Among the many lessons to be learnt by Australia’s defeated Liberal-National coalition parties from the election is that they should stop getting into bed with News Corporation.

Why would a political party outsource its policy platform and strategy to people with plenty of opinions, but no experience in actually running a government?

The result of the federal election suggests that unlike the coalition, many Australians are ignoring the opinions of News Corp Australia’s leading journalists such as Andrew Bolt and Sharri Markson.

• READ MORE: Australia ‘Islamic Caliphate’? Dark money and the 11th hour election propaganda blitzkrieg
• Other Australian federal election reports

Last Thursday, in her eponymous programme on Sky News Australia, Markson said:

For the first time in my journalistic career I’m going to also offer a pre-election editorial, endorsing one side of politics […] A Dutton prime ministership would give our great nation the fresh start we deserve.

Sharri Markson issues own Dutton endorsement as ACM says ‘Australia is Tanya Plibersek’https://t.co/UYh0xKeXPR

— amanda meade (@meadea) May 2, 2025

After a vote count that sees the Labor government returned with an increased majority, Bolt wrote a piece for the Herald Sun admonishing voters:

No, the voters aren’t always right. This time they were wrong, and this gutless and incoherent Coalition should be ashamed.

Australians just voted for three more years of a Labor government that’s left this country poorer, weaker, more divided and deeper in debt, and which won only by telling astonishing lies.

That’s staggering. If that’s what voters really like, then this country is going to get more of it, good and hard.

The Australian and most of News’ tabloid newspapers endorsed the coalition in their election eve editorials.

Repudiation of minor culture war
The election result was a repudiation of the minor culture war Peter Dutton reprised during the campaign when he advised voters to steer clear of the ABC and “other hate media”. It may have felt good alluding to “leftie-woke” tropes about the ABC, but it was a tactical error.

The message probably resonated only with rusted-on hardline coalition voters and supporters of right-wing minor parties.

But they were either voting for the coalition, or sending them their preferences, anyway. Instead, attacking the ABC sent a signal to the people the coalition desperately needed to keep onside — the moderates who already felt disappointed by the coalition’s drift to the right and who were considering voting Teal or for another independent.

Attacking just about the most trusted media outlet in the country simply gave those voters another reason to believe the coalition no longer represented their values.

Reporting from the campaign bus is often derided as shallow form of election coverage. Reporters tend to be captive to a party’s agenda and don’t get to look much beyond a leader’s message.

But there was real value in covering Dutton’s daily stunts and doorstops, often in the outer suburbs that his electoral strategy relied on winning over.

What was revealed by having journalists on the bus was the paucity of policy substance. Details about housing affordability and petrol pricing — which voters desperately wanted to hear — were little more than sound bites.

Steered clear of nuclear sites
This was obvious by Dutton’s second visit to a petrol station, and yet there were another 15 to come. The fact that the campaign bus steered clear of the sites for proposed nuclear plants was also telling.

Dutton has come out this morning to say his biggest regret was not attending more petrol stations. #auspol #ausvotes #qanda #abc730 pic.twitter.com/sbd6GWpElR

— C h r i s @chrishehim.bsky.social (@ChrisHeHim1) May 4, 2025

The grind of daily coverage helped expose the lateness of policy releases, the paucity of detail and the lack of preparation for the campaign, let alone for government.

On ABC TV’s Insiders, the Nine Newspapers’ political editor, David Crowe, wondered whether the media has been too soft on Dutton, rather than too hard as some coalition supporters might assume.

He reckoned that if the media had asked more difficult questions months ago, Dutton might have been stress-tested and better prepared before the campaign began.

Instead, the coalition went into the election believing it would be enough to attack Labor without presenting a fully considered alternative vision. Similarly, it would suffice to appear on friendly media outlets such as News Corp, and avoid more searching questions from the Canberra press gallery or on the ABC.

Reporters and commentators across the media did a reasonable job of exposing this and holding the opposition to account. The scrutiny also exposed its increasingly desperate tactics late in the campaign, such as turning on Welcome to Country ceremonies.

If many Australians appear more interested in what their prospective political leaders have to say about housing policy or climate change than the endless culture wars being waged by the coalition, that message did not appear to have been heard by Peta Credlin.

The Sky News Australia presenter and former chief-of-staff to prime minister Tony Abbott said during Saturday night’s election coverage “I’d argue we didn’t do enough of a culture war”.

Dr Matthew Ricketson is professor of communication, Deakin University and Andrew Dodd  is professor of journalism and director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

COMMENTARY: By Bernard Keane

Two moments stand out so far from the Federal Court hearings relating to Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, insofar as they demonstrate how power works in Australia — and especially in Australia’s media.

The first is how the ABC’s senior management abandoned due process in the face of a sustained lobbying effort by a pro-Israel group to have Lattouf taken off air, under the confected basis she was “antisemitic”.

Managing director David Anderson admitted in court that there was a “step missing” in the process that led to her sacking — in particular, a failure to consult with the ABC’s HR area, and a failure to discuss the attacks on Lattouf with Lattouf herself, before kicking her out.

• READ MORE: Legacy media outlets also stand in dock over Gaza: How RNZ, ABC and other Western media failed to challenge Israeli war narratives – Pacific Journalism Review
• Pressure from ‘higher up’ at ABC to sack Antoinette Lattouf from very first day on air, court hears

To this, it might be added, was acting editorial director Simon Melkman’s advice to management that Lattouf had not breached any editorial policies.

Anderson bizarrely singled out Lattouf’s authorship, alongside Cameron Wilson, of a Crikey article questioning the narrative that pro-Palestinian protesters had chanted “gas the Jews”, as basis for his concerns about her, only for one of his executives to point out the article was “balanced and journalistically sound“.

That is, by the ABC’s own admission, there was no basis to sack Lattouf and the sacking was conducted improperly. And yet, here we are, with the ABC tying itself in absurd knots — no such race as Lebanese, indeed — spending millions defending its inappropriate actions in response to a lobbying campaign.

The second moment that stands out is a decision by the court early in the trial to protect the identities of those calling for Lattouf’s sacking.

Abandoned due process
The campaign that the group rolled out prompted the ABC chair and managing director to immediately react — and the ABC to abandon due process and procedural fairness. Yet the court protects their identities.

