How news is made in Australia – some personal views

There is an interesting overlap where the journalists identify agenda setters, and the public record good ratings or circulation. This intersection of influence occurs with commercial radio talkback, especially 2UE with I suspect the rest of Southern Cross network following, and with the tabloid newspapers (I am referring to size not necessarily quality), especially The Daily Telegraph, with the News stable and Western Australian newspapers following.

INFLUENCES ON JOURNALISTS - OWNERS

According to the survey, the public thinks the biggest influence on the media – in the sense of deciding what is newsworthy and how the news should be presented – are the media owners, then big business, and then commercial sponsors. Ratings circulation come a lowly fourth, ahead of politicians, then regulatory bodies, lobby groups, religious groups and small business.

Journalists put audience ratings and circulation first. Then come media owners, big business, lobby groups, other journalists (the public didn't consider them), regulators, sponsors, religious groups and small business.

What seems to emerge from the interviews with journalists is that media owners' influence relates more to their perceived commercial interests than their attempting to control, in any systemic way, the selection or presentation of news.

The media 'mogul' may well be becoming endangered species. Today there is no media 'mogul', that is an identifiable single dominant proprietor, at Fairfax, West Australian Newspapers, Channel 10, most major commercial radio and of course the ABC and the SBS.

Moreover, media culture today has changed, and changed irreversibly.

The fact is that to a greater or lesser extent media power and influence has now devolved to the journalists, subject of course to the relevant commercial enterprise remaining profitable. (This latter factor does not of course apply to the public broadcasters.)

Who it is who each day selects what is the news? Who determines day by day, not only how the news is to be presented? Who decides how much comment is to be included in the statement of facts? Who writes that comment? The answer is the journalists. And whom do they look to for guidance in their decisions? Other journalists.

THE JOURNALISTS

So what do we know about our Australian journalists? The project confirms Professor Henningham's revelation in 1996, that "your average journalist is not your average Australian". This is particularly so with regard to political and social views. They have, he found a "curious mix of values". While in favour of capitalism and free enterprise, journalists were "bleeding heart liberals on social issues, libertines in moral areas and hostile to organised religion."

It is important to note that in any scale of conservatism the distances between the more conservative and the less conservative is not so great in this country. We are closer to one another than in the United States, even more so than in the larger continental powers and considerably closer than in Latin America. Although it may worry them, One Nation, the Greens and the Democrats are much closer than say Le Pen and the French Communist Party, both of which are in the French Parliament.