Cartoons of the Week

Bill Bramhall

David Rowe

 

Alan Moir

Fiona Katauskas

Cathy Wilcox

Quotes of the Week

"... lies are fissiparous, like bacteria in laboratory cultures, and one soon becomes two, then four, then eight and 16."

[Senior Reporter Rick Morton, writing in The Saturday Paper, 2-8 December 2023]

"Australia is engaged in the most significant economic, industrial and social transformation – the transition to renewable energy. Unfortunately, the opposition, backed by its loyal media comrades, is doing its level best to complicate and undermine this effort with baseless assertions and misrepresentations, scaremongering about the costs of the transition and raising unfounded doubts about the reliability of power supply. This is clearly against our national interests."

[Former Liberal Party Leader John Hewson, writing in The Saturday Paper, 2-8 December 2023]

Cartoons of the Week

 

Cathy Wilcox

David Pope

Mark David

Cartoons of the Week

 

Mark David

Peter Broelman

David Rowe

David Pope

News Corp's The Daily Examiner continues to die the death of a thousand cuts

The Clarence Valley had a resident population of est. 51,730 souls in 2020.

Up until mid 2020 it was home to three print newspapers, The Daily Examiner, Coastal Views and the Clarence Valley Independent. 

Only the 'Independent' remains as a print newspaper with a dedicated website, as the other two were part of a media purchase made by foreign-owned News Corp Inc. and these print mastheads have been allowed to wither and die.

In July 2021 News Corp boasts The Daily Examiner has a digital Facebook following of est. 20,747 people (presumably worldwide), an Instagram following of 1,806 and, a Twitter account showing one published tweet from 2009 with a following of only 105.

There is of course no longer a print circulation or a presence on Press Reader because Rupert Murdoch quickly killed off this newspaper which had been the purveyor of news from 1859 to mid 2020. Even its dedicated web address now redirects to a section of The Daily Telegraph website called “Grafton News”. 

One is left to wonder when the ghost of The Daily Examiner masthead will fade from the Internet completely. 

The corporate planned lingering death of a news outlet is sad to witness.

A virulent cancer lodged in the the heart of Australian society - News Corp

U.S. citizen Keith Rupert Murdoch
Media magnate & founder of News Corp
IMAGE: Google Images

The New Daily, 12 April 2021:

As the federal Senate convenes its latest hearing on the inquiry into media diversity, with former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull as its headline act on Monday, it has been revealed News Corp owns nearly 60 per cent of the metro and national print media market.

The company also earns 40 per cent of TV revenues, and is part of a profitable trio controlling a mind-boggling 90 per cent of metro radio licences…..

On the eve of the Senate inquiry, a study by University of Sydney academics found how densely Australia’s media ownership is concentrated.

“News Corp is the unchallenged dominant player,” wrote Associate Professor of Communication Benedetta Brevini and PhD candidate Michael Ward.

“The predominance of News Corp in cross-media settings is unprecedented in liberal democracies.”

The report, commissioned by activist group GetUp!, found News Corp had a 59 per cent share in the metro and national print media markets, when measured by readership.

The authors said that compared to just 25 per cent in 1984.

Nine Entertainment, which owns the former Fairfax papers including the Sydney Morning Herald, has “a combined 23 per cent readership share”, the report details.

“The dominance of News Corp and Nine’s media ownership extends beyond print to other media platforms,” the authors said.

“Just three corporations – News Corp, Nine, and Southern Cross Media (and their associated entities) – control almost 90 per cent of the lucrative metropolitan radio licences across the country.”

That’s in addition to the 40 per cent of total Australian television revenue that News Corp earns, when taking into account free-to-air and subscription revenues.

The authors note this is “almost double that of second-place holder Nine”.....

The full GetUp! report is at https://d68ej2dhhub09.cloudfront.net/2810-GetUp_-_Who_Controls_Our_Media_.pdf

Cartoons of the Week

David Pope

Mark David

Cathy Wilcox

Quotes of the Week

 

“ Since the start of the 46th Parliament, there have been about 538 divisions in the lower house. Just 18 of those divisions have occurred to pass legislation. A staggering 233 have occurred to prevent Opposition MPs giving speeches. That means government MPs have voted more times to silence their political opponents than they have to make laws – by a factor of 13.”  [Labor MP for Watson Tony Burke, writing in The New Daily, 28 January 2021]