The reasoning — that the identities behind the complaints should be protected for their safety — may or may not be based on reasonable fears, but it’s the second time that institutions have worked to protect people who planned to undermine the careers of people — specifically, women — who have dared to criticise Israel.

The first was when some members — a minority — of a WhatsApp group supposedly composed of pro-Israel “creatives” discussed how to wreck the careers of, inter alia, Clementine Ford and Lauren Dubois for their criticism of Israel.

The publishing of the identities of this group was held by both the media and the political class to be an outrageous, antisemitic act of “doxxing”, and the federal government rushed through laws to make such publications illegal.

No mention of making the act of trying to destroy people’s careers because they hold different political views — or, cancel culture, as the right likes to call it — illegal.

Whether it’s courts, politicians or the media, it seems that the dice are always loaded in favour of those wanting to crush criticism of Israel, while its victims are left to fend for themselves.

Human rights lawyer and fighter against antisemitism Sarah Schwartz has been repeatedly threatened with (entirely vexatious) lawsuits by Israel supporters for her criticism of Israel, and her discussion of the exploitation of Australian Jews by Peter Dutton.

Opinion | Australian democracy and the rule of law is being damaged by the media’s willingness to abandon due process and attack those who criticise Israel, writes @bernardkeane.

Read it here: https://t.co/gpNuppn31l pic.twitter.com/AyxKdyVMG4

— Crikey (@crikey_news) February 11, 2025

Targeted by another News Corp smear campaign
She’s been targeted by yet another News Corp smear campaign, based on nothing more than a wilfully misinterpreted slide. She has no government or court rushing to protect her.

Meanwhile, Peter Lalor, one of Australia’s finest sports journalists (and I write as someone who can’t abide most sports journalism) lost his job with SEN because he, too, dared to criticise Israel and call out the Palestinian genocide. No-one’s rushing to his aide, either.

No powerful institutions are weighing in to safeguard his privacy, or protect him from the consequences of his opinions.

The individual cases add up to a pattern: Australian institutions, and especially its major media institutions, will punish you for criticising Israel.

Pro-Israel groups will demand you be sacked, they will call for your career to be destroyed. Those groups will be protected.

Media companies will ride roughshod over basic rights and due process to comply with their demands. You will be smeared and publicly vilified on completely spurious bases. Politicians will join in, as Jason Clare did with the campaign against Schwartz and as Chris Minns is doing in NSW, imposing hate speech laws that even Christian groups think are a bad idea.

Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was sacked from her job at ABC because she shared an Instagram post from @hrw in which the NGS accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. She is now taking the broadcaster to court. pic.twitter.com/jRmQW2AAl3

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) February 11, 2025

Damaging the fabric of democracy
This is how the campaign to legitimise the Palestinian genocide and destroy critics of the Netanyahu government has damaged the fabric of Australia’s democracy and the rule of law.

The basic rights and protections that Australians should have under a legal system devoted to preventing discrimination can be stripped away in a moment, while those engaged in destroying people’s careers and livelihoods are protected.

Ill-advised laws are rushed in to stifle freedom of speech. Australian Jews are stereotyped as a politically convenient monolith aligned with the Israeli government.

The experience of Palestinians themselves, and of Arab communities in Australia, is minimised and erased. And the media are the worst perpetrators of all.

Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. First published by Crikey.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Michael West

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has misled the Australian Parliament. In a submission to the Senate, the company claimed, “Foxtel also pays millions of dollars in income tax, GST and payroll tax, unlike many of our large international digital competitors”.

However, an MWM investigation into the financial affairs of Foxtel has shown Foxtel was paying zero income tax when it told the Senate it was paying “millions”. The penalty for lying to the Senate is potential imprisonment, although “contempt of Parliament” laws are never enforced.

The investigation found that NXE, the entity that controls Foxtel, paid no income tax in any of the five years from 2019 to 2023. During this time it generated $14 billion of total income.

• READ MORE: Other digital tech corporation reports

The total tax payable across this period is $0. The average total income is $2.8 billion per year.

Why did News Corporation mislead the Parliament? The plausible answers are in its Foxtel Submission to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee Inquiry into The Broadcasting Legislation Amendment.

In May 2021 — which is also where the transgression occurred — the media executives for the American tycoon were lobbying a Parliamentary committee to change the laws in their favour.

By this time, Netflix had leap-frogged Foxtel Pay TV subscriptions in Australia and Foxtel was complaining it had to spend too much money on producing local Australian content under the laws of the time. Also that Netflix paid almost no tax.

Big-league tax dodger
They were correct in this. Netflix, which is a big-league tax dodger itself, was by then making bucketloads of money in Australia but with zero local content requirements.

Making television drama and so forth is expensive. It is far cheaper to pipe foreign content through your channels online. As Netflix does.

The misleading of Parliament by corporations is rife, and contempt laws need to be enforced, as demonstrated routinely by the PwC inquiry last year. Corporations and their representatives routinely lie in their pursuit of corporate objectives.

If democracy is to function better, the information provided to Parliament needs to be clarified, beyond doubt, as reliable. Former senator Rex Patrick has made the point in these pages.

Even in this short statement to the committee of inquiry (published above), there are other misleading statements. Like many companies defending their failure to pay adequate income tax, Foxtel claims that it “paid millions” in GST and payroll tax.

Companies don’t “pay” GST or payroll tax. They collect these taxes on behalf of governments.

Little regard for laws
Further to the contempt of Parliament, so little regard for the laws of Australia is shown by corporations that the local American boss of a small gas fracking company, Tamboran Resources, controlled by a US oil billionaire, didn’t even bother turning up to give evidence when asked.

This despite being rewarded with millions in public grant money.

Politicians need to muscle up, as Greens Senator Nick McKim did when grilling former Woolies boss Brad Banducci for prevaricating over providing evidence to the supermarket inquiry.

The incoming chair of the ABC, Kim Williams, must immediately move to restore the reputation of Australia’s national broadcaster by addressing concerns about the impact of external pressures on editorial decision making, says the media union.

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, the union representing journalists at the ABC, today called on Williams to work with unions to support staff who were under attack, reaffirm the commitment to cultural diversity in the workplace, and uphold the standards of reporting without fear or favour that the public expected of the ABC.

