Despite assiduously crawling and arse-kissing to News Ltd. journos during his short, unlamented tenure, Kevin Rudd has lately decided that the Murdoch media empire is the devil incarnate. Afflicted with more than the usual discarded politician’s Relevance Deprivation Syndrome, Rudd has apparently decided that, seeing as he was undoubtedly the greatest prime minister that ever was or will be, it could only have been Evil Rupert Murdoch who was responsible for his downfall.
To that end, Rudd is hawking a petition for an inquiry into Australian media (another one: after all when the left don’t get what they want, they just keep bludgeoning until they do). Naturally, the internet petition is worth the paper it’s written on: it’s been revealed, for instance, that “someone” bought tranches of fake signatories from a Bangladeshi sweatshop.
Which begs the question, just what kind of media landscape would Rudd prefer? One suspects he’s looking with longing across the Tasman.
The media paradise Rudd craves looks somewhat like New Zealand, where inoffensive newspapers compete for drabness and commentators are all but united in adoration of Jacinda Ardern.
You’ll struggle to read a word of dissent in the four daily newspapers. Mike Hosking and some of his fellow presenters are prepared to break from the pack at Newstalk ZB, but that’s it. Retired ZB host Leighton Smith remains in the fray as a podcaster and columnist but, when it comes to broadcast media, Hosking is Alan Jones, Chris Kenny, Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin and Paul Murray rolled into one.
Rolled into one and watered down by five at the same time. Hosking does a manful enough job, but still seems pretty toothless compared to the likes of Alan Jones, who – like him or not, and I often don’t – at least isn’t afraid to give a prime minister a good bollocking.
Those with a more sophisticated understanding of liberal democracy than “Media” (the generic name ascribed to journalists in the transcript, presumably because they are all of one mind) may be feeling a little queasy.
A Prime Minister who tells voters she chose politics because it was a profession that “would make me feel I was making a difference”, and holds an absolute majority in the parliament’s only chamber, is an accident waiting to happen. An independent media should be the first responders in such circumstances, ready to erect barriers in the path of the Prime Minister, should she swerve across the line.
Yet the press pack are not merely on the bus, they are telling her how to drive it.
Witness, for instance, the media’s dismay that the hoi polloi of New Zealand refused to do what they were told and pass the recent cannabis referendum. The media begged Saint Ardern – why didn’t she just pass it, anyway?
New Zealand’s small population and splendid isolation are part of the explanation for the enfeeblement of its media. Ardern’s sledgehammer response to the COVID-19 pandemic hastened the decline.
Not least the $50m carrot she dangled in front of the panting media pack.
State-Funded Media. The BFD. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.
In fact, Ardern seems to be the only person who sees a future in investing in NZ media. Everyone else is voting with their wallets.
We can only conclude that commercial logic no longer applies. Media companies are no longer driven by the pursuit of unserved segments in the market. It’s not the product that is faulty but the customer. When commercially minded proprietors leave the building, the journalists take charge. They are university-educated professionals cut from the same narcissistic cloth as Ardern.
So what’s left for New Zealanders still determined to think for themselves?
Intellectual opposition is all but extinguished in the universities, but still flickers on in alternative media, blogs, websites and YouTube channels, which serve as a faint beacon of dissent.
The Australian
But then, if you’re reading this, you already knew that.
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