The federal government
unveiled its plan for media diversity this week. It will work like
this: instead of the present limit which restricts a media owner to one
newspaper or one TV station or one radio station in a market, owners
will be able to own any or all media in a market – as long as the ACCC
doesn’t object and as long as there are at least five “voices” left in
mainland state capitals and four in regional markets.

“For the
government, the endgame is diversity and clear benefits for Australian
consumers,” is how Communications Minister Helen Coonan explained the
plan at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

Of course there
won’t be more diversity under the Coonan plan, other than the
“diversity” that’s already flowering through new media like the
internet and mobile phones which are in no way inhibited by government
regulations. By definition, the plan will create less diversity – it
will trigger a spate of mergers and acquisitions which will see the
biggest players (News and PBL) get bigger by gobbling up medium-sized
fish as they branch into print+TV+radio.

But that’s not the
worst of it, nor is it the nub of it. “Diversity” is a spurious and
meaningless word when talking about media ownership in the small, cosy,
concentrated media market of Australia. The relevant word is power.

The power
of media owners has nothing to do with the “new platforms and services
[that] bypass the traditional definition of media,” as Coonan describes
the pretext for changing the media rules.

Media power
is not about how many media outlets you own, it’s about owning the most
powerful ones – which happen to be a handful of major newspapers, talk
radio stations and key TV programs. That’s where political and societal
power is wielded.

Concentration of power is the key
problem in Australia. The Coonan plan will not only dramatically reduce
diversity, it will also dramatically increase the power of the two
families who already direct most of the political traffic in our
democracy.

If you want evidence of media power at work in
Australia, have a look at what happened on Wednesday. Within hours of a
political leader attempting suicide apparently because of coverage of
him by the most powerful newspaper group in the country, the
communications minister stood up at the National Press Club to announce
that that media group, and one other, would be handed even more power
under her new media “endgame.”