MEAA welcomed the appointment of Williams, a former chief executive of News Corp Australia, noting that he had decades of media experience including senior management positions at the ABC, commercial broadcast media and arts administration in the past, and that he had been recommended by an independent nomination panel.

• READ MORE: PM announces Kim Williams as new ABC chair
• Ita Buttrose backs David Anderson after ABC board defiant over ‘abhorrent and incorrect’ journalists’ criticism
• ABC staff ‘have lost confidence’ in boss in defending public trust in Israel row
• Cancelling the journalist: Fuhttps://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/jan/23/abc-managing-director-david-anderson-no-confidence-vote-fails-ita-buttrose-supportrore over ABC’s coverage of Israel war on Gaza
• Back SA over genocide case, ‘don’t yield to pressure’, Hania tells NZ

The acting chief executive of MEAA, Adam Portelli, said the new chair would take office at a critical time for the ABC’s future following a staff vote of no confidence in managing director David Anderson earlier this week over the handling of a crisis over pressure from pro-Israeli lobbyists in the war on Gaza.

“On Monday, union members overwhelmingly said they had lost confidence in David Anderson because of his failure to address very real concerns about the way the ABC deals with external pressure and supports journalists from First Nations and culturally diverse backgrounds when they are under attack,” he said.

“Public trust in the ABC as an organisation that will always pursue frank and fearless journalism has been damaged, and management under Mr Anderson has not demonstrated it is taking these concerns seriously.

Buttrose ‘completely out of touch’
“Following yesterday’s board meeting, the current chair, Ita Buttrose, revealed she is completely out of touch with the concerns felt in newsrooms across Australia,” Portelli said.

“Dozens of staff have told us their first hand experiences of feeling unsupported by management when under external attack and the negative impact this is having on their ability to do their jobs and on the reputation and integrity of the ABC. But Ms Buttrose failed to acknowledge these concerns.

“ABC journalists have put forward five very reasonable suggestions to restore the confidence of staff in the managing director but at this stage, Mr Anderson has not committed to an urgent meeting as they requested.”

Portelli said MEAA was optimistic that Williams would bring a more collaborative approach to dealing with issues of cultural safety and editorial integrity than had been witnessed under Buttrose.

“He must understand that nothing less than the reputation of the ABC is at stake here,” Portelli said.

The late Sir Rabbie Namaliu’s character and his humble leadership featured well in one of Australia’s top news organisations –– News Corp Australia and its executive chairman Michael Miller has paid a tribute.

Businessman Frank Kramer, reading out a special eulogy from the business point of view reflecting on the life of Sir Rabbie at the National Haus Krai on Sunday night repeatedly echoed the man he was.

In his address, he read out Miller’s condolence message sent to the family and friends of the late Sir Rabbie among others.

• READ MORE: PNG’s Sir Rabbie blessed at birth – ‘he’ll be a big man, clever’
• Other Sir Rabbie Namaliu reports

Sir Rabbie joined the Post-Courier board as a director on February 2013 and had been there until he died on March 31, 2023.

Miller’s message read: “On behalf of everyone at News Corp Australia, I’d like to express our deepest condolences to Sir Rabbie’s family, friends and colleagues at this sad time.

“Sir Rabbie lived a rich life dedicated to public service and to the people of PNG.

“He will be missed but never forgotten and will, especially, be remembered for the quiet authority he brought to PNG’s often robust political scene and for the strong, eloquent and unflinching advocacy made on behalf of his people as prime minister and in many other roles in government and public life.

“Sir Rabbie was a patriot, a good friend to many and as a director of the board of the Post-Courier, [he] did much to further the cause of free speech and the importance to his country’s fledgling democracy of a free and fearless media.”

Gorethy Kenneth is a senior PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

News Corp Australia and Google have announced the creation of the Digital News Academy in partnership with the Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne. It will provide digital skills training for News Corp journalists and other media outlets.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

The academy won’t provide full degrees, just certificates and a chance to upgrade digital skills in a fast-changing media environment.

• READ MORE: More than protection, Australian journalism needs better standards
• The news media bargaining code could backfire if small media outlets aren’t protected: an economist explains

Many companies in various industries have partnered with universities to deliver what used to be in-house training programmes. Strengthening the links between industry and the academy has been welcomed in many sectors and certainly encouraged by governments for many years.

Why then are we as journalism academics concerned?

There are several reasons. The first and most obvious is the incursion of a high-profile and controversial media company into the higher education sector and the extent to which that is funded by a large disruptive digital search company.

Antagonism towards academia
It is telling that the Digital News Academy will be housed in the University of Melbourne’s private arm, the Melbourne Business School, rather than its Centre for Advancing Journalism within the Arts faculty.

Australia’s largest commercial media company has long criticised university journalism education, and journalism academics, including each of the authors of this article and many of our colleagues.

The company even once sent an incognito reporter into a University of Sydney lecture to uncover criticism of News Corp in the classroom. That reporter, Sharri Markson, is now investigations editor at The Australian and a member of “the panel of experts” that will oversee the Digital News Academy.

So it comes as no surprise that News Corp has avoided journalism programmes.

News Corp Australasia’s executive chairman Michael Miller has said part of the academy’s role will be building a stronger Australia by keeping society informed through “strong and fearless news reporting and advocacy”.

Yet partnering with a journalism programme would have facilitated that. It might also have helped assuage News Corp critics, some of whom have been active online during the week with reminders about News Corp’s unethical conduct during the hacking scandal and its disregard for scientific evidence in its reporting on climate change.

University journalism courses teach ethics and critical thinking alongside practical skills such as new digital ways of fact checking, gathering information and telling stories.

Google Australia already offers free tutorials to journalism programmes about smart ways to use its search engine to find and check investigative stories.

University journalism programmes also distinguish between training and education; the former is predominantly about skills, the latter places those skills in context and teaches students how to think critically about the industry and environment in which they work.

By placing this course in a business school and not a liberal arts or humanities faculty, the venture gets the kudos of the University of Melbourne’s backing without the challenging academic culture News Corp dislikes.

News Corp and Google are corporate clients, paying the university for these courses, so the capacity for independent criticism of Australia’s most dominant newspaper company is eroded even further.

What will the Digital News Academy do?
All we know so far about the academic credibility of the Digital News Academy comes from its promotional announcement, in press releases reported in the Media section of The Australian (published by News Corp).

