The Media Diversity Inquiry has been painted as a battle between former prime ministers and a media oligarch, though it actually has a wide purview that touches on many areas of risk beyond issues of concentration of media ownership. It also attracted an extraordinary body of public submissions from beyond the typical bevy of experts, community groups and industry bodies. Fully 5068 submissions were received, not accounting for supplementary materials, consisting almost entirely of personal submissions from the general public.
These submissions open the door to a kind of self-inflicted déjà vu: sentiments are consistently repeated and bleed from one page to the next. There is a great deal of concern for the state of Australia’s media, support for (as well as much rarer attacks on) the ABC, and considerable antipathy for Murdoch and News Corp, but these statements are generally prefaced with ‘I think’, ‘In my opinion’, and ‘I believe’ rather than sources and data. In many cases, these submissions are not grounded on the salient data to which experts and professionals have access. Ignoring these submissions would be a mistake, however, as they are often based on the sort of highly practical insights that industry analytics and assertions of professional standards are not able to capture. Within these thousands of submissions, hundreds of people describe the signs they see, the newspapers on the café tables, the news that goes unreported, and the communities that go unsupported. These recounts of real-life experience with the media ecosystem mark a crucial opportunity. Given the dearth of investigations of the impacts of media diversity risks on people and communities, these submissions are an untapped resource that can not only test assumptions about media diversity impacts but also raise new challenges that may have gone unexplored in past research.
Here at the CMT, I am currently researching these contributions, exploring the ways that the public are capable of providing us with important cues on what kinds of media diversity are most important to their lives. With a clearer sense of both the size and nature of this vital issue, researchers and policymakers will be able to make a more informed and motivated push to engaging with and engendering a more diverse media ecosystem.
This article featured in our first newsletter of the year.
Tim Koskie, CMT researcher