Only a day after the Federal Court has ruled Andrew Bolt breached the Racial Discrimination Act, NewsStand, along with Melinda Warner from Media Matters, has launched a report looking into his kind of firebrand journalism – is Australia heading down the same path as the US?
Here it is:
From Fringe to Mainstream: The American Media Experience
In the past 20 years, the US media landscape has been dramatically transformed. Under the pressure of a changing business model, extreme commentators and opinions once on the fringe now dominate the airwaves and ratings. The Australian media, under the same market pressures, is already witnessing the same trend – extreme fringe opinions presented as fact. This report from Media Matters and NewsStand shows how, since the 1990s, ultra-conservative pundits have influenced conservative media. Fox News, openly partisan, draws a bigger audience than all other cable news networks, and so sparks a broader drift to opinion- and agenda-driven reporting replacing factual and impartial coverage. In Australia, we can see evidence of this happening in a similar trajectory. Fringe commentators such as Andrew Bolt have progressed from print press to commercial television, and the concentration of media ownership ensures the variety of opinions Australians are exposed to is shrinking. Australia should look to the US to ensure we avoid a situation where the profitability of ‘infotainment’ opinion means it is presented under the guise of mainstream news.
From Fringe to Mainstream
The American media has undergone a massive transformation in the past 20 years. Prior to the 1990s, the media consisted of three major television news networks, national newspapers (The New York Times and The Washington Post, et al), state newspapers, and a scattering of radio programs. The decade saw the birth of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News and the skyrocketing power and fame of radio hosts. The rapid, astonishing success of conservative news sources like Fox News and radio host Rush Limbaugh affected the models of newspapers across the country. Editorial pages became increasingly dominated by conservative columns, and opinion seeped into the straight news articles.
A decade later, online blogs blazed onto the international scene. A growing number of people diversified their news consumption by reading online posts written by authors with dubious sources. As more and more people began to rely on blogs, actual news sources saw their revenues and readership decline. This in turn caused newspaper editors to further shift their editorial pages – often in the direction of the widely lucrative conservative movement.
Recently, newspapers across the country have been shuttering their doors, unable to compete with the online news market. Radio hosts are retreating to the American ideal of free speech in order to protect their increasingly hateful and violent rants. Cable news networks are struggling to keep up with the Fox News juggernaut. The competition has unfortunately not resulted in objective reporting in the US that is either balanced or comprehensive:
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During the recent US debt-ceiling debate, only 4.1% of guests brought on to evening news programs to comment on the crisis were actual economists;
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In the course of a year’s worth of extreme debates about immigration, Fox featured anti-immigration guests by a 3:1 margin;
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In six months of commentary on the question of increasing EPA regulations over multiple news outlets, 76% of guests invited to speak were opponents of regulation.
These are not the statistics of a “fair and balanced”, as Fox News refer to themselves, or objective media. These are the statistics of media bowing to the will of conservative powerhouses who choose what Americans get to experience as news. These are the statistics of a media still badly in need of greater objectivity.
Missing in Action: Objective American Media
The notion of an objective media presiding over the airwaves and newsstands of the USA is now a myth. It has become tacitly acceptable for news networks to distort political debates with opinions from both extremes masquerading as legitimate news. The zealous conservative wing of the country has expanded its influence over the media to such an extent that their talking points, their ideology, and their spin is presented as fact by many “reputable” news outlets. Although media bias is evident from both sides of politics, the partisan vitriol and power-playing is overwhelmingly the pastime of commentators from the right.
After 12 years of Republican leadership, the Clinton Administration ushered in an era of Democratic control and an economic boom. The conservative fringe viewed the progress of the United States under a Democrat-held White House as an ideological threat. In order to retake power, conservatives had to undermine liberal policies and convince Americans that “liberals” were anti-America, anti-family, and anti-God… all values the right wing believes it holds a monopoly over. It was during this period that News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch made the hire that would forever alter the course of American media: by bringing on Roger Ailes to run Fox News, Murdoch made a clear play for the control of the American media and political experience.
The Rise Of Radio
At around the same time, Rush Limbaugh was fully emerging onto the national stage with a nationally broadcast radio program, a syndicated television show, and several books. Then, as today, Limbaugh was viewed as a de facto leader of the Republican Party – at one point named an honorary member of the House Republican caucus. With Republican leaders routinely calling into his radio show and kowtowing to his demands, there can be no doubt that Rush Limbaugh indeed drives public opinion.
