The Media & Its Role In Our Lives
Rupert Murdoch upon being questioned about Fox News and its blatant political bias defended it via these words. “It is not red or blue, it is green.” Green as in greenbacks, the American currency. Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, was telling us that the primary role of his network was to make money by exploiting the market for right wing news. The fact that Rupert Murdoch himself is a rabid supporter of right wing politics is neither here nor there, according to the billionaire businessman. I leave it to you the reader to weigh up the truthfulness of said statements. That news networks, like Fox, have left the anchoring principle of ‘objectivity’ far behind in their pursuit of viewers and advertising revenue is the real shame here. What is the point of having news platforms at all if they only tell one side of the story? It is not journalism but PR. The media and its role in our lives has been diminished by purveyors of it like Rupert Murdoch.
Legacy Media Downunder & Its Tax Avoidance
Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp own nearly all of Australia’s main newspapers, apart from Nine Fairfax’s couple of broadsheets. In addition, Murdoch has Sky News Australia, which is a local copy of Fox News in style and right wing content. News Corp is an American company and has not paid corporate tax for more than a decade in Australia. It shares this tax avoiding reality with many American multinationals operating in Australia, as they shift profits to tax havens via clever accounting tricks – which are legally permissible. This tax minimisation by multinational corporations impacts upon the Australian government’s tax revenue. In a strange twist of irony, the right wing locals who consume News Corp’s media frequently bemoan Australia’s high taxes on alcohol, tobacco and gambling. These folk also bag the ABC, despite its actual objectivity in reporting the news, decrying it as the mouthpiece of minorities like the LGBTQI community, women, greenies and groups supporting refugees. The anti-woke stance on the Right means that these things are beyond the pale for the manosphere.
The irony is that if these large multinationals actually paid the tens of billions of dollars rightfully owed as corporate profits every year the high taxation on booze, fags and bets would not be so necessary to the nation’s bottom line.
What The Media Should Be Doing?
Pauline Hanson, the One Nation leader, has banned the ABC from covering her events. This Trumpian style cancelling of actual investigative journalism is all part of the right wing playbook to avoid answering uncomfortable questions. The fourth estate should be speaking truth to power. This is the real role of the media in a functioning democratic state. Many One Nation types are unaware of what the media is there for, as it is not to tell the story they wish to tell with all the bad bits whitewashed out. How else are we the public to find out about the white collar criminals and sex offenders in their ranks? Pauline is not going to tell us. Recently, someone wealthy paid for millions of dollars’ worth of online content flooding the feeds of social media platforms promoting Pauline Hanson. Much of it was fake news. This has seen a rise in One Nation’s vote and polling around Australia. Most Aussies are none too smart about how the internet works. Few question the sources of their news online, taking stuff at face value. Thus, it makes it easy for those with deep pockets to generate groundswells based on social media promotional campaigns. Most people are getting their news via the apps on their phones. They use these things but don’t rightly understand how they work. This makes them vulnerable to scammers of all persuasions. Money is not the only thing being scammed downunder. The art of persuasion has never gone away, it just morphs into new mediums.
The New Media Lacks Transparency
The media and its role in our lives continues to change, as we progress through the 21C. The decentralisation of media influence via social media, blogging and other online manifestations has been hailed as democratising. However, in truth, powerful elites still pull the strings via oligarchic wealth. Elon Musk bought Twitter, which became X. Billionaires fund online campaigns and bot factories, now with AI abilities. Populations around the globe consume digital content without the nous to dig into the provenance of videos, posts and blogs. Accepting stuff at face value is the inclination of the disengaged and the gullible. In Hanson’s case, like Trump before her in America, the politics of grievance are easy to exploit via digital content claiming empathy and shared rage at emotive issues. The culture wars and its anti-woke strategy functions effectively by exaggerating instances of outrage fodder. Stuff like teenage gender trans cases, despite involving a handful of individuals out of a population of 28 million, these provoke emotive outrage in many right wing folk. DEI policies have long enraged white citizens who see them as unfairly limiting their own opportunities despite the obvious bias within the dominant white skinned cohort.
Anything that favours minorities at the perceived expense of the dominant cohort has been weaponised by right wing political parties.
DV Is A 2 Way Street According To Pauline
Pauline Hanson has recently shared with Australians her view that domestic violence is a two way street. In a nation, where a woman is murdered by her partner or former partner every week this has been called out as victim blaming by some working in this controversial sector. It can be inferred from this latest Hanson sharing that many of her supporters are men. Indeed, men who see themselves as being unfairly blamed for the violence perpetrated upon women.
There are votes to be banked in supporting the manosphere downunder. The more pressing question is, do we want real solutions for the scourge that is domestic violence in Australia or are we happy to have politicians mining the territory for votes? More grievance politics for One Nation.
Right Wing Partisan Media
The media and its role in our lives continues to provide plenty of grist for the mill. The Australia media landscape has a predominately right wing bent with Murdoch’s News Corp and the Kerry Stokes Seven West Media consistently championing the manosphere and its concerns. Channel 7 defended Ben Roberts-Smith and Bruce Lehrmann, despite their apparent guilt in both legal situations. It smelt strongly of backing the bloke against all comers no matter the cost. Again, objectivity in the media went missing in favour of partisanship.
The Roots Of The Far Right
“There is a direct line through history from raiders and enslavers to right wing politics today. The fundamental belief underpinning all of these positions is that it is OK to enrich yourself at the expense of others. Further to that, the primary focus is always on your own desires and bugger the greater community around you. The Vikings are most famous as raiders, who came to other places to slaughter and pillage. They would enslave their most saleable surviving victims to enrich themselves, even more. This attitude to life and getting ahead still exists in a tempered form for right wing folk. The belief that it is a dog eat dog world and that only the strong will thrive flourishes in far right politics today.”
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of The Stoic Golfer; The AI Heresy; What Price Life?; America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump; and other titles. NOW AVAILABLE AT APPLE BOOKS & GOOGLE PLAY BOOKS. Google Play Books AUDIOBOOK
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