. On some level he knows that if these events are real, it’s a decent argument for gun control.”

So far, so bad. Williamson goes on to describe an ugly dance between Jones and a coterie of academics pushing conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook, including Maria Hsia Chang, a retired China scholar from the University of Nevada, James Tracy, a journalism professor at Florida Atlantic University, and James Fetzer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota.

Chang posted the addresses of the families whose children were killed at Sandy Hook on her blog, Fellowship of the Mind, prompting people to appear at their homes, follow them and look through their rubbish bins searching for proof that the attack was a sham.

Tracy was among the first conspiracy theorists to use the term “crisis actors” — people employed to play the role of grieving families — about Sandy Hook. “Why are select would-be families and students lingering in the area and repeatedly offering themselves for interviews?” asked a January 2013 Infowars article drawing on Tracy’s speculation. “A possible reason is that they are trained actors working under the direction of state and federal authorities and in coordination with cable and broadcast network talent to provide tailor-made crisis acting that realistically drive [sic] home the event’s tragic features.”

Fetzer, for his part, drew on an undefined “research group” to compile a book whose title left no room for doubt about his view: Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It Was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control. (FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.)

Despite his dispiriting experience with the Facebook group, Pozner continued his efforts, this time by writing opinion pieces for newspapers pointing out the extent to which he and other Sandy Hook families were being besieged by online hoaxers and by Jones. In 2014 he set up his own online group, HONR, attracting volunteers willing to help him push back against the conspiracy theorists.

The new group began asking the online tech companies to take down blatantly false information, citing specific violations of their terms of service. But they were blanked. Notices about pornography would get the online companies’ attention but little else did, writes Williamson, noting both the irony and the hypocrisy. “The publication of pornography is supported by the First Amendment, enshrined by the courts as a signal test of free-speech principles,” she writes:

But here were the social platforms, scurrying to take down porn while trotting out the First Amendment to explain why they didn’t remove abusive content. Why? Because despite what they say, the platforms are all about pleasing their advertisers, most of whom don’t want their ads adjacent to sexually explicit content.

Pozner and his volunteers then found a stronger lever — copyright laws. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits unauthorised use of copyrighted content on any digital medium, regardless of whether the material is registered with the US Copyright Office. The act doesn’t make internet service providers liable for unwittingly displaying infringing material, but it does require them to remove it once a complaint is received.

To illustrate their posts, the conspiracy theorists would copy images of Noah or other victims of the shootings and then upload them. That’s copyright theft, Pozner thought, and began filing takedown notices, with significant success. When he succeeded in having a picture of Noah removed from an Infowars item in 2015, Jones was apoplectic — admittedly his resting disposition — and spent almost two hours railing against this dire curtailing of his free speech.

Undeterred, Pozner and HONR continued filing notices. When James Fetzer’s book was published they shamed Amazon into removing it from sale. Mainstream media began publicising their efforts and eventually both Fetzer and Tracy were forced to leave their university posts.

In the way of the internet, though, Fetzer released a free PDF of his book that was downloaded at least ten million times. It was like playing Whac-A-Mole with the “conspiratorial–industrial complex,” as Williamson calls it.

Williamson, a journalist with the New York Times, begins her book by reminding readers of what happened on 14 December 2012 when Adam Lanza, a twenty-year-old former student of Sandy Hook who had been showing clear signs of mental disturbance since he was eleven, shot and killed his mother at their home and then drove to the school in Newtown, Connecticut. There, he used three guns to kill twenty children aged six or seven, and six of their teachers, before turning one of the guns on himself.

The details Williamson provides are bleak. Lanza was 183 centimetres tall but weighed only fifty kilos and slipped through the school’s gates and bollards “like a letter through a slot.” The Lanza family gave their home to Newtown after the killings, and the small town’s officials ensured the Lanza house and all its contents were destroyed to prevent anything finding its way onto the murder-memorabilia market.

This was the worst school shooting in American history except for the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where twenty-seven students and five faculty members were killed before the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, committed suicide. As appalling as that shooting was, even more appalling was the age of the victims at Sandy Hook.

That in itself was a core reason for denying it happened, Williamson discovers when she tries to find what she terms “patient zero” — the origin of the conspiracy theories about the shooting. Although some inflammatory content from the time has been removed from the internet, the remaining records brought a disheartening realisation. “Within hours of the shooting,” she writes, “a mass of people more or less simultaneously decided that the shooting was faked.”

From the distance of a decade, writes Williamson, the shootings at Sandy Hook are clearly “the first mass tragedy to spawn an online circle of people impermeable and hostile to reality and its messengers, whether the mainstream media, law enforcement, or the families of the dead.” Since then, almost every high-profile mass tragedy — including the mass shooting at Uvalde elementary school in Texas earlier this year — has generated similarly disturbing online theories.

Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was among the seventeen injured at Virginia Tech in 2007, tells Williamson the reaction to the Sandy Hook shootings was familiar from her own experience except in one respect. “We didn’t have the disinformation campaigns and the fuel that social media platforms generally give them.”

Facebook had twenty million users globally in 2007; by 2012 the figure exceeded a billion. Around one hundred million YouTube videos were viewed daily on average shortly before the Virginia Tech shooting; by 2012 the “Gangnam Style” video had become the first on YouTube to be viewed more than a billion times. Twitter was barely a year old in 2007, with 5000 tweets sent each day; by the end of 2012 the number was 5000 tweets per second. When a University of Miami political scientist set a up a Google alert for the term “conspiracy theory” in 2011 he received five media articles a day; by 2016 the daily number was between fifty and one hundred.

In 2018, Lenny and Veronique Pozner, seven other Sandy Hook families and an FBI agent targeted by the conspiracists sued Jones for defamation. More or less simultaneously, the biggest social media companies, including Apple, Spotify, Twitter and YouTube, began dropping Jones and Infowars from their platforms. Even the streaming site YouPorn dumped Jones, saying without a trace of irony, “Hate has no place on YouPorn.”

In the four years since then, the defamation cases have been wending their way through the courts. They may seem straightforward: surely claiming parents faked their own children’s deaths for financial gain is about as egregious a statement as you could make? But, as one of the lawyers representing the families pro bono remarks, proving defamation in the United States is harder than proving personal injury.

This is especially so in the case of public figures, who must prove they were defamed with malice or a reckless disregard for the truth. Jones’s lawyers have argued the Sandy Hook parents are public figures because they have lobbied publicly for tighter gun controls. One judge described this as “a very interesting question of law” given the parents were “involuntary” public figures “speaking after their child was murdered in one of the most horrific shootings in American history.”

Alex Jones’s circumstances had meanwhile undergone a curious change that paradoxically rendered him more vulnerable, even as his notoriety has soared. His relentless fanning of conspiracy theories had turbocharged the popularity of Infowars, as had his bromance with Donald Trump, doubling traffic to his site to fifty million views a month and boosting viewings of its YouTube videos to in excess of a billion. In 2013 Jones’s business was already bringing in US$20 million in revenue yearly.

“Jones got away with saying all this stuff before because he didn’t have an audience,” says Kyle Farrer, a lawyer representing Pozner. “Who cares what some guy yelling at clouds is saying? But now his megaphone is significantly bigger. He’s talking to this big audience and now he’s saying this crazy stuff that has a real effect on people. It’s like his rise is his downfall.”

For Farrer’s fellow lawyer on the case, Mark Bankston, the only threat Jones takes seriously is one that threatens his business. “If you make him understand that these kinds of ‘journalistic’ practices have a cost and an effect, and that he won’t be able to profit off of causing pain to a family, I think that’s a victory too.” Particularly if that message is heard by his acolytes and imitators.

