Who Killed the News?

A new book by one of Australia's most respected journalists looks at the destructive role of many media magnates in the past century. But was it men who killed the news, or machines?

A story ostensibly about the history of media barons and their abuses of power, ‘The Men Who Killed the News: The Inside Story of How Media Moguls Abused their Power, Manipulated the Truth and Distorted Democracy’ is a classic example of events overtaking an author's chosen thesis.

To be fair, author and veteran journalist Eric Beecher (owner of Crikey and a former editor of both Fairfax and News Corp newspapers), admits as much in the afterword.

 “When I first began to think about writing this book, a decade ago, its central premise was uncomplicated,” Beecher writes. “The owners and practitioners of news journalism either exercised their social licence responsibly or they abused it, but they used it. “

“Ten years on, as media power has shifted rapidly into the hands of the owners of social-media algorithms and partisan propaganda platforms, technology is replacing the humans. Scale is no longer a limitation. The century-old idea that greedy, malign media moguls are the greatest danger to moral journalism has become almost quaint.”

That dramatic shift in power of the past decade in some ways undermines Beecher's original intention to the extent that one wonders whether his publisher ever asked him to recast the entire book to focus on what is happening right now. To use a journalistic cliche, he “buried the lead”.

So, this starts out as a story about the media moguls, both good and bad, who dominated the 20th century, an era in which it was possible to amass significant wealth and political influence through ownership of media assets. With a virtual monopoly on advertising, they had elected leaders at their beck and call (indeed some still do).

Beecher's telling of the colourful, albeit well-trodden, histories of the Hearsts and Pulitzers, Northcliffes and Beaverbrooks, Maxwells and Murdochs is central to the book. These are people who cast themselves as romantic swashbucklers doing battle with ‘the elites’ and who revelled in flexing power without responsibility while making extraordinary profits in the process. It was called the 'popular press' because it had no higher purpose than getting people's attention. Beecher describes the ‘magic formula’:

“Titillating journalism = mass audiences = abundant advertising revenue = vast profits= political power. This is the formula, in its raw simplicity, that empowered a coterie of moguls to exploit journalism to both uphold and pollute civil society, with Murdoch as its greatest exponent.”

But with newspapers virtually dead as a medium, arguably the more compelling story is the one he dedicates less space to. And that is the threat to democracy's institutions from artificial intelligence, unaccountable social media platforms and in the case of Murdoch’s Fox News, an empire openly prepared to spread disinformation to support the commercial imperative of maintaining an audience that has grown increasingly dependent on the delusions it cynically pedals. So the title of this book is to an extent a misnomer. ‘The men’ didn’t kill the news at all. The machines did.

With that in mind, I often found myself skimming the mogul anecdotes in the central chapters of the book to get back to the vital moral issues about journalism that Beecher identifies in a hard-hitting opening chapter, one in which he muses on the cumulative damage done to liberal democracies by publishers who place profits and power ahead of civic responsibility and decency.

In perhaps his most piercing insight, Beecher talks of media owners exploiting a ‘loophole’ in democracy built around their organisations’ unlimited access to power, information as a tradable (sometimes lethal) commodity, and the use of fear to bring elected leaders to heel.

“When I first became a journalist in my 20s, I was highly motivated, like most of my peers, by its mission to report the facts and uncover important things that people don’t want aired in public; to be society’s watchdog,” Beecher recalls.

“Over the years...I began thinking less about the obvious virtues of journalism and more about the exploitation of journalism by its owners and their enablers. I know why it happens – human nature and greed – but I remain perplexed as to why most people working inside the media almost never talk about their power or make themselves accountable for it.”

