LAST WEEK, News Corp’s newspapers The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier Mail and The Adelaide Advertiser caused controversy by publishing front page “exclusives” and “special reports” alleging that more gas is needed to avoid electricity blackouts in the future.
If readers turned the page and read the fine print, they would learn that this so-called “news” was actually not news. It was an advertorial (a fancy word for an advertisement), paid for by – you guessed it – the fossil fuel industry.
@Joshi
Disagreements are fine, more than fine, they are needed if we are to understand where we stand on issues and why we do so.
My thinking is that the fourth estate should not be ‘muzzled’ by laws in what it produces as ‘editorials’ and ‘opinion pieces’ because that would be ‘censorship’. Australia has a history with govt censorship and we really don’t want to go back there (plenty of detail on the internet if interested).
Such opinions and editorials are not, of course, beyond the laws as they stand today. This is why liable cases are brought against journalists and their agencies from time to time (even if the legal system is somewhat skewed to favour the well-off, ie. those who can afford the usurious legal fees). That works fine up to a point. In my opinion, access to the legal system should be broadened to cover those aggrieved but too poor to litigate. Everyone should have received an education which equips them to know the difference between news (the reporting of a factual event) and editorails and opinions ( as well as infomercials, copyadvertising, puff pieces, fiction and propaganda).
As for the last of these, propaganda, we only need to strengthen our electoral laws to cover it, at the expense of extremist political groups if needs be. The benchmark being ‘factual truth’, subject to litigation, in political advertising. More work for govt here.
As for ‘news reporting’, the only culprit for the lies ‘reported’ are those who originally spoke them or performed them. In an open democracy you would not want to censor that (even if the reporters are slack and don’t put in the work to point out the fallacies, lies and misdirections in the items they are reporting on - that’s another issue altogether). Maybe there needs to be more that journalism as an oversight body ought to do to bring rogue reporters to heal (something like the medical profession does, or the govt does with respect to trade registration regulators).
Last, we all know that the nearer to a monopoly an enterprise is the worse off everyone else will be. And here our govt out to have the power to break up these monopolistic empires (aka Murdock and quite a few others). Divestiture legislation ought to be supported by all our representatives in Parliament ( those that won’t, do not have our social and financial interests in mind - one then wonders what the F** they are doing in Parliament in the first place, but that’s another story to tell).
Happy to read your own thoughts on this. Apologies for the length of this toot.
BTW, for the trolls out there reading this (you know who you are) present your arguments without attacking the person and you’ll get a lot more out of your ‘doom scrolling’.
#journalism #corporatemedia #censorship #auspol #Murdockcracy
I’m sorry if I’m misunderstanding, I don’t feel that you’ve actually addressed the issue at hand.
Specifically the event where Murdoch papers took payment from the fossil fuel lobby and in return ran front page stories pushing specifically their line that increased natural gas is necessary. This was made technically legal by small print on the next page.
The longstanding convention is that when presented as such a story has been written by a journalist to create the content and not pursue promotion, ‘advertorials’, while problematic in themselves, have always had a note, often small print, directly adjacent to the story.
The event reported here was deliberate misdirection intended to escape the notice of the reader.
The issue isn’t the freedom of the fourth estate, it isn’t even advertising or opinion in the press, it is that it should be clear to the reader what is news, what is opinion and what is advertising. There already exist laws that protect this separation. The Murdoch papers have found a loophole and have deliberately exploited it to deliberately mislead their readers. It is difficult to interpret it any other way and it is this specifically which should be made illegal by clarifying existing laws to close this loophole.
@Joshi
One solution could be to make terms such as ‘news’ or ‘current affairs’ or ‘journalism’ protected terms.
Anybody can claim to be a “nutritionist” but only those with actual recognised qualifications may describe themselves as “dieticians”.
The news media could be given tax breaks under the strict condition they produce only accurate and unbiased journalism.
“Advertorials”, and “puff pieces” would be banned and if a news organisation broke the rules, they would be fined heavily and lose their tax breaks.
Thoughts?
@RaymondPierreL3
It’s an interesting idea, I honestly don’t think there is an easy solution here though. Balancing freedom of speech with controlling false and misleading information is a supremely difficult and as yet unsolved problem.