“ For those concerned about the cumulative impact of Fox News in America on the radicalisation of US politics, the same template is being followed with Sky News in Australia. We will see its full impact in a decade’s time…..At its core, it has delegitimised the twin pillars of the enlightenment: empirical fact and rational argument. The assault by Fox News on both as “fake news”, the culture that validates the world of “alternative facts” and the adulation of far-right “opinion” as somehow co-equal with (or superior to) scientifically established truths, all undermine the foundations of an informed citizenry in a functioning democracy. It also creates a political environment that is increasingly receptive to the world of fantasy, conspiracy, identity politics and extremist religious views no longer anchored in any common foundation of evidence and reason. The result is not just the creation of two warring political tribes based on different concepts of economic interests and social values, but two different conceptual worlds that can no longer communicate with each other because they no longer speak a common language. Murdoch’s Fox News has been central to this process of dividing the way in which Americans talk with each other for nearly 30 years. Most importantly, its net effect has been to delegitimise the democracy itself in the eyes of many Americans. It has created a radically divided country where the possibility of rational compromise has become progressively impossible between the warring tribes that Murdoch has sought successfully to create. This weakening of the American democracy, and the fracturing of the republic on which it rests, has dealt more damage to the global standing, influence and power of the United States than the combined efforts of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. Murdoch’s template for America, culminating in the political crisis of 6 January 2021. It’s a template which Murdoch has believed would maximise his personal, business and ideological interests – by demonising the agency of government; undermining essential government regulation; and most importantly by minimising corporate and personal tax. Trump achieved all three. It’s also Murdoch’s vision for Australia.”  [Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, excerpt from written submission to Australian Parliament, Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications, Inquiry into Media Diversity in Australia]

Kevin Rudd: "Donald Trump may have lit the match that caused his country’s turmoil, but it was Rupert Murdoch who crammed the joint full of explosives"

Crikey, 12 January 2021:

SCOTT MORRISON AND DONALD TRUMP (IMAGE: AAP/MICK TSIKAS)

Donald Trump may have lit the match that caused his country’s turmoil, but it was Rupert Murdoch who crammed the joint full of explosives. 

His systematic manipulation and radicalisation of the American right-wing polity at large, and the Republican Party in particular, should ring alarm bells throughout our nation, including in the office of the prime minister. 

Over the past 25 years, Murdoch has used his Fox News network to unite American conservatives under his banner and shift them from the centre right to the far right with an intoxicating diet of grievance-driven, race-fuelled identity politics. 

By the time Trump announced his presidential campaign, these voters had been indoctrinated into a universe of “fake news”, “alternative facts” and elaborate conspiracy theories. The operational definition of fake news, in the eyes of the Trump presidency, became anything other than Fox News. 

After some initial disagreements, Murdoch backed Trump all the way to the White House. And they kept in lockstep throughout the Trump presidency. 

Trump would often repeat publicly the talking points he’d picked up from Fox. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker, recommended booking interviews on Trump’s favourite shows as among the most effective ways of communicating directly with the Oval Office. And nothing delighted Murdoch’s swaggering ego, hard-right ideology and business tax interests more. 

Fox covered up for Trump’s mistakes, trying desperately to keep track with his shifting claims about the mildness or severity of the coronavirus. 

When Fox’s news reporters found nothing newsworthy in documents relating to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, Murdoch’s New York Post (under the watchful eye of his leading Australian henchman Col Allan) swooped in by pressuring junior reporters to put their names to its dubious front page story.

Like Trump, Murdoch’s news outlets also gave succour to the dangerous QAnon cult, with the devastating consequences witnessed in Washington last week. 

It is now beyond time for Scott Morrison to stand up and denounce QAnon before it can fully take root here in Australia. Even if it strains the prime minister’s personal friendships with members of the far right, he should send the sort of crystal-clear signal that Trump proved himself unable to before it was too late.....

Read the full article here. 

Personally, I believe it is too late to save Scott Morrison from himself. He lacks the ability for genuine self-examination.

Morrison was always attracted to Donald Trump, as one flimflam man often admires another more successful confidence trickster.

SNAPSHOT: Peter van Onselen

Scotty from Marketing has clearly drunk the QAnon-Trump Kool Aid, wrapped himself in his personal closet racism, his foreign Legion of Merit medal and those evangelical & pentecostal contacts he appears to prize above the interests of the Australian nation, so that he is now willingly protecting those members of his own government who are just the sort of greedy, self-interested, ignorant crazies who have driven American society into the ground.

