For Australians, as part of the English-speaking community, the Internet potentially offers a wide array of news sources, but this has not abated continuous declines in regional and local reporting.
As a result of deregulation, Australia’s media is dominated by two large commercial media corporations (Nine Entertainment Co Ltd and News Corp) and there are no longer any larger scale independent media voices. It might be asked – as the newspaper sector is in historic structural decline with fewer people reading newspapers and especially younger cohorts being less interested in these legacy mastheads – why does that matter?
There are at least three reasons to be concerned about this dominance regarding diversity in news sources (Media Pluralism Project, 2019). First, News Corp Australia and Nine Entertainment dominate not only legacy media, but also online news media, as they own many of the most visited online sites (see Figure 4). The exceptions (such as The Guardian and Daily Mail) only reinforce the point, as they are often established legacy media from other countries.
Visitation in an average four weeks over twelve months, April 2017–March 2018. n = 50,014 Australians aged 14+.
Source: Graph from Roy Morgan, 2018b
Second, the removal of cross-media laws, which prevented co-ownership of television, radio, and newspapers, will likely intensify this dominance. Contrary to earlier expectations of more diversity online, the convergence of digital media has resulted in news media being reused across platforms. The search engines and aggregators online and on mobile phones only exacerbate this dominance in their algorithms, which give preference to established media (Athey et al., 2017).
And third, the agenda for the rest of the media tends to be set by these major brands, as they control the bulk of the journalistic resources.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is still an important part of the Australian media ecosystem. However, its ability to undertake the best quality investigative journalism is severely threatened because funding has been slashed year after year. In June 2020, a new round of staff cuts hit all areas, but particularly news and production. It was reported that the broadcaster needed to meet a shortfall of AUD 84 million, after having its funding reduced in real terms for several years (BBC, 2020).
If it is in a position where it is less likely to be critical of the government for fear of further budget cuts, the effect is that it is less likely to play a watchdog role, holding politicians to account for their actions. These cuts come in spite of ABC’s status as the most trusted news source for Australians (Roy Morgan, 2018a) and after decades of sustained pressure from increasingly dominating news organisations like News Corp and the now further expanded Nine Entertainment Company.
Industry change is having a significant impact on magazines in Australia, who in recent years have fallen on tough times with the migration of audiences to the Internet. There have been large-scale job losses after the closure of titles in the sector, particularly as a result of a recent buyout of the Seven West Media–owned Pacific Magazines by its closest rival Bauer, which is the dominant player in the sector in Australia. The sale of Pacific Magazines for AUD 40 million to German company Bauer Media was accompanied by the announcement that Bauer had suspended a number of print editions of magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, OK!, and NW, as well as making 70 staff redundant and standing down as many more (Mason, 2020b).
Social media platforms could help provide diversity of news sources, but their actual performance does not seem promising. They rather distribute and amplify existing news stories amongst like-minded networked groups (Media Pluralism Project, 2019). Furthermore, these platforms are often regarded as responsible for amplifying the worst kinds of speech (Sunstein, 2018), while they also provide a means for algorithmic news manipulation, as witnessed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other incidents by extremist groups. So, while audiences are increasingly discovering their news on social media platforms, the contribution of those sources to news diversity is a more nuanced story (Andi et al., 2020).
