News Corp mastheads are not doing journalism. Why pretend otherwise?

Australia’s news media face a difficult choice in this election: how much longer are they going to go along with the pretence of News Corp mastheads that they’re all part of the same club?

It’s time for news media to ’fess up to what everyone knows: News Corp is not a normal news organisation and does not act like one. And it’s time for the rest of the media to stop treating the US company as though it were.

In its mastheads, in its Sky after dark commentary, the company has adapted the practices of its US Fox sibling to its Australian ambitions. It’s a particular type of propaganda that steals the semiotics of journalism — the look and feel of the news — and shapes it for virality in the social media age. (Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society called it “Network Propaganda” in its 2018 study.)

In conservative infrastructure, think of it as an arm’s-length outrage meme factory. It’s proving particularly useful in this 2022 campaign as a voice for saying the quiet bits out loud about those nice-but-nasty teal independents stealing the Liberal Party’s well-heeled voters in its traditional suburbs.

Treating News Corp seriously is hurting the fact-based news media, particularly the ABC. It pays the price in its own credibility every time it provides space to the News tabloids and The Australian as legitimate media voices.

The payments can come in small doses, such as the inclusion of News’ mastheads in regular “what the papers say” round-ups (and the usual simultaneous exclusion of rising independent digital news media), even with a “did they really say that?” raised eyebrow. The price comes a bit higher whenever it recognises the News commentariat with guest appearances, from metropolitan talk radio to flagship programs such as Insiders.

The highest cost is when it follows on from the agenda set by News mastheads, from “gaffe-gate” to “tough on borders or taxes”. Or, worse, when it acts safe by downplaying the agendas News Corp disdains, like the climate crisis.

Election by election, the mastheads have slid down the groove carved by Sky News (particularly in its after dark manifestation) as it followed Fox.

Through this election, the four major metropolitan tabloids in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane have splashed politics on their front pages about twice a week. Uniformly, those splashes have been anti-Labor, such as “Wannabe Westies” in The Daily Telegraph or, in The Advertiser in Adelaide’s “Iceberg Ahead” (which required a kicker explainer “ALP’s cost of living attack a limp lettuce leaf”). Or it’s been Liberal-friendly: Morrison’s no new tax’s pledge got front-page treatment in both the Herald Sun and The Courier-Mail.

This week the mastheads have pivoted to focus on the existential threat to their party posed by the teal independents, with attacks on individuals (such as the “Dyer Straits” splash in The Advertiser) or puffing Liberal candidates under threat like Warringah candidate Katherine Deves in the Tele and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in the Herald Sun.

The Australian, meanwhile, provides the talking points memo for the thinking person’s Liberal Party supporter. The independents? They’re a News Corp three for “extreme and destructive and incoherent”.

The election has shattered a common complacency about News Corp’s political dominance — no need to worry: “Rupert backs winners”. Well, maybe once. Over the past two decades its support for centre-left candidates has been, at best, sporadic. Even a rare editorial endorsement (like the NT News in 2019) is drowned in the torrent of propaganda.

The experience out of the US is that the election of a Labor government is likely to make News’ behaviour worse. As Lachlan Murdoch said in response to the election of Joe Biden, it reckons there’s money to be made out of being the opposition. And the sort of outrage that dominates Fox will be the product on offer for Australian audiences.

Not all News Corp products, of course. Where it depends on mass audiences for advertising (like news.com.au), market forces demand it be more journalistically respectful. But where it’s built a paying audience for its subscription mastheads, it has to give the grumpy old audience what it’s paying for.

For the rest of us, that’s good news. It means the worst of News Corp is safely sequestered to small audiences behind its hard paywalls, delivering homilies for the already converted.

Here’s a tip for the rest of the news media: how about we leave it there?