 

Meme of the Week

 

via @Earth1stlinda2

A grand gesture by James Murdoch which changes nothing on the Australian media landscape

@mjrowland68

James Rupert Jacob Murdoch has decided to leave his father's toxic media organisation.

The Hollywood Reporter, 31 July 2020:

Getty

Former 21st Century Fox CEO James Murdoch has resigned from the board of News Corp., the parent company of the Wall Street Journal. 

In a letter of resignation filed Friday afternoon, Murdoch wrote: "My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions." 

James Murdoch had been on News Corp.'s board of directors since 2013. News Corp. is one of two media companies controlled by James' father Rupert Murdoch and the Murdoch family. 

The other is Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News and the Fox broadcast network, which was created after 21st Century Fox sold its entertainment assets to The Walt Disney Company. 

Murdoch stepped down as Fox CEO following the sale, with his brother Lachlan Murdoch becoming CEO, and father Rupert becoming co-chairman. 

News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, New York Post, News U.K. and newspaper and TV assets in Australia, is run by CEO Robert Thomson. 

After leaving the Fox fold, Murdoch started his own company, Lupa Systems, which has invested in technology companies and other firms. 

Lupa Systems has acquired stakes in Vice Media, tech startup Betalab, and is pursuing a stake in MCH Group, the parent company of the Art Basel fair. 

Lupa Systems and Joe Marchese's Attention Capital also acquired a majority stake in Tribeca Enterprises last year, the parent organization of the Tribeca Film Festival. 

In a joint statement released after the letter was made public, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said "We’re grateful to James for his many years of service to the company. We wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”

Earlier this year James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn issued a joint statement expressing disappointment with the level of climate change denial found in News Corp’s Australian outlets.

James Murdoch became chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting in 2003 at the age of 30, when his father Rupert was still chairman. 

By 2012 after the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the subsequent Leveson Inquiry, U.K. media watchdog Ofcom declared James' ''conduct in relation to events at NGN repeatedly fell short of the conduct to be expected of him as a chief executive officer and chairman'' when he was running News Corp's News Group Newspapers.

At that time James was also a director of British Sky Broadcasting Group as well as a director of News Corporation.

He apparently stepped back from any day-to-day roles within the family business at the end of 2018.

His resignation does not imply that he has sold or intends to sell his shareholdings in News Corp or Disney.

Memes of the Week

@raywilton4

@AndrewPStreet

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch yells ‘Jump!’ Frydenberg and Fletcher respond by leaping into battle

“News Corp is an $8.6 billion corporation run from Sixth Avenue in New York. It is controlled by the (American) Murdoch family. Its exploits over seven decades have been as brutal and Darwinian as any media company in history. It has regularly dispensed “we will wipe you out” threats to small and large competitors across the world. Now, we’re told, “international platforms” who have “no commitment to local communities” are responsible for depriving 60 Australian local communities of the news they have depended on for decades. At some point in Australian history, the malevolent abuse of power by the billionaire family who milks its former colony will be exposed.” [Crikey Editor Eric Beecher, News Corp’s abuse of power must be exposed — and stopped, 3 April 2020]

Australian Treasurer & Liberal MP for Kooyong Josh Frydenberg speaking at a joint doorstop interview on 20 April 2020:

Well, good morning. It’s a real pleasure to be here with my friend and colleague, the Minister for Communications, Paul Fletcher. It’s time the tech titans were held to account and we had genuine competition, we have a level playing field, we have more transparency and we get payment for original journalistic content. The rise of the digital platforms, and in particular Google and Facebook have delivered real and significant benefits to consumers. But it’s has also been a period of great disruption. And it’s called into question the adequacy of our existing regulatory frameworks and the viability of traditional media outlets. This is why Scott Morrison, when he was Treasurer,= tasked the ACCC to undertake a ground-breaking report, a report that took them 18 months to put together, into the digital platforms. The ACCC led by Rod Sims, produced an outstanding report which made a number of recommendations. Recommendations that the Government has accepted. One of those key areas of focus for the ACCC was to develop a voluntary code between the traditional media businesses and the digital platforms to govern their relationships. Last year, the Government announced that it hoped a voluntary code would be reached by November of this year. Well those negotiations were held and no meaningful progress was made on the most significant component of which the code was to deal with, namely payment for content. And in the words of the ACCC, they did not believe that progress would be made and a deal would be done with a voluntary code. So the Government's taken a decision to move to a mandatory code, with a draft mandatory code to be released by the end of July and to be put together by the ACCC. We hope it will be legislated soon thereafter. We’re very conscious of the challenges we face and that we are dealing with some of the most valuable and powerful companies in the world. In France and in Spain and in other countries where they have tried to bring these tech titans to the table to pay for content they haven't been successful. But we believe this is a battle worth fighting. We believe this is critical for the future viability of our media sector and it's all about competition and creating a level playing field. So together with Minister Fletcher and our colleagues led by the Prime Minister, we will move with the ACCC to put together this mandatory code in the weeks ahead and hopefully it will deliver lasting reform for the sector and importantly, ensure that we have a level playing field into the future…