A recent and ongoing example of his influence involves First Lady Michelle Obama’s initiative to bring awareness to the obesity problem in the US and to encourage Americans and their children to make healthier choices. Limbaugh began waging war against the program immediately, not only mocking the assertion that everyone can make better choices in regards to what they eat, but also ridiculing Mrs Obama’s weight and overall appearance. His treatment of the First Lady is echoed by conservative figures in print, online, and on television.
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Fox News host Neil Cavuto and a guest likened the First Lady to a mobster after a restaurant chain reduced sodium in its food;
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Right-wing bloggers suggested the recent East Coast earthquake was caused by the First Lady hitting a pothole while riding her bicycle;
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Conservative cartoonists portrayed the First Lady as an overweight wife gorging herself on hamburgers while harping on her husband.
Limbaugh’s prominence in the national debate and his influence over other opinion makers and politicians is further reflected in the current radio environment in which conservative hosts desperately seek to achieve similar status. Those that are successful reap great influence over American audiences. And no right-wing radio host has been more successful at commanding the political dialogue in recent years than Glenn Beck. Beck has had multiple avenues through which to fill American airwaves with his opinions. A radio host, author, and former Fox host, Beck’s broadcasts are full of wild conspiracies, paranoid delusions, outright lies, and sick jokes.
Beck’s two-year reign on Fox News was a roller coaster of chalkboard diagrams, slanderous lies about progressive figures, costumes, self-promotion, and tears. While his time on Fox News has concluded – time marked by anti-Semitic and racially charged commentary and regular invocations of violence – Beck’s foray into US mainstream media illustrates the need for vigilance against the rhetoric coming from the most extreme fringes of political discourse.
Indeed, many of Beck’s conspiracies were taken directly from the musings of online provocateur Alex Jones, known to push wild conspiracy theories and outright lies. Jones has pointed to fruit juice boxes as evidence that the government is encouraging homosexuality, and he frequently warns that an emerging global government will use mass extermination in order to consolidate power. He has also been the one to point out striking similarities between his theories and those that have been mainstreamed by Glenn Beck and Fox News.
The Decline of Newspapers
In 2007, Media Matters produced a report analyzing 96% of the 1430 English-language newspapers in the United States at that time. The report revealed a broad conservative bias across the nation’s op-ed pages. A whopping 60% of papers printed more conservative syndicated columnists than progressive, 20% printed more progressive columnists than conservative, and the remaining 20% were evenly balanced. The Fox model of promoting conservative ideology above all else has proven too lucrative for newspaper editors to ignore.
Throughout the 2008 presidential election, the health care battle, the fight to pass climate legislation, the 2010 midterm elections, and the budget negotiations of 2011, newspaper editorial pages (and indeed their reporting) followed the political whims of their editors. Media Matters noted that during the week of the anniversary of the passage of the health-care law, the Ohio Columbus Dispatch gave over their entire editorial section to the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and those commentators peddling Heritage’s talking points. Only after Media Matters prevailed upon them to broaden the scope of their pages did they admit a column from a progressive author, albeit surrounded by heavy promotion of the Heritage Foundation.
Fox News: Accountability Optional
There is no disputing Fox News’ dominance over American cable news. In February of 1996, Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to launch Fox. Ailes was a former NBC executive and media consultant to Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Fifteen years later, more people watch Fox News than the other cable news channels by a massive margin. September 2011 statistics show that while 257,000 people watch CNN and 269,000 watch MSNBC each evening, 526,000 are watching Fox.
Ailes’ notion of slanting television news to the right dates to his days in the Nixon Administration, as evidenced by a recently unearthed memo titled “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”. That memo takes on additional significance given Ailes’ recent confession that Fox News was designed not as an objective news source but as a “balance” to a perception that the rest of the media was liberally biased. But in allegedly striving to present a “balance”, what Fox and Ailes have done is actively misinformed their audience. A University of Maryland study conducted after the 2010 election found Fox News viewers were “significantly more likely” to believe:
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Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring;
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It is not clear that Obama was born in the United States;
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The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts;
- Most economists have estimated the health-care law will worsen the deficit.
Furthermore, a Stanford University study found that the Fox audience does not accept scientists’ assertions of global warming. Unsurprising, really, when Fox VP Bill Sammon told his employees to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question”.