The publicity says the nine-month course will take 750 enrolments from journalists at News Corp Australia, Australian Community Media (the stable of 160 regional publications formerly owned by Fairfax) and smaller media partners.

A “governance committee” will select candidates (who nominate themselves or are put forward by their employers). These students will be expected to use the Google suite of tools as they collaborate online at the Melbourne Business School, to generate, build and sell stories to the course’s “Virtual Academy Newsroom”.

Each year there will be what is being billed as a major journalism conference and a US study tour for a select group of trainees.

There are no public details yet of the academic credentials of the certificate programme but the academy has drawn on a “panel of experts”, almost all of whom come from inside News Corp and Google.

Google gains influence
It’s easy to see why Google was motivated to fund a News Corp training academy above and beyond what it is required to do as part of its bid to stop further intervention in its workings by the Australian government under the terms of the News Media Bargaining Code.

But there are some deeper questions about why a company that has such a stranglehold on the new digital economy is involved. By funding the academy Google may be undercutting full university degrees specialising in journalism.

Relying on Google to make up the shortfall in news organisations’ training budgets is a problem. It allows Google to shape curriculum while appearing to be a champion of the same journalism industry it has been accused of undermining.

As journalism academics we respect the need for specialised training and skills development. But journalism programmes should never be captured or constrained from being critical of the industry for which they prepare students.

They should continue to embed ethics in their courses. The aim, after all, is to improve journalism, for everybody’s benefit.

As it is often said, news is not just another business. While studying journalism often involves the study of business, business imperatives should not drive the study of journalism itself.

Dr Andrew Dodd is director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne; Dr Alexandra Wake is programme manager, journalism, at RMIT University, and Dr Matthew Ricketson is professor of communication at Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Dr Dodd has worked as a journalist at The Australian newspaper and has provided in-house legal and news writing training for News Corp. Dr Wake has provided in-house training for the ABC and for Australian Provincial Newspapers. She is the elected president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA). Professor Ricketson has worked on staff at The Australian, among other news outlets. He was a member of the Finkelstein inquiry into the media and media regulation which was sharply criticised in News Corp Australia publications. His appointment as the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s representative on the Press Council was also criticised by News Corp Australia. Full disclosures at The Conversation.

It has indeed been a few strange days for Australian news media. Apparently, monopolies are bad if they are not NewsCorp.

This week, Facebook came through on its threat to ban all news from its service, in retaliation against the Australian Federal government’s proposed new media code, that could see the tech giant paying news producers for content they willingly share on the Facebook platform.

Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp rather predictably ran a story accusing Facebooks’ messenger platform of aiding and abetting paedophiles. A remarkable display of mutual chestbeating.

• READ MORE: Why Google is now funnelling millions into media outlets, as Facebook pulls news for Australia
• Facebook under fire over move to ‘bully democracy’ in Australia
• Google’s and Facebook’s loud appeal to users over the news media bargaining code shows a lack of political power
• Facebook has pulled the trigger on news content — and possibly shot itself in the foot
• Facebook back at negotiating table with Australia
• Facebook move reinforces need for a News Media Bargaining Code
• JERAA demands Facebook stop blocking Australians from receiving news

But it is news media diversity and independent journalism routinely pillaged by Murdoch that will be the real victims of ScoMo trying to extort one billionaire at the behest of another.

Queensland’s independent press, for example, is just beginning to lift its head after Rupert ruthlessly destroyed a whole swathe of rural and regional newspapers of record. I wonder how this posturing between two billionaires will affect those independent newspapers that are slowly beginning to show promise in that desolate landscape.

Sure, there needs to be funding for good journalism, and the tech-giants should pitch in, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, of a rather long “to do list” to ensure a robust and independent news media that includes ensuring media diversity and the public’s access to fact-verified public interest journalism irrespective of petty party politics.

In this respect it’s hard to see this whole fiasco as anything but a half-baked idea built on a NewsCorp orchestrated lie.

Holding readers hostage
News organisations could have easily blocked Google searches listing their content. They could also have stopped putting their content on Facebook pages, explored micro-payments or some such innovative solution, instead of holding readers hostage with archaic subscription models.

Is Australian journalism suffering because of Google and Facebook? What of the media monopolies that have systematically destroyed diversity and independence of the press through concentration of ownership unparalleled in the Western world?

What of the three-decade long devaluing of journalism, and training an entire generation to get free news on vanity websites while simultaneously selling the same content in printed papers, only to then retreat behind paywalls?

What about forcing journalists to pimp their stories by linking KPIs to journalists’ capacity to secure subscriptions and assessing the value of stories on the basis of clicks?

What of the ruthless stripping of journalists’ rights that has created a precariat work force?

And what of the armies of media pundits who jumped on the citizen journalism bandwagon and vigorously claimed we didn’t need professional journalists because we were now all citizen journalists?

What of the media educators who have conflated journalism with media, normalised native advertising and created a grey slurry of content where fact and fiction is indistinguishable and ethics non-existent?

Championed social media
And then there are the media theorists who have championed social media as a great equaliser.

A “town square” where ideas flow freely, or as Mark Zuckerberg calls it a “digital living room” instead of seeing it for what it really is – a privately owned advertising platform hell bent on creating a global monopoly.

Let’s say we manage to force Facebook to pay for content. I wonder exactly how the dollars Zuckerberg doles out to Newscorp will flow onto the journalists and the gutted newsrooms who everyone is suddenly concerned for.

Shouldn’t the money be directly invested in public interest journalism instead of becoming just another version of that wonderfully Liberal idea of trickle-down economics filtered through Rupert’s pockets.

Dr Kasun Ubayasiri is a senior lecturer and journalism programme director at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. An earlier version of this piece was originally a Facebook posting and this been revised and contributed to Asia Pacific Report as a column.

Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

Nine Entertainment and News Corporation are wrong to say Google and Facebook have destroyed their business models by stealing content, according to news publisher Eric Beecher, reports The New Daily.

Giving evidence before the Australian Senate hearing on the government’s proposed media bargaining code on Monday, Beecher said representatives from Nine, News Corp and The Guardian had wrongly accused Facebook and Google during previous hearings of “stealing both their content and their advertising revenue”.

