Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts

Thursday 15 April 2021

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


Sunday 11 April 2021

Netflix to drown Byron Bay in Tacky With Extra Syrup


ABC News, 9 April 2021:


Netflix has announced it is making a reality series based on the lives of "hot Instagrammers" in Byron Bay, but many locals say they will not be watching.


In a Netflix press release, the series Byron Baes is described as a "docu-soap following a feed of hot Instagrammers living their best lives, being their best selves, creating the best drama content, #nofilter guaranteed."


Executive producer Julian Morgans said he came up with the idea while on holiday in the Byron hinterland with a friend "who's in advertising".


"It was getting dark and I could see all these big mansions in the forest and I thought 'my god this place is changing'," Mr Morgans said.


"It felt like there was this influx of money and power in this place that had been famous for hippies.


"I've become aware publications like the Daily Mail like stories about Chris Hemsworth and living in Byron as their bread and butter, so I put two and two together and thought 'there should be a show about this'."





.Byron Shire comedian and Greens federal political candidate Mandy Nolan said the bay was not currently an attractive backdrop.


"Byron Bay doesn't need any more vacuous exposure, it needs housing, it needs urgent work on coastal erosion," she said.


"Reality show about influencers? How is that remotely authentic?


"This is just artifice. Byron will be a set."


Friday 6 November 2020

A mega petition is about to be considered by the Australian House of Representatives

 

The only direct means by which an individual or group can ask Australian parliaments to take action is by means of a written petition.


Australians have always had a right to petition parliament.


One of the most famous petitions would have to be the close to 30,000 signature petition presented to the Parliament of Victoria in September 1891 which asked that “Women should Vote on Equal terms with Men”. This petition played a part in Federation which in 1901 gave women the national right to vote and stand for parliament.


Another petition which isn’t always remembered is the February 2014 Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s petition asking federal parliament “to take whatever action is needed to ensure that community pharmacy receives the funding support it needs to stay in business, serve patients, employ staff and remain open after hours”, which had 1,210,471 signatures.


In 2016 the Australian Parliament introduced the e-petition alternative to paper petitions.


Until recently these e-petitions have contained signature numbers ranging from single figure to 4 figure totals.


However the following e-petition appears to have struck a national chord and its signatures are in the hundreds of thousands……..


Petition EN1938 - Royal Commission to ensure a strong, diverse Australian news media


Petition Reason

Our democracy depends on diverse sources of reliable, accurate and independent news. But media ownership is becoming more concentrated alongside new business models that encourage deliberately polarising and politically manipulated news. We are especially concerned that Australia’s print media is overwhelmingly controlled by News Corporation, founded by Fox News billionaire Rupert Murdoch, with around two-thirds of daily newspaper readership. This power is routinely used to attack opponents in business and politics by blending editorial opinion with news reporting. Australians who hold contrary views have felt intimidated into silence. These facts chill free speech and undermine public debate. Powerful monopolies are also emerging online, including Facebook and Google. We are deeply concerned by: mass-sackings of news journalists; digital platforms impacting on media diversity and viability; Nine Entertainment's takeover of the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald; News Corp’s acquisition (and then closure) of more than 200 smaller newspapers, undermining regional and local news; attempts to replace AAP Newswire with News Corp’s alternative; and relentless attacks on the ABC’s independence and funding. Professional journalists further have legitimate concerns around unjust searches, potential prosecution, whistle-blower protection, official secrecy and dispute resolution that should be comprehensively addressed. Only a Royal Commission would have the powers and independence to investigate threats to media diversity, and recommend policies to ensure optimal diversity across all platforms to help guarantee our nation’s democratic future.


Petition Request

We therefore ask the House to support the establishment of such a Royal Commission to ensure the strength and diversity of Australian news media.


Number of signatures: 501876 [as at 11:59pm AEDT, 4 November 2020]


Closing date for signatures: 04 November 2020 (11.59pm AEST)


The petition will now be presented to the House of Representatives where MPs already cowed by media monopolies may or may not decide to refer it to a Morrison Government minister who, in his or her turn, will in all likelihood take up to 90 days to boot it into political oblivion - in a show of support for News Ltd/NewsCorp and the Murdoch family who have been political donors to the Liberal Party since at least 1998.