the ACCC is going to be looking at the method by which the payment for content would occur. There are a number of different options. You can do it on a value option or you can do it on a cost option, meaning that the tech titans would end up paying a fraction of what the cost was for producing that original content every time that they use it. The other alternative is in terms of the value to that particular digital platform that they get from getting eyeballs onto their sites by using that content. So this is to be worked out by the ACCC over the next three months. This is a very significant reform. It’s about holding these tech titans to account. It’s about ensuring genuine competition. It’s about delivering a level playing field. It’s about keeping jobs in journalism, and it’s about ensuring a fair outcome for all….

...these are very profitable platforms so this may eat into their profitability, to the Facebook’s and to the Google’s. But it’s only understandable that they would be paying for that content that they use to get traffic through their websites. You see the way Google and Facebook operate is that they don’t necessarily charge a fee for their service but they attract eyeballs onto their sites and then sell the advertising that goes with it. So this is about ensuring that they are genuinely rewarding and compensating the content that they use….

...but what was clear from the ACCC is that on the key issue of payment for content, there wasn’t a hope that there would be a deal reached between the parties. And the fact that we could not see a light at the end of that tunnel meant that we would move from a voluntary code which was the original intention, to a mandatory code which would be legislated through the Parliament.

One independent media company did not agree with Frydenberg’s assessment of the situation.

Crikey, 23 April 2020:

Earlier this week, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher got up and struck a blow for foreign multinational News Corp in its ongoing war with the tech giants that have used innovation and the internet to wreck the Murdochs’ media business model….

...government has recycled demonstrable lies peddled by News Corp about how it is being robbed by Google and Facebook, with the aim of helping prop up News Corp’s failing Australian media businesses….

News Corp charges that when Google (mostly) and Facebook use its headlines and automatically generated “snippets” of News Corp stories on their sites, they are stealing content, and should be made to pay for it via a licence fee that will “reflect the financial benefit digital platforms derive from using snippets”.

It also complains that longer “snippets” deter people from clicking through the attached link to the original story because they get all they need from what’s displayed.

Except the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) digital platforms inquiry found that News Corp’s claims don’t stack up.

Headlines and snippets aren’t theft of content: “generally, digital platforms’ use of article headlines is unlikely to infringe copyright protections in Australia,” the ACCC noted. “Digital platforms reproducing a snippet of a copyright-protected news article does not infringe copyright protections if the snippet does not reproduce a substantial part of the article.”

And the ACCC found that the tech companies, media organisations and consumers all benefit from the use of snippets. Specifically, “media businesses benefit because a snippet provides context and an indication to the user of the value of that content, increasing the likelihood of consumers clicking through”.

Real-world evidence backed this up. “As a result of a German copyright law requiring Google to pay fees to publish snippets from news media websites, Google stopped showing snippets from [media company Axel Springer’s] news articles. Axel Springer noted that the lack of snippets led to a nearly 40% decline in referral traffic from Google Search and an almost 80% decline in referral traffic from the Google News user interface”.

The ACCC also “does not agree that longer snippet lengths necessarily have a negative effect on referral traffic, with users remaining on an aggregator or search platform rather than clicking through to a news media business’s website”. As a result, it did not recommend that a mandatory licence fee be imposed.

Where it did agree with media companies is that they have little bargaining power with Google et al when it comes to the length and composition of snippets. They can block Google from automatically generating snippets, but beyond being able to “opt out”, they have no way of managing them, or maximising click-through.

The ACCC thus proposed the industry-led development of a code of conduct to be agreed between media and tech companies to address this “imbalance of power” and enable media companies to get access to data and negotiate more effectively with the likes of Google.

