News Corp influenced the Election, just not the way it wanted

In trying to Trumpify Australia, News Corp may have sealed the fate of its political allies and helped Labor win instead, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

AS THE IMPLICATIONS of Labor’s historic Election victory continue to reverberate throughout the country, there have been suggestions made that the result demonstrates that News Corp no longer has a powerful influence on Australian democracy.

I believe News Corp did have a powerful influence on the Election result, just not the way it wanted. This is because News Corp helped create a Trumpist-Liberal and National movement, engraining a hard-right, toxic way of doing politics, a movement which was thoroughly rejected by the Australian public. That is to say, News Corp inadvertently helped Labor win.

One of the reasons people argue that News Corp no longer has the influence it once did is because Australia’s media landscape is changing, just as it is everywhere else around the globe. The argument goes that younger demographics in particular are turning off “mainstream media” and instead get their “news” from social media, including powerful influencers, some of whom use journalistic styles but present news in a much more social-friendly way.

This argument ignores the influence that mainstream outlets like News Corp have on the media ecosystem, an ecosystem which encompasses both competitor mainstream outlets – including the ABC – and social media voices who amplify and reinforce what is being talked about in legacy media. News Corp not only influences the agendas of their mainstream media competitors, but also the downstream social media conversation.

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The fact is, most social media “influencers” and their audiences are not journalists who are presenting facts, but are commentators who are sharing opinions. Those opinions are very often about issues and events written about in mainstream news and thus mainstream media continues to legitimise ideas and to set the agenda elsewhere in the ecosystem.

Indeed, the discussion of the rise and popularity of social media influencers tends to forget that News Corp are the original media “influencers” and continue to be, including being highly influential on the right-wing media ecosystem, as well as right-wing politics.

Through this lens, News Corp’s direct influence on media discourse is clear. News Corp owns the majority share of newspaper readership, as well as broadcast outlet Sky News. These outlets not only have a powerful presence in traditional media but also a large presence on digital and social media platforms, such as Sky News’ YouTube channel, which receives millions of views.

On top of this influence, people who “get their news from social media” are still consuming mainstream media agendas and talking points, often without recognising where they originated.

This influence is exemplified by Peter Shamshiri, who said of hugely popular pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan:

‘Rogan and his ilk are not right-wing propagandists targeting low-information voters; they are low-information voters being targeted by right-wing propaganda. Rogan is downstream of a pre-existing right-wing media ecosystem that targets dummies like him. He’s a proliferator of right-wing propaganda, sure, but he’s a consumer first.’

The right-wing propaganda pumped out non-stop by News Corp, in concert with the Liberal Party and cashed-up campaign outfit Advance, is a campaign of influence across the media ecosystem. That propaganda, of course, influences the Australian electorate.

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This influence is particularly obvious amongst the Liberal National base. In a surprisingly candid moment, former Liberal strategist Tony Barry described how Liberal branch members have been captured by the Sky After Dark propaganda machine by describing how a Liberal MP told him he has to watch Sky News to find out what his branch members are being told.

This insight suggests News Corp is directly influencing the culture and political priorities of Liberal Party members.

Crucially, where News Corp blends news and commentary in a style more reminiscent of right-wing propaganda than traditional journalism, there is nothing even close to this power on the left of the media spectrum. The News Corp right-wing megaphone thus distorts the Australian media landscape, tilting it rightward so that there is no level playing field in the public sphere.

Left-wing parties and politicians not only must compete with their political rivals, but also with their media ones. Australia has an inherently unequal media ecosystem, which means we have an inherently unequal democracy.

Aside from this powerful direct media influence, News Corp also has an equally powerful indirect influence on Australian politics by being entwined politically in the Liberal and National Parties. This close and often toxic relationship was explored by The Saturday Paper’s Jason Koutsoukis, who described how former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his former chief of staff, now News Corp commentator, Peta Credlin, continue to be the behind-the-scenes king-makers in the Liberal Party.

