News Corp’s fossil fuel advertising dressed as news should be illegal

News Corp's unethical support for the fossil fuel industry is propaganda dressed as news and requires some kind of regulation, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

LAST WEEK, News Corp’s newspapers The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier Mail and The Adelaide Advertiser caused controversy by publishing front page “exclusives” and “special reports” alleging that more gas is needed to avoid electricity blackouts in the future.

If readers turned the page and read the fine print, they would learn that this so-called “news” was actually not news. It was an advertorial (a fancy word for an advertisement), paid for by – you guessed it – the fossil fuel industry.

To say this “coverage” was a breach of journalistic ethics is an understatement. The Greens have called Murdoch executives before a senate inquiry into greenwashing to explain themselves.

More public scrutiny, however, is required to hold News Corp accountable for not just this breach, but its entire unethical misrepresentation which dresses up propaganda as news.

News Corp continues to endorse climate change nonsense

An article in The Australian has proven once again how out of touch the Murdoch press is with the real threat of climate change.

Let’s be clear: the reason that News Corp did not declare the funders of this content – the agenda of this content – on the page where the content was printed, is quite obvious. It set out to make the gas advertisement look like “news”, using the façade of journalism to campaign for the fossil fuel industry. This is no different to what it does on every page of the paper, in every broadcast, every day of the week.

In discussing this ethical breach on The Guardian podcast Newsroom Edition, Bridie Jabour asked the question:

“News outlets set agendas, but what is the line between agenda setting and lobbying?”

The Guardian editor Lenore Taylor replied:

“If it’s journalism, it should be done independently and shouldn’t be paid for by a lobby group, well that kind of goes without saying... it’s journalism 101.”

This is the key point. Content is not journalism when it is paid for by the fossil fuel industry. It is paid propaganda. And that fact, when not transparently declared, makes News Corp’s content deceptive and misleading.

That fact opens a can of worms for News Corp. It raises huge questions about why news media content is not regulated to ensure that when a consumer is buying a newspaper, they are being served what they have bought — news. Other industries are subject to consumer law to ensure that consumers are not deceived and misled, so why are news organisations any different?

Facts and figures confirm Murdoch’s minions are continually lying to you

News Corp in Australia systematically distorts the ‘news’ it publishes, this time on bankruptcies.

No doubt News Corp would claim that everyone in Australia knows they are biased towards fossil fuel interests, towards mining billionaires, and towards the fossil fuel and mining billionaire’s political representatives — the Liberal and National Parties.

News Corp might also claim that it’s well known that it has a long history of climate denial in its newspapers, that it campaigns against renewable energy and against the Labor Party, the Greens and Teal Independents who fight for more climate action.

But just because everyone knows News Corp has an agenda does not make its agenda-driven news reporting ethical, or any less misleading. Its paid-for gas advertisements are an overt example of news being used as promotional material, an example so blatant it has brought some much-needed public scrutiny to News Corp.

Yet, this example is the tip of a much larger iceberg, showing what News Corp has always been — an agenda-driven, ideological campaign machine that uses the genre of news and commentary content as a form of political propaganda.

It is important to be clear about why News Corp uses news and commentary as a political and economic weapon, because this goes to the heart of the problem. Journalism – whether reporting or commentary – holds an authoritative position in Western society through the cultural assumption that news is there to “inform” people.

Along with this assumption is also the idea that journalists use legitimate methods of research, verification and fact-checking to ensure they’re not misleading audiences. And, crucially, in the Western context, as pointed out by Lenore Taylor, “journalism 101” dictates that journalists act independently of the political, cultural and economic environment they report about.

This is the context in which news is consumed. And this is why News Corp uses news as a form of propaganda — because it is not assumed to be propaganda, which makes it infinitely more powerful.

The Murdoch family distrust

In a family feud that would put Game of Thrones to shame, a legal fight has broken out over control of the Murdoch media empire.

There are many places in the world where news outlets work in concert with political parties and movements, where news is overtly produced as a form of propaganda to advance the interests of these groups. Western news media in its earliest forms was also produced by partisan interests, whether political or economic.

However, from the early 1900s onwards, Western news institutions embraced the values of objectivity, independence and balance, with these standards becoming “journalism 101”, setting the expectations of the audience and delivering a powerful cultural authority to news producers.

News Corp is clearly a partisan organisation, using its media power to benefit its political and economic interests. Yet the problem is, it never transparently declares this. Its ties to the Liberal and National Party, its ties to the mining and fossil fuel industry, and its interests are never overtly declared. We, of course, can all see these ties, but they are not formalised and thus its news is treated by audiences and, crucially, by other outlets as “news” and not what it really is — propaganda.

If News Corp was a small website with a marginal audience, perhaps it would be okay for it to be openly partisan and interest-driven, promoting its views to a niche like-minded audience. However, News Corp owns nearly 60% of print news outlets by readership, making it the largest news organisation in the most concentrated Western news media market.

When the largest news company in Australia is producing propaganda dressed up as news in aid of fossil fuel billionaires and against the interests of the planet, isn’t it time some regulation at least placed some guardrails against this blatantly unethical, undemocratic, misuse of media power?