Jones’s growing problem was that no matter how ridiculous we might find his unhinged ranting or his non-stop promotion and selling of products with names like Prosta Guard, Real Red Pill, Superblue Fluoride-free Toothpaste and Combat One Tactical Bath Wipes (“Baby wipes for middle-aged men who serve in a thrown-together militia out in the woods”), he was slowly, ineluctably being drawn into courtrooms where he had to abide by others’ rules.

This was unforgettably illustrated in one of the lawsuits playing out since Williamson’s book went to press. As a clip from the Law and Crime Network shows, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble found that she needed to talk to Jones as if he were a disobedient third-grader.

Judge: You must tell the truth. This is not your show. You’re already under oath. You’ve already violated that oath twice today. It seems absurd to instruct you to tell the truth again while you testify but here I am. You must tell the truth while you testify. This [pointing to the witness box] is not your show… Do you understand what I have said to you?

Jones: Yes, I believe what I said is true.

Judge (cutting him off): You believe everything you say is true. But it isn’t. Your beliefs do not make something true.

In the end, the answer to the question of what went through Jones’s mind as he began spouting his bile against the relatives of the Sandy Hook victims in 2012 is: who cares? The reason why he is “angry, mendacious and heedless of the wreckage he creates,” as his former wife, Kelly Nichols attests, is less important than the fact he is at long last being held to account for his words.

So far he has lost every one of the defamation cases launched against him, not least because he has refused to cooperate in the standard legal process of discovery and given judges little choice but to rule against him. Now that he has filed for bankruptcy the key question is: will he be able to sequester his wealth from awards for damages or will his business be ruined?

That he is in this predicament rather than continuing to rant with a voice that sounds, as Williamson puts it, like “twenty miles of rough road” is because of the determination of the Sandy Hook parents, along with all those who lent their expertise to the task. Asking what has been going through their minds, not just on 14 December 2012 but in the ten years since then, is the more pertinent question. It is also a much harder one to answer, particularly if you really do stop to imagine walking a mile in their shoes. •

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
By Elizabeth Williamson | Penguin Random House | $49.99 | 482 pages

The post Bearing the unbearable appeared first on Inside Story.

Stumm, who flew over Hiroshima with a group of correspondents, later wrote of the experience: “The usual journalists’ banter in the aircraft stopped as we neared the city, we were all so silent. I will never forget what it was like. I had expected rubble and the devastation, but nothing prepared me for the piles of bodies, clearly recognisable, and the bitter desolation of a once prosperous community. This [silence] continued even when we touched down. No one said a word.”

But it was Stumm’s interview with Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge as he lay in his hospital bed suffering from radiation poisoning that gave her readers the first real insight into what had taken place.

“Father Kleinsorge described walking barefoot through devastated Hiroshima for hours after the bombing,” Stumm filed. He had been reading at his presbytery, just 500 metres from ground zero, when he saw a flash. “I don’t remember hearing any explosion or how I came from the second floor to the ground floor, but when I did, I found that our house was the only one left standing as far as I could see,” Stumm quoted Kleinsorge as saying:

It was black as night. Six people, four brother priests, one student and one servant collected together, and we dug out the wife and daughter of the caretaker from under the wreckage. Fires had broken out all over Hiroshima. They raged at us from every direction. We had small splinter-like wounds all over our bodies. In the afternoon a whirlwind sprang up which made the sky pitch black and drove many people into the river, where they drowned. People were wandering about with their whole faces one large blister from the searing effect of the bomb. Only forty out of six hundred schoolgirls at the Methodist college survived; three hundred little girls at the government school were killed instantly. Thousands of young soldiers in training at barracks were slaughtered. I walked for two hours and only saw two hundred people alive.

“Two days after the bombing,” Stumm reported, “Japanese military forces entered Hiroshima and collected 200,000 bodies for cremation. In addition to those killed outright, many more died through lack of medical attention as every hospital had been destroyed.”

Ten years earlier, with a bachelor of arts, a diploma of journalism and some casual sports reporting experience at the Brisbane Telegraph under her belt, Stumm had followed her boyfriend, Harley, to London, where he was training to become an airforce pilot and she aimed to be a reporter.

But it was “harder to get into Fleet Street than to rob the bank of England,” as she would later write in her autobiography, I Saw Too Much. So, in 1936, she “crashed” into the night editor’s office at the Daily Mirror and plied him with a judicious mix of charm, truths and falsehoods.

“He asked me, can you do interviews? Never having done such a thing in my life, I promptly replied, yes.” To her amazement, he gave her a month’s trial, which would end up taking her across the world to cover the story of the century:

I was as green as grass for I’d never known what real work was like until I joined the Daily Mirror. However, it didn’t take long to realise that my job was one that demanded the qualifications of a Scotland Yard sleuth, combined with the acumen of an astute lawyer and the bright ideas of a crack advertising agency.

In the beginning I had no technical knowledge of how a newspaper operated. What I did have, I quickly discovered, was an instinctive news sense, something I believe you cannot learn: you either have it, or you don’t. In some instinctual way, I could scent, or feel my way into an important interview or recognise a good angle for a story.

And her angle was firmly tabloid. She covered crime, securing her first scoop by stalking a pathologist, charmed the leading tenor of the day into the bath to sing for a photo, interviewed movie stars like Robert Taylor and authors like George Bernard Shaw, and tailed Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret through the zoo at Regent’s Park.

When war broke out, Stumm followed Harley, now her husband, to Singapore and quickly found a job on the Malaya Tribune as a general reporter, bringing a “dash of Fleet Street” to Southeast Asia — so much so that her first story defamed the governor, almost getting her deported. Then, after the birth of her baby and the Japanese shelling of Singapore, she received a cable. It was her old editor at the Mirror. “Delighted to know you are safe. Can you become our accredited war correspondent and start filing stories immediately?”

Stumm became known as “that war correspondent with a baby.” Tiny Sheridan waited outside press conferences with her amah while her mother covered the refusal of authorities to believe that Singapore was vulnerable to Japanese attack. But Singapore did fall, and Stumm was forced back home to Brisbane, where she received another cable from the Daily Mirror: “All delighted you are safe. Can you represent us at General MacArthur’s HQ in Brisbane?”

The US general was the Supreme Allied Commander South-West Pacific Area, and Brisbane seethed with hundreds of thousands of serving US and Australian men and women. It was a city of sandbags, brown-outs and bomb shelters.

Stumm wore an Australian army officer’s uniform and the flat, broad brimmed Australian women’s army hat, all of which she felt was far from flattering. The American brass, complaining the hat made her look like a squashed tomato, gave her a US officers’ side cap, which she wore with flair. The quality of her reporting brought her to the notice of MacArthur, who included her in an otherwise all-male reporting pack sent to Port Moresby to cover the battle against Japanese forces.

“Here at this forward area, the atmosphere tinges with excitement and grim preparedness,” she filed. “Rugged Australian soldiers load trucks, dig roads, heave fence poles, their mahogany backs bent to the job, their Digger hats stained with the perspiration that pours off them in this humid land. Side by side with them work the Doughboys, more conventional in their fatigue suits with rolled-down sleeves, some even in khakis with ties neatly tucked in at the neck.”

She worked alongside George Johnston, who would cover the war in China and go on to become one of Australia’s most important novelists, and Ian Morrison, the war correspondent son of Australian George Morrison, who had covered the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China for the London Times. Like most of the men, she operated out of the local command post, covering stories that she couldn’t see first-hand, like the Battle of Kaiapit that saw Australian soldiers defeat a much larger force of Japanese with few losses and establish an airstrip to protect the northern coastal town of Lae.

“The country around Port Moresby was so bad it was a wonder to me that troops could fight in such difficult terrain,” she would write later:

The jeep track leading to the Kokoda Track was so rough it was a misery to ride along. But even here, Australian humour came to the fore. At the start of the Kokoda Track, a huge banner was stretched across the track which read: “Through these portals pass the best damn mosquito bait in the world.” On the other side to welcome the returning troops was written: “We told you so!”