Crucially, Abbott and Credlin’s influence has been wielded to push the Liberal Party to the Right – to make it as Trumpist as possible – with News Corp’s media power being used to intimidate, threaten and discipline anyone who doesn’t toe the Abbott-Credlin hard-right line.

This capture by hard-right players demonstrates how News Corp uses the same culture-warring, fear-mongering methods as it uses on the Australian public, to capture the Right wing of Australian politics.

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All this means that it would be incredibly naïve to think News Corp has no influence on Australian politics. News Corp staff are not outsiders, platformed on old technology, talking to themselves. They are at the centre of right-wing politics, media and culture, influencing what is debated, the policies advanced or attacked, and the public discourse that influences voting behaviour.

So, what happened in the May Election? I believe that News Corp contributed powerfully to Trumpifying the Liberal-Nationals and this hard-right turn spectacularly backfired. As soon as Trump was exposed as a dangerous chaos-maker, News Corp and Advance together undermined former Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s campaign by making him look as Trump-like as possible.

The Liberals are not a victim of News Corp, but a co-conspirator. There was perhaps a moment after former PM Scott Morrison lost the 2022 Election that some Liberals thought the hard-right playbook might not be the best way forward. But these doubters were mostly from the cohort of moderates who lost their seats to Teals.

With hard-right Dutton in charge and the success of the culture-warring, fear-mongering News Corp-Advance-Liberal playbook in the 2023 Voice Referendum, it was full steam ahead for the Liberal Party in waging a Trumpist assault on Australia in 2025.

Andrew Hastie on ABC’s Four Corners said the quiet bit out loud when he admitted the Liberals attacked the Voice through the “No” campaign in the hope this would help them beat Labor in the 2025 Election. Liberal and National MPs still seem shell-shocked that this sadistic political strategy did not work.

As I’ve already written in the election washup, it is my view that had the Election occurred before the full horrors of the Trump second term were known, Dutton would likely have won, despite the Liberals’ woeful campaign and despite Dutton’s personal unpopularity. Indeed, on 16 February, the ABC’s headline screamed: ‘Peter Dutton most likely to be next prime minister, according to YouGov poll.’

As The Guardian’s poll tracker showed, this polling ended up being Dutton’s high point, with his vote crashing nationwide from then on. There is absolutely an argument that the more the public got to know Dutton, the more it disliked him. But, I do not think you can underestimate how much the public “got to know” Dutton through his equivalence with Trump and how this was ultimately his undoing.

Elections are always won or lost on the “vibe” and News Corp has always played a huge part in setting the tone of this vibe. Just as News Corp has traditionally influenced Liberals’ election wins – where fear campaigns against Labor worked – this time the culture-warring and fear campaigns created mass fear about the dangers of putting cruel, fear-mongering, culture-warring Trumpists in charge.

All this means that Dutton’s loss was also News Corp’s. I found it particularly gratifying to read in The Saturday Paper that due to Liberal pollsters’ over-estimates of Dutton and the Liberals’ popularity, all the way up until days before the Election, Dutton thought the Liberals were still in with a chance of forcing Labor into minority government. He also did not expect the electoral tidal wave of the 7.7 per cent swing in Dickson, which unseated him.

Dutton had no doubt been tuned into Sky News hack Sharri Markson’s exclusive insider polling a week out from the Election, which claimed the Liberals were in “poll position”.

So, what is next for the Liberal-News Corp-Advance pincer movement? New Opposition Leader Sussan Ley claims to want to modernise the Liberal Party. Yet, when asked by The Saturday Paper’s Karen Barlow if this means an end to ‘culture wars and the Trumpish fights over Welcome to Country ceremonies, Australia Day and the school curriculum’, Ley was described as ‘noncommittal’.

Ley responded:

“The so-called culture wars will always be a feature of the Australian landscape.”

They certainly will be while News Corp still pulls the Liberal Party’s political strings.

If you would like to hear more about this topic, I am hosting a free online event as part of the Australian Festival of Democracy and Human Rights titled ‘Hidden Influences on Media and Democracy’ on Thursday 5 June, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM AEST. Details and registration information are available here.