Beecher, the chairman of Solstice Media and owner of Private Media, publisher of the independent Crikey!, said the multibillion-dollar organisations clearly gained more than they lost from sharing their journalism on Facebook and Google, writes Euan Black in his New Daily report.

• READ MORE: The Conversation’s submission to the Australian Senate media code inquiry
• Nine’s statement to the media bargaining code inquiry
• The proposed Australian media bargaining code

“Those media companies actively provide snippets or their full journalism to the platforms for one blindingly obvious reason: They gain huge benefit from the exposure – and clicks – their content attracts on Google and Facebook,” he told the senate committee.

“If they didn’t, they wouldn’t allow it to be ‘stolen’.”

Beecher, who also chairs Motion Publishing, publisher of The New Daily, disputed claims that the internet giants had siphoned off advertising revenue from the news organisations.

He said that before Google and Facebook most of this revenue came from newspaper classifieds that have since moved online.

Money ‘ended up in pockets’
Beecher said this money had “ended up in the pockets” of realestate.com.au (owned by News Corp), Domain (owned by Nine) and other classified advertising websites like Seek and Carsales.

“As has been meticulously researched, the vast bulk of Google and Facebook’s advertising revenue has not come from news publishers,” he told the hearing.

In an earlier submission to the senate inquiry, Facebook said it had generated 4.7 billion referrals to Australian media publishers and shared A$5.4 million in revenue with them between January and November.

It also claimed “the commercial value we derive from news content in Australia is virtually zero”, while Google has threatened to remove its search engine from Australia if the current version of the code is passed into law.

Despite disagreeing with key arguments used to defend the media bargaining code, Beecher said the internet giants were “almost certainly too powerful” and should be legally required to “pay full Australian tax on all their Australian profits that stem from all their Australian revenue”.

“I’m not here to defend Google and Facebook,” he said.

‘Their behaviour is scary’
“Their market dominance and the information they collect about their users’ online behaviour is scary.”

Beecher said the huge market share and tax minimisation strategies of the internet giants provided enough justification to ask them to pay a “social licence” fee to support public interest journalism.

“For those reasons — not because of spurious arguments about stealing content and advertising revenue — I believe they should pay what is, in effect, a social licence to support the public interest journalism that has been severely affected by the invention of the commercial internet, which Google and Facebook dominate,” he said.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who is the Greens’ media spokesperson and sits on the committee tasked with interrogating the proposed new laws, also called for the code to explicitly support public interest journalism.

She said in a statement that the Greens would seek amendments to the bill that:

• “Require news organisations to spend the revenue from the Code on resourcing public interest journalism, and
• “Require the 12-month review of the Code to report on the impact that the Code is having on small, independent and start up publications.”

It is easy to assume Australia has a free press. Our squawky newspapers are filled with stories about the failings of government, acid-tongued columnists routinely lash our politicians, and until May last year the police hardly ever raided newsrooms or journalists.

On Wednesday, the High Court appeared to uphold the principle of press freedom when it ruled that the warrant the Australian Federal Police used to search News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst’s home in 2019 was invalid.

You might recall that the police raided her home (and searched through her underwear drawer) looking for the source of a story Smethurst had published in The Daily Telegraph more than a year earlier.

READ MORE: Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy

• RSF criticises Australian court for being ‘unconcerned by press freedom, protection of sources’

Her story revealed the government was considering expanding the powers of our international electronic eavesdropping agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, so it could turn its sophisticated bugs on Australian citizens.

(The very next day, the AFP searched the ABC’s Sydney headquarters looking for the sources of another story – the Afghan Files – about Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan.)

Smethurst’s story was important because it revealed details of a shift in policy that affected all Australians. Regardless of what you think about the rights or wrongs of such a change, it is hard to argue it should not have been part of an open public debate.

At the same time, nobody has ever suggested national security suffered as a result of the story. It was a fine example of a free press doing its job by uncovering government actions that we all ought to know about.

Slap-down for police
News Corp went to the High Court to argue that the police had written the warrant so badly that it failed to explain why they were conducting the search and what they were looking for. In a unanimous slap-down for the police, all seven judges on the bench agreed the warrant “lacked clarity” and ruled it invalid.

A victory for journalism? Not quite.

News Corp also asked the court to order the police to either return or destroy any evidence collected during the raid. In a decision split 4:3, the judges rejected the request. This effectively allowed the police to still use the evidence for any investigation and prosecution.

The reasoning is complex and highly technical, but its overall effect is to undermine the already paper-thin protections for press freedom in Australia.

This is not the fault of the court. It was doing its job adjudicating on narrow points of law and police procedure, but it does underscore the urgent need for robust reform of our legal code.

Australian journalists operate freely in spite of the law, rather than because of it. While the United States Constitution has its First Amendment and the UK has Article 10 of its Human Rights Act (to name just a few), the most we have is a hopelessly weak “implied freedom of political communication” that’s merely inferred in our constitution.

Without more explicit protections, we have seen a slew of national security laws undermining the ability of journalists to investigate government and keep their sources safe.

This matters because the ability of the press to act as a noisy (and nosy) watchdog is vital to the way our democracy works.

Nobody is arguing for complete and unfettered protection for journalists. Much of the work of our security agencies, individuals’ private details and commercially sensitive information must be off-limits, but there are ways of striking a balance between those imperatives.

A host of organisations have already proposed a set of reforms. The Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom (which I represent) published a White Paper on Press Freedom in Australia three weeks before the raids. The AJF proposes:

• protections for journalists’ sources
• the chance for news organisations to contest warrants even before the police carry out their searches
• an “exemption from prosecution”, so that when journalists are engaged in legitimate work, press freedom is assumed.

It would then be up to the police to show a judge why there is enough of a risk to national security to justify setting aside that principle and issuing a warrant.

It is impossible to reform every corner of our statute books, though, so we also need a Media Freedom Act that enshrines the principle of press freedom in our legal code. That way, every court up to and including the High Court has to take it into account in every case that threatens to undermine media freedom.

Together, those kinds of protections would give comfort to journalists and their sources: as long as they are not violating clear and strictly set-out rules on national security and privacy, and are otherwise acting in accordance with the law, they should not be subject to prosecution. It would also help the police avoid being accused of launching politically motivated inquiries.

Our press might look free and fearless, but without significant reforms that remains a dangerously fragile illusion.

