Paper emperors or paper tigers
Partisanship in Australian media reached new heights in the 2019 federal election — at least according to The New Daily and ABC’s Media Watch. Media Watch’s audit of metropolitan front pages showed heavy anti-Labor bias from News Corp papers and almost as aggressively anti-Labor coverage from Nine Entertainment’s papers.
This isn’t a new phenomenon.
New research from Professor Sally Young at the University of Melbourne in her book Paper Emperors: the rise of Australia’s newspaper empires shows how Australia’s press was founded as explicitly partisan political outfits — and for all major metropolitan papers, universal support for the major conservative political party of the day.
So what are editorials?
Editorials date back to the early 19th century, when small, underground newspapers were starting to be replaced by major metropolitan dailies owned by various magnates, governments or political parties.
Soon, newspaper owners and their handpicked editors turned their papers on influencing the politics of the day. This manifested as the single, unnamed “public voice” of the paper: the editorial.
Newspapers were founded to explicitly influence politics. Making information more accessible to people was just one step.
The editorial filled a useful gap in the political project of newspaper owners. It could be an explicit statement, in a way that reporting couldn’t be.
It could be, all at the same time, their readers’ political will, their staff’s collective view and their owner’s personal opinion — even if none of them had been asked their opinion.
What an editorial usually represents — ultimately — is the paper’s corporate-political identity as a business in an appeal and not-so-veiled threat to society’s movers and shakers.
The dominant view in journalism is that editorials reflect a contest of ideas, where individual journalists debate what the most important political issue of the day is and come to some consensus on which editorial to run.
That’s clearly not the case.
Generously, editorials speak for the management in the editorial board. Rick Morton, late of The Australian, talks about class homogeneity in Australian newsrooms, with journalists and editors coming from the same rich families, going to the same rich schools and universities and living in the same rich neighbourhoods. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume these people would share similar, largely conservative, political opinions.
The line that gets run by mouthpieces on the left of Australian politics is that these newspapers have their political direction dictated to them by their corporate owners — the Murdochs and the Packers. Sally Young’s book says this theory bears fruit, at least for the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century.
The problem is that, despite the consolidation of media ownership over the last fifty years, newspaper endorsements have become less homogeneously conservative since the 1990s.
Another theory might be that endorsements speak more to the commercial interests of the paper rather than its owners. Specifically, that editors want to reflect what they perceive as their audience’s political identity, and given newspaper subscribers skew older, whiter and richer, they will tend to hold more conservative views — but when the political winds are blowing another direction, it would be commercially prudent for the paper to shift with them.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer about which is more true. In a way, they’re all true, and how true each are changes.
I set about seeing if endorsement editorials — the editorials that get published on election day telling the reader who to vote for — gave any clues as to how bias manifests in Australia, and if it’s changed.
Why endorse political parties?
It’s difficult to work out how many people read editorials, but industry wisdom holds that it’s relatively few.
The Enhanced Media Metrics Australia, the monthly readership data issued by Nielsen, breaks readership down by newspaper and even sections or inserts, but does not separate out readership of sports, news and opinion, let alone editorials and the letters page.
The transition from paper to online for newspapers also impact readership. Editorials and opinion get mixed in with reporting and the line gets fuzzy when papers rely on social media click-throughs to drive traffic. On the other hand, editorials are usually hidden from the paper’s landing page, meaning browsers or subscribers may miss the story entirely.
So without knowing if people even read your editorial, why gamble your political capital and independence on an endorsement?
The secret is that the audience of editorials aren’t your everyday reader.
Editorials are aimed squarely at industry big-wigs, political decision-makers, and — importantly — other journalists, especially those who rely on the morning newspaper to lead the day’s radio and television coverage.
Endorsements get amplified in these circles. They carry real weight — even if their implied threats are illusionary.
As an aside, it’s worth remembering that Sunday editions have their own brand, audience and editorial board, and, as a result, sometimes issue conflicting endorsements to their daily counterpart.
Who do Australian newspapers endorse?
I went through the ProQuest Newsstream and pulled out the election editorials for each of the major metropolitan papers from 1996 to 2019.
I found that media ownership did not really affect editorial direction.
Whether it was News Corp, Fairfax, Nine Entertainment or Seven West, Australian papers tended to endorse the same parties each election, with some like The Age and the Canberra Times less consistent than others, reflecting their audiences’ more progressive political preferences.
The big trend I did identify was that papers would endorse Labor (or choose not to issue an endorsement) when it seemed likely that Labor would win the two party-preferred vote in whatever market the paper was working in.
Essentially — if a Labor win in a state looked overwhelmingly likely, that state’s papers would avoid endorsing conservative parties. Pretty easy to infer that the paper is aware that a conservative endorsement would antagonise a not-insubstantial portion of their audience.
If we compare Sally Young’s research to my analysis of endorsements, we see that newspapers have become less uniformly supportive of conservative parties.
This seems to bear out the idea that newspaper editorials have transitioned from consciously reflecting the political will of their owners to reflecting the “political marketplace” inhabited by their readership — or at least how the editorial team perceives their readership.
When once upon a time, newspapers would endorse conservative parties despite their audiences, newspapers today seem more receptive or at least reactive to their audiences’ voter preferences.
Why do some outlets not endorse parties?
Since “peak consolidation” following the closure of the Herald and Weekly Times and the merger of morning and afternoon editions in the early 1990s, Australia’s print news landscape has seen a period of unprecedented diversification, mostly driven by NewMedia organisations using the internet to reach their audiences.
These NewMedia outlets have chosen to avoid issuing election endorsements, or editorials altogether.
Part of this can be attributed to their writing style. Youth outlets often fuse journalism and opinion, and give their writers a lot of freedom to express personal views inside stories. More established media outlets have also started going this, albeit while continuing to hide behind apparent journalistic independence.
These outlets don’t see a point of an explicit editorial.
But even those who do issue editorials (or whatever their equivalent is), there’s a fairly consistent throughline from editors. I interviewed editors at several NewMedia organisations and newer newspapers and they mostly shared a similar attitude to political endorsements.
Several NewMedia outlets noted that their audiences skew younger, better educated and less wedded to the major political parties. Furthermore, because they operated on much a smaller staff without a seperate editorial or executive board, choosing a political party to endorse would amount to journalists and editors sharing who they vote for in an all-staff meeting, which would make for an unpleasant work environment.
The Saturday Paper, for example, took a “principled stand” against endorsements in 2016 and 2019:
This is not because such an endorsement would be anachronistic or self-important, although it would be that too. It is because nowhere in this campaign has the vision of either party shown itself to be sufficiently brave or large or consistent as to warrant commendation.
Universally, these NewMedia outlets and national regulars echoed their major metro counterparts with strong assertions of their political independence, from both their corporate owners and from political parties.
They certainly have a stronger claim to that independence than the major metro newspapers.
