The Captive Press by David Bowman

At a recent international conference at Victoria Falls, Mr Rupert Murdoch spoke passionately of the role of a free press. His national masthead, The Australian, reported the essence. Mr Murdoch said too many journalists made life easy for governments because they lacked the energy and mental attitude to ... find out what is going on for themselves. We must confront (people in power) at all times because (their desire for secrecy usually goes far beyond reasonable national security ... government everywhere are always going to try and find ways to control news ... but I think it is up to us ... to prevent them. The Captive Press is an account of how Murdoch’s domination of the Australian print media mocks those words. This book is a caring insider’s account of the changes in print me&shy;dia ownership and the consequences of that for freedom of speech – for the very goals Murdoch speaks of so piously. For the events which Bowman so readably records show that Murdoch is above governments. His supranational empire can defy and intimidate any national government (and opposition). He has an influence of such proportions that it amounts to a power beyond real accountability. It is a power which could be used for good or ill. Its potential use for the distortion of truth and the manipulation of pol&shy;itical outcomes is frightening – the very antithesis of the freedoms which our press and our society claim to embrace. Moreover, the potential for our exciting evolving culture to be lost in some multinational formula is great. Similarly, instead of seeing Australia’s interests in the Indian and Pacific Oceans directly, we will tend to get a view filtered through a North Atlantic perspective. For these two reasons alone, the case against both the concentration of ownership and its foreign character is overwhelming. ‘David Bowman traces the expansion of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian empire and concludes that, as a re&shy;sult of the failure of political leadership, freedom of the press is now threatened by the press itself. It is too easy ‘to advance some private cause dressed up as legitimate news or comment or opinion’. He is correct when he says that the Australian press is now, less than ever, one which is truly representative of the public it ‘serves’. He observes that those who oppose a monolithic education system fail to acknowledge similar indoctrination potential in a monolithic press. Yet for those on the left of politics or at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder it is hard to find comment which takes account of their perspective or needs. The Age tries harder than any other paper in Australia to overcome these deficiencies but it only circulates in Victoria and its ownership is still under a cloud. Bowman deals with what he knows and loves – the print media. He has left the concentration of tele&shy;vision ownership to others, but his brief references to that should ring alarm bells about the potential for media manipulations of the percep&shy;tions upon which public opinion is formed. Yet, throughout the debate on media ownership, the public seemed most unconcerned. Perhaps evidence of Mr Bond’s approach to his responsibilities will arouse some concern. The fallout from the astonishing Fairfax saga certainly should. And it will be in that regard that Bowman’s book will be most valuable. This is a most authoritative book which raises disturbing questions which can really only be fully examined at a public enquiry. The Government is reluctant to hold one, the community seems impervious to the problem, and the Trade Practices Commission (the one body which might have initiated some enquiry) says it has not got the resources. Unless one is held, the slim chapter entitled ‘Solutions?’ will go unaddressed by any agency capable of acting. Murdoch wants the press to watch politicians but Bowman asks who watches the press? He calmly reminds us that the concentration of ownership of a narrow and unrepresentative press worked against democracy in Germany after World War I. We would be mad to ignore that lesson. Bowman warns: ‘When government leaders and media proprietors can be mates, we have a conspiracy at the expense of the public. Perhaps a new generation of politicians will have the guts to do something about the rod that Bob Hawke and Paul Keating have made for their country.’ There must be no ‘perhaps’ about it. The concentration of both print and television ownership must be reduced greatly if our basic right to information is to be enhanced and preserved. But no federal government is likely to use its power to do that unless it is led by one who puts such freedoms above currently accepted ‘political realities’ or unless there is a public clamouring for such action. One must hope that this book will help start that clamouring. Apart from Archbishop. Penman, religious, academic, and business leaders have been silent on this vital issue. With the exception of some civil libertarians, even the legal profession has been silent. Bowman has structured his book sensibly. He paints an engrossing portrait of Murdoch (to add to the knowledge gained from George Munster’s A Paper Prince). Rupert Murdoch has many attractive features, but also has a manipulative record so great that one can only shudder at the power he possesses and the uses to which he can make of that power. I doubt if there is a federal electorate in Australia not serviced by a Murdoch paper in addition to The Australian. His chapter on the Fairfax family is his most eloquent, based as it is on his rich personal experiences. Sir Warwick was another manipulator but his empire was relatively small. His successor, his eldest son, James, had no great desire to steer the world one way or another and, therefore, no urge to speak personally through the Herald or any other paper’. The Fairfax chapter also gives important insights into the NSW right-wing machine of the ALP upon whom Keating and Hawke rely for their leadership positions. Fairfax refused to join LOTTO (with Kerry Packer and Murdoch and which, under most Labor governments, would have been run by the NSW Lotteries Office). Fairfax also allowed The Age and The National Times to investigate corruption. Bowman records that, even though Fairfax papers showed considerable sympathy for Labor’s policies, Hawke and Keating ‘objected to the public examination of the affairs of their friends, such as Sir Peter Abeles and Warren Anderson, the Sydney property developer, which shed a certain light upon themselves.’ Thus, certain arms of the Fairfax press were doing what Murdoch said recently should be done. Murdoch’s press did not. Bowman’s coverage of relations between Neville Wran and Packer and Murdoch compared with Wran and Fairfax and the ABC is important and could have been amplified as another illustration of the dangers to free speech which flow from concentrated media ownership. A rich field is there for further exploration. Bowman devotes a chapter each to editors and journalists. Some heroes emerge, but the reader is left in no doubt that a forceful proprietor will prevail; liberal editors were always rare but are almost certainly creatures of the past. Bowman is generous in his praise for certain editors who tried to assert independence from their proprietor or his manager – but each illustration justifies his conclusion that: The corporate organisation demands, and eventually gets, the corporate editor. If there if a significant clash between the interests of the corporation and the interests of the public, the corporation will normally win. Issues may be sidestepped, copy held over, journalists reassigned, soft pedal applied. The corporate editor is the compliant editor. The corporate editor and the great editor are mutually exclusive concepts. The corporate editor’s job seems to be not an end in itself, inviting long service and a real commitment, but merely another rung on the corporate ladder. Bowman’s view of the corporate editor is reflected in his chapter on journalists. Proprietors often understate their influence, editors often overstate their independence, and the diminishing number of proprietors leads journalists to see their survival as part of a corporate empire whose values are increasingly hard to reconcile with freedom of speech. Apart from Paul Chadwick, who formed ‘Free the Media’, Bowman’s other heroes tend to have been former editors with reputations which enable them some latitude as journalists. Unless there is a corporate breakup, however, we will not see their like again. For the managers of these media empires add their own prejudices to those of the proprietor and influence what is published – or not. When there is diversity of ownership we might be able to afford the assertion by a Murdoch that a proprietor has an unfettered right to do what he likes. But Bowman forcefully points out that ‘generations of martyrs suffered before that freedom was won and it belongs not to press proprietors but to society at large.’ But how can society’s interests be served when ‘the press in Australia is overwhelmingly dominated by one man to whom the public interest is not a significant consideration?’ Add to that his proposed Port Melbourne print capacity, his access to news&shy;print and his near monopoly on distribution to the newsagents and we have a massive threat to free speech. In a land which takes its freedoms for granted, one can only hope that this excellent book will galvanise the community so that it demands action from a future government. But is that too much to hope?

Ian MacPhee

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