Monday 17 June 2019

Australian mainstream media learns another lesson as to why racism is bad policy



BuzzFeed News, 13 June 2019:

Channel Seven has failed in its bid to strike out a lawsuit brought by a group of Aboriginal people who say they were defamed during a now infamous panel discussion on breakfast TV show Sunrise about adopting Indigenous children.
Yolngu woman Kathy Mununggurr and 14 others from the remote community of Yirrkala, including adults and children, are suing the TV network after they were depicted in blurred overlay footage that played during the segment in March 2018.

In the discussion, hosted by Samantha Armytage, commentator Prue Macsween said of the Stolen Generations that “we need to do it again, perhaps”, and then-radio host Ben Davis said Aboriginal kids are getting “abused” and “damaged”.

The comments made by the all-white panel provoked protests outside the Sunrise studio in Sydney's CBD.

Mununggurr and the adults suing argue they were identifiable in the footage and that by playing it during the discussion Sunrise had suggested they abused, assaulted or neglected children, were incapable of protecting their children, and were members of a dysfunctional community.

The children suing say the program defamed them by suggesting they had been raped and assaulted, and were so vulnerable to danger that they should be removed from their families.

The group is also suing for breach of confidence and breach of privacy, as well as misleading and deceptive conduct and unconscionable conduct under the Australian Consumer Law.

The TV network tried to strike out all aspects of the lawsuit in a Federal Court hearing on Wednesday afternoon, but was slapped down by Justice Steven Rares, who said all the issues could and should be argued at trial…..

"This is about an Aboriginal community. They’re all very close. The neighbours know each other, they all know each other," the judge said.

"You’ve got a whole community up there, most of whom will be able to recognise each other, obviously some of whom who watch Sunrise, or whatever the show is called."…...

Rares accepted there was an argument that Davis and the radio station 4BC were being promoted during the segment, but was less convinced when it came to Macsween.

“To me she’s a nobody. I’ve never heard of her and I’ve got no idea what contribution she possibly could have made to the program,” he said.

Nonetheless Rares sided with Catanzariti and declined to strike out the claim.
Seven's attempts to strike out the remaining claims of breach of confidence, breach of privacy and unconscionable conduct were similarly rejected.

Seven was ordered to pay the costs of the hearing.

Monday 8 April 2019

"USING 150 INTERVIEWS ON THREE CONTINENTS, THE [NEW YORK] TIMES DESCRIBES THE MURDOCH FAMILY’S ROLE IN DESTABILIZING DEMOCRACY IN NORTH AMERICA, EUROPE AND AUSTRALIA"


With Murdoch’s News Corp mastheads dominating the local newspaper landscape in the NSW Northern Rivers region this should interest readers…….

The New York Times, 3 April 2019:

Rupert Murdoch, the founder of a global media empire that includes Fox News, has said he “never asked a prime minister for anything.”

But that empire has given him influence over world affairs in a way few private citizens ever have, granting the Murdoch family enormous sway over not just the United States, but English-speaking countries around the world.

A six-month investigation by The New York Times covering three continents and including more than 150 interviews has described how Mr. Murdoch and his feuding sons turned their media outlets into right-wing political influence machines that have destabilized democracy in North America, Europe and Australia.

Here are some key takeaways from The Times’s investigation into the Murdoch family and its role in the illiberal, right-wing political wave sweeping the globe.

THE MURDOCH FAMILY SITS AT THE CENTER OF GLOBAL UPHEAVAL.

Fox News has long exerted a gravitational pull on the Republican Party in the United States, where it most recently amplified the nativist revolt that has fueled the rise of the far right and the election of President Trump.

Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun spent years demonizing the European Union to its readers in Britain, where it helped lead the Brexit campaign that persuaded a slim majority of voters in a 2016 referendum to endorse pulling out of the bloc. Political havoc has reigned in Britain ever since.

And in Australia, where his hold over the media is most extensive, Mr. Murdoch’s outlets pushed for the repeal of the country’s carbon tax and helped topple a series of prime ministers whose agenda he disliked, including Malcolm Turnbull last year.

At the center of this upheaval sits the Murdoch family, a clan whose dysfunction has both shaped and mirrored the global tumult of recent years.

The Times explored those family dynamics and their impact on the Murdoch empire, which is on the cusp of succession as its 88-year-old patriarch prepares to hand power to the son whose politics most resemble his own: Lachlan Murdoch.

A key step in that succession has paradoxically been the partial dismemberment of the empire, which significantly shrunk last month when Mr. Murdoch sold one of his companies, the film studio 21st Century Fox, to the Walt Disney Company for $71.3 billion.

