I get my daily news through the 9NEWs app, my Facebook feed, and the morning Today show, but who owns and controls what stories they produce?
The Australian news is dominated by two main corporations, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Nine Entertainment Co. The news that I access is controlled by the Nine Entertainment Co, but what does this mean?
The Nine Entertainment Co (NEC) is advertised as being the heart of Australia, its tagline literally being, “Where Australia Connects”. And that is exactly there aim, to connect us in a trusted and family orientated environment. After advocate research on the NEC, it is possible to say that the controversies and exclamations around the news corporation is limited. Which is a great thing, right? Or maybe we could speculate that because of the large reach that NEC has, stories about controversies in the business aren’t able to seep through the surfaces.
Murdoch is known fairly worldwide as the puppet master of journalism. He has controlled the media in America, England and Australia, this power, in the wrong hands can change what entire countries believe in. Lord Beaverbrook, the former Minister of Production commented on media as “a flaming sword which will cut through any political armour … When skilfully employed at the psychological moment no politician of any party can resist it.” Evidence of this flaming sword can be seen in the article, ‘Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in Australia comes under growing scrutiny’. As it states, “Mr Rudd has described the Murdoch empire’s impact in Australia as a “cancer on democracy”, saying it has spread climate change denialism and promoted anti-China hysteria.” Murdoch’s reach allowed him and his media company to change opinions in Australia.
But what’s all this talk of reach?
Reach is the number of people that is exposed to the media. Both NEC and Murdoch’s Corp have a large reach over the country.
In very recent news, we were able to see the effects of having such a large reach, as the Nine network was hacked, forcing Australian Nine New’s Networks to go offline. On Sunday the 28th of March many shows were forced to go off air, including the Today shows, weekend show with Richard Wilkins.
It is evidence for how vulnerable we make ourselves by having only one or two news corps, rather then running an independent new based system.
Obviously we need large corporations to pay for news stories, but idealistically a few more corporations would add a nice touch to the media market. The growth of independent blogs and podcasts has largely accelerated in this age of ‘influences’, and in this environment we now have free lance writers from around the world feeding us with information. In reality though, the influence of the large corporations is weighted more heavily then any independent writer, thus giving the control of how we think and the opinions we have to either Murdoch or NEC.
But if we read more from independent blogs we could take away the power and start to stimulate more opinions, rather then having a mainstream society, we could start to build difference into the ground works. Thus taking away the need to care for who owns what we read and creating more diversity through the opinions that are written in our media.
Beecher, E. et al. (2020) Murdoch’s power: how it works and how it debases Australia, Crikey. Available at: https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/10/23/rupert-murdoch-power/ (Accessed: 28 March 2021).
PEARLMAN, J. (2020) Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in Australia comes under growing scrutiny, The Straits Times. Available at: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/australianz/rupert-murdochs-media-empire-in-australia-comes-under-growing-scrutiny (Accessed: 1 April 2021).
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