Published: 22 April 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The Australian media is riddled with hostile, one-eyed coverage but it hasn’t really had much impact on who wins on election day
IF LABOR LOSES the coming election, the reflex response of many of its supporters will be to blame the media, and specifically the Murdoch media empire. There is no doubt that sections of the Australian media, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd outlets in particular, are consistently hostile to the Labor cause.
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has made a new career for himself as a trenchant critic of the Murdoch media – although he was happy to curry favour with them when he was in office.
There is not a single major newspaper in Australia that is supportive of the Labor Party. The Murdoch papers (notably their flagship the Australian, but also their tabloids, of which more shortly) are ideologically hostile, and their news coverage is clearly heavily slanted in favour of the Coalition.
The Nine papers (the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian Financial Review) are seemingly more moderate in their news coverage, but still editorially unfriendly to Labor. The Guardian (whose Australian edition only appears online) generally takes a position to the left of Labor.
Contrast this situation with that in the United States, where many of the most respected (and highly circulated) newspapers are broadly supportive of the Democratic Party, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times.
In Britain the Guardian and the Daily Mirror are generally hostile to the Tories, if not always friendly to Labour (note the UK party spells their name differently to Australia). In France Le Monde is an influential left-wing daily. Australia stands out among the Western democracies for the unanimous conservative slant of its print media.
Of course, the days when “media” meant primarily “newspapers” are long gone. Most Australians get their news from electronic media of various kinds. Australia’s free-to-air TV networks generally try to avoid party politics, but their news coverage generally follows in the footsteps of the print media. The exception is Murdoch’s Sky News (primarily “after dark”, that is after 6pm), which is not just anti-Labor but aggressively right-wing, following the model of Fox News in the United States.
