With our national media reduced to six dominant groups, and key groupings such as the Murdochs, the Gordons, the Stokes and James Packer working in concert in varying permutations across influential media, it’s time to reconsider how we regulate media diversity.
The last overhaul of media ownership laws was in 2006, when the Howard government liberalised them as part of a wider set of media reforms. The reforms went through on the vote of Steve Fielding after Barnaby Joyce crossed the floor, despite of a list of sweeteners offered to the Nationals on the regulation of regional content.
If you think 2006 isn’t all that long ago, consider the changes in Australian media since then (some of which were engendered by the reforms, some of which were occurring anyway). And note that in the UK, the media regulator OfCom is required to review the UK’s more stringent media ownership laws every three years.
Regardless of everyone’s strong opinions on the subject, regulating media diversity is complex and difficult. The basic difficulty is that diversity, or its close cousin plurality, is a nebulous thing, and only exists in the eye of the beholder or by common agreement. When we talk about regulating for diversity, we’re really talking about regulating diversity of news content, but we can’t regulate that directly without putting regulators in every newsroom in the country.
As a result, we use ownership as a proxy for diversity.
This isn’t entirely satisfactory. A consolidated media company operating across different platforms can provide diversity, if it cares to. Indeed, it may be in its interests to provide diversity if it operates more than one service in the same medium, enabling it to appeal to different market segments (as an analogy, though not an example, the ABC provides different kinds of news and current affairs services via Radio National, Triple J, Local Radio and NewsRadio, because it serves multiple markets in the same medium). Moreover, diverse ownership may not mean diverse news sources, if different companies source news and current affairs from the same provider.
Still, ownership is a much more concrete, objective, easy-to-regulate phenomenon than diversity, so we’re stuck with it.
And then there’s competition in the media. People get confused about the relationship between diversity and competition, and tend to mix them together. The two are only coincidentally related. The application of competition laws to the media is no different to their application in any other industry — it’s about markets, and whether a transaction substantially lessens competition. Markets require things to be bought and sold — such as advertising, or programming. Some people try to link competition and diversity by talking about a “marketplace of ideas”, but the idea doesn’t work under competition law because the “marketplace” is a metaphorical one, not an economic one.
Thus we regulate the ownership of the primary news and current affairs media, with the goal of balancing the tendency of industries to consolidate and develop economies of scale, with the commonly, though not universally, accepted goal of retaining media diversity. We used to regulate to keep foreigners (other than Rupert Murdoch) out of our media, too, but that was axed in the 2006 reforms.
This involves some choices. What are the primary news and current affairs media? Traditionally they’ve been television, radio and newspapers. Newspapers are slowly declining in influence because their circulation is falling. And the inclusion of radio in that group is increasingly anomalous, given that news and current affairs occupies a relatively small component of the radio industry’s output. TV remains the most influential medium by far in news and current affairs (interestingly OfCom found in the UK that TV had become more influential, not less, in recent years). But radio licence areas are the traditional unit of regulation when it comes to media ownership in Australia. Our media ownership laws consider who owns the newspapers and TV licences in each radio licence area. This is important in regional areas, where there are fewer media outlets and therefore each one is automatically more influential, but creates the anomaly that influential newspapers such as The Australian or The Australian Financial Review aren’t counted towards the media ownership rules anywhere. Nor is subscription television, which doesn’t operate on a licence area-based regulatory system, even though it probably produces more influential news and current affairs than most of the radio industry.
And then there’s online media, long considered a source of additional news and current affairs diversity (Richard Alston, for example, partly justified attempts to liberalise cross-media laws in the late 1990s by referring to internet services). In Australia, new media hasn’t been a significant mass media source of additional news and current affairs — especially not compared to, say, the United States. New media was rapidly colonised by the old media (using a business model that cleverly wrecked their own revenue streams), and the sites of traditional media companies and the ABC are the primary online news sources. The primary role of new media re diversity has been to enable greater user connectivity — traditionally, media companies were the gatekeepers for foreign media content, but they have now been bypassed by the internet, and blogging and other content-sharing media connect up communities and provide analysis and commentary. Actual additional news sites, such as Crikey, are rarities in Australia, and don’t attract anything like the traffic of the large media companies. Even so, given sections of News Ltd evidently feel sufficiently threatened by new media to try to silence critical views, the level of influence of new media might be ripe for reappraisal.
