While everyone seems to be worrying about the impact of a surging One Nation on the traditional parties of the right, will no-one think of the real losers? That looks like being Lachlan Murdoch and his News Corp confreres.
For News Corp, in Australia now, it’s existential. Those people abandoning the Liberals and Nationals for One Nation aren’t just voters. They’re something much more important. They’re a business model. More, for the Murdochs, they’re THE business model.
It’s not the first time the Murdoch family — or Lachlan himself, for that matter — has found the perceptions of their power suddenly constrained by the unpredictable whims of their audiences. In the US, it’s driven the slow gutting of their political clout as, under Rupert, Fox zig-zagged from undermining and critiquing Trump to whole-hearted cheer-leading and back again.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1248317
The Murdochs have always had to fight harder for power in America. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this in Australia, where the family’s iron hand on the right of politics goes back almost a century to the original media Murdoch, Sir Keith, who largely ran the 1930s United Australia Party out of The Herald & Weekly Times offices in Melbourne.
But for this generation, control was supposed to be cemented in the post-Morrison Liberal Party with the help of the Liberal’s maker and shaker, once-was PM Tony Abbott, on the family payroll. Abbott is the first Australian pollie to be made a board member of the family’s Fox Corp. It comes with a nice $US335,000 in cash and stock last financial year, while the family’s publishing arm, Harper-Collins, has also published Abbott’s Australia: A History, a must buy for the hard-to-please Sky News watcher in your life.
The key to control has been having the final say on conservative talking points, delivered through a harder line on content that followed the consolidation of ownership of Sky in 2016. This turned into corporate strategy with the pivot to reader revenues through subscriptions.
Ever since the big tech platforms grabbed hold of advertising, subscriptions are the only strategy that has been found to work at scale in mass media. And News Corp has been the most successful in meshing subscriptions with a right-wing agenda.
At the same time, the Australian mastheads have tried to stand close enough to traditional news values to keep their news coverage broad enough — and straight enough — to hang on to more centre-right readers, particularly in the high-paying corporate market.
But when subscriptions meet politics, it creates the all-too-standard piper-paying problem: politically motivated subscribers want to call the tune. Right now, the most problematically demanding of those subscribers sit dead centre of the demographic of those Liberal and National voters most at risk of defecting to One Nation.
The readers of News Corp papers lean older, usually retired. It’s an age group that boasts below-average education, is increasingly self-funded thanks to superannuation, largely Anglo, and often living in regional communities. Crikey contributor William Bowe gave a breakdown of One Nation voters in his Poll Bludger blog last week.
One option for the US company is to follow on behind and pivot to One Nation, just as Fox eventually went all in on Trump. They already seem to be quietly testing the waters — think “booing on the inside” over Welcome to Country, as Peta Credlin grumbled last week.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1249355
Right-wing media in the UK have already gone all in on the radical right-wing Reform Party, most openly seen in broadcaster GB News’ embrace of party leader (and their own program presenter) Nigel Farage, in a relationship that has boosted the audiences of both.
In Germany, the Axel Springer group is grappling with its own version of the Murdoch dilemma as it attempts to build itself as a global — increasingly Anglophone — voice. As the hard-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has surged in the past couple of years in demographics similar to One Nation, the media group once loyal to the traditional right-wing Christian Democrats has slowly been edging towards Europe’s far-right parties, including the anti-immigrant AfD, which CEO Mathias Döpfner once described as antithetical to the company’s values.
For News Corp, in Australia, it’s a pivot that’s easier claimed than done. It forces a choice between money and power.
While all the wannabes in the Liberal and National parties needed either Sky or the mastheads (or both) to build their profile on the right, Pauline Hanson, well, doesn’t. She’s got the much more useful Facebook, after all — the platform she’s powered to speak directly to the over-65s whose votes she’s after.
For Lachlan, things are happening fast. One minute, you’re being fitted out in your father’s oligarchic robes, the next your preferred political parties fall apart and the new voice of the right seems to think it just doesn’t need you. The traditional offers of memoirs from News Corp’s publishing arm, your own programs on Sky or columns in their newspapers just don’t cut it any more.
For Hanson, that’s just all unnecessary effort compared to the ease of Facebook and the gift of a “sexy” plane from her preferred oligarch and fellow boomer, Gina Rinehart.
