It’s a strange week to assert this, but I think Mark Latham is useful. Not in and of himself, of course, but for what he reveals about conservative media in Australia and its ecosystem of talent.
This week, Sky sacked him after a series of on-air outrages. But recall that this is not the first time that Latham has lost a media job. In 2015, he resigned from the Australian Financial Review, where he’d been a columnist for eight years, after using the space to attack Lisa Pryor and feminists in general, and trolling Rosie Batty on Twitter.
He quarrelled with two consecutive editors of the Spectator Australia leading to his column being discontinued not once but twice. And a projected gig at the Age came to nothing after newsroom protests at the mere rumour that it might happen. And Sky itself had previously taken him off air in 2015.
Despite this history, this year he was given a show with a couple of other journeyman grumps at Sky. Amazingly, he still has a column at the Daily Telegraph. And even now it’s easy to imagine that he will fulfil his promise to find a new home for The Outsiders.
Not because it was good – it mainly served as a place for Latham and friends to ventilate their grudges and obsessions. Nor because it was popular – The Outsiders didn’t manage to push Sky News beyond its roughly 0.5% share of television viewers in Australia’s metropolitan markets.
The fact is that as crude as Latham’s provocations are, as sad and obsessive as he may have become, and as boring as his rote denunciations of a largely imaginary PC culture might be, the Australian right – of which Latham is now unambiguously a part – is well resourced, but tends to recycle the same talent, and rely on the same voices. A small group, mostly men, have come to dominate a wide range of media outlets, and their opinions count for much more than they should.
Latham’s show was so unpopular that it took weeks to uncover the gaffes that sank him, but conservative media doesn’t need to be popular. It’s an open question in Australia as to how many partisan outlets actually pay their way. In the US, News Corp’s Fox News has found ways to make money because in a big market, there is a sufficient critical mass of mostly old people who are prepared to sit through ads for home security systems and incontinence remedies to listen to Bill O’Reilly yelling.
But it’s hard to say the same in Australia. News Corp does not disaggregate figures on particular titles, but in 2014 Chris Mitchell admitted that rightwing flagship The Australian had not been profitable since 2008.
Despite the newspaper’s trumpeting of its digital subscriptions, it doesn’t get a lot of traffic compared with its competitors. The West Australian certainly summarised conventional media wisdom when it called the paper a Murdoch “vanity project”.
Other Murdoch papers offer platforms to blowhard opinionistas, but how many bums do they put on seats, as opposed to the breathless sports coverage on the back pages? Put that aside and note that recent figures show that News Corp’s newspapers have continued to slide in their earnings.
And Sky’s rightwing commentators subsist on the diminishing surpluses of a larger business whose own long-term future is murky. But because Sky (in the evening and during a lot of the weekend) makes no effort to be a balanced news service, there is plenty of airtime to fill with dreary hard-right opinion.
Rightwing Talkback Radio on stations like Sydney’s 2GB fares better money-wise, but its audience is dominated by people past retirement age.
When we consider smaller conservative organs, we might wonder how they keep body and soul together. Last year Quadrant was crying foul because they missed out on an Australia Council grant.
Despite their diminished, declining audiences, and despite all of the space they have to fill, none of these outlets appear to think that they should broaden their search for talent. The same names crop up all over the conservative mediasphere.
Andrew Bolt has a column that not only appears in the Herald Sun, but in News Corp titles all over the country. He supplements this on his blog. And he also has a Sky show and a regular spot on Sydney radio.
Chris Kenny has a column in the Australian and a blog on their website, an Adelaide Advertiser column, and also hosts on Sky. (In his spare time, he maintains what must be, even in a crowded field, the worst Australian Twitter accounts).
Gary Johns writes for the Australian and the Australian Spectator. David Flint writes for the Australian Spectator and Quadrant. Latham outsider Rowan Dean is the editor of the Spectator and also has a column in the Courier-Mail and the AFR.
The op-ed page of The Oz and other News Limited titles is dominated by familiar, middle-aged, white male faces. If the average age of the contributors wasn’t somewhere north of 50, you might be tempted to call it a boys’ club.
Perhaps this closed shop is just a matter of risk aversion. When new talent is blooded – a Caleb Bond or a Daisy Cousens – it rarely works out as planned and often seems to be inadequately nurtured, as we saw when a bizarre Cousens column on Bill Leak was inexplicably published, pulled and republished earlier this month. When fringe conservative writers are given space at places like Quadrant, they tend to fill it with paranoid bilge.
The trouble is that the clique of ideologues and opportunists that populate conservative media, and which form a feedback loop with the rightwing of the Liberal party, are not necessarily the best guide to the priorities of the people outside the conservative opinion bubble.
Consider the doomed effort to change section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act this week (an effort which Latham fully supported).
Few in the community were demanding this – the best indications are that people don’t much care. But conservative commentators were almost unanimous that it was the most pressing issue facing the country. In their minds, and in those of a significant group Liberal party MPs and senators, this small, ongoing challenge to their privilege took on an outsize significance.
The result was that a bemused electorate has looked on while the government acted out the imperatives of a conservative echo chamber where the same names, the same faces, and the same views crop up over and over again.
How long will governments dance to their tune?