Such a code of conduct might also cover how revenue is shared “where the digital platform obtains value, directly or indirectly, from content produced by news media”.

How much value do digital platforms obtain from news content? Google doesn’t show any ads on its news feed, and “does not generally sell advertising opportunities next to search queries that are considered by Google as having a ‘news intent’”. In other countries where it has been ordered to pay fees, it has simply stopped carrying snippets if it can’t do so for free. In Spain, it shut down Google News.

Interestingly, the result in Spain — and one echoed elsewhere — was that smaller media sites lost a large volume of traffic while major media sites suffered relatively little loss. 

It would be to News Corp’s considerable advantage if that same result eventuated in Australia, with smaller competitors in an already marginal economic environment suffering a major loss in traffic…..

[my yellow highlighting]

Very predictably News Corp rolled out a climate change denier to help buttress the Morrison Government's stubborn contrarian stance

Here is mining company director/shareholder and sometimes owner, as well as consultant to industry, Ian Plimer, joining in the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison-Murdoch Coalition's ongoing attempt to deny anthropomorphic global warming and climate change.

In the opening paragraphs of the article Plimer exceeds his previous infantile opposition to the science of climate change. 

The Australian, 22 November 2019, p.12:

Talk of an emergency is ignorant, populist scaremongering

As soon as the words carbon footprint, emissions, pollution, and decarbonisation, climate emergency, extreme weather, unprecedented and extinction are used, I know I am being conned by ignorant activ­ists, populist scaremonger­ing, vote-chasing politicians and rent seekers.

Pollution by plastics, sulphur and nitrogen gases, particulates and chemicals occurs in developing countries. That’s real pollution. The major pollution in advanced economies is the polluting of minds about the role of carbon dioxide. There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims...... [my yellow highlighting]

As most high school students would be able to tell Mr. Plimer - not that he needs telling as he was university educated and his purpose here is to obfuscate not inform - "Carbon" is shorthand for "Carbon Dioxide Equivalent" or CO2-e. 

These terms covers what are known as "Greenhouse Gases" such as water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, some artificial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons and hydrocarbons.

Again, a high school student would be aware that black carbon is a dangerous air polluting element - mainly produced by the incomplete combustion of oil or coal and the burning of wood. It also contributes to global warming.

However, the reason black carbon has not turned the sky into permanent darkness that Plimer suggests as an outcome is that it has not yet reached saturation levels in the atmosphere.

Though black carbon can lead to very low visibility for prolonged periods as the bushfire smoke over Sydney and rural/regional Australia this month demonstrated and, open-cut coal mining on a weekly basis and city traffic periodically demonstrate throughout the year.

Bushfire smoke over Sydney NSW, 21 November 2019
2GB Image

Bushfire smoke in Clarence Valley NSW, 22 November 2019
NSWRFS Image

Air pollution over coal mine, Hunter Valley NSW, circa 2019
The Singleton Argus Image

Smog in Melbourne Vic, 28 June 2018
ABC News Image

Mr. Plimer makes a fool of himself in his attempt to fool others - when the evidence of black carbon pollution is both before our eyes and in the air quality readings that state governments collect. [See NSW EPA website]

Has U.S. citizen and media mogul Rupert Murdoch overplayed his hand in this Australian federal election cycle?

“It sounds unreal to say that News Corp is not a media organisation. It sounds outré to say that it is instead a political propaganda entity of a kind perhaps not seen since the 19th century, one that has climbed to its pedestal through regulatory capture, governmental favours and menace, and is now applying its energies to the promotion of white nationalism, even as white nationalists commit scores of murders.”  [Journalist Richard Cooke wiring in The Monthly, May 2019], 

It is your judgement that counts because the right and responsibility to elect the next Australian Government rests with you, the Australian voter, not with an elderly authoritarian U.S. billionaire who rarely visits this country.

Australian society is not as tolerant of Murdoch's sense of entitlement as it once may have been......

Who are you really voting for? #auspol #Elections2019 pic.twitter.com/Swe5ple9v9

— 💧🐟 Lotta Cheek (@lottacheek) May 11, 2019

March 2018 to March 2019 year-to-year data shows News Corp's principal mastheads are losing readership over the 7 day circulation period, according to Roy Morgan.

By its own admission News Corp has been lobbying local government to keep its community papers afloat in South Australia.