Then there’s the role of the ABC, which has a comprehensive charter but the core role of which is seen as the provision of high-quality, independent news and current affairs (for argumentative readers wishing to dispute “independent”, go look it up in a dictionary and compare its meaning to “balanced”, which is your real beef). The newscaff role of the national broadcaster is supposed to be in addition to what we get from media diversity, but increasingly the ABC (and to a much lesser extent SBS) seem to be regarded as having to do the heavy lifting of providing diversity of news content. That’s certainly the case in regional areas, where commercial radio has hubbed itself out of local relevance and ABC Local Radio and community radio stations have been left as the only real local voices other than the daily newspaper, if one exists.
Either we’re serious about diversity in this evolving media environment, or we leave the current rules to ossify, because they’re doing little to protect genuine diversity in light of the Packer-Murdoch move on Ten.
*Bernard Keane worked in broadcasting policy in the Department of Communications from 2000-08
Tomorrow: toward a new national media diversity rule
{Then there’s the role of the ABC, which has a comprehensive charter but the core role of which is seen as the provision of high-quality, independent news and current affairs (for argumentative readers wishing to dispute “independent”, go look it up in a dictionary and compare its meaning to “balanced”, which is your real beef). }
I have no BEEF with balanced, which it rarely is, my major gripe with their ABC is the copying of News Ltd headlines and stories, particularly from the Australian.
The lack of good decent BALANCED professional journalists, which the ABC were one proud to offer, are now merely commentators, opinion piece regurgitators, lacking in the ability to present good english pronounciation and diction, formerly a requirement of a well trained ABC staff. Training? Sorry not a word often heard these days in the ABC newsrooms.
If you look at the literature on media regulation, you see that much of the interest in limiting concentration of ownership relates to the goal of limiting the concentration of power that attaches to media ownership.
Inquiries into media ownership invariably recognise that diversity of content can exist under consolidated ownership, as does Keane. And they also usually recognise that there are limits to the capacity of owners to intervene in the detailed running of media organisations.
But these inquiries also recognise that owners are well able to set the tone of media organisations, and that at the end of the day the public interest in having diverse media content is to a large extent dependent upon the goodwill of ownership.
It is this power with its potential to limit diversity, rather than diversity itself, that has been a major concern of policy formulators in this area.
Isn’t this all a bit academic? I look for but cannot find a series of sources – that word “diversity” comes up again. Whether it is provided by one, three or thirty-three individual media and channels therein, I care not.
What I tend to find, though, is ABC mimicing Murdoch, perhaps from fear of being judged as being too far away from mainstream. The remainder are also-rans.
Clearly, the ABC’s Charter is in need of reworking to ensure that it is able and willing to include real diversity in its output, along with a preparedness to critique fearlessly the offereings of others.
Hope for revitalisation of the private sectors – whether print, radio or TV – is wasted until Aunty gets her act together, in part because Aunty is seen widely as the only reall opposition to whatever the locally dominant private voice is.
Now, to internet. As the lead article in today’s Crikey points out, Wikileaks and other instant online sources are changing the way that news is being distributed. Unfortunately, analysis and investigation are not strong points in the internet toolkit, unless for those who are prepared to put the time into following specialised blogs.
So, folks, if it is quality and diversity that you want, at present that means supporting Aunty to the hilt.
Oops… one thing more.
Crikey has stepped up to the plate frequently, by providing diversity of opinion and a range of topics. The depth and substance of analysis offered, including via links to the Poll Bludger, etc, is hard to beat.
It has lost its edginess during the past several years. Too many libel cases? Risk averse? Grown up a bit and needing to display “maturity”?
Whatever, Crikey is a bright light in this firmament, even though illogical and unreasoned rubbish from the likes of Tamas appears, without rime or reason, appears spasmodically as a distraction.
To the editor: I will leave TC alone when he leaves me alone… OR when he learns to rely on peer reviewed stuff for his opinion pieces.
I find the headlines now are very suggestive. Even the reporters on TV are opinionated and lean to one side or the other. I always thought journalism was the act of presenting the facts for the reader or viewer to decide? Wasn’t there some kind of law to uphold this?