Keating-era media laws outdated

Laws meant to guarantee diversity of “voices” are redundant as every news site on the planet is available online to all.

To those on the left who are sceptical media reform will only help News Corp, publisher of this newspaper, and those on the right who don’t like the way the ABC treats its obligation to provide political balance in its reporting, one point is indisputable.

The present unhappy, polarised media environment — with its slow destruction of traditional operators — grew out of the existing legal regime.

When Paul Keating 30 years ago talked about “princes of print” and “queens of the screen” he would certainly have foreseen the damage the new regime would do to Fairfax, always hated by the NSW Labor Right because it was seen as a left-wing critic of all mainstream governments of ­either side of politics.

But he could never have imagined his bill breaking up cross-media shareholdings in print, radio and television and limiting penetration in individual markets would still be hobbling companies three decades later.

Nor could he have foreseen the media world exploding with internet television, smartphone newspaper reading and Australian-staffed versions of British newspapers The Guardian, the Daily Mail and BBC as well as a local operation of The New York Times.

Arguably laws originally designed to guarantee at least five media “voices” in capital cities and four in the regions are redundant in a world in which every news site on the planet is available online to every consumer every day.

And why should Australian free-to-air television channels that create local content and employ local journalists, actors and film crews be hobbled with licence fees equal to 4.5 per cent of gross annual revenue of all broadcasters when US streaming service giant Netflix pays no such licence and is cannibalising the television market?

Why should a struggling print news business with a capital city radio station be prevented from owning a free-to-air TV business in that city when the BBC, the biggest public broadcaster in the world, can set up an advertising-based website business in Australia without restriction?

Why should Fairfax Media, part-owner of the successful Macquarie Media radio business that controls Sydney station 2GB and Melbourne’s 3AW, be prevented from partnering with the Nine network when both Fairfax and Nine have struggled financially? Surely better to allow mergers to strengthen their businesses, which after all are Australian owned and produce Australian content?

Same argument with News Corp, Foxtel and the Ten Network, which was teetering last Friday even as the government was unable to reach a final deal with Nick Xenophon’s Senate crossbench team to pass the legislation in the Upper House. It passed the Lower House in June.

All the traditional players are vulnerable.

Telstra and News Corp last week revealed plans to merge their 50 per cent-each Foxtel holdings with News Corp’s Fox Sports to help protect the sports franchises now under threat from global tech players after Amazon this month took ATP World Tour Tennis rights from European satellite and cable operator Sky.

This newspaper has for two years been railing against the damage being done in the media marketplace by Google and Facebook, between them now taking an estimated $4 billion a year and growing out of the annual national advertising market, most of it by cannibalising the work of Australian media companies actually paying the heavy price of creating Australian content.

Communications Minister Mitch Fifield introduced his reform package in February last year and is still horse trading with Senator Xenophon and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation to get his changes passed. The industry supports the reforms unanimously.

At least both minor crossbench parties acknowledge the main pillars of the reform — abandoning the two-out-of-three cross-media ownership and 75 per cent reach rules — are essential in the face of the loss of thousands of journalists’ jobs. The Labor Party, which only five years ago wanted a News Media Council to control what publishers could print, is opposing key reforms that it believes could help News Corp.

Former Media columnist Mark Day wrote in this paper last Thursday that there is not a lot of logic in One Nation’s bid to link the reform to a tougher fairness and balance test at the ABC. After all, as a range of ABC commentators were quick to point out at every opportunity all week the troubles facing the commercial media are not driven by public broadcasting, but by the failure of the business model in the face of digital disruption.

Yet the $1 billion a year ABC ­behemoth, the biggest media ­player domestically, does do ­commercial damage, and I think intentionally so.

As a long-time newspaper editor, I was stunned in my last few years in the job at the money being spent by the ABC on search-engine marketing: paying Google for words that lift stories to the top of searches. Commercial media do this to drive traffic to their sites with popular stories and then reap the benefits with advertising linked to clicks on those sites.

There can be no commercial reason for the ABC to damage private media in this way and it has claimed the practice is only to ensure its stories are widely read. Yet ratings have never been part of its charter responsibilities.

The board of the corporation should ban the practice now. It should also police balance issues through its managing director Michelle Guthrie, who holds editor-in-chief responsibilities at the corporation.

Anyone who saw the hysterical, morally pompous commentary by Andrew Probyn on 7.30 last Thursday about Pauline Hanson’s burqa stunt will know what I mean. This sort of highly charged commentary is not appropriate for the political correspondent of a highly regarded current affairs program on a public broadcaster.

Rather than formally link a change in the charter to passing media reform, the government should promise to do its job properly by forcing the chairman and the board to take proper oversight of editorial standards. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull used to talk a good game about this when he was communications minister but not much has been done since he took the top job.

I don’t have a problem with other One Nation demands to which Senator Fifield has agreed: a register of foreign media interests, a look at whether the ABC is breaching competitive neutrality (on search engine optimisation and rural news online that threatens small commercial newspapers), and revealing salaries of senior ABC staff and on-air talent. This has caused uproar within the corporation, but the salaries of most people on the public payroll and across the public service are publicly known.

I have a little more trouble with one of Senator Xenophon’s demands at which the government also baulks: tax breaks for news services with total annual revenue of less than $30 million a year. This would already include Guardian Australia, Private Media (publisher of Crikey) and Schwartz Publishing’s Black Inc (publisher of The Saturday Paper, The Monthly and the Quarterly Essay). I would argue such a tax break would just stimulate more start-ups in the left and centre-left space that is already overcrowded with Ten, Nine, Fairfax, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Crikey and the ABC.

To my mind, a better field of exploration might be a tax imposed on new media news pirates such as Google and Facebook that could be redistributed to publishers. The European Union is already looking at such a plan.

Senator Xenophon has secured concessions on gambling advertising during live sporting fixtures and Senator Fifield is promising an Australian Competition and Consumer probe into the effects of Facebook and Google on the market and enhanced local content in regional markets. It is essential if the nation is to retain a media that can scrutinise governments and big business that Senator Fifield’s Bill pass before the next election.

A Bill Shorten Labor government, which seems very probable, will most likely pump up funding for the ABC at the same time it does everything possible to hobble independent proprietors. We have seen this story from Labor before.