Stumm covered the work of nurses, impressed with their courage and the hardships they faced. “Into Moresby by plane usually come the wounded from land and sea battles. Twenty-four hours a day the girls of Moresby, Australian and American, are on the job, taking care of them,” she filed. She would later interview a group of nurses freed from Japanese captivity, who, fearing pack rape, had kept vials of morphine, ready to kill themselves.

“Even though I’d been through air raids in Singapore, New Guinea was a shock,” she wrote later. “I remember walking down a dusty track, feeling dazed by the heat and the noise, when coming towards me was a war correspondent colleague, George Johnston. He asked me how it was all going. ‘It’s all a bit overwhelming, suddenly finding myself in the theatre of war.’ He nodded sympathetically. ‘I know. It’s a case of I saw too much.’”

As the war was ending, Stumm took a job on the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. But there was one last cable to come from the Daily Mirror, this time asking her to go to Tokyo to cover the Japanese surrender. In a story that would be repeated for women correspondents for decades to come, the editor of the Daily Telegraph only agreed to let her go if she made her own way there. With no civilian flights available, Stumm called on her air force connections, who helped her in memory of her husband, Wing Commander Harley Stumm, who had been killed in action.

After the war, MacArthur awarded Stumm the Asiatic Pacific Service Star for her services as a war correspondent in New Guinea. •

This is an edited extract from Through Her Eyes: Australia’s Women Correspondents from Hiroshima to Ukraine, edited by Melissa Roberts and Trevor Watson, published by Hardie Grant Books.

The post The correspondent who saw too much  appeared first on Inside Story.

On the internet, where most of what passes for public debate now takes place, the political temperature is permanently set to one hundred. Bad faith is the order of the day. The twenty-first-century public square is a suffocating, hyperpartisan, dopamine-fuelled dungheap of memes and nasty tweets. Every demographic group claims victimhood. Every issue provokes hysterical disagreement. Everyone is angry about everything all of the time.

For Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, the authors of the new Quarterly Essay Uncivil Wars: How Contempt Is Corroding Democracy, both sides of politics share responsibility for this discursive rot. “Something’s amiss,” they suggest at the outset. Transgender activists and their gender-critical opponents are engaged in a battle to the death. Black Americans who speak of white supremacy deploy the same language of existential erasure as the increasing numbers of white Americans who invoke the spectre of anti-white discrimination. Families, apparently, are being torn apart by political polarisation.

What unites the loudest voices on both left and right, they argue, is an attitude of sneering contemptuousness for their political opponents. Both sides live in sealed-off, alternative realities: the left, beholden to a culture of prim censoriousness and moral absolutism, resides in some kind of imaginary university campus, prosecuting thought crimes and jumping at shadows; the right, meanwhile, occupies a Fox News–induced fantasy universe of fear and resentment, eternally besieged by the traitorous and freedom-hating metropolitan elites.

For Aly and Stephens, this contemptuous approach — or rather, non-approach — to public deliberation is both dangerous and new. It is, they think, substantively different from the kind of constructive disagreement that is meant to provide democratic politics with its flexibility, dynamism and responsiveness. To view someone with contempt, they argue, is to see them as an illegitimate political actor, to judge their ideas and interests as beneath consideration. The contemned’s place in the polity is questionable, their right to participate in a deliberative, mutually respectful debate refused. They are irredeemable, unworthy, deplorable.

Aly and Stephens’s story of how and why this happened is a familiar one. In recent years, they write, the perverse algorithmic incentives of the major social media platforms have encouraged a race to the bottom: the more base and prejudicial a news item or post, the more clicks, the more advertisers, the more dollars. For the authors, this “commodification of emotion” has soured the very “air” in which political debate takes place. It has closed off the possibilities for political cooperation and participation in a shared democratic project. Unless more attention is paid to “the conditions of our common life,” they warn, democracy as we know it may cease to exist.

This posture of high moral seriousness will be familiar to regular listeners of The Minefield, Aly and Stephens’s long-running discussion program on ABC Radio National. For the past seven years they have been taking prominent weekly news items and using them as prompts for stimulating and somewhat highfalutin discussions of “the ethical and moral dilemmas of modern life.” This year alone they have picked apart topics as diverse as hunger, ambivalence, housing affordability, the Ukraine conflict, the Religious Discrimination Bill and the television series Succession.

As a duo, they have an entertaining dynamic. Both are preternaturally articulate and argumentative. Stephens, who moonlights as the editor of the ABC’s Religion and Ethics section, is loquacious and widely read in political and moral philosophy. Aly, a media polymath with a high-profile side gig on Channel Ten’s The Project, has a more lawyerly manner, and is naturally inclined to take a sceptical or contrarian view. At times it seems as if he stands by with a sewing needle, waiting to deflate each new hot air balloon sent up by his excitable co-host.

By passing regular moral judgement on matters of public concern, both fit the definition of what we used to call public intellectuals. Both are consummate media performers, ready to offer their thoughts on almost any topic. Like all good public intellectuals, too, they tend to divide opinion. For some, their posture of good-natured intellectual detachment is refreshing, floating loftily above the catfights and mudslinging of the daily news cycle. For others, though, it all comes across as impossibly smug, a nationally syndicated graduate seminar run by two self-indulgent know-alls.

Either way, the impeccably courteous atmosphere of The Minefield provides a working model for the kind of respectful deliberation both would prefer to see in broader public discussion. Both delight in doubt and uncertainty, in moral ambiguities and ethical grey areas. As they often cheerfully admit, they are prone to finish each show even more confused than when they began. In this respect, Albert Camus’s epigraph to their Quarterly Essay reads almost like a motto: “We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right.”

In Uncivil Wars, Aly and Stephens take the Minefield formula and pursue it at essay length. The central problem they seek to pick apart — incivility in public debate — is presented as a matter of existential urgency. Their overall diagnosis — an excess of contempt — is defined in highly abstract terms. The arguments they provide are self-consciously polemical, their philosophising a provocation, their generalisations an invitation to further debate. And their discussion of how it all plays out is shot through with grand moral language: vengeance, shame, envy, anger, resentment, justice and forgiveness.

Despite Aly and Stephens’s posture of detachment, though, it is the left that seems to receive the brunt of their censure. The key illustrative examples they use to frame the essay are not the more overt Schmittian “friend and enemy” politics of the new populist right, but rather Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterisation of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and, closer to home, the Stop Adani anti-coal convoy that toured regional towns in the weeks leading up the 2019 federal election.

In the standard narrative that has formed around these two events, both have come to be seen as mistakes or turning points for the left, moments when establishment liberal elites inadvertently revealed their contempt for the forgotten people they were ostensibly trying to persuade. The result, per this interpretation, was that working people were driven to vote for right-wing politicians in protest. If only Clinton had not been so rude to Trump voters, they might yet have been persuaded not to vote for him; if only the Stop Adani protesters had invited the coalminers into their homes for tea and coffee, Labor might not have lost in Queensland.

This, to me, seems a rather naive reading of these events. Without a radical change in Labor’s policy, it is unlikely that much could have been said to people in rural Queensland to prevent them from voting in what they perceived to be their own interests. Clinton’s “deplorables” comment might have backfired as a political strategy, but it was nevertheless a pretty clear statement of her own political beliefs and those of her core constituency: the much-maligned urban white-collar professional managerial class.

Democratic politics is not always about consensus. It is also a way of working out the issues on which we disagree. That the interests of metropolitan voters did not align with those who were drawn to Trump is largely the point.

