Sky News commentator and News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt (Image: Sky)

Looks like the failure of climate action is all down to China — at least if you’re getting your “news” out of the right-wing misinformation ecosystem. That’s the eyebrow-raising claim that shuffled along the amplification chain from Sky after dark on Monday night through a prime ministerial press conference on Tuesday and onto Wednesday’s front-page of The Australian.

Now watch for this NMP (not my problem) roadblock to action as it’s laundered into the mainstream on the ABC through the guest appearance of coal-urger Senator Matt Canavan on Q+A tonight.

It’s the perfectly framed denialist trope that hits all three points of the lies-damned-lies-and-statistics framework with just enough de-contextualised factoids to carry it off. It’s 2020s denialism, News Corp style: unapologetically nod past the clarity of the science (finally!) while muddying the challenges of the transition.

Since YouTube sin-binned Sky for seven days over COVID misinformation, there’s been a bit of media gymnastics to land the claim that Sky doesn’t matter — low audiences, narrow (and largely US) social media spread, confined to a secondary regional channel.

But that misses both the target “ecology” and the integrated “system” of the right-wing misinformation ecosystem. Sky’s narrow contribution is a feature, not a bug. It’s aimed at that section of the electorate — often in regional or ex-urban seats — that tips a conservative minority over 50%.

In the US, they call it (with appropriate intersectionality) the non-college educated, white and largely male working class. In Australia’s media they’ve transitioned from Howard’s Battlers to Abbott’s Tradies. For Katharine Murphy in The Guardian earlier this year they were “blokes who might vote Labor”.

It’s the Australian equivalent of the US Fox audience, which (on the more common cable) reaches about 2 million in prime time. Adjusted for population, that’s about double Sky’s 75,000-odd viewers most nights. They’re more than viewers: they’re distributors, amplifiers through social media. That makes Sky a perfect misinformation test lab with instant algorithmic feedback on social media if it touches the right buttons.

Does it matter? Studies in the US have demonstrated the power of the Fox model to boost Republican vote by between 3.5 to 6.5%. Even an extra two-and-a-half minutes of Fox a week shifts the vote by 0.3% — well within the range in the right electorates needed to tip Australia’s 2019 election.

While the Sky reach is smaller than Fox, it’s more integrated in the broader News Corp network. Not all News Corp, of course: just that part of the company that’s optimised for politically motivated outrage. Along with Sky News, that’s the metropolitan tabloids in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and most — getting close to all — of The Australian.

According to the Delaware-based company’s latest filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, those four mastheads reach about 700,000 paid subscriptions, most of them sheltered behind the hardest of pay-walls.

These aren’t the parts that make money. That’s sports broadcasting and real estate advertising and, in the US, book publishing and the Wall Street Journal.  And they’re not the parts that do more-or-less independent news: that’s the remaining mass audience products like news.com.au or segments that deliver mission critical information for its audience part of The Australian (still) or its new $1.6 billion purchase of the fossil-fuel industry’s Oil Price Information Service.

But the outrage powers News Corp’s ability to assert its authority within the right’s information supply chain and, through that authority, set the political agenda.

The rest of Australia’s media industry has long treated News Corp as a legitimate news organisation. Partly that’s a reluctance to cast off their masthead’s history of good journalism, partly its size — and its readiness to throw its weight around to bully its competitors (particularly the ABC) to extend their voice.

The all-too-brief YouTube ban suggests attitudes are changing. The company’s usual shrieks of censorship got no traction outside their own echo chamber. The US big tech giant didn’t blink. Sky has been quietly scrubbing its website with a “News supports vaccines, News has always supported vaccines” diligence. 

We’re closer to Australia embracing what’s now accepted wisdom in the US: News Corp is no longer a news organisation. But the reporting of the IPCC global warming alarm call demonstrates why it remains a continuing danger.