The deal turned Mr. Murdoch’s children into billionaires and left Lachlan in control of a powerful political weapon: a streamlined company, the Fox Corporation, whose most potent asset is Fox News…..

The Murdoch empire has also boldly flexed its muscles in Australia, which was for many years Lachlan’s domain.

In Australia, Lachlan expressed disdain for efforts to fight climate change and once rebuked the staff at one of his family’s newspapers, The Australian, for an editorial in support of same-sex marriage (He says through a representative that he is in favor of same-sex marriage). He also became close to the politician Tony Abbott, whose 2013 election as prime minister was given an assist by Murdoch newspapers.

The Murdoch family changed Australian politics in 2016 when it took control of Sky News Australia and imported the Fox News model. They quickly introduced a slate of right-wing opinion shows that often focused on race, immigration and climate change. The programming became known as Sky After Dark.

Last year, Mr. Turnbull and his staff accused Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch of using their media outlets to help foment the intraparty coup that thrust him from office in August. Mr. Turnbull, a moderate and longtime nemesis of his friend Mr. Abbott, was replaced by the right-wing nationalist Scott Morrison.

The Murdochs have denied any role in Mr. Turnbull’s downfall.....

The night after his arrival, Lachlan invited a small group of Sky employees and managers to his $16 million mansion in Sydney for drinks. With its new prime-time lineup of hard-right opinion hosts, Sky had become a force in Australian politics. Its audience was still small by American standards, but it was the network of choice in the capital, Canberra, and it was finalizing a deal to expand its reach into the Australian Outback — demographically speaking, the equivalent of Trump country.

It was a mirror of Fox News, with its fixation on race, identity and climate-change denial. Night after night, Sky’s hosts and their guests stirred anger over the perceived liberal bias of the media, “suicidal self-hatred” of Western civilization and the Australian equivalent of the Central American “caravans” that were dividing the United States: asylum seekers coming to the country by boat from Indonesia and Malaysia, many of them Muslim. Days before Lachlan’s arrival, a national neo-Nazi leader, Blair Cottrell — who had recently been fined for “inciting contempt for Muslims” — appeared on one of the network’s shows. Cottrell had been interviewed on Australian TV before, but his deferential treatment by Sky caused a national outcry. Under gentle questioning, he called on his countrymen to “reclaim our traditional identity as Australians” and advocated limiting immigration to those “who are not too culturally dissimilar from us,” such as white South African farmers. (Sky apologized and suspended the program.)

Inside Lachlan’s living room, the talk turned to national politics. “Do you think Malcolm is going to survive?” Lachlan asked his staff. Malcolm was Malcolm Turnbull, the relatively moderate Australian prime minister who took office a few years earlier. Inside the government, a small right-wing uprising had been brewing over his plans to bring Australia into compliance with the Paris climate accord. It is well established among those who have worked for the Murdochs that the family rarely, if ever, issues specific directives. They convey their desires indirectly, maybe with a tweet — as Murdoch did in the spring of 2016 when he decided to back Trump — or a question, the subtleties of which are rarely lost on their like-minded news executives.

In the days that followed, Sky Australia’s hosts and the Murdoch papers — the newspaper editors had their own drinks session at Lachlan’s mansion — set about trying to throw Turnbull out of office. Alan Jones, a Sky host and conservative radio star, called for a party “rebellion” against him on his program. Days later, the Murdochs’ major paper in Sydney, The Daily Telegraph, broke the news that a leadership challenge was in the works. Cheering on the challenge, Andrew Bolt, the Murdoch columnist who was once convicted of violating the country’s Racial Discrimination Act, told his Sky viewers that Turnbull’s “credibility is shot, his authority is gone.” Peta Credlin, the commentator who was Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, chewed out a member of Parliament for the chaos inside Turnbull’s administration. The Australian, the Murdochs’ national newspaper, was soon declaring Turnbull a “dead man walking.”......

It was always difficult to separate the personal from the financial and the ideological with the Murdochs. All appeared to be in evidence in their decision to turn against Turnbull. To begin with, he took office a few years earlier by ousting Lachlan’s friend Tony Abbott, and it was Abbott who helped lead the Turnbull uprising. Turnbull’s policies were also not perfectly aligned with the Murdochs’ interests. For instance, he had expedited the construction of the country’s national broadband network, which directly threatened the family’s highly profitable cable business by giving Netflix a government-subsidized pipeline into Australian homes.