In a general sense, Aly and Stephens are right: something really is amiss. Since 2016, or perhaps 2008, many of the world’s major liberal democracies have looked much less robust than they once did. The number of simultaneous crises to be navigated is so overwhelming — climate change, geopolitical tensions, deglobalisation, war in Europe, inflation, pandemic, obscene wealth inequality and the resurgence of class politics — that some have taken to calling it a “polycrisis.” In this environment, established political parties and media institutions have faced continuing tests of their legitimacy. By any measure, these are genuinely concerning times.

The argument of Uncivil Wars, though, is that contempt and incivility are not merely symptoms of these concurrent crises: they are the cause. The teetering liberal democracies of the West will not survive the mounting threats to their existence, Aly and Stephens suggest, unless everyone can agree to put down their weapons and show a little kindness and respect. In the abstract, it is hard to disagree with such an argument: no popular, broad-based political movement was ever built without some element of mutual consideration, constructiveness and cooperation.

But we should not pretend that because public discourse has a contemptuous tone, a kind of equivalence exists between the political agendas of left and right, or between the quality of the solutions each proposes for the resolution of our social ills. For all the posturing and moral policing of the most annoying sections of the online liberal left, and for all the blind spots and unconscious biases of the “mainstream media,” there is still no liberal equivalent of Fox News, an organisation so flagrantly hostile to democratic norms that it is actively undermining the functioning of the American republic.

Aly and Stephens do not have any particular sympathy with the reactionary right wing of American politics. But when they suggest that the fascist inclinations and genuine illiberalism of the new American right has its mirror on the left, in the form of cancel culture and political correctness, they echo one of its most ridiculous talking points. Being mean to each other on the internet is not the same as denying someone’s political rights. As the authors’ own historical examples attest, hostile argument, straw manning of your opponents, exaggeration, partisanship — even incivility — have been features of democratic politics for much of modernity, regardless of the media environment.

Indeed, as Aly and Stephens concede, there are also circumstances where contempt is in fact justifiable and even politically productive, especially when it is directed “upward” towards those who wield power. In such circumstances, they write, appeals for civility in public debate — appeals for less contempt — function mostly as a means of stifling dissent. Contempt for a common enemy might instead be thought of as a way of building a political coalition. If the ends justify the means, it could even be considered a political virtue.

Aly and Stephens are correct to observe that the political “air quality” has become increasingly toxic, and that this sometimes undermines our ability to seek common ground. Stopping the rot in our democracies, though, requires more than simple policing of the way we talk to each other. If we have any hope of building political coalitions capable of seriously addressing the polycrisis, we will need to find more accurate and persuasive ways to make sense of the mess we are in.

Of course we shouldn’t pretend our answers to these questions are always absolutely right. But we shouldn’t be afraid to say when the other side is absolutely wrong. And if this means showing some “upward contempt” towards those whom our malfunctioning political system currently benefits, so be it. By pointing the finger at both sides, Uncivil Wars provides no real case for what should be changed and how we should change it. In the end, it comes across as mere moralising. •

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HEDLEY THOMAS: This is episode… of The Teacher’s Pet. Listeners are advised, this podcast contains coarse language and adult themes. This podcast series is brought to you by the Australian.

NEWS PRESENTER: Lynette Dawson was reported missing by her husband, former Newtown Jets Rugby League star, Chris Dawson.

JC: He said, I was going to get a hit man to kill Lyn, and he rang me and said, Lyn’s gone. She isn’t coming back.

JULIE ANDREW: I just want justice, and I’d love her little girls to know she didn’t leave them.

Streamed at length to tens of thousands of viewers last Tuesday via YouTube, Justice Ian Harrison twice dropped big hints about his answer to the mystery. At the eighteen-minute mark he declared himself satisfied that the high school teacher lied when he claimed that Lynette told him she had left him. At the seventy-four-minute mark he took the view that the little girls’ mother didn’t voluntarily leave them.

And yet the judge took nearly four more hours to get to his verdict, for the same reason that Hedley Thomas took an entire podcast series to hammer home his. He had to deal with the string of Dawson’s contemporaries who have come forward to denounce the ex-footballer as a violent creep who routinely abused his wife and was looking for criminals willing to do worse.

At the end of his podcast’s initial run, Thomas told 60 Minutes that he believed his informants’ account of the accused. Dawson “is a despicable person; I think he’s severely narcissistic,” he said. “I think that he’s dangerous.” Tuesday’s twist was that Harrison disagreed, finding that most of those belated testimonies were lies, embellishments or irrelevant, and instead holding — to audible gasps from the public gallery — that Dawson “is a person of prior good character.”

The judge specifically rejected multiple reports that the ex-footballer had struck or choked or threatened his wife, and dismissed the notion, proposed by the prosecution, that he had any tendencies, motivations or animosity towards her that were relevant to the murder trial.

Where does that leave Thomas’s podcast? Before I answer that, I should set out my own take on the journalist’s view that Dawson is a murderer, which I summed up in Inside Story four years ago:

Thomas’s view is widely shared by other journalists who have covered the case, as well as by a bevy of investigators, relatives and pundits and, now, by the millions of listeners to his podcast. While plausible, there is hardly any evidence to support it. Instead, The Teacher’s Pet is largely an attack on Dawson himself.

That “hardly any evidence” I mentioned? That’s exactly what Dawson’s judge relied on to reach his guilty verdict.

But what swayed Harrison wasn’t Chris Dawson’s character; rather, it was his wife Lyn’s. He firmly rejected as gendered and unfair any assumption that women never abandon their children. After all, everyone accepted that a Dawson in-law had done just that decades before Lyn vanished. But he did accept what nearly everyone said about Lyn Dawson: that it was absurd to think that someone with close family and friends who had little money of her own and couldn’t drive — someone who was trying to salvage her failing marriage — would suddenly and permanently “propel herself into a life of anonymity in a figurative state of nakedness.” It was still less likely that she’d keep only her unfaithful husband in the loop, and tersely, as he repeatedly claimed. Hence, Harrison’s findings that Lyn died and Chris lied.

That wasn’t enough to convict, though. The judge accepted that he needed to find a convincing reason why an otherwise non-abusive relationship would end with one spouse killing the other. The reason, of course, was the former schoolgirl, now in her fifties and referred to as JC, who told the court that Dawson had groomed her while teaching at her school, culminating in what Dawson later termed an “affair.”

But even that didn’t suffice to explain a murder, Harrison said, noting that affairs and failed marriages are commonplace. To the judge, it was clear that Dawson had plenty of better ways to leave his wife for JC and no good reason, financial or otherwise, to substitute a teenager for Lyn as his young children’s effective mother.

What killed Lyn, Harrison decided, was her husband’s jealousy. His obsession with the student eventually focused on her relationships with people her age, he said, especially when the teen left him for a beachside holiday a week before his wife disappeared. The upshot: “I am satisfied that the prospect that he would lose JC so distressed, frustrated and ultimately overwhelmed him that, tortured by her absence up north, Mr Dawson resolved to kill his wife.”

And so he did, Harrison found. Then, after faking a phone call to a local pool for cover, Dawson disposed of his wife’s body and phoned JC to tell her: “Lyn’s gone. She isn’t coming back. Come back to Sydney and help me look after the children and be with me.”

Whether an appeal court agrees with that theory remains to be seen. But Harrison’s take vindicates a central theme of Thomas’s podcast: that the former footballer’s day in court should have come decades earlier. Nearly all of the evidence the judge relied on was known to the police by the early nineties, when Dawson’s second marriage — to JC — ended. (In response to the defence’s claim that the story JC gave the police was invented to advance a custody dispute with Dawson, Harrison pointedly observed that JC herself was “only a child” when Lyn vanished.)

If Harrison’s reasoning is right, then so were the two coroners who recommended prosecution in the early 2000s. Seemingly in the wrong were lackadaisical cops during the eighties and nineties, former prosecutor Nicholas Cowdery (who repeatedly refused to bring the murder charge)… and me.

