Tuesday, 11 March 2014

Australian Media laws should serve everyone, not just the moguls

Media laws should serve everyone, not just the moguls

Malcolm Turnbull’s proposed changes will potentially benefit the dominant players in the industry most, specifically News Corp
, deputy political editor
Malcolm Turnbull is the ideal salesman for media deregulation because he’s an optimist and an internet utopian. He absolutely believes technological change and a combination of market forces and inspired philanthropy are in the business of sorting out Australia’s diversity problem.
If that’s actually your core belief then the logical thing for a communications minister to do is precisely what he’s foreshadowing – rip up the outmoded regulation, let the industry rationalise while guiding some traffic behind the scenes – like a form of intelligent design, but for the media.
The problem is that Turnbull’s assessment of the current media landscape is both right, and quite wrong.
Let’s deal with the right first. Things are changing. There are new and vibrant voices, there’s disruption and entrepreneurship and the hegemony of the old players is not what it once was. Technology gives us all the power to not only indulge in the latest fashion of fact selection, but actually curate our own news. We can take what we like and screen out the rest. The most avid news consumer can construct their bespoke media cocoon and furnish it to their taste. (Happy days – except for all the downsides, which would require a whole separate analysis – so let’s not go there today.)
Now let’s deal with the wrong.
The world Turnbull paints is the world of the information privileged, not the average consumer. The average Australian media consumer still resides in one of the most concentrated media markets in the developed world. The old, entrenched media players still dominate and shape the local media narrative, from the first news bulletin at first light to late night TV current affairs.
The current concentration reflects several decades of public policy failure by both Liberal and Labor governments, who prioritised making peace with rent-seeking media moguls above serving the broader public interest.
These genuflections have had a cumulative effect: they’ve made governments weaker and the megaphone wielders stronger. Why governments keep consenting to that zero-sum-game transaction is really beyond me.
Let’s be clear here. The changes flagged by Turnbull over the weekend won’t actually benefit the upstarts and the disrupters. They benefit the incumbents, and potentially at least, the biggest, most politically influential incumbent of them all, News Corp.
That’s the real world that stands behind the still protean world of progress being depicted by the periodic enthusiasms of the communications minister. And it’s a complicated world, because the moguls actually have competing interests – a fact telegraphed by the prime minister on Monday.
Labor will be an interesting player to watch in all this. Having been so bruised and pounded by its efforts to come at the same set of problems with a contentious regulatory solution – having been pounded by News Corp during the last federal election – will it fold and let the Abbott government have its head?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/10/media-laws-should-serve-everyone-not-just-the-moguls

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