Australia is about to experience its biggest shake-up in media ownership laws for nearly 30 years.
In 1987, then-treasurer Paul Keating declared media owners could be “queens of screen or princes of print but not both.” But digital technology has obliterated that distinction, and media owners may now become emperors of everything.
Using online platforms and social media, television and radio broadcasters now publish text; newspapers now publish audio and video. Audiences—at least where the infrastructure is good—can stream and podcast anything from anywhere. Digitization mocks the rule that says a broadcast licence-holder can own only two out of three distribution platforms in any one market—when the field consisted of newspapers, radio, and television.
Similarly, the rule that a broadcaster’s audience reach is restricted to a maximum of 75 percent of the population is unenforceable when audiences can download from anywhere.
However, the underlying rationale for those rules remains valid. It is in the public interest to have a diversity of voices in the news media and some restraints on the concentration of media power.
Australia already has extremely concentrated news media ownership. This is most vividly exemplified by News Corp’s control of about 70 percent of daily newspaper circulation. This, incidentally, was the most spectacular consequence of the 1987 shake-up.
Policy Challenges
Achieving a diversity of news media voices remains a difficult policy challenge.
Theoretically, digital technology enables everyone with a computer, access to the Internet and the skills of basic literacy to become a publisher. A few new players have emerged as a result, most notably Crikey and The Guardian Australia, but the overwhelming majority of people who get their news online get it from the long-established media organizations—the ABC, News Corp, and Fairfax.
The reason is that even with the heavy cuts to journalists’ jobs, these organizations still have more resources, more access to newsmakers, a bigger news-making capability, and stronger reputations than most startups.
If the mooted rule changes go through, the mergers already foreshadowed by the media industry will mean less diversity—not more.
A further unresolved policy challenge concerns the provision of local news services in regional and rural Australia.
