Post an election is a field day for the Monday’s Experts, amateur psephologists* and would-be entrail readers. Most of which commentary seems little more than the writer using an election result to ride their own personal hobbyhorses over the corpses of the defeated. No doubt I’m as guilty as any other opinionated scribe, but occasionally some mainstream media hack comes out with a take that’s more on point than they’d probably like to admit.
Such as Australian editor Dennis Shanahan’s take on the influence of MSM editorial endorsements on election outcomes.
When The Washington Post decided not to publish a presidential endorsement editorial in 2024 in the lead-up to the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris – perhaps understandably, given the choice – it created a public furore, prompted accusations of weakness and divided editorial staff.
The Post had previously endorsed both Republican and Democratic candidates so its decision to sit on the fence was seen as a way to avoid offending Trump if it didn’t endorse him, or causing a staff revolt if it did.
But would an editorial endorsement from The Post have changed a single vote?
As one critic has written: show me the body of the fascist killed by Woody Guthrie’s guitar. Like pompous celebrities and half-wit musicians (a tautology?), the MSM have long nursed far too high an opinion of their own influence. To his credit, and contrary to the unshakeably bigoted beliefs of the bien pensant left, media mogul Rupert Murdoch seems to be well aware of just how little influence the MSM really have. In an interview some decades back, Murdoch noted that, while his mastheads took a firm line of supporting the Iraq invasion, public opinion remained implacably opposed.
So much for influence, then.
The same goes for ‘editorial endorsements’ of candidates. Probably the only people really hanging on an editorial endorsement are the candidates themselves, and the hacks who write them.
In the 1960s, changes in editorial support at the Fairfax-owned The Sydney Morning Herald, first away from Robert Menzies and the Coalition in 1961 to Arthur Calwell and Labor, and then back to Menzies in 1963, caused huge ructions within the Fairfax family, management and senior editorial staff.
And no one else really gave a toss.
Which makes rather a moot point of recent claims of a ‘decline’ of MSM influence. In reality, ’twas ever thus.
After the 2025 federal election there is a new narrative that, as the readership and influence of legacy media are challenged by social media, the decline of the influence of editorial endorsement is evidence “major media companies have been left to bellow from the sidelines”.
A research paper released by The Australia Institute last week, titled “Yesterday’s kingmakers, today’s spectators”, argues that “securing newspaper endorsements was once a key part of running a successful Australian election campaign, through which Australian media shaped Australian politics”.
Was it really, though?
The academic reasoning, the historical examples and the selected data designed to show the recent federal election results and aggregated newspaper editorial endorsements fail a test of political reality and logic.
What’s more, the narrative seems to be that the majority of newspaper editorials have favoured the coalition over “progressive” Labor.
“In 2022, despite receiving a minority of major newspaper endorsements, Labor broke past the media gatekeepers, winning government with a large two-party-preferred swing in their favour,” the report said.
What on earth are they talking about? Labor’s primary vote in 2022 saw nearly a one per cent swing against them. The primary vote swing against the coalition was nearly twice as high as the 2pp swing to Labor. In other words, voters didn’t swing to Labor: they swung against the entire two-party system.
The argument is that in the 2022 and 2025 elections, “legacy newspaper and TV media has been left to bellow from the sidelines” because “newspaper endorsements and televised debates now appear to have little to no influence on public opinion”.
“Australian newspaper endorsements have overwhelmingly favoured the Coalition over Labor in the past three decades, with 2007 and 2010 being the only exceptions,” the report said.
Yet Labor barely scraped back in, in 2010. The 2pp swing against Labor was twice the swing to them in 2022. The study also conspicuously leaves out the 1993 election, which Paul Keating won with the endorsement of only one paper (the Murdoch-own Daily Telegraph). In 1998, 80 per cent of editorials backed John Howard, yet there was a massive voter backlash, resulting in the loss of 14 seats to the Coalition government, which only hung onto power by virtue of the huge buffer of 29 seats it gained in 1996.
In other words, election outcomes depend a lot more on voter choice than media endorsements.
It may comfort a declining MSM to tell themselves cosy stories about their supposed salad days of political influence, but, like most stories of ‘the good old days’, they’re a crock.
*Yes, it’s a real word.
