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Gettin’ woke, goin’ broke. It’s what the left does. Nowhere more so than in the news media.
In the USA, centre-right Fox News is trouncing all its left-wing competitors combined. In Australia, Fox’s centre-right cousin, News Corp dominates the media landscape not through ownership of mastheads (although it owns a lot) but by sales.
The left-wing ABC would be floundering if it weren’t guaranteed an eye-watering billion-plus dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.
The other bastion of woke leftism, the Guardian, is also haemorrhaging money. It’s no surprise to see who’s sinking money into to it, either.
The left-wing news site has struggled since day one to turn a profit.
Since its first digital edition at the end of May 2013, thanks to the financial backing of entrepreneur Graeme Wood, founder of travel website wotif, The Guardian Australia has notched up $26.m in total losses over its seven years of operation.
It’s famously said that there is nothing to stop the Flat Earth News being a bestselling paper except a lack of people with 5p and a conviction that the Earth is flat. The good news for the Guardian is that they are attracting more people each year convinced that the Earth is left-wing – just not nearly enough.
An analysis by Media of the financial results of the media outlet’s local company GNM Australia since 2013 financial year reveal the now Lenore Taylor-led masthead has managed to grow sales revenue each year since it began for total sales receipts of $62m.
However, profit has been much harder to come by, with GNM recording a loss in four out of its seven years.
Is it any surprise that the left-wing legacy media are begging the government to prop them up, either by direct funding or by taxing the social media corporations?
But, what’s particularly interesting in all this is just who is behind the Guardian’s Australian venture.
[Editor Lenore] Taylor wrote on her online news site recently about how the local edition had come to pass, confirming that [Malcolm] Turnbull had a hand in the media outlet’s creation[…]
The former Goldman Sachs investment banker’s role was revealed in his highly anticipated memoir, A Bigger Picture, published by Hardie Grant.
“I suggested to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the UK’s Guardian, that he should establish an Australian edition … we exchanged some rough numbers and he concluded he’d need $20m of underwriting for three years,” Mr Turnbull wrote.
Mr Turnbull wrote that he brokered the $20m deal between Rusbridger and Mr Wood, who was on “the political left” and had been a generous donor to the Greens.
Turnbull, Wood…the same clique of wealthy Soros Mini-Mes crop up everywhere. Green oligarchs with their fingers in all the progressive pies.
That doesn’t mean I want to see the Guardian fail. Just because I don’t like its politics doesn’t mean I’d like to see yet another media site go under. But I would like to see the left-wing echo-chamber of the Guardian and its ilk engage in some serious self-reflection. If the left can’t sell papers or page views, they seriously need to review their Trump-deranged, far-left spiral into irrelevancy. A principled left media of some kind is necessary – but it must be principled. And it must give up its monolithic groupthink and start paying attention to what punters want to read.
In Citizen Kane, when Orson Welles’ Kane is informed that his paper lost a million dollars a year, he laughs that, at that rate, he’ll go broke in 67 years. The Guardian’s backers won’t have that long.
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