By Christopher Warren
Copyright crikey
The Trump-aligned capture of the media hurried along overnight, with the reality TV-style reveal of an American-adjusted TikTok involving some of the US president’s favoured billionaires like Lachlan Murdoch (perhaps Rupert, too) and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
It’s a nice gift for Murdoch father and son, levering the family back into the social media space some 20 years after their ill-fated buy of MySpace just in time to be overrun by a scrappy Facebook (“a huge mistake,” Rupert conceded in 2011).
The deal is more an amuse-bouche for Ellison, who’s been trading places back and forth with Elon Musk over the “world’s richest man” tag and now looks like getting his own social media platform to compete.
Along with the purge of Lachlan’s siblings from the family businesses, the explosive growth of the media interests of Ellison heir David, and the radicalisation of Twitter under right-wing speechifier Musk, we’re being deafened by a cacophony of right-wing voices.
Australia’s media is so deeply entrenched — culturally, economically — in the American world that we’re getting all the noise at the same decibels as Americans. The big question for Australia out of the Murdoch TikTok news is: what control will the American board have over the platform’s algorithm? And which algorithm are we going to get?
The global monopolies of old media and big tech have created a Five Eyes media space across Australia, the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand, with common or overlapping ownerships which set a common agenda for what the shared English-speaking media world considers “news”.
The result? America’s political and culture wars quickly translate into our front pages. Their talking points quickly become ours too. All of us have become caught up in Trump’s unfolding of the standard authoritarian playbook across news and information media. So how does it work?
Step 1: Consolidate media ownership in an oligarchic inner circle
The purge of the insufficiently trustworthy Murdoch siblings leaves the more right-wing Lachlan in unchallenged control at News Corp. The suddenly explosive growth of Ellison family media is creating a new integrated MAGA voice. It includes the Ten Network here in Australia, and is expected soon to absorb CNN and other Warner interests, and the American franchise of TikTok.
The same pattern is showing up in other parts of the populist authoritarian world, like India where Prime Minister Modi’s close confidant Adani bought out formerly independent media, like cable network NDTV, with a promise to have the courage to report “when the government is doing the right thing every day”.
It’s a similar situation in Israel where Netanyahu allies control commercial media, including the widely-distributed free tabloid Israel Hayom, owned by Miriam Adelson. (Last week’s op-ed: “Now is the best time to annex Judea and Samaria”.)
Once upon a tine, the billionaire-media track worked the other way around: politicians had to suck up to moguls as the cashflow-rich media made its owners into billionaires (like the Murdochs, or the Redstones who recently sold Paramount to the Ellisons). Now, news media are a loss-leader, a necessary investment by the very rich to seek favours as they puff up their leader.
Step 2: Radicalise the right
Forget fake news or Russian bots. It’s the legacy media that’s radicalising the right — the bots just amplify it. In the UK, for example, it’s the traditional Tory newspapers and right-wing broadcasters like GB News that are enabling the hard-right anti-immigrant Reform Party with a focus on their talking points of choice.
It’s not just the Daily Mail (which produces a successful online Australian edition) or the Murdoch-owned The Sun. Once the UK’s Daily Telegraph was so reliable for the centre-right Conservative Party that it was dubbed the “Torygraph”. Now it’s a regular promoter of Reform leader Nigel Farage.
Similarly, in the US, The Washington Post has been using the Kirk fracas to add Karen Attiah to its list of sackings, this time for social media posts about that much-abused and notoriously thin-skinned demographic: “white men”. Since dropping their “democracy dies in darkness” schtick of the first Trump term for “personal liberties and free markets” in the second, most of the best journalists and analysts on the paper have left or been, quietly or not, moved on.
Step 3: Cow the rest
Those few corporate media reluctant to be caught jumping on the Trump train still find themselves restrained by their inert corporate cowardice. Disney has been taking “we’re not bought, just scared” defence over their sacking of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
It’s not clear who Disney are most scared of: the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission which controls broadcast licenses, or the right-leaning NexStar Media and Sinclair Broadcasting who carry the corporation’s ABC channel and were the first to kick up a fuss about Kimmel. Either way, it demonstrated the impossibility of US media standing aloof from the MAGA line.
As the pages of the authoritarian playbook get turned one by one, our media — legacy and social platforms alike — are being replaced with the choices of an increasingly radicalised billionaire class, all chattering in tune with the hard right.