It is clear Murdoch knew what he was doing when he hired Ailes: one of the most fearsome and skilled operatives in the Republican party, Ailes ditched the less profitable business model of an objective news network for the more profitable 24-hour political propaganda and misinformation machine. The eventual tagline “fair and balanced” proved to convince viewers that the propaganda was true journalism. A more appropriate tagline would be “accountability optional”.
This approach has certainly paid off for both Ailes and Murdoch. Just last year, Fox reaped an estimated $816 million profit, accounting for nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. Fox News reaches over 100 million households. For every two viewers watching each of the other major cable news networks, CNN and MSNBC, five are watching Fox. The success of Fox has given Ailes the freedom to shape the network and its executives in his own political image. Ailes’ view of “news” was clearly demonstrated when Bill Sammon admitted:
“Last year, candidate Barack Obama stood on a sidewalk in Toledo, Ohio, and first let it slip to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to, quote, ‘spread the wealth around’. At that time, I have to admit, that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.”
A recent Rolling Stone profile of Ailes read, “An examination of his career reveals that Ailes has used Fox News to pioneer a new form of political campaign – one that enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion. The network, at its core, is a giant sound stage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.”
Even a former Ailes deputy told Rolling Stone, “It’s a political campaign – a 24/7 political campaign. Nobody has been able to issue talking points to the American public morning after morning, day after day, night after night.”
Early Warning System
The current media landscape permits organisations and news personalities to operate under the “news” framework whilst duly lying to the public. In this climate, the US media now allows enterprising smear artists to waltz into organisations and government offices with outrageous stories, costumes, and cameras, in order to destroy systems that help millions of people. In the past few months, we’ve seen a small number of individuals, armed with hidden cameras, concoct fantastic fake identities and pose difficult and confusing questions to low-level employees at organisations that help register poor voters, help women obtain inexpensive and basic health care, or assist the poor in applying for medical assistance. Their goal is to destroy these organisations – and it has worked, because the media is unwilling to critically analyse these videos.
Planned Parenthood (PP) is a national organisation providing cheap, basic health care for men and women – and receiving government subsidies for doing so. But because it provides abortions (on top of strep tests, breast cancer screenings, STD treatment and a variety of other services), it is controversial and a target for American conservatives. Individuals from a fringe group called Live Action visited various PP clinics, posing as human traffickers hoping to obtain abortions for underage girls with no questions asked. After acting like a pimps and prostitutes, asking odd questions – and secretly filming their conversations – Live Action published heavily edited versions of the videotape.
The story was immediately seized upon by the media, many of whom failed to report the full story: that as soon as PP officials suspected the pair of operating an underage prostitution ring, they called the FBI, and later fired a clinic representative for the way she handled the round of questions. The result has been an increase in opposition to Planned Parenthood and several state governments voting to defund the program.
Fox News isn’t the only outlet reporting these types of videos as news. So-called news outlets aren’t even taking the time to review the entire videos before parroting the claims of right-wing activists with a clear agenda and a documented track record of dishonestly promoting their videos. The result has been the destruction of one group and the near collapse of another – both groups that exist to aid the poor.
The Australian Trajectory
In the US, the dominance of conservative commentators has been marked by their crossover into different mediums, and the rise of their share of TV audience (Fox News, it must be said, it already broadcast in full into Australian homes with subscription services). They are often conduits for more extreme ultra-conservative authors, and their reach is amplified by close contact with political insiders and the syndication of their content to other outlets and reporters.
Rush Limbaugh, for example, began in radio and moved into television as his audience grew. His provocative style proved hugely popular, and has been credited with inspiring a wave of similar conservative commentators, such as Glenn Beck, who launch deliberately provocative and inflammatory tirades against liberal targets.
And so to Australia. In 2011, journalist Andrew Bolt crossed over into free-to-air television, with Channel 10 show The Bolt Report. His content is broadcast over several mediums and syndicated throughout News Limited press. His column is printed in all major News Limited newspapers, with a nationwide weekday circulation of at least 1.5 million. The Power Index said of Bolt that “there’s no medium this conservative can’t conquer”.
There truly is an unnerving synchronicity between Bolt’s burgeoning nationwide platform and Glenn Beck’s once bold cross-media juggernaut. Bolt’s divisive, worldview-heavy material reaches millions every day and his punchy monologues mercilessly mine the hard right for material.