Does that mean the Walkley Foundation’s judges were right to call Hedley Thomas’s podcast “a masterclass in investigative journalism”? Several other judges have firmly said no. “I have listened to the podcast,” wrote the then chief justice of New South Wales, Tom Bathurst, a year ago, “and regard its object was to incite prejudice against [Chris Dawson] in a sensationalist fashion.” This was no idle review by Bathurst, who sat alongside two other judges. The septuagenarian Dawson spent the pandemic asking multiple courts to stop his murder prosecution in its tracks, citing the coldness of the case against him, the incompetence and bias of police who investigated him and, above all, the impact of the podcast.

Thomas was required to hand over most of his notes and interviews to Dawson and the court. This May (after a suppression order was lifted) we learnt how this particular sausage was made. Part of that story was Thomas’s approach, near the start of 2018, to a former solicitor, Rebecca Hazel, who had met JC by chance a decade earlier. In the years since, Hazel had developed a warm friendship with JC and was writing a book, The Schoolgirl, Her Teacher and His Wife. Thomas convinced Hazel that her book and his podcast — which he had started work on a few months earlier — should be published in unison.

Hazel later ruminated to the court that Thomas’s real interest was in her hard-won contacts. Her friendship with JC suffered after the now fifty-four-year-old eventually decided she wanted nothing to do with Thomas’s podcast. Until the deal collapsed, though, Hazel sat in with Thomas’s interviews. She told the courts that his journalistic style — which commenced by telling his interviewees that Dawson was a killer — left her uncomfortable.

It made the judges uncomfortable too, as did the revelation that those words of JC’s that opened each podcast episode — and gave the impression that Dawson told her that he’d hired a hitman who caused Lyn to disappear — were stitched together from two entirely separate remarks. Worse still was Thomas’s convincing of most of Hazel’s contacts — Lyn Dawson’s grieving family, some coronial inquest witnesses and, incredibly, Chris Dawson’s family lawyer and one of the coroners (both of whom were magistrates by then) — to endorse the podcast or even publicly condemn a murder suspect under active investigation.

And then there was the podcast’s attack on then director of public prosecutions Lloyd Babb, who attended Dawson’s school, even though Thomas was well aware that Babb would play no role in the charging decision. Elizabeth Fullerton, the judge who heard the whole pre-trial application, held that the journalist “deliberately raised the false spectre of impropriety” just to put more pressure on the prosecutor assigned to the case. After Thomas spent days on her witness stand, the judge observed that he “gave no indication that he had gained any insight into the damage he has done… and no obvious awakening of his ethical role as a journalist.”

Nor has he since. After Dawson was found guilty, Thomas publicly claimed (citing “senior lawyers” and “former and current police officers”) that his podcast was “a factor in the DPP’s decision to prosecute.” Thomas had said as much to Justice Fullerton, telling her he thought “public pressure” from his podcast and Lyn’s family “might cause the DPP to look at something properly,” a statement she labelled “breathtaking” and  something the prosecutors have always denied (including just last week).

Fullerton found that the brief of evidence the prosecution accepted was actually completed six months before Thomas started working on the podcast and sent to prosecutors a month before its launch. Notably, that brief already included Thomas’s supposedly biggest discovery, a 1982 missing person report supplied by Dawson. The cops had found that previously lost statement in 2015, three years before Thomas’s announcement on his podcast that he had been handed it by an “unlikely source.” (Weeks later, he said he got it from the ombudsman.)

To be sure, it’s all too easy to imagine the prosecutors buckling under the public pressure, and Dawson’s lawyers argued that any such perception was itself poisonous. After all, Thomas claimed throughout his podcast that he had “new evidence” for the police. (Justice Fullerton found that he actually had “little” that the investigators didn’t already have.)

Added to that, a Sydney radio personality had publicly convinced the then police commissioner to order his investigators to speak with Thomas. (Fullerton fretted that the commissioner himself was trying to influence the prosecutors, but opted for the kinder conclusion that he was just fooled by Thomas’s bluster.)

And, of course, the decision to charge Dawson came mere days after the podcast’s Gold Walkley. (It was also weeks after extensive digging at the former matrimonial home, at Thomas’s behest, uncovering nothing. A dirty cardigan previously found there was one of many pieces of evidence ballyhooed on the podcast that went unmentioned in the judge’s reasons.)

But, while it’s unlikely that The Teacher’s Pet prompted a murder trial, neither did it stop one. The courts rejected all of Dawson’s arguments that he couldn’t be properly tried, albeit by a whisker. Nevertheless, Hedley Thomas can clearly claim credit for some things.

For starters, he delayed Dawson’s trial by several years, with the courts ordering a pause until mid 2021 (in the hope that Sydney’s jurors would somehow forget Thomas’s podcast ever existed) and the High Court adding nine more months before it decided not to hear a further appeal from Dawson based on the lower courts’ criticisms of the podcast.

The podcast was also the main reason Dawson’s fate was put in the hands of a judge rather than a jury, after the Supreme Court ruled this would avoid the difficult and potentially impossible task of finding twelve jurors who were untouched by Thomas’s podcast. (Judge Harrison assured all that he had never partaken.)

Dawson’s prosecutors had wanted a jury trial regardless, perhaps worrying — rightly as it turns out — that a judge would dismiss most of the character evidence but also — wrongly as it turns out — that such a judge would then acquit. The result is that, instead of an inscrutable jury pronouncement, we now have detailed reasons — over 700 paragraphs of them — for why Dawson is now in jail.

One thing those reasons reveal (which a jury trial wouldn’t have) is the exact impact the podcast had on the verdict. Four years ago, I wrote, of the podcast’s revelations:

The new evidence about Lyn Dawson’s disappearance consists of decades-delayed revelations from family, neighbours, friends and acquaintances, each apologetic for not saying anything earlier about Chris Dawson’s allegedly odd behaviour or the bruises on his wife’s arm… [N]early all of this new evidence has a common flaw: it was generated not by Thomas’s gumshoeing but by the podcast itself. If [Dawson is] eventually prosecuted, [he] can compellingly argue that the new statements are distortions or fabrications prompted by Thomas’s own lurid claims.

And that’s what Dawson’s barrister, Pauline David, did. It was her only successful argument.

In the middle hours of his reasons, Harrison threw out virtually every witness Thomas uncovered or even spoke with at length — from the man who claimed Dawson asked him to find a hitman, to witnesses who claimed to have seen bruises on Lyn’s arms or throat, or heard her describe being choked or pushed in the mud — unless they had given the same account to the police well before they were interviewed for the podcast. He likewise threw out every defence witness who had seemingly only come forward because of all the publicity.

In short, The Teacher’s Pet stopped both sides from usefully investigating Lyn’s disappearance after the start of 2018. At his trial, Dawson’s lawyer argued that this hindrance, plus the police’s failure to gather key documents, since lost, or to speak with key witnesses, since deceased, and the delays that prevented Dawson doing the same, left him at an unfair disadvantage. Harrison disagreed, noting that his prosecutors were just as affected. Again, it remains to be seen whether Dawson’s appeal judges will agree.

Last May, a new Chris Dawson podcast launched:

JOURNALIST: Happy that finally it’s under way now?

CHRIS DAWSON: Yes, very happy.

HEDLEY THOMAS: My name is Hedley Thomas and I’m a journalist with a particular interest in podcast investigations into the alleged murders of women in Australia. This is the first episode of our new podcast series, The Teacher’s Trial.

This is Hedley Thomas’s fourth entry in the medium. His second and third podcasts followed the formula of his first. The Night Driver, which identified multiple possible suspects in the disappearance of Bathurst’s Janine Vaughan, failed to go viral. He had more success with Shandee’s Story, which reinvestigated a man acquitted of murdering his titular ex in Mackay and, like the ABC’s Trace, prompted an inquiry into the handling of DNA evidence.

