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Comment by pfundstein | Hacker News Reader

> the entire Australian media has been nothing but puppets controlled by murdoch

You're going a bit heavy on hyperbole there. There's a decent amount of non-murdoch news; ABC, SBS, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, The Conversation, etc.

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It's actually getting worse and worse. The Age and the Herald, having been sold to Nine are much lower quality than they once were. The Government is putting more and more pressure on the ABC, with constant (effective) funding cuts, and both direct editorial interference or indirect (i.e. threatening more funding cuts because of journalists publishing articles they don't like). With the ABC, this has been going on for years - in 2013, they withheld a detailed analysis of the flaws of the Liberal's NBN plan (which has been proven accurate) by Nick Ross before the election because of pushback from "the Turnbull camp", and then eventually he was made redundant because of pressure from the Government. Last year, emails were leaked of the chairman saying they needed to "get rid of Emma Alberici and Andrew Probyn because the Government hates them and they put our funding at risk" - for Alberici because she wrote some articles that got a lot of traction while the Government was trying to push big company tax cuts, pointing out that tax cuts haven't historically correlated with increased economic growth or employment growth (this is true). Last month, Emma Alberici was made redundant...

That's not even mentioning that the chairman of 9News is former treasurer of the conservative party which Murdoch is backing.

Alberici was caught making egregious errors and was heavily biased. She couldn't even tell that MYOB is a software company, instead calling them an insurance company IIRC.

Her claims that all corporate losses are profit-shifting was similarly egregious.

She deserved to lose her position, she was campaigning for one side and lying to do so.

I don't say this lightly - go look at the investigation into her piece and why it was taken down.

TheAge has gone to sh*t. It’s basically a collection of government press releases now. I’d been noticing just though reading it, and then their own journalists made the same point. It had become pretty blatant.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/14/journalists-at...

To be fair, The Age has long been in a state of derangement through having to compete for its traditional audience with both the (state-funded) ABC and The (trust-funded) Guardian, as well as smaller outlets like The Saturday Paper, Crikey, etc, whilst having lost much of the classifieds revenue that used to fund the formidable investigative, political and business reporting on which it built its proud reputation.

It hasn't been a decent publication for at least 12-15 years, and has long sought to attract eyeballs by stooping to BuzzFeed-style clickbait.

The Nine merger is an attempt to restore it to the position it used to hold in the market, but sadly the world has changed too much for that to be possible, so it's just gone from one kind of trash to another, it would seem.

It's a shame, I have great nostalgia for what it used to be in my early adulthood of the late 90s/early 2000s.

The Age and SMH (as well as Nine) are owned by the same company, which is chaired by Peter Costello. Though non-Murdoch, it's rare to see anything non-friendly to the Liberal party on there.

You mean aside from these articles published over the past few days?

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/icac-to-investigate-corr...

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/who-is-richard-colbe...

https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-law-to-deprive-immigration...

https://www.smh.com.au/national/morrison-s-china-decree-reek...

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/how-good-are-the-pro...

Yeah they exist and most of them are good (certainly a lot better at least) but it's not what the mainstream majority of "Aussies" read and they don't have the advertising power or control of the Murdoch press here.

"Sydney Morning Herald" publishes articles written by people you'd think are journalists but are climate deniers working in the "Institute of public affairs" think tank [1][2]. Back when a tsunami hit the coast of Indonesia in 2018, the death toll was growing over the days and Sydney Morning Herald was giving the numbers from a few days back in a tinny article about halfhway through the newspaper with the frontpage news telling the story of a deer accident on a NSW road. Sydney Morning Herald is the worst mainstream newspaper I've seen in a non communist country.

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/budget-tax-cuts-prom.... - there's a long list of articles written by people working in the "institute of public affair" think tank both in smh and other outlets like theaustralian and more.

[2] https://ipa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/IPA-Report-Why...

Most of them are specifically excluded from this legislation.

Yeah, I know. I'm not trying to defend it or "News" Corp.

FWIW, the ABC and SBS both depend on government funding, and so are far from independent; before even factoring in the Murdoch-Liberal Party relationship.

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