Journalists need to resist adopting News Corp’s agenda

When News Corp frames the story, too many journalists stop asking whether the frame is true — and democracy pays the price, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

WHEN I TELL PEOPLE about my research, which argues that News Corp uses the façade of news and commentary to campaign for conservative political causes, they usually say: “Well, that’s obvious.” Even the PM openly criticises News Corp for campaigning against Labor “hand-in-glove” with the Liberals and Nationals.

Since everyone knows News Corp is not only biased towards the Right, but is in practice the propaganda wing of the Liberal and National parties, it begs the question why the rest of the media don’t work a little harder to resist joining the Murdoch anti-Labor, anti-progressives, anti-anything-not-right-wing pile on.

In a paper I recently published with my colleagues from the Murdoch Referendum Accountability Project in the journal Journalism and Media, we argue that during the Voice Referendum, News Corp deliberately set an agenda that framed the Voice as divisive and that the rest of the mainstream media – including the ABC – dutifully followed the same script.

In this study, we used the case study of News Corp’s clear and obvious activism in its aggressive (and misrepresentative) criticism of Professor Marcia Langton. If you recall, in the final months of the Voice Referendum, Langton was recorded at a university event saying that the “No” campaign was using racist and stupid tactics. The Australian immediately jumped on the story, misrepresenting Langton’s comments, claiming Langton called “No” voters racist and stupid. She did not.

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The Australian quietly updated its incorrect assertions without apology (which didn’t stop former Opposition Leader Peter Dutton continuing the misrepresentation, because of course he did), while at the same time News Corp collectively went full-blown attack-dog on Langton, characterising her criticism as unfair to the “No” campaign and “No” voters.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what News Corp was doing here. Throughout the referendum, they worked – as Albanese says – “hand in glove” with the “No” campaign, particularly to cultivate the idea that the Voice was “divisive”. Langton was framed as evidence of this “divisiveness”.

Note that it is a right-wing tradition always to characterise allegations of racism against Indigenous people and other non-White racial minorities as worse than being actually racist. Indeed, many in the “No” campaign, including their News Corp media arm, claimed the Voice was racist towards White Australians.

This deflection of criticism is two-pronged. It diverts any scrutiny of whether racism is actually occurring (of course it did, it was front and centre during the whole Referendum campaign — why do you think the Referendum was needed in the first place?). It also puts the person who is making the accusation in the villain frame and characterises those accused of being racist as victims. This is a potent form of weaponised victimhood, a rhetorical strategy central to right-wing movements the world over.

So, we know what News Corp was doing here. That is obvious. But what is just as frustrating is – as we found in this research – the fact that the rest of the media also fell in behind News Corp in treating Langton’s comments about racism like they were controversial for the “Yes” campaign and, in turn, the Labor Government.

The Labor Government was then challenged to account for Langton’s statements.

For instance, this The Australian piece starts with the paragraph:

‘Linda Burney has been forced to intervene and call for care and respect from both sides of the Voice Referendum debate after Marcia Langton accused the “No” case of racism and stupidity, undermining the “Yes” campaign’s strategy to win over five million undecided voters.’

We argue in our paper that the collective media framing of Langton as controversial and problematic for the “Yes” campaign through her accusations of racism had an important influence on the referendum debate.

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It is important to note that outside of News Corp, the media’s framing of Langton was less aggressive, less prolific and less critical, but nonetheless, apart from a single outlier by Annabel Crabb at the ABC, it collectively accepted the premise that Langton’s comments were indeed controversial. More importantly, the media collectively accepted News Corp’s notion that there was no racism that required scrutiny in the “No” campaign and thus, no legitimacy in Langton’s accusations.

Lo and behold, no journalists sought to investigate the validity of Langton’s accusations, nor did they investigate how racism was emboldened during this dark period in Australia’s history and continues to be emboldened through the “No” campaign’s victory.

What this meant was that News Corp set the fire and the rest of the media poured oil on it to reinforce the “No” campaign’s scot-free claims that Langton was wrong to call out racism and that the only racism that existed in the referendum campaign was racism against White people.

We characterise this process as an “Agenda Feedback Wheel”. As part of News Corp’s conservative advocacy against the Voice, it used its media power to deliberately build an agenda that was passively adopted by the rest of the media. Through this collective scandal-making media coverage, the political agenda and, in turn, the public agenda sided against the Voice at a crucial time in the Referendum campaign.

Once you understand how this Agenda Feedback Wheel works, you can recognise it everywhere. Whether it be during the COVID pandemic when News Corp set an agenda framing Victorian Premier Dan Andrews as “Dictator Dan” but Liberal NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian got no such scrutiny, or more recently when News Corp politicised the abhorrent Bondi terrorist attack as the fault of Albanese’s government, journalists outside of News Corp need to be more resistant to adopting News Corp’s framing as their own.

News Corp presents one view — an extreme right-wing view that represents the interests of a tiny elite few in Australia. There are, of course, other views that have just as much right to be heard and given fair and reasonable treatment by journalists to ensure that the right-wing view does not dominate.

Journalists who don’t bother to seek those other views out and don’t scrutinise right-wing views are abusing their media power just as badly as News Corp is.