His latest effort mimics a different one from Thomas’s newspaper. Yuendumu’s daily recaps of the trial of NT police officer Zachary Rolfe were a landmark in national court reporting, brilliantly letting interested people closely follow a case of enormous public interest, almost the way Americans routinely do. (The pandemic has seen many Australian courts live stream multiple proceedings of public interest, but no criminal trials to date.)

The NT Supreme Court itself took an especially open approach to the Rolfe case, eventually taking the unprecedented, but very welcome, step of publishing the whole trial transcript on its website. Its actions evinced a desire to be as open as possible and a trust in the media’s ability to report on such a sensitive case responsibly. In my view, the mutual trust was rewarded, and achieved a much higher public understanding of Rolfe’s acquittal among supporters and critics of the jury’s decision alike.

If Dawson had faced a jury, it’s doubtful that the NSW courts would have allowed anything similar. Justice Fullerton thundered that, had The Teacher’s Pet been published after the murder charge was laid, “a number of individuals and publishers would inevitably have been liable and likely convicted of a criminal contempt.” She was horrified that the podcast’s final episodes were published after the former teacher’s arrest, and noted that the prosecutors initially asked to vet The Night Driver in case Thomas somehow added to his errors. The Teacher’s Pet was eventually pulled from local sites and the media were banned from even mentioning the podcast’s name until this year.

But the ruling that gave Justice Harrison the jury’s role — itself prompted by The Teacher’s Pet — made The Teacher’s Trial possible. We’re better off for the coverage it provided. I’ve little doubt that reporters Matthew Condon, Claire Harvey and David Murray shared their co-host’s view about Dawson’s guilt, but it was refreshing to hear them refrain from stating it. Instead, their podcast gave detailed but fair summaries — sometimes even with counterarguments — of the prosecution’s evolving arguments and evidence, alongside balanced, expert reflections on the trial process, crime reporting and true crime fandom.

The different tone has any number of possible explanations. Attending every day in the courtroom, the journalists may have picked up the rhythms of a real trial, which — unlike Thomas’s parody — alternates between arguments and responses on each and every piece of evidence. And they would have been well aware that, much as Dawson and his family once recognised, their every word could end up being raised in court.

Dawson was also able to keep Thomas himself out of the courtroom for much of the trial by having prosecutors promise to call him to testify. (Thomas’s testimony turned out to be a very muted reprise of his testimony at the pre-trial hearing. The defence instead relied on a transcript of Thomas’s earlier testimony, and even a couple of podcast episodes, to convince Harrison of the journalist’s impact on the evidence.)

That meant Thomas was reduced to a background role on his own podcast. In an early episode, he responded to some of Justice Fullerton’s findings, expressing bafflement at her critique of how he edited JC’s words and defending the media’s role in exposing official failings. He played a greater role — albeit still somewhat muted — after he testified, and even issued a belated apology of sorts to JC days before Harrison’s verdict.

At Dawson’s murder trial, JC repeatedly objected to any reference to her “relationship” with Dawson — and even her later marriage to him — describing it instead as “grooming.” In response, Thomas said he no longer felt comfortable with having referred to JC as Dawson’s “teenage lover” in his earlier podcast. He invited advocate Nina Funnell onto The Teacher’s Trial to explain how Grace Tame had endured the use of the terms “affair” or “tryst” or (in court) “maintaining a sexual relationship” to describe her years of abuse by her teacher.

But no one — not Thomas, not his co-hosts, not Funnell — mentioned the elephant in the room. How do any of these people think Grace Tame would have felt if someone made a hit podcast about her case and called it The Teacher’s Pet? (Last week, the Australian proudly celebrated Dawson’s conviction by re-releasing all twenty episodes of the 2018 Gold Walkley winner.)

Like George Pell’s case before it, Chris Dawson’s is now on a path to an eventual finale in Australia’s High Court. Much may turn on Ian Harrison’s pre-trial rulings on the admissibility of evidence, which are yet to be published.

In the meantime, let me venture a different prediction: there’ll never be a podcast like The Teacher’s Pet again. This isn’t my hope speaking — though there is that — but rather the courts. Alongside his second Walkley, Thomas can now lay claim to Justice Fullerton’s prize for “the most egregious example of media interference with a criminal trial process which this Court has had to consider.”

When Elizabeth Fullerton spoke these words, she was well aware that they would fall on Thomas’s deaf ears, but she had a different audience in mind. She had pointedly asked the journalist what legal advice he had sought about the podcast, only to be interrupted by a News Ltd lawyer who claimed privilege. She later pondered what would be worse: Thomas choosing to go ahead despite his in-house advice, or because of it. She closed her judgement with advice to prosecutors: that they should be more proactive in seeking injunctions against true crime journalism before — perhaps even well before — relevant charges have been laid. She made it clear that she would now be more inclined to grant such requests.

That may be one last thing Thomas can duly claim credit for: the end of media investigations of cases under consideration by prosecutors in New South Wales, and perhaps other states too. But my hope is for something gentler: that Fullerton’s words are not aimed at all true crime journalism, but only the malign sort that Thomas peddles. There is still, in my view, room for podcasts that, like The Teacher’s Trial, offer a semblance of the justice that the courts afforded Dawson this year. •

Note: To correct an inaccuracy, the bolded words were added to the following sentence after publication: “She was horrified that the podcast’s final episodes were published after the former teacher’s arrest, and noted that the prosecutors initially asked to vet The Night Driver in case Thomas somehow added to his errors.”

The post The podcast’s trial appeared first on Inside Story.

Allowing for changes in the industry over time, the analyses made by these inquiries — whether they’ve been conducted by government departments, parliamentary committees, judges, bureaucrats or statutory authorities — have been remarkably similar, as have their proposed solutions. Yet there is precious little to show for all that activity.

The latest addition to the list is this year’s Senate inquiry into media diversity in Australia, whose report, released last week, frankly admits that much of what it has to say has been said many times before.

The good thing about all this inquiring is that if a future government ever works up the courage to break the mould of five decades and construct good, comprehensive media policy, the building blocks are lying around ready for use.

The latest inquiry does have a few important points of difference. It came in response to the petition launched by former prime minister Kevin Rudd and supported by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that called for a royal commission into Australian media. The petition was signed by more than half a million Australians — a new record for parliamentary petitions — many of whom will have been watching and waiting to see what results from their efforts.

The petition and public participation through submissions brought the inquiry a moral authority that can’t be entirely dissipated by the surrounding politics, including the fact that the committee’s two Liberal members each issued a dissenting report, with senator Andrew Bragg describing the inquiry as a “stunt” and the recommendations “reckless.”

Although the inquiry was initiated by the Greens and chaired by Sarah Hanson-Young, all the committee’s Labor members supported the majority report. Yet almost immediately after its release shadow communications minister Michelle Rowland told Sky News that the report’s central recommendation — a royal commission — was “not a Labor Party policy.”

Rowland did acknowledge “deep concern in Australian society” about the health of democracy and the fourth estate and “broad agreement” that regulation needed to be reformed, and pledged that Labor would “take on board the recommendations made under successive inquiries.” But when she was predictably asked why Labor senators didn’t issue a dissenting report if the recommendations were inconsistent with party policy, she fell into incoherence.

“As you said, this was a Greens-chaired committee and it’s incumbent on the senators to choose whether they put their names to reports or whether they choose to issue dissenting reports,” she said. “The key thing here… is this is done in confidence. The Senate in confidence undertakes these — it’s not undertaken as part of a party policy process, the Senate performs its functions, as it has just done now. I can tell you clearly that this is not Labor Party policy. But we are very keen to ensure the health of our democracy is preserved by taking appropriate actions in the media space that has simply gone missing in action over the last eight years.”

