Australia has unwittingly become a social experiment. A ruthless experiment on the fate of a society when a single media conglomerate, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, owns 167 newspapers and controls around 70% of the printed media market.
After the phone-hacking scandal rocked Britain, News Corp officials in Australia struggled to put some daylight between its local operations and the rest of the empire, assuring the public that the country was spared phone hacking and other unethical practices. It is perhaps unlikely that wire tapping or phone hacking was practiced in Australia, simply because the local specialty of the Murdoch organs and their shock-jock allies has been a fairly low-tech reliance on outrageous spin.
Nowhere has the reliance on spin been more apparent than during the coverage of the climate “debate” by the Murdoch media and allied shock jocks.
The Australian government is currently seeking to introduce a rather modest tax on carbon, which will have little effect on low-to-moderate income earners, but which will nonetheless help cut emissions, thus finally getting Australia to live up to its historical responsibilities as one of the world’s largest per capita carbon emitters and one of the dirtiest producers of power.
The resultant “debate” about the carbon tax has turned into a fact-free brawl that is sufficiently devoid of ethics to make football hooligans blush. Segments of the media, alas, do not blush.
During the recent truck “convoy” that descended upon Parliament Hill in Canberra to protest against the carbon tax, faint memories of Allende’s Chile were quickly overpowered by the raging tirade of the presiding shock jock, Alan Jones, who whipped his crowd of truckwits into a frenzy when journalists asked whether he had been paid for his engagement. Not a silly question, given that this individual has been involved in a cash-for-comment scandal before.
This rage has been no isolated incident. At a recent talkfest by vaudevillian denialist Lord Christopher Monckton, a journalist of the ABC was jostled by the hostile crowd.
And despite the robustness of its editorial, the Australian appears remarkably thin-skinned. Its editor-in-chef threatened to sue a former reporter for defamation because she reportedly said writing about climate change at the paper was “absolutely excruciating. It was torture.”
In response to all this, and in the absence of politicians with sufficient courage to take on the hate-mongers, some Australian academics have started to provide a platform for accountability by shining a light on the media’s practices.
