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“A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!”
So thundered science fiction author Robert A Heinlein (through the thinly disguised mouthpiece of his character Jubal Harshaw, in Stranger in a Strange Land). When it comes to the legacy media, the whores are not just incompetent: they’re the pox-ridden Typhoid Marys of Misinformation. An exasperated Frank Sinatra didn’t call the Australian media “pimps and hookers” for nothing.
As the New Zealand readers of Good Oil will know from experience, the government doling out taxpayer money to the legacy media only buys one thing: propaganda. As lawyer and journalist Paul Chadwick warned in 1999, “All roads from a so-called independent statutory tribunal lead back through a parliament to a cabinet room.”
So, you’ll excuse me if I take a dim view of yet another legacy media initiative going cap-in-hand to the government and asking for special favours.
The Albanese government’s proposed News Bargaining Incentive is the latest example: force social media and search giants to hand over 2.25 per cent of their Australian revenue to “support quality journalism” unless they strike a deal. Legacy outlets are cheering it as a public-interest saviour. They would say that.
The Public Interest Journalism Initiative, which is chaired by Allan Fels, warned the committee that “news market failure” was becoming a more likely prospect across the country.
This was because the producers of public interest journalism faced the overlapping challenges of declining advertising revenue and an increasing reliance on digital platforms for referral traffic.
Yet, as Heather du Plessis-Allan noted recently, the media have mostly brought their woes on themselves. They have spent years squandering the public’s trust through serial scandals, selective reporting and outright disinformation. Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop suppression, the ‘very fine people’ hoax, the Covid lies… these weren’t isolated slip-ups. They were institutional failures that made millions of ordinary people conclude the legacy press was actively working against them.
Far too many people are turning for their news to social media, which is notoriously biased and unreliable.
I’ll pause for you all to wipe the spray of your beverage from your screens.
Social media may spread conspiracies, but the legacy media are hardly immune. The New York Times hired Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer for denying Stalin’s Holodomor while millions starved. It still hasn’t rescinded the prize. More recently, columnist Nicholas Kristof’s anti-Israel pieces have been shredded for basic factual errors and ideological distortion. When the Times gets caught, it issues a quiet correction (on rare occasions) or simply shrugs. When Facebook gets it wrong, it’s a national emergency.
This isn’t new. Old media has always feared and smeared the new. In 1938, newspapers hyped the mythical “War of the Worlds” radio panic to discredit the upstart medium. The same pattern repeats today: legacy outlets warn that social media is destroying democracy while ignoring their own role in eroding it. The campaign against platforms isn’t about truth. It’s about protecting market share and forcing the punters back into the fold. They’re the equivalent of the Ostlers’ Union or horse-whip companies demanding the government get those new-fangled automobiles off the road.
Research published last year by the University of Canberra found for the first time that social media platforms had overtaken online news sites as the main source of news for many people.
Television remains the most popular source of news, favoured by 37 per cent of people. But social media was the main source of news for 26 per cent, compared to just 23 per cent for online news sites.
There is really only one solution to this problem.
Yes: start telling the truth. Stop telling lies for power.
That’s all a bit hard for the legacy media, of course. So naturally, they turn to a government that is only too eager to buy off the press.
The Albanese plan is classic protectionism dressed as public interest. The Public Interest Journalism Initiative warns of “news market failure”. Funny how the market only fails when it stops subsidising their preferred narrative. The same outlets that spent years lecturing us about ‘misinformation’, while peddling it assiduously themselves, now demand special treatment because the public has voted with its feet.
Australians aren’t turning to social media because they love conspiracies. They’re turning because legacy media spent two decades proving it couldn’t be trusted.
Government intervention won’t fix that. It will only confirm the suspicion that the legacy media are now client media – dependent on the political class they’re meant to hold to account. As Heinlein knew, once the whores start taking government coin, they stop being honest hookers and become something far less respectable.
The Albanese government can force the tech giants to pay. It cannot force the public to trust the legacy media.