Dr Peter Greste is the UNESCO professor of journalism and communications The University of Queensland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

• To protect press freedom, we need more public outrage – and an overhaul of our laws
  
  

In September 2019, the editor of The Conversation, Misha Ketchell, declared The Conversation’s editorial team in Australia was henceforth taking what he called a “zero-tolerance” approach to climate change deniers and sceptics. Their comments would be blocked and their accounts locked.

His reasons were succinct:

Climate change deniers and those shamelessly peddling pseudoscience and misinformation are perpetuating ideas that will ultimately destroy the planet.

READ MORE: Bushfires, bots and arson claims: Australia flung in the global disinformation spotlight

From the standpoint of conventional media ethics, it was a dramatic, even shocking, decision. It seemed to violate journalism’s principle of impartiality – that all sides of a story should be told so audiences could make up their own minds.

But in the era of climate change, this conventional approach is out of date. A more analytical approach is called for.

The ABC’s editorial policy on impartiality offers the best analytical approach so far developed in Australia. It states that impartiality requires:

• a balance that follows the weight of evidence
• fair treatment
• open-mindedness
• opportunities over time for principal relevant perspectives on matters of contention to be expressed.

Weight of evidence
It stops short of saying material contradicting the weight of evidence should not be published, which is the position adopted explicitly by The Conversation and implicitly by Guardian Australia.

Guardian Australia’s position is to concentrate on presenting the evidence that human-induced climate change is real and is having a detrimental effect on global heating, wildlife extinction and pollution. It states that this is the defining issue of our times and fundamental societal change is needed in response.

The position of Australia’s other big media organisations is far less clear and rests on generalities applicable to all issues.

The former Fairfax (now Nine) newspapers, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, have separate codes. The Age code does not mention impartiality but requires its journalists to report in a way that is fair, accurate and balanced. The Herald’s does mention impartiality but confines it to an instruction to avoid promoting an individual staff member’s personal interests or preferences.

Both say, however, that comment should be kept separate from news.

News Corp Australia’s editorial professional conduct policy is quite different from all these. It states that comment, conjecture and opinion are acceptable in [news] reports to provide perspective on an issue, or explain the significance of an issue, or to allow readers to recognise what the publication’s standpoint is on the matter being reported.

Its journalists are told to try always to tell all sides of the story when reporting on disputes.

Misleading publication
However, the policy also states that none of this allows the publication of information known to be inaccurate or misleading.

Markedly different as these positions are, they have one element in common: freedom of the press does not mean freedom to publish false or misleading material.

From an ethical perspective, this is a bare minimum. The ABC requires that its journalists follow the weight of evidence, which is a substantially more exacting standard of truthfulness than anything required by the Fairfax or News Corp newspapers. The Guardian Australia and The Conversation have imposed what it is in effect a ban on climate-change denialism, on the ground that it is harmful.

Harm is a long-established criterion for abridging free speech. John Stuart Mill, in his seminal work, On Liberty, published in 1859, was a robust advocate for free speech but he drew the line at harm:

[…] the only purpose for which power can be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

It follows that editors may exercise the power of refusing to publish climate-denialist material if doing so prevents harm to others, without violating fundamental free-speech principles.

Other harms too provide established grounds for limiting free speech. Some of these are enforceable at law – defamation, contempt of court, national security – but speech about climate change falls outside the law and so becomes a question of ethics.

Climate change harm
The harms done by climate change, both at a planetary level and at the level of human health, are well-documented and supported by overwhelming scientific evidence.

At a planetary level, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report last year on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

It stated that human activities are estimated to have already caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, and that 1.5°C was likely to be reached between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.

At the level of human health, in June 2019 the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners published its Position Statement on Climate Change and Human Health.

It stated that climate change resulting from human activity “presents an urgent, significant and growing threat to health worldwide”.

Projected changes in Australia’s climate would result in more frequent and widespread heatwaves and extreme heat. This would increase the risks of heat stress, heat stroke, dehydration and mortality, contribute to acute cerebrovascular accidents, and aggravate chronic respiratory, cardiac and kidney conditions and psychiatric illness.

At both the planetary and human-health levels, then, the harms are serious and grounded in credible scientific evidence. It follows that they provide a strong ethical justification for the stands taken by The Conversation and Guardian Australia in prioritising Mill’s harm principle over free speech.

Limited internal guidance
Aside from these two platforms and the ABC, journalists are offered very limited internal guidance about how to approach the balancing of free-speech interests with the harm principle in the context of climate change.

External guidance is nonexistent. The ethical codes promulgated by the media accountability bodies – the Australian Press Council and the Australian Communications and Media Authority – make no mention of how impartiality should be achieved in the context of climate change. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s code of ethics is similarly silent.

These bodies would serve the profession and the public interest by developing specific standards to deal with the issue of climate change, and guidance about how to meet them. It is not an issue like any other. It is existential on a scale surpassing even nuclear war.

As I write in my study at Central Tilba on the far south coast of New South Wales, the entire landscape of farmland, bush and coastline is shrouded in smoke. It has been like that since before Christmas.

Twice we have been evacuated from our home. Twice we have been among the lucky ones to return unhurt and find our home intact.

The front of the Badja Forest Road fire (292,630 ha) is 3.6 km to the north, creeping towards us in the leaf litter. A northerly wind would turn it into an immediate threat.

From this perspective, media acquiescence in climate change denial, failure to follow the weight of evidence, or continued adherence to an out-of-date standard of impartiality looks like culpable irresponsibility.

Dr Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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I joined the Australian Journalists Association (now the MEAA – Media Alliance) in, I think, 1971, when I still lived and worked in Papua New Guinea.

When I formally retired from paid work a few years back, I was given honorary membership but, to bolster the journalism profession and its union, I recently asked to return as a paying member – which was accepted.

Given that I still scribble the PNG Attitude blog, book reviews for The Australian, a column in Noosa Style and other bits and pieces, that seemed appropriate.

READ MORE: Journalists call for legislation to protect press freedom and the public’s right to know

It may seem implausible, but freedom of the press is under attack in our country. The actions of federal authorities have been nibbling at that freedom for some time, and most recently the federal police took a large bite at it.

