Today, in the second part of our week-long Bias-o-meter series, Margaret Simons looks at Australia’s major capital city newspapers and finds the usual suspects dividing on predictable party and proprietorial lines. In print, it seems, we list heavily to starboard.

We live in a strange time of simultaneous concentration of ownership and increasing new media diversity, an era in which print journalism is being squeezed by declining revenue, pinched resources and editorial management that as often as not is compromised by the infectious proximity of commercial interests. But even as their circulations crumble and standards slip, our newspapers stand as the key contributors to an informed general public. We are what we read. A fact, it seems, that isn’t lost on the people who own and shape our newspapers, people who seem keen to lead us through influence rather than information.