Marcia Langton (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)
Marcia Langton (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

It wasn’t long after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the referendum date during a visit to Adelaide late last month that Australia’s news publishers slowly began to let readers know where they stand on the Voice. A number of them, though, have been curiously quiet.

Among them is the oft-outspoken Sky News, which Media Briefs is told will abstain from endorsing either campaign through what’s left of the run-up to polling day. The network, whose news boss Chris Willis last week made way for his deputy Elise Holman after five decades in the business, tells us the decision to withhold a corporate position on the constitutional change squares up with its “editorial principles”, which right now, the network says, are geared toward informing Australians on all perspectives of the debate.

“We have always encouraged debate on the issues confronting Australians and our commitment for this referendum is no different, as we continue to deliver coverage from all angles so that viewers can make up their own minds,” a Sky News Australia spokesperson told Media Briefs.

Editors from across the broader News Corp Australia stable, meanwhile, will be left to make up their own minds on the matter, and take their papers in whichever direction they wish. Ben English, editor of The Daily Telegraph, and Michelle Gunn, editor-in-chief of The Australian, didn’t get back to us. But a News Corp Australia spokesperson said the publications’ focus at the moment is on reporting out “the contest of ideas” surrounding the referendum, which is now just five weeks away. 

Just days before Albanese announced the referendum date of October 14 from Adelaide’s north in South Australia — a battleground for the Yes campaign, as far as polling suggests — he was in Sydney as a guest of Kerry Stokes and the Seven Network to open their new studios. Even still, whether or not the network decides to take a corporate position remains to be seen. Seven didn’t return a request for comment in time for publication. 

The state of play among Nine’s most-read publishing assets is by now well-known. In an editorial last week, The Sydney Morning Herald, which first endorsed the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2019, said that while the campaign has been far from perfect, a Voice would offer more potential for better outcomes for Indigenous peoples. 

The week before, the SMH’s Melbourne sister paper, The Age, sang from the same hymn sheet and told readers in an editorial that voting Yes could “only help” close the gap between First Nations peoples and the rest of Australia. The Australian Financial Review took a similar line, if not one more pragmatic in its assessment of the risks that the Yes campaign has taken in getting there — and potentially falling short. 

For Yes campaign spokespeople, though, the media will need to offer more than its endorsements. As much was made clear by Professor Marcia Langton in an address to the National Press Club on Wednesday afternoon, when her voice wavered in telling those in the room of the toll the campaign had taken on her and others in the Yes camp, who face death threats and a barrage of daily harassment. 

In the event that a No vote gets up, Langton said: “I think our generation of leaders will hand over to younger leaders and they too then will become targets like Adam Goodes, like Stan Grant, and the cycle will continue. And in this regard, I think that the media has a responsibility to lift their game in reporting on these issues, and not participate in pile-ons on persons who are good and decent people.”

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