The small number of Australian media outlets that the Murdochs did not own portrayed Turnbull’s ouster as a Murdoch-led “coup.” Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister whom the family had helped push out of office years earlier, described Murdoch in an op-ed in The Sydney Morning Herald as “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

Turnbull was replaced by the right-wing nationalist Scott Morrison, who quickly aligned himself with Trump. The two met in person for the first time in late 2018 at the G-20 summit meeting in Buenos Aires. “I think it’s going to be a great relationship,” Trump said afterward. With a national election scheduled for May 2019, Morrison quickly staked his party’s prospects on the polarizing issue of immigration, promising a new hard-line approach. It dovetailed with Sky’s regular prime-time programming. Andrew Bolt, who previously warned of a “foreign invasion,” said in one segment, “We also risk importing ethnic and religious strife, even terrorism,” as the screen flashed an image of Australia’s potential future: rows of Muslims on a city street, bowing toward Mecca. When the opposing Labor Party managed to muscle through legislation that would allow doctors to transfer severely sick migrants in detention centers on the Australian islands of Nauru and Manus into hospitals on the mainland, Sky Australia’s prime-time hosts went on the offensive.

Read the full article here.

Monday 24 September 2018

One old man to rule them all and in the darkness bind them?



Octogenarian U.S. citizen, international media mogul and papal knight since1998  Rupert Keith Murdoch is a living example of the perils of concentrated media ownership.

For many in America, the United Kingdom and Australia his name is filed under 'arrogant' 'avaricious' and 'ruthless'.

Media mogul Rupert Keith Murdoch : Google Images

The Guardian
, 20 September 2018:

In his farewell speech as prime minister last month, Malcolm Turnbull pointed to “an insurgency” in his own party and “outside forces in the media” as the architects of his demise.

If there was any doubt at all who the media forces Turnbull was referring to during those final minutes in the prime mister’s courtyard in Canberra, there is, after the events of the past 24 hours, none now.

Rupert Murdoch is the name firmly in the frame along with his ubiquitous News Corp empire – an organisation which is accused of playing a major role in orchestrating the removal from office of not just Turnbull but also Labor’s Kevin Rudd.

In the case of Turnbull he believed his Liberal colleagues had been gripped by “a form of madness” so the only way they could see to end the unrelenting internal turmoil and negative coverage in the media was to cave into it and replace him as leader…..

But the details that have emerged over the past 48 hours of the role the US-based Murdoch played during last month’s visit to his Australian assets raise serious questions about how Australian politics can be swayed by a concentrated media industry where News Corp dominates.

Turnbull certainly believes he was the target of a News Corp campaign. When he narrowly fended off Peter Dutton in a party room spill on Tuesday 21 August, Turnbull phoned Murdoch to ask him why he was trying to replace him with the home affairs minister.

Rupert Murdoch intends to transform Australia into a conservative nation and he wants to put it on the Trump road
Associate Professor David McKnight

Turnbull had watched horrified as shortly after Murdoch’s arrival in Australia, News Corp, the most powerful media organisation in the land, turned on him. The Daily Telegraph warned of “a toxic brawl” over energy policy and that Dutton was preparing to challenge him. On Sky the night-time commentators Peta Credlin and Andrew Bolt ramped up their negative coverage of the national energy guarantee and Turnbull’s performance.

 “There was no doubt there was a marked shift in the tone and content of the News Corp publications once Rupert arrived,” one of Turnbull’s former staff told Guardian Australia. “And there was no doubt in our minds that News was backing Dutton.”
The prime minister had another reason to believe the octogenarian media mogul was driving the negative coverage – Turnbull had been warned by another media mogul that Rupert wanted him replaced.

According to both the Australian Financial Review and the ABC, Murdoch had told fellow media billionaire Kerry Stokes, owner of the Seven Network, a few days before that Turnbull should be replaced. Guardian Australia also reported that Turnbull was warned in a phone call from Stokes that Murdoch and his media company News Corp were intent on removing him from power.

Stokes is said to have replied that the likely result of such a campaign would be to deliver government to Labor and Bill Shorten. But Murdoch is reported to have brushed aside such concerns, saying it would only be for three years and he made money under Labor in the past.

By that week’s end the deed was done. Turnbull was out as prime minister, replaced by Scott Morrison after Dutton’s much hyped candidacy failed to get the numbers....

Read the full article here.