Voice referendum will be history long before Sky News is held to ‘account’ for its lies

As Malcolm Turnbull and Sharan Burrow pointed out yesterday, the Murdoch family’s far-right pay-TV outlet Sky News has become a platform for lies and misinformation about the Voice to Parliament, not just for its tiny subscriber audience but via regional free-to-air broadcasters and YouTube.

Turnbull and Burrow list multiple egregious lies being peddled by Sky’s coterie of extremists, including that the Voice will be more powerful than Parliament and is racially divisive, and that No advocates are being censored.

But don’t expect the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to call out News Corp’s misinformation before the referendum. Any complaints about lies on Sky News are unlikely to be fully dealt with until the end of 2024, more than a year after the referendum is held.

The ACMA rarely investigates pay-TV, with the bulk of its investigations aimed at commercial free-to-air television and radio broadcasters or the ABC. Its investigations also take a long time. For the past quarter of 2022 — the ACMA’s most recent data period — the 12-month rolling average time taken to finalise investigations had grown to more than nine months, up from six months at the start of 2022.

The recent occasion in which the ACMA did inquire into Sky News — for blatant climate denialism on Outsiders — saw the regulator commence an investigation in June 2022 about broadcasts in late 2021. It was completed in December 2022 and was not released until April this year.

That probe might have been quicker if the ACMA had not been preparing its risible attack on the ABC in relation to Four Corners’ look at the role of Fox News in the January 6 insurrection — an epic investigation that ran a full year from December 2021 and concluded with probably the most bizarre and ridiculous report released since the ACMA was created from the Australian Broadcasting Authority 20 years ago.

Its findings included that Sarah Ferguson shouldn’t have used the word “mob” to describe the insurrectionists and that her report failed to cover social media’s role in the events. (Ferguson comprehensively demolished the ACMA’s report after its release.)

So, in the event that the ACMA can bring itself to investigate Sky News’ lies about the Voice, don’t expect any findings until at least late 2024, when it might finally produce a report saying it had ordered the organisation to provide more training to its presenters.

The ACMA, of course, will plead that it is hostage to delays at both ends of the process. Under the Broadcasting Services Act, it can’t receive complaints about broadcasting content until the broadcaster has first decided whether or not to deal with it, and it has to afford natural justice to the broadcaster when it has made its draft findings. But the steady blowout in investigation timelines over 2022 suggests the ACMA is again suffering from its long-term problem of being too slow to offer any effective check on egregious violations of content standards.

And that will make Sky News’ effectiveness at spreading lies and misinformation about the Voice all the greater.