A Nobel peace prize laureate and media mogul Rupert Murdoch might not have a lot in common, but this week Filipino journalist Maria Ressa and the News Corporation executive chairman spoke with one voice against what they both say is a threat to journalism: social media platforms.
Ressa told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Sydney dialogue that Facebook and Google are biased against facts and are creating "a virus of lies" that threatens all democracies.
Murdoch told his shareholders at the company's annual general meeting that "Big Tech" needed reform because the algorithms are "subjective" and silence conservative voices.
While Ressa is concerned about the effect on democracy, Murdoch, to be fair, is focused on the need to protect his business.
Their comments come in the wake of accusations by a Facebook whistleblower that the social networks are responsible for the world's increasingly polarised politics.
Ressa was awarded the Nobel prize along with the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov for their "courageous fight for freedom of expression, a precondition for democracy and lasting peace".
While Murdoch may not have powerful algorithms, he does have faithful lieutenants.
And none more so than veteran business commentator Terry McCrann, who was first out of the blocks backing up the media mogul's remarks.
"Social media like Facebook, YouTube and the rest, search engines like Google, don't need to be better regulated, they need to be destroyed," he wrote in the Australian.
That he rushed to print to support Murdoch comes as no surprise. Just a few weeks ago McCrann wrote a notable piece about the 25th anniversary of Fox News: Rupert Murdoch and his most amazing decade ever. Notable for its laudatory treatment of the boss, that is.
"Extraordinary and impressive as the Fox News story has been in its own right, is the even more extraordinary fact that it was the culmination of a decade of breathtaking entrepreneurial business-creating risk-taking across three continents by Murdoch."
Murdoch does have an enemy closer to home than Facebook and Google of course, and that is the ABC, which like the digital giants is a roadblock to his total domination of the market.
A stark demonstration of what Murdoch is up against when it comes to the ABC was a list of the top 20 Australian news sites, released this week by data analyst Similarweb and industry bible Mediaweek.
The data, which is based on total non-unique traffic for October 2021, shows abc.net.au as the biggest Australian news publisher, with over 100m total visits for the month.
In second spot is Murdoch's news.com.au, the only Murdoch property not behind a paywall. The Daily Telegraph fails to make the list and the Australian is in 15th spot, not a great result for the "heart of the nation". After news.com.au, News Corp websites don't come in above 14th.
Outgoing ABC news boss Gaven Morris addressed the constant attacks on the ABC by News Corp, in an exit interview with Inside Story.
Morris told journalist Margaret Simons he wished ABC journalists would spend less time worrying about the "noise" that comes from the Australian and its News Corp stablemates and more time trying to broaden their focus to the "breadth of experience and views of the audience — working-class people, people living with a disability, people most journalists never meet". The Australian takes pot shots at the ABC on a daily basis, leading to the unfair impression that the public broadcaster is in crisis and is failing viewers.
Morris wants the ABC's staff to ignore the criticism.
"He worries, for example, about whether the organisation adequately reflected the views of the 30% of Australians who voted ‘no' in the marriage equality referendum," Simons wrote.
"‘I'm not talking about religious zealots. I'm talking about genuine Australians who have a point of view that's different to the 70%. Are we at least making sure that is reflected? I don't necessarily think we struck that right.'"
Morris also revealed he was not happy about the culture of leaking to the press and it stopped him being "upfront and honest" with staff for fear that what he said would appear in the paper.
"That's one of the real difficult parts of the ABC culture," he said. "I've always struggled with that."
Ita Buttrose showed just how tough and fearless she is this week when accused the Morrison government of political interference.
The ABC chair said the government was trying to intimidate the public broadcaster after the Senate established an inquiry into the ABC's complaints handling process.
"Any incursion of this kind into the ABC's independence should be seen by Australians for what it is: an attempt to weaken the community's trust in the public broadcaster," Buttrose, a "captain's pick" by prime minister Scott Morrison, said.
The 79-year-old talked about her remarkable career and being the first woman to edit a major metropolitan newspaper in Australia in the 2021 Women for Media Report: ‘Take the Next Steps'.
She says when she left Kerry Packer's magazine empire to join Murdoch's News Ltd in 1981 she was in complete shock because there were no women in the hierarchy.
"They didn't quite know what to make of me and clearly, editing newspapers was still ‘a man's job'," the former editor of the Australian Women's Weekly said.
Buttrose clearly has no qualms when it comes to calling out powerful men. On Sunday she accused Liberal senator Andrew Bragg of playing politics and in the report she made unflattering remarks about none other than the News Corporation executive chairman.
Asked about working with Packer and Murdoch in the 1980s, Buttrose says: "Kerry was the smarter of the two".
The statistics in the 2021 Women for Media report, by Dr Jenna Price and Dr Blair Williams, make for depressing reading. The academics took a snapshot of Australia's media landscape by analysing articles published every day of May 2021.
Men still dominate the media industry despite the pioneering work of women like Buttrose. The gender disparity is apparent in the journalists who write the stories, the subjects of the stories and the topics of the stories.
For example female journalists wrote 43% of the highly visible, top billing stories, and women featured in 50% of the sample. But when men write, women feature in just 37% of the stories.
Of the big print publications the Australian Financial Review, the Herald Sun and the Australian published many more stories by men.
Of all the opinion pieces published across all media in May, 65% were written by men. And women's voices are still not heard as frequently in the media: only 31% of quotes are attributed to women.
For someone who has been dead for more than 40 years, Robert Menzies had a particularly active day in The Australian on Friday. "Menzies ‘aghast' at trends on campus," read the page three headline.
No, Ming was not back from the dead, but his spirit had been summoned for the opening of the Robert Menzies Institute at the University of Melbourne, where the federal education minister, Alan Tudge, said Australia's longest-serving PM would have been outraged by "de-platforming" and "hostility to contrary views".
It's a big claim given Menzies unsuccessfully tried to outlaw the Australian Communist Party and wasn't above a bit of censorship himself.
The press regulator has backed the Australian Financial Review's right to name "BBQ man", the mystery shopper who broke Sydney's 110-day Covid-free run back in May.
The AFR article revealed his name, his job and his face on the front page of the paper, sparking outrage that identifying Covid-19 patients would discourage people from getting tested and cooperating with contact tracers.
"The council considers there is a public interest in reporting on the business activities of Apollo Global Management in Australia, and notes the named person is somewhat of a public figure given his position within the organisation," the Australian Press Council said in its adjudication which cleared the Fin.