Conservative political leaders often can be heard singing from the same sheet, as the issues of the day develop – as even Fox News staff admitted is the case in the US. In Australia, for example, the first to come to Andrew Bolt’s support when found guilty in September 2011 of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act was conservative Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, who echoed Andrew Bolt’s response and warned against restricting “the sacred principle of free speech”.
The blurring of opinion and fact in the US has made it difficult to distinguish between objective, impartial news and partisan opinion. While Fox News has claimed: “the average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page”, there are many examples of Fox’s ‘straight news’ hours – 9am-4pm and 6-8pm on weekdays – being rife with the same bias and same content its opinion makers broadcast outside of those hours.
In Australia, during an NRL preliminary final in September 2011 broadcast to almost 1.7 million viewers nationwide, commentators Ray Warren and Phil Gould launched into what appeared to be a scripted attack on proposed legislation to address problem gambling. The broadcast went so far as to simultaneously display the Clubs Australia campaign website URL. At no point did Warren or Gould mention that they were offering their opinions for any other reason than they were genuinely held views, and no mention was made as to other motivations for doing so.
This is a symptom of the creep of agenda-driven politics into the mainstream media and beyond – even, in this case, into a sporting broadcast. Ultra-conservative opinion makes its way into conservative ‘straight news’, and from there is syndicated further. Combined with a shrinking of budgets for actual ‘straight news’, the temptation to recycle opinion as fact is strong, as demonstrated in the US experience.
This is compounded by the relatively high level of media concentration in Australia, and the international trend towards increasing concentration. In Australia, the top three newspaper companies own a 98% share of circulation – with the majority (70% of the metropolitan daily news market) owned by News Limited. In the US, only 26% of circulation is controlled by the top three companies, but TV network ownership is highly concentrated (2164 on the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index).
Newspapers, however, play a disproportionate role in driving the overall news cycle. Print stories are the source of much of the news of the day reported in other mediums. Australia’s print press drives the agenda and, in the other direction, TV news (influenced by the morning’s paper) is syndicated back to online newspaper sites. The concentration of ownership in Australia means the trajectory evident in the US media landscape could occur much more rapidly in Australia, and spread to a higher percentage of the total news audience.
What can be done?
The changing business model and market pressures on news outlets increase the temptation to fall back on the combative columnists and divisive TV and radio hosts that peddle their opinion as news – and drive profits. What we will be left with in this situation is mainstream news dominated by what would appropriately be classed as opinion, and which is often deliberately inflammatory. Australia needs to act quickly to prevent this from happening, given that the trend towards such a model is already evident.
Media Matters has had successes in its campaign against conservative media control: Glenn Beck left his Fox show after two years; the new, costume-fueled attacks on Medicaid have not taken root; more than one radio host has been forced off the air due to Media Matters’ exposure of their use of racist language; and this is not to mention the numerous lies and smears devised by the right that never progress to mainstream media because of the efforts of the Media Matters staff. But these victories are battles won in a never-ending war.
If Media Matters had existed as Murdoch, Ailes, and Limbaugh’s tactics began gaining traction, we could have helped avoid the conservative leanings in our current media. We may have been able to expose Murdoch and Ailes for what they were planning before their methods became a matter of course in American news. The conservative media would be widely recognised as such.
Both the Australian and American complaints processes are convoluted. There are many procedures to follow in order to achieve results from a complaint – and that is how it should be. Any governmental oversight committee must be structured to prevent censorship of any kind. Regulation agencies can provide one form of balance to developing problems in the media, and by increasing the number of eyes watching the media, the extent of the misinformation can be greatly decreased. Organisations like Media Matters and NewsStand can bring to light the misinformation, lies, and partisan or negative rhetoric that creeps into the media, and thus allow citizens to respond. Public outcry against a media outlet can be more effective than waiting for a governmental agency to reprimand the offending parties.
Thus the true arbiters of what is acceptable news are the viewers themselves – coupled with organisations they can look to for media scrutiny that highlights digressions, and effective regulatory agencies where they can direct their complaints when they find something they judge to be inappropriate. It is essential for Australians to be presented more than one opinion, and always based on factual sources.
Happily, such opportunities to find solutions are already appearing, and the independent Australian media inquiry headed by former judge Ray Finkelstein is the first step on a long road to reform.
Report Authors:
Melinda Warner, Media Matters for America
Ed Coper, NewsStand
Download the report here.
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