Rupert was right to worry

It could also be remarked that public opinion polls are surely partly owned by the many members of the public whose opinions are picked up and strained through the mesh. What News Limited owns is a methodology, a brand name and the means of publication. They do not own the opinions, nor the proper interpretation of those opinions.

To make matters worse, News Limited then appeared to censor one of its own bloggers, Tim Dunlop. Dunlop had written this post commenting on the editorial. He wrote:

If bias is in the eye of the beholder, then there are a lot of “beholders” out there who think The Australian is biased, particularly in its coverage of polling data. The evidence for this is not just [to] found in the blogosphere but on their own pages where their columns and articles often fill up with criticism from their own readers accusing them of spinning information in favour of the Howard Government. In attacking the “online commentariat” they are also attacking a sizeable sampling of their own readership.

But Dunlop’s post was pulled within the hour by News Limited management, against Dunlop’s will. Fortunately, other bloggers had already cached it, and it was soon posted on half a dozen independent blogs - proof, if any were needed, that editing newspapers doesn’t work like it used to. It’s a fair bet that Dunlop’s pulled post has now been read by many more people than would otherwise have encountered it.

The censoring of Dunlop is significant, because he was the first Australian blogger hired by the mainstream media “from the wild”, and at the time there was a lot of speculation about whether or not it could work. Dunlop, an Adelaide based academic and former small business owner whose doctoral thesis was about public debate, came to prominence as author of the cheekily named Road to Surfdom, which was one of the first political blogs in Australia and remains among the most popular. When he signed with News Limited last year he assured his readers that he would remain an independent voice. He has indeed had a free hand, regularly criticising his colleagues on News Limited newspapers and offering a decidedly more liberal view than his hard copy journalistic colleagues - but it seems he has now discovered the limits of News Limited’s tolerance.

Dunlop told me the week after his post was pulled that he was having “talks” with management about editorial independence and expected to be able to blog on the result of his talks soon. He still hasn’t done so, but is continuing to blog feistily on other matters. My understanding is that Dunlop has, after much soul-searching, decided to give News Limited one more chance.

Quite apart from highlighting the tensions between blogging and proprietorial expectations of control, this affair highlights the gap between the larger international News Corporation - a modern interactive empire - and its Australian incarnation. These days Australia is rather like the home planet for the intergalactic corporation. It is fondly remembered, but rarely visited. The Australian News Limited is still predominately a newspaper company, controlling more than 60 per cent of the country’s total newspaper circulation. It is run by sharp but old fashioned conservative newspaper men. For powerful and intelligent people they have, in this affair, made themselves look fragile and silly. It is rather sad.

Contrast the behaviour of News Limited with some words of wisdom from a well-known newspaper man a couple of years ago.

What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel … They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle … We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.

That’s right: these words are from the landmark speech by Rupert Murdoch in which he signalled his conversion to the digital world. Murdoch worried about whether his editors were capable of making the cultural change. He said that too many saw their readers as stupid and less able than they to discuss the news. “In any business” he said, “such an attitude toward one’s customers would not be healthy. But in the newspaper business, where we rely on people to come back to us each day, it will be disastrous if not addressed.”

It seems Rupert was right to worry.

The irony in this whole matter is that if The Australian had simply shut up and let the blogosphere commentariat be, nobody would be talking about them now. As it is The Australian seems to have confirmed and increased the impact of political blogging, even in the act of dismissing it as the work of self-appointed amateurs.