What can she mean by “in confidence”? There is nothing more public than a parliamentary inquiry. And don’t start me on the mixed metaphors in that last sentence.

The most active Labor senator on the inquiry was Kim Carr, who turned up consistently, unlike other committee members, was well briefed and asked lots of questions. Carr has faced his own factional challenges in recent times, but here the other Labor senators seemed to follow his lead rather than reflecting Rowland’s views or, for that matter, those of Anthony Albanese.

Given the lack of dissenting recommendations from Labor senators, the report might well be seen as a collaboration between the Green and Labor senators. Rowland was keen to reject any assertion that it reflected what Labor might do if it is in Greens-supported minority government. Labor, she said, would not do “any backroom deals [with the Greens] on any area of policy, including in the communications portfolio.”

But let’s back up. What does the report actually say?

It makes two recommendations, with the second having multiple parts. The first deals with media regulation and adopts the Rudd petition’s call for a royal commission or judicial inquiry “to determine whether the existing system of media regulation is fit-for-purpose and to investigate the concentration of media ownership in Australia.” It wants the possibility of a single, independent media regulator to be explored in order to “harmonise news media standards and oversee an effective process for remedying complaints.”

The second, covering government funding for media outlets, calls for “sustainable and adequate” funding for the ABC and SBS, permanent funding for independent newswire Australian Associated Press (currently limping forward on philanthropy after News Corp tried to close it down), a trust to administer grants for emerging media ventures, and an upgraded National Broadband Network, kept in public hands, “to provide crucial communications infrastructure for as broad a range of new media ventures as possible, especially those engaging in public interest journalism.”

The majority report also recommended using the tax system to support journalism, both through tax incentives for investment, similar to those already used to encourage private sector research and development, and by making philanthropic donations to journalism ventures tax-deductible.*

The seven chapters justifying these recommendations serve as a decent primer for those — probably including some of the Rudd petition’s signatories — who have only just begun paying attention to the state of the news media and how it is regulated.

The senators agree with News Corp that the digital platforms, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, should be regulated, and approvingly cite the current government’s moves in this direction. But they turn this point back onto News Corp itself in the very next chapter, making it clear that such regulation and accountability should be uniform, and include equivalent levels of responsibility for traditional media. They twice quote the stunningly frank response of News Corp’s global head, Robert Thomson, when asked about aspects of media regulation and digital platforms: “Honestly, I have conflicting views on this. I would like it to be relaxed for us and intensified for them.”

What follows is the most strongly worded criticism of News Corp I have seen in any media inquiry report. The section headings give you the drift: “The Corrosive Effects of Monopoly on Democracy”; “An Unhealthy and Dangerous Influence on Politics” (which covers anti-Labor bias) and  “national security implications” which covers the spread of misinformation and the potential encouragement of political extremism, referencing the role of Fox News in the Capitol Building riot in Washington. Another section discusses “Public Health Misinformation,” and another examines the assertion that Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person to steward a global media company.”

The report includes case studies to demonstrate the failure of the current regulatory system, with all the examples drawn from the behaviour of News Corp, which the senators suggest is now impervious to the action of regulators. News Corp was invited to respond to the case studies but declined to do so.

The dissenting Liberal senators and News Corporation have cited this focus as evidence of bias. I disagree. Other media outlets are far from perfect, but when it comes to Nine, Seven West and the ABC the problems are usually the result of cock-ups, resourcing difficulties, errors of judgement or outbreaks of stupidity.

The News Corp behaviour detailed in the report is of a different order — intense, politically charged campaigns against institutions and individuals, sometimes with inadequate respect for the facts. This report makes clear it is time to stop pretending the reality is otherwise.

It also contains the most strongly worded critique so far of the current system of regulation. The senators excoriate both the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which regulates broadcasting, and the text-based industry’s self-regulation body, the Australian Press Council.

I have some sympathy for ACMA staff, who are saddled with weak legislation, limited resources and an absence of political courage from successive ministers. Nevertheless, the responses of ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin to the senators’ questions have to be read to be believed. Why, for instance did ACMA not act before YouTube decided to take down Sky News videos spreading Covid misinformation?

Sarah Hanson-Young: Let’s be very clear, Ms O’Loughlin. We’re not asking you about the number of complaints. We’ve heard that. What we’re asking is whether Sky News… is abiding by their obligations.

Nerida O’Loughlin: We do not see evidence before us, through the complaints process, that they are not.

Hanson-Young: You don’t look for it, do you?

O’Loughlin: We do not have a monitoring role.

The senators clearly thought YouTube’s action to combat misinformation was a good thing, but they also pointed to the dangerous  precedent — that a foreign-owned multinational accountable to nobody exercises greater power over the parameters of public debate in our country than the government regulator acting under Australian law.

When it came to the Press Council, the senators were scathing, noting that its performance was judged inadequate as far back as the 2012 report of the Convergence Review, and that this judgement had been echoed by just about every relevant inquiry since.

Two recent case studies refreshed the point. One concerned the United Firefighters Union (which is close to Senator Carr, it should be noted), which lodged a detailed complaint with the Press Council alleging egregious errors and vilification in a campaign by the Herald Sun. For the senators, the Press Council’s response — that it couldn’t deal with a complaint involving so many stories — “suggests not only that the Council does not have sufficient resources to investigate serious claims, but also that it could be perceived at times to be reluctant to investigate a publication that is the principal funder of its activities.”

The report notes that ten years ago, when the Finkelstein inquiry found the Press Council was not fit for purpose, News Limited (as it was then) was contributing 45 per cent of its funding. Today, the figure is 60 per cent.

The other case study concerned a campaign against Professor Michelle Telfer by the Australian. Telfer is a paediatrician and head of the Department of Adolescent Medicine at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. The Press Council found that the Australian’s coverage of her work with children experiencing gender dysphoria breached accuracy and fairness standards. Unbowed, the paper editorialised against the finding, saying it was “partisan and compromised by activists” and an example of “cancel culture tactics.”

Astonishingly, the Press Council suggested this combative editorial should be seen not as a sign of disrespect but rather as evidence that its adjudications matter to the industry. For the senators, it demonstrated “both the dubious ethical standards guiding the Australian’s editorial judgement, and the impotence of the Press Council.” Even the dissenting report by Senator Bragg describes the Press Council as a “toothless tiger” that can “only improve.” But he wants reform to be left to the industry.

Good luck with that. The Council and its industry members have been promising reform for more than ten years. If it were capable of serious reform, it would have done it by now.

Yet I share some of the Liberal senators’ concerns. The Labor and Green senators believe “it is the parliament’s responsibility to ensure that the nation’s news media are sufficiently diverse,” which places that obligation much more squarely in the laps of our political representatives than any other inquiry I can recall.

This needs careful teasing out. Media policy and regulation is the responsibility of government and parliament, but politicians should not  be trusted with any power over news media. In fact, as this report itself lays out, that is an argument for rather than against a royal commission — to take regulation reform  out of the hands of politicians.

When it comes to funding news media, one only has to look at the current government’s record of pork-barrelling and pressure on the ABC to be worried by the implications. A government-funded AAP, for instance, would be an extraordinary development — though not without precedent. The respected French newswire Agence France-Presse is state-owned and government-funded. But grants programs will always be vulnerable to political interference. The senators recommend an independent trust to oversee grants — but even so. Who appoints the trust? All routes lead to a minister’s office, and thence to cabinet.

Add to this that recent grant programs have seen money awarded to companies that nevertheless cut their editorial staff.

That’s a big reason why I think tax incentives for investment in public interest journalism is the best way of delivering government support at a time of collapsed media business models.*

Also helpful would be a longer cycle of funding for the ABC and SBS, with the amount tied to total government spending, or GDP, or another politically neutral indicator.