I’m concerned. That’s why I’m sharing this letter:

A GRAVE THREAT TO MEDIA FREEDOM

Dear Llew O’Brien, MP,
cc Prime Minister Scott Morrison,
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese

I support in full the following letter from the MEAA calling upon the Australian Parliament to act to guarantee the freedom of the press in Australia.

Recent events have shown that this implied right of Australians is under threat. Legislative and constitutional changes are required:

The Australian Federal Police raids on the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst and on the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) represent a grave threat to press freedom in Australia.

We welcome the Prime Minister’s stated commitment to freedom of the press and openness to discuss the concerns that have been raised.

A healthy democracy cannot function without its media being free to bring to light uncomfortable truths, to scrutinise the powerful and inform our communities. Investigative journalism cannot survive without the courage of whistleblowers, motivated by concern for their fellow citizens, who seek to bring to light instances of wrongdoing, illegal activities, fraud, corruption and threats to public health and safety.

These are issues of public interest, of the public’s right to know. Whistleblowers and the journalists who work with them are entitled to protection, not prosecution. Truth-telling is being punished.

The raids, a raft of recent national security laws, and the prosecutions of whistleblowers Richard Boyle, David McBride and Witness K all demonstrate the public’s right to know is being harmed. Truth-telling is being punished.

It is also clear from the global response to the recent raids that Australia’s proud reputation around the world as a free and open society is under threat.

We urge Parliament to legislate changes to the law to recognise and enshrine a positive public interest protection for whistleblowers and for journalists. Without these protections Australians will be denied important information it is their right as citizens to have.

We urge you to take prompt action to protect our democracy for all Australians.

Yours sincerely,
Keith Jackson AM

• Australia’s press freedom needs more protection: Here’s where to start
• More Australian media raids stories
• Press freedom demonstrators say: ‘Australian democracy is in grave danger’

Two raids by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) on journalists and media organisations within the last 24 hours represent a disturbing attempt to intimidate legitimate news journalism that is in the public interest, says the union for Australian journalists, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).

Yesterday’s raid on a News Corporation Australia journalist, and today’s raid on the public broadcaster ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and three of its journalists, suggest that no media organisation is immune from government attacks on press freedom.

“A second day of raids by the AFP sets a disturbing pattern of assaults on Australian press freedom. This is nothing short of an attack on the public’s right to know,” said MEAA media section president Marcus Strom in a statement.

READ MORE: ABC’s Sydney headquarters raided by Australian Federal Police over Afghan Files stories

WATCH: John Lyons of the ABC’s The Drum sums up the Australian Federal Police raid

“Police raiding journalists is becoming normalised and it has to stop.

“These raids are about intimidating journalists and media organisations because of their truth-telling.

“They are about more than hunting down whistleblowers that reveal what governments are secretly doing in our name, but also preventing the media from shining a light on the actions of government,” Strom said.

“It is equally clear that the spate of national security laws passed by the Parliament over the past six years have been designed not just to combat terrorism but to persecute and prosecute whistleblowers who seek to expose wrongdoing.

‘Poisonous laws’
“These laws seek to muzzle the media and criminalise legitimate journalism. They seek to punish those that tell Australians the truth.

“Yesterday’s raid was in response to a story published a year ago. Today’s raid comes after a story was published nearly two years ago.

“Suddenly, just days after a federal election, the Federal Police launches this attack on press freedom. It seems that when the truth embarrasses the government, the result is the Federal Police will come knocking at your door,” Strom said.

“MEAA demands to know who is responsible for ordering these coordinated raids, and why now. We call for the government and opposition to take collective responsibility for the legal framework they’ve created that is allowing for what appears to be politically motivated assault on press freedom,” Strom said.

“For years the Liberal and Labor parties have engaged in a high-stakes game of bluff which has seen the introduction of anti-democratic laws in the guise of national security legislation.

“It is time that the government and opposition had a common sense approach to defusing these poisonous laws that are effectively criminalising journalism. This attack on the truth must end.”

• The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) is the Australian union defending press freedoms and is a member of the International Federation of Journalists.
• More media freedom stories

Two big media-related issues have emerged from the federal election: how opinion polls are reported and the polarisation of the main newspaper groups.

Opinion polls have been part of Australia’s political landscape for 90 years, and for most of that time they have been reliable barometers of public opinion.

As a result, they have acquired considerable credibility. Malcolm Turnbull weaponised this for political purposes when he justified his challenge to Tony Abbott’s prime ministership in 2015 on the basis that Abbott had lost 30 consecutive Newspolls.

READ MORE: Morrison leads Coalition to ‘miracle’ win, but how do they govern now?

It was a gross lapse of judgment.

Not only did it set up Turnbull to be judged by the same criterion – as duly happened last year when he lost his 31st Newspoll – but he chose precisely the wrong time to elevate public opinion polls to the status of prime ministerial kingmaker.

Public opinion polls have been living on borrowed time since mobile phones began to displace household fixed-line phones, a gradual but inexorable process over a couple of decades.

Without digressing too far into the complexities of sampling, it is now difficult, time-consuming and expensive to generate a genuinely random sample of voters.

Telephone polling
Telephone polling, introduced in the 1980s, originally drew its samples from the Telstra list of fixed-line numbers – in other words, from the White Pages. There is no equivalent available list of mobile phones so, for practical purposes, drawing a genuine random sample has become impossible.

To cope with these realities, polling organisations have adopted somewhat makeshift sampling and interviewing procedures, drawing on various combinations of fixed-line phones, mobile phones, large panels of available respondents, and robo-polling.

This in turn raises questions about the validity of statements about sampling error, something the election results brought home with a thump.

Yet the media have carried on reporting the polls as if nothing has changed.

Poll results still make banner headlines. Stories are still written on the basis that the data are as good as they have always been.

The public, accustomed to the longstanding reliability of Australian polls, do not know and are not told that this is nonsense.

Polls are useful and interesting stories, but the reporting of them needs to change.

Greater transparency
There needs to be greater transparency about how a poll’s sampling and interviewing are done. The way a poll is done – whether it is a human being or a machine asking the questions, for instance – is significant.

The public is also entitled to know that today’s polls have limitations that polls of the past did not have. They are more indicative and less precise, so statements about sampling error need to be qualified accordingly.

And as the main newspapers have become more partisan, so the reporting of polls has shifted from straightforward accounts of the data to stories dominated by analysis, comment or wishful thinking on the part of the writer or the editor.

