Joe Hildebrand is the face of News Corp’s major campaign calling for a return to the golden age of 1960s manufacturing when Australia “made things here” and was “self-reliant”. The left should join the right in “embracing, celebrating and proclaiming national pride”, Hildebrand writes in the Daily Telegraph.
It was the same columnist who spearheaded News’s Mission Zero series four years ago, which inexplicably flipped the company’s long-held editorial position on climate change and extolled the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The latest campaign, rather clumsily dubbed Back Australia, launched on Sunday across all Murdoch’s brands including the metro and regional tabloid newspapers, the Australian, news.com.au, taste.com.au, Escape and Body+Soul. Spring-boarding off the front pages, Back Australia has produced dozens of articles and videos already pleading with readers to “back Australia”.
The strategy, which features the billionaire Dick Smith, has baffled those who have watched the company push a free-market philosophy, in particular at the Australian.
It was The Australian that just last year published an editorial warning that Albanese’s Future Made in Australia push “risks worsening the situation by favouring uneconomic or undeveloped technologies over existing industries that will be compromised but still expected to pay high royalties and taxes”. It condemned the policy as “old-style industry protection”.
And then there was Judith Sloan’s passionate defence of free, open markets and condemnation of Andrew Hastie’s “bonkers” pitch to revive a domestic car manufacturing industry.
“The most worrying aspect of Hastie’s bonkers intervention is the clear trend among conservative/right-wing politicians to ditch their belief in free markets and open international competition.”
Listening exercise
The flip-flopping on economic policy may be down to the lure of advertising dollars. News Corp has made no secret of the fact that Back Australia was not just an editorial campaign but a sales one. It is supported by major advertisers Harvey Norman, Australian Made Campaign, Westpac, Bunnings, Coles, TechnologyOne, REA Group, Cadbury, RM Williams, Qantas, Vodafone and BHP. Each page is marked “supported by”, which denotes it is advertiser-supported editorial.
Louise Barrett, News Corp’s managing director of sales, told the trade press that she took Murdoch editors to sales meetings and advertisers would “listen to them a lot more than they listen to me”.
But advertisers are not paying newspapers to be silent on issues they “may not like us covering”, assures the Daily Telegraph’s editor, Ben English. “What they’re paying for is to be associated with a campaign that aligns with their values and their approach to business.”
Toby Ralph, a global marketer, told Weekly Beast that western nations increasingly hanker for protectionism and a rebirth of local manufacturing in the face of globalism.
“To try to swim against this tide seems a hapless strategy, but perhaps not for the good people of News Corporation,” he said. “If there’s no independent lift in sales beyond News’s footprint, it’s sentiment theatre: ad sales dressed as patriotism.”
Ralph says brand marketers sign on to these campaigns because it’s cheaper than inventing a purpose from scratch. “They get to rent News’s megaphone and borrow the halo. Isn’t it amazing how often civic duty aligns with inventory?”
Gaza complaint dismissed
The latest coordinated attempt to bombard the ABC with complaints about its coverage, this time about the recent Hamas executions, has failed. Despite more than 100 complaints, the ABC ombudsman found the article did not breach the ABC’s editorial standards for impartiality.
It was only in June that the federal court found that an “orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists” led to the ABC unlawfully terminating the contract of casual broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf.
On this occasion, the ABC ombudsman received 108 complaints about an ABC News Verify article about Hamas carrying out executions in Gaza.
“The complaints were based on a template and were substantially identically worded,” the ombudsman reports.
“Broadly, they allege that the article, through relying on limited sources, rationalises Hamas’s brutality and minimises its agency and ideology.”
Complainants were concerned that the inclusion of comments from a political scientist saying Palestinians in Gaza have been subject to immense violence minimised Hamas’s actions as a reaction to war.
“We believe they reference more broadly how the people of Gaza have been conditioned to violence and brutality, and how, in the current environment, this may spill over into violent vigilantism,” the ombudsman said.
“In summary, we do not consider that the article minimises or is misleading about Hamas’s action and includes sufficient context and perspectives relevant to its newsworthy focus.”
Ita’s wild recollections
Ita Buttrose’s memoir, Unapologetically Ita, was published by Simon & Schuster this week and those of us who eagerly turned to the index to get her take on the Lattouf unlawful dismissal case were disappointed.
The 83-year-old former ABC chair neatly side-stepped the reputation-damaging incident by saying nothing at all, despite the publisher’s promise she would reflect on her experience at the top of the public broadcaster.
You had to turn to publicity for the book, largely in Nine Entertainment outlets, for any insight.
“I didn’t cave in to the lobby group,” Buttrose told the Good Weekend. “I didn’t cave in to anybody. I had a procedure that I followed with complaints, and these were constant because most people had an opinion one way or the other about the ABC.”
She told A Current Affair that she did not dismiss Lattouf and neither did she play a part in deciding to fight the case in court. “It’s ended up costing the ABC $2.2m and that’s appalling,” she said.
“Now when I left, we were going to settle. So what happened between then and when the case eventually came to trial? God only knows.”
Asked about her sex life by ACA host Allison Langdon, the former Cleo editor answered without missing a beat.
“You have to think about it more, because, you know, you might have an arthritic hip or something. You mightn’t be quite as versatile in the bed as you once were, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy sex,” she said.
“You’ve just got to be inventive … and throw abandon to the wind.”
Stokes defiant on BRS
Landing almost 3,000 words in a national newspaper to talk about a charitable cause like a telethon is quite the feat, unless you are a billionaire media mogul like Kerry Stokes that is.
At first glance an interview with Stokes and his wife of 30 years, Christine Simpson Stokes, was a deep dive into his media empire and his recent decision to step down.
But actually it was the telethon Stokes wanted to talk about and it was the telethon which took up the majority of the article: there were 47 mentions of the annual event.
“The highlight of the Telethon weekend was its annual ball, Perth’s most coveted black-tie affair, which raised a record $21.4m, up from $16.7m last year,” Damon Kitney wrote.
“When asked how Telethon has changed him, Stokes says that above all, it has given him a better understanding of the less fortunate.
Readers did get a few pars on the elephant in the room: Stokes’s financial support of the former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith. The Seven West chair has been ordered to pay $13.5m in legal costs to the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times, who were unsuccessfully sued for defamation by his former employee, Roberts-Smith.
“I still get angry that there seems to be some law that says I shouldn’t have defended him,” Stokes tells The Australian.
“He served the country and won a VC. Doesn’t he deserve to have a defence? With a multibillion-dollar corporation throwing every one of its resources at him, he deserves a little bit of help. That is what I did and I would still do it tomorrow.”
Stokes also used the opportunity to insist he has never interfered with “any of his news outlets’ independent editorial processes”.
“I’ve never, ever spoken to a journo at Seven and said, ‘You must do this.’ I have never spoken to a journo about a news story before it goes to air. The only thing I said once to [Seven’s former news director] Craig McPherson on Ben Roberts-Smith was ‘Make sure we are fair.’”