This gets to the heart of the issues he raises - the inability or refusal of journalists to ever reflect on their own power and how it is abused. I and other former journalists and academics have written and presented on this for years, without anything ever changing. Journalists remain notoriously incurious about their own power and how the media industry, which employs them, actually works. They piously proclaim their role as public watchdogs but are revealed so often as nothing more than handservants for the commercial and ideological ambitions of the people who own the platforms that employ them. In one of the best passages of the book, Beecher rips back the curtain of convenience under which journalists operated:

“The truth is, journalism has always operated as a kind of mirage,” he writes. “The people who consume it have never paid what it costs to produce. And the people who funded most of those costs, the advertisers, never had a say in what was produced because they were paying for a different product – access to the audience. To me, this misalignment of incentives always felt uneasy. And, finally, it has proved to be untenable.”

Of course, the likes of the Murdochs will say they ARE accountable to ‘the market’ and the proof of whether they are serving a need is in the readership and viewership figures of their publications and broadcasts. But producing journalism is not like producing widgets. Its value is not measured solely by the number of eyeballs its output attracts, but by the tough questions it asks of power and by its capacity to reveal truths in the public interest that those who hold power do not want revealed. Unfortunately, the reality is that public trust in media has never been lower than it is now, and that is partly because the legacy media, under pressure from digital platforms that built a better advertising mousetrap, are getting down into the same sewer as social media to generate clicks and attention.

In his final chapter on reimagining journalism, Beecher turns back to the more interesting question about how, if at all, we can restore the civic principles of public interest journalism while ensuring it is commercially viable. He runs through the familiar alternative models - philanthropy, niche publishing, government subsidy etc; - none of which restore the old town square or mass market information commons that everyone would draw from.

But I think this is putting the cart before the horse. The priority is not finding a viable business model but restoring trust in journalism and public support for its civic purpose. In many ways, civic journalism should be seen as a public utility like safe drinking water and breathable air. But it can’t survive without trust.

And that will require enforceable standards. Beecher rightly notes that journalism, alone among the ‘professions’ (more a craft really) has no governing body with the power to sanction abuses of agreed standards. There is no licensing or formal self-policing. Instead, culture and behaviour are set from the top of each organisation and percolate down through the ranks. We see the outcome of this in Australia in which every move by local government on media regulation has been to satisfy the commercial imperatives of dominant organisations like Nine, News Corp and Seven West Media, while any move toward greater public accountability is dismissed as an attempt to undermine the power of the Fourth Estate.

We had a proposal in Australia after the Finklestein media inquiry in 2012 for a legislated News Media Council that would have made binding decisions about media malfeasance. Beyond providing the funding, the government itself would have had no role in the council, which would have comprised community industry, and professional representatives. In the UK, after the phone hacking scandals, the Leveson inquiry recommended something similar - a powerful independent body with the capacity to deliver real sanctions. In both cases, nothing happened, partly because politicians were too gutless and partly because the media barons played the ‘freedom’ card.

In the meantime, the consequences of the unaccountable power of media owners grow more threatening by the day. In 2023, Murdoch's Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $US800 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election. Recently, free-speech absolutist Elon Musk actively sought to foment violent unrest in the UK by using his platform, X (formerly Twitter), to encourage the spread of disinformation.

In the world’s most concentrated media market, half a million Australians in 2020 signed a petition to parliament calling for a Royal Commission into the dominance of Rupert Murdoch. The petition was supported by two former prime ministers – Labor’s Kevin Rudd, who has called Murdoch “an arrogant cancer on our democracy” and the Liberals’ Malcolm Turnbull, who sees the Murdochs’ ‘angertainment’ business model as one of the greatest threats to the democratic world. Yet nothing changes, and one can’t imagine anything happening until Murdoch senior dies. And maybe not even then.

I agree with Beecher that civic-minded, public interest journalism is essential to a functioning liberal democracy. But the death of the 20th century business model in which a virtual monopoly on advertising subsidised quality journalism has created a dangerous vaccuum. In the meantime, morally deficient characters like Murdoch and Musk are exploiting that loophole in democracy that Beecher rightly identifies to undermine the institutions of democracy.

Don't tell me there is absolutely nothing we can do about that, beyond signing petititions?