Last week the new Independent member for Goldstein, Zoe Daniel, issued a statement calling for a judicial inquiry into media concentration and News Corp. It’s not a new idea. A judicial inquiry into ‘media diversity, ownership and regulation’ was proposed by the Senate Inquiry into Media Diversity in Australialast year. That followed Kevin Rudd’s call for a royal commission. And now the whole issue has become entangled in the defamation brawl between Crikey and Lachlan Murdoch.
A judicial inquiry is not what we need, especially one that – in Daniel’s words – probes ‘the Murdoch media empire’.
Sweeping gestures such as this conflate issues of media diversity, concentration of ownership, and news standards. Sure, it’s worth questioning Lachlan Murdoch’s decision to take action against Crikey for commenting on the Murdochs’ support of a culture at Fox News that encouraged the dangerous rhetoric surrounding the attacks on the US Capitol. Here in Australia, News Corp has to answer for its own lapses in journalistic standards, and it occupies a bigger space in Australian media than is desirable. But that can be said of others, and News does participate in, and fund, an independent complaints scheme.
When we unpack some of this, we can see work has already been done on some aspects of regulation and policy. For example:
- We know there is a need for a better grip on what we mean by ‘media diversity’. PIJI has gradually been building picture of news production through its mapping project, while in 2020 the ACMA released a really thoughtful paper on building a measurement framework, linking diversity to localism.
- We know that with the removal of sector-specific media ownership laws, there’s a gap in assessing media mergers that is not adequately addressed by s 50 of the Competition and Consumer Act, or CCA. Whatever you think of the merger of Nine and Fairfax, the CCA did not offer a good framework for assessing that transaction. CMT and others have urged development of a public interest test, drawing on reviews dating back to the Productivity Commission report in 2000.
- We know there’s a problem in encouraging effective media standards when rules about accuracy and fairness vary according to the media platform on which the consumer encounters the content. Some news consumers can complain to the Press Council, some to the Independent News Council and some to ACMA. Others have no independent body to assess their complaint.
These are not matters best addressed by a judicial inquiry. They do need attention, but they require specialist consideration by government as part of broader policy reform.
Derek Wilding, CMT Co-Director
This article was featured in our newsletter of 2 September 2022, read it in full here.
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