The distortion of the Australian public sphere: Media ownership concentration in Australia
This article will not resort to News Corp bashing, because the problem is far greater than just one company. But there are a few useful case studies emanating from News Corp that I’ll return to. The wider problem is a structural and regulatory issue where Australian politicians, from both major parties, have yet again failed to play the role of the honest broker between market forces and the public interest.
Australia is not alone in having a concentrated media market. We can see similar patterns emerging both in the US and in some parts of Europe. But Australia stands out as one of the most concentrated media markets in the world and this increasing concentration has been happening for some time. Then there is the question of why it also appears to be speeding up.
Background
We could program our Tardis to revisit various technological disruptions that have led to, first, media expansion and then concentration, eg. offset printing, the birth of radio followed by TV, but they all pale in comparison with the birth of the internet within which the world wide web (www) exists. The online/digital disruption was, and still is, immense and it caught most legacy media companies off guard.
WHAT WERE THE LEGACY MEDIA COMPANIES THINKING WHEN OFFERING THEIR QUITE EXPENSIVELY PRODUCED CONTENT FOR FREE? PROBABLY THAT THE WWW WAS A BIT OF PASSING FAD.
Australian politicians, from both major parties, have yet again failed to play the role of the honest broker between market forces and the public interest.
I saw my first web page in 1992. It is forever burned into my memory. It was the official web page of the US White House. The second page my early technology adopter colleague showed me was a fake US White House page – an ominous sign of what the www would offer in the future.
It took until the mid-to-end 1990s until media companies started to explore the potential of publishing online. Here we find pivotal moment one: most publishers made news available for free.