Most people now accept that government has a role in supporting news media; public interest journalism is a public good. We are left to determine the appropriate mechanisms. Despite so many inquiries, with so few results, these issues keep coming up, and the sheer number of Kevin Rudd’s signatories suggest it is now entering the mainstream of public concern. Surely the time for action that is more than piecemeal, that constitutes properly considered media policy, must be approaching. •

* Declaration: I have been involved in advancing these ideas through my work with the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, of which I was a board member until earlier this year. The PIJI made submissions to the Senate inquiry. The underpinning research reports can be read here.

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Not yet, as it transpired, and nor was the fall of the Republican Party, which continues to deny its real significance. Coincidentally or not, the fall that didn’t quite happen has been a central theme in several major American television series this year. Following major disruption to production schedules through the pandemic, The Morning Show (Apple Plus), Billions (Showtime) and Succession (HBO) all returned with new seasons about those who surf the high tides of wealth, power and celebrity.

The leading characters may not be likeable but their complex and often perverse personalities have disturbing resonances in the real world. Their fantasies, delusions, moods and impulses are consequential because wealth and celebrity mean power. Not the power of the presidency, though they sometimes come close to it, but power that is wide-ranging and even fundamental.

Billions continued its rollercoaster ride through the theme park of hedge fund capitalism, where the key players, always seemingly headed for a crash, take daredevil loops into the next escapade. This year’s season five eventually saw the departure of Damien Lewis from the lead role of maverick trader Bobby “Axe” Axelrod after a marathon combat with prosecutor Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giametti) and, for a while, it looked like a classic downfall.

Regular viewers, of course, knew better than to expect anything like that. Victories and losses in this arena are never final and, while billions are always at stake, that never seems to matter much. It’s all about the combat, which plays out in round after round of alpha male confrontation that is at times overtly primordial.

Episode one begins literally in the jungle, with Axe and his right-hand guy Mike Wagner (David Costabile) bellowing and beating their chests under the influence of the psychoactive brew ayahuasca. Afterwards they hare off on motorbikes, bearded and leather-clad, to get back to the city and be restyled in time for a contest with new challenger Mike Prince (Corey Stoll): not a shootout, but a photoshoot for GQ, vying for the cover profile.

Meanwhile, over at the headquarters of Axe Capital, the women are proving that they too can play hard. Performance coach Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff) has arranged a stunt with a friend who poses as a feral intruder looking for trouble. They throw each other across tables, do a few spins and backflips then embrace to the applause of the assembled company. “Now are we ready to do the fucking job for each other?” yells Wendy.

That’s Billions, subtle as a shower of brickbats. Purporting to offer an updated interpretation of game theory, a view of human nature developed by the Rand Corporation in the 1950s, the dramaturgy always revolves around competitive individualism, where collaboration is only another means of serving one’s own ends.

Axe’s departure, with its soundtrack of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” may signal the emergence of an instinct to escape the psychological straitjacket, but maybe not. “Why can’t we make our own?” was his response to Chuck’s challenge about the need to recognise wider laws in the universe. Prince arrives to take over Axe’s company, quoting Emerson and apparently offering a more expansive philosophy, until his concluding pronouncement: “What this is, is mine.” Ultimately, this gives us an Ayn Rand world — endlessly profitable but weary, stale and flat.

In its first season, The Morning Show offered a welcome antidote, working a blend of farce and pathos in its portrayal of a major television network descending into mayhem when leading anchor Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) is forced to leave following allegations of abuse. There was genuine sparkle in the performances of Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon as Alex Levy and Bradley Jackson, the presenters left with the challenge of holding the audience and restoring confidence.

Integrity, of the news and those communicating it, remains a central theme in season two, but the business of distinguishing between genuine integrity and its public enactment becomes increasingly tortuous. Kessler’s fall is terminal, but with other key personnel implicated in the scandal, the fall of the network is what counts; and there, the public face is all that matters.

The longer story arcs of The Morning Show follow each of the central characters as they confront the question of what it means to be a good or worthwhile person. Their explorations take them on divergent paths, which means the new season has been criticised for lack of dramatic cohesion. Aniston and Witherspoon don’t have enough good material to work with and risk settling into prototypes: Alex as the melancholic narcissist, unable to escape her own mannered persona, and Bradley as the queen of charm whose zipped-on smile vanishes as instantly as it appears.

But showrunners Jay Carson and Kerry Ehrin should be credited with some serious thematic commitment. With his capacity to escape every impasse by stretching the parameters of the situation, chief executive Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) emerges as the most dynamic figure, becoming a focus for larger questions about the corporate ethos he represents.

Stood down in the first phase of the crisis, he makes a defiant return as head of the news division and fronts the board with debonair contempt. Holland Taylor gives a crisp vignette performance as the board’s chair, Cybil Richards, getting nowhere in her attempts to exert authority over someone whose response to her demands is, “You really think that’s what this is all about, your little television network? This is a battle for the soul of the universe.”

Crudup portrays him as a lightning-witted improviser, always fully present in the moment, “exploiting the landscape of chaos.” Perceptive in interviews, Crudup speculates that if wealth and celebrity are the foundations of our value system, the implicit assumption is that individuals who personify those things must somehow be good.

The invitation to perform honesty, warmth and courage is always there, and some have the talent to do it with aplomb, but when the quest for goodness becomes introspective, as it does for each of the leading characters, and eventually for Cory himself, the corporate vehicle they are piloting may indeed go off the rails.

Succession has been compared to classical dramas of dynastic power and family conflict. Scripted with brutal wit and terse intelligence, and featuring a superb ensemble cast, it is widely acknowledged to be in a class of its own. Nevertheless, I have friends who won’t watch it, saying that the personalities it portrays are too toxic. And so they are, but the history of drama is filled with toxic characters. In ancient Greek tragedy, five generations of the house of Atreus engage in an unrelenting exchange of atrocities. Shakespeare gives us the murderous family pathologies of Hamlet and King Lear.

In these canonical models, the dramatic arc moves towards redemption through the downfall of the villains, and the termination of the regimes over which they have presided. But the rollout of the multi-season television drama allows the dramatic fall to be protracted, and perhaps ultimately averted, and therein lies the most troubling aspect of the contemporary picture.

The central strand of tension in Succession lies in an unresolved question: are we in a world that can no longer bring down a ruthless potentate and the twisted system of values over which s/he presides? Ageing media magnate Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is no mafia figure. He doesn’t dispatch people with physical violence; he destroys them by capsizing their economies and, if they are part of his inner circle, through humiliation and personal abuse. His four adult children are treated to the psychological equivalent of flaying.

This shouldn’t be fun to watch, but sadism in the realms of psychology has always been the stuff of comedy, where unfailing resilience is a source of entertainment. Connor (Alan Ruck), Roy’s eldest son, has an obtuseness that forms a natural defence: when he’s being got at, he usually just doesn’t get it. Roman (Kieran Culkin) and his sister Shiv (Sarah Snook), children of a second marriage, sharpen their wits on each other through pseudo-incestuous sparring that is exuberant and vicious by turns.

Some farcical secondary fallout comes from Shiv’s earnest spouse Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) who rolls with punches then takes it out through mock-bullying sessions with cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun). Only Kendall (Jeremy Strong) seems to have enough human sensitivity to be really vulnerable to the abuse, which, of course, makes him Logan’s prime target.

Spoiled, arrogant and petty, they are all ruined personalities, playing the game of corporate succession because it’s all they know how to do, though much of the comedy arises from their conviction that they can do pretty much anything. Shiv thinks she can dance, Kendall thinks he can sing, Roman fancies himself as a slick negotiator and Connor thinks he can be president.

How it will all turn out is unclear, and with a fourth season announced recently it is likely to remain so for some time, but don’t expect any catharsis. Chaos will always come again, and we live in an era when those who thrive in its landscapes are almost impossible to bring down. •

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