Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is dragging the Liberal Party down “one funeral at a time”. And visa-versa. Michael Pascoe reports.
Two swimmers struggling in the water might survive individually but both are more likely to drown if they grab the other. The Murdochs’ Australian operation and the Liberal Party are like that, captives of the mutual base they have created, dragging each other down.
Quite simply, Murdoch is killing the Liberal Party, locked in a vicious cycle of needing to feed its audience the echo chamber it demands, ensuring in the process that the Liberal base remains disconnected from modern Australia, reinforcing the narrow conservatism that has led the coalition into the electoral wilderness.
Just as the Murdochs’ Fox News was forced by its audience to rapidly swing back to supporting Trump after daring to question his 2020 election lie, the local Murdoch audience demands the diet it’s been fed of climate denialism, culture wars and a general brand of conservatism ranging from hard-right to far-loopy. Rowan Dean, anyone?
A dying demographic
It’s a destructive diet made worse by the Coalition’s demographics (aging and dying). A moderate former MP once told me of frustration of attending branch meetings to be met with a barrage of demands and advice based on whatever the members had just heard Alan Jones say on Sky News.
Jones no longer sings on Sky but song remains the same. The Sky After Dark menagerie and the Australian’s opinion pages exactly fit the diagnosis former Liberal Attorney General George Brandis gave Four Corners last week:
“We alienated women, particularly women who wanted to work from home. We offended public servants. We offended multicultural communities. We insulted people who live in the inner cities. We didn’t really have an offering for young people, particularly students. We offended other minority groups as well. It was almost as if we were running out of new people to offend.”
Brandis said it wasn’t just the bad campaign the lost the election. The Liberal Party had become narrower.
“The people you have to persuade to vote for you live in the centre ground of Australian politics and if you spend your time drinking your own political bathwater and only living in an echo chamber of far-right wing opinion, you’re never going to get them.”
Alias, living in narrow, aging Murdoch land.
The ashes of Ashton
This is not new. Niki Savva served up prescient similar analysis after the Liberal Party lost the Ashton by-election in 2023, warning that the base and the parliamentary party was very much out of sync with community sentiment.
“If they keep listening to all those who say ‘you’re not right wing enough, you’re not conservative enough’, well they’re off on the path to oblivion.”
The record shows the party did not take Savva’s advice, preferring the conservative comfort of Murdoch land.
Overwhelmingly, the Murdoch audience, like Liberal Party membership, skews old. The Guardian on the weekend reported Liberal membership in freefall in NSW and Victoria where the average age is 68.
When the branches aren’t occupied with stacking (as they are, according to Savva), the Guardian quotes members busy buying flowers:
“One of the biggest expenses we used to have (at our local branch) was on funeral wreaths. We’d be down at the florist every week handing over $70.”
Planck’s principle in full states: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.”
That has been paraphrased as “science progresses one funeral at a time” and further evolved into “society progresses one funeral at a time”. It promises to be a slow task for Sussan Ley to bury enough of the Murdochians to make the party modern.
The irony of course is that while Murdoch organs dominate Coalition thinking, they’ve demonstrably lost their sway over the electorate. It’s easy to brand News Corp as the Coalition’s propaganda wing but it’s effectiveness has been diving for a dozen years.
The long slow slide
Neither major party has a primary vote to be proud of, both are shadows of their former selves, but last month the Coalition sank to third place. More people (33.6 per cent) put 1 next to independents and minor parties than they did for Liberal and National candidates (31.8 per cent).
Labor’s primary vote fell to miserable status in 2013 – 33.4 per cent – but it has been fairly stable since then. The Coalition primary vote over the same dozen years has been in a steady slide from 45.6 per cent, eaten away by the “other” that was just 21.1 per cent a dozen years ago.
A dozen years of headlines, stories, editorials and broadcast raves attacking Labor has done no damage to its true believers and failed to stop the Coalition’s primary vote atrophying.
(As an aside, given the stirrings of the conservative and simple minded, it’s worth quoting Antony Green: “What is odd is that the declining level of support for major parties has seen some call for the abolition of preferential voting. It seems nonsensical to abandon a system designed to elect a winner representing majority support in an electoral district, for a system that would produce minority winners from an ever-declining level of major party support.”)
Rupert Murdoch told the Australian’s 60th birthday party last year that printed newspapers had a life expectancy of 15 years and that only with “a lot of luck”.
That’s partly the one-funeral-at-a-time thing at work. Physical newspaper readers tend to be old. An Australian Communications and Media Authority study last year detailed the demographics. Just over half of Australians aged 75+ had read a print newspaper in the previous week, but only 7 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds.
More worrying: “Younger Australians are shifting away from online news websites and towards social media websites and apps, with just 12% of 18–24-year-olds using online news websites as their main source, down from 28% in 2022.
Social media websites or apps were more likely to be the main source of news for those aged 18–24 (46%) and 25– 34 (38% up from 28% in 2022), higher than all other age groups.”
Funereal numbers
It is Sky News claim to fame that it’s big on YouTube. It needs to be as it’s almost nowhere anywhere else.
Amanda Meade’s Weekly Beast recorded that lawyer Adam Houda’s defamation action against Sky and Andrew Bolt brought full disclosure of how many people watch The Bolt Report across all Sky Platforms.
For the 7pm broadcast on Foxtel on the night the allegedly defamatory comments were made (23 January 2024) there was an average audience of 57,000.
For a rough comparison, Bolt is up against ABC News and Nine’s A Current Affair in the 7pm time slot. Both free-to-air shows usually have up to 1 million viewers.
On Sky News Regional, Bolt picked up another 43,900 and Sky News Now had 10,100 streams.
On Foxtel’s streaming platform the program had an average audience of 4,600 with 250 video-on-demand streams.
On the Flash service there were 757 streams and an additional 48 on the Sky News website.
The content was also published on skynews.com.au, Facebook and YouTube.
No wonder the Sky After Dark ravers failed to swing the election – only those addicted to the hard-right echo chamber heard.
But that category is the aging Liberal Party membership and its representatives. And, in my opinion, it seems to play with their political perception.
For example, Jacinta Price, a Murdoch media favourite and regular guest on Sky, believes people want her to be Prime Minister.
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Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.