Partisanship in the media, especially the newspapers, has always been with us, but analyses by Media Watch and The New Daily show it reached extreme levels in this election.

An audit of metropolitan newspaper front pages by Media Watch showed a heavy anti-Labor bias by News Corp papers, and a roughly equivalent – but less strident – pro-Labor bias by the old Fairfax (now Nine) newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

The New Daily analysed three nights of Sky News coverage – April 30, May 1 and 2 – and found gross anti-Labor bias:

News Corp’s unconstrained anti-Labor bias cannot account entirely for Labor’s disastrous showing, but common sense says it accounts for some.

Virulently anti-Labor
For example, the company has a daily newspaper monopoly in Brisbane through The Courier-Mail. It was virulently anti-Labor and Labor did astonishingly badly in Queensland. Coincidence? Possibly, but unlikely.

If Australia had a half-decent system of media accountability, there would be a public inquiry into the increasing polarisation of Australian newspapers and into the conduct of Sky at night.

However, the newspaper industry’s self-regulator, the Australian Press Council, relies on the two big newspaper organisations for nearly all its funding, so the chances of having such an inquiry approach zero.

And the broadcasting regulator, the Australian Media and Communications Authority, has never shown the slightest interest in reviewing the way commercial television and radio cover elections.

So in an age where polarisation is undermining democracies around the world, Australia is stuck with an increasingly polarised media, a highly concentrated media ownership landscape and no apparent way to do anything about it.

• Dr Denis Muller is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
• Mounting evidence that the tide is turning on News Corp, and its owner

The Nauru government’s refusal to allow the ABC from entering the country to cover the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum is disgraceful.

It is against the fundamentals of a free press.

It cannot be condoned.

READ MORE: Nauru government bans ABC from Pacific Forum

To allow a government to dictate which media outlets covers a story is tantamount to censorship and as journalists and as members of a healthy democracy, we cannot accept it.

ABC is our competitor, and a tough one at that, but there is something bigger at stake here than beating a rival.

Even in the Nauru government’s attempt to explain the move, the hypocrisy was blatant.

While the government claimed it only placed restrictions “on a number of people from all sectors” due to “very limited accommodation” and there was “no restrictions placed on media attendance for any reason other than this indisputable fact of accommodation and facility available”, it also said the ABC was not welcome because the government does not like what it reports.

The statement said the ABC would not be granted access “under any circumstances due to this organisation’s blatant interference in Nauru’s domestic politics prior to the 2016 election, harassment of and lack of respect towards our president in Australia, false and defamatory allegations against members of our government, and continued biased and false reporting about our country.

“It is our right, as it is the right of every nation, to choose who is allowed to enter.”

Many Australian media outlets are standing in solidarity with the ABC – as the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery president David Crowe said: “If the ban is not reversed, the media pool will be disbanded. If one cannot go, none will go.”

And it’s not just Aussie media dismayed by this move by the Nauru government.

Vanuatu’s Daily Post has withdrawn its reporter from the Vanuatu media delegation allotted to covering the event.

“This isn’t a self-righteous, moralising action. It’s a survival tactic. If we allow ourselves to get into a situation where our ability to report is predicted on how positive our coverage is, then we can’t do our job,” Daily Post media director Dan McGarry explained.

Of course, not all are of that view – the ABC’s natural enemy News Corp will still be attending.

Red Ink is Australia’s Nine Network “ears and eyes behind the big decisions, the gossip and spin” in the media world. Nauru is due to host the 49th Pacific Islands Forum and related meetings from September 3-6, 2018.

• Nauru’s ban on ABC splits commercial media
• Vanuatu Daily Post editorial on the issue
• IFJ calls on Nauru president to revoke ban on ABC journalists
• Outrageous Nauru ban on ABC journalists
• World public broadcasters group says ban is unacceptable

Environmental campaigners have accused The Australian and Courier Mail newspapers in regional Queensland of being printed on paper linked to illegal deforestation and human rights abuses in Indonesia.

In a campaign launched earlier this month, Tasmania-based advocacy group Markets for Change and Washington DC-headquartered Mighty Earth said that the owners of the two publications, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, buys paper from Indonesian paper manufacturer Aspex.

Aspex is a wholly owned subsidiary of Korean-Indonesian agribusiness conglomerate The Korindo Group, which has businesses ranging from palm oil and paper to construction, to real estate, financial services, and building wind towers.

An investigation by Mighty Earth last year revealed that Korindo’s palm oil arm was burning ecologically precious tracts of forest in Indonesia’s Papua province bordering with Papua New Guinea, as well as violating the rights of local indigenous communities by grabbing land without their consent, and destroying their forest livelihoods.

While the company has committed to a moratorium on forest clearing until an independent assessment has identified areas that have a high carbon stock and high conservation value—though it did briefly break this ban in February—it has yet to make progress on implementing more stringent environmental and social impact policies.

Measures that environmentalists are calling for include the institution of a no deforestation policy, restoring forests to compensate for the land they cleared after issuing a moratorium on deforestation, resolving conflicts with communities, and being transparent about its concession boundaries, suppliers, and sustainability practices.

The Australian connection
Deborah Lapidus, campaign director, Mighty Earth, said that the investigation was sparked by a reference to Aspex on the website of Australia-based paper products company Oceanic Multitrading; the firm says it imports Aspex newsprint—that is, the cheap paper used to make newspapers—into Australia.

Through further research, trade data analysis and collaboration with a paper supply chain expert, investigators determined that Aspex newsprint was used to produce The Australian and Courier Mail in regional Queensland. News Corp has confirmed that it sources some newsprint from the firm.

Lapidus explained that this was not an active decision by News Corp, but rather a “holdover issue” from the media giant’s acquisition of APN News and Media’s regional Queensland publications last December.

APN had an existing trade relationship with Aspex in the regional Queesland market, which News Corp inherited, Lapidus said.

For the rest of its print publications, News Corp sources sustainable newsprint from the Norwegian pulp and paper firm Norse Skog’s Australian business.

News Corp’s head of environment Tony Wilkins told Mighty Earth and Markets for Change in a letter dated July 19 that “the only paper we procure from Aspex is 100 percent recycled fibre content newsprint and this is Forest Stewardship Council certified”.

• More Indonesian stories