How News Corp got ‘Airbus Albo’ to take off — and dragged the media along with it

From “Airbus Albo” to “the honeymoon’s over”, News Corp has used the thudding power of repetition to reset the political narrative — at least as far as gallery insiders are concerned. It’s a tough job and you have to admire the chutzpah in trying. But before you get too critical of News Corp, have a go at making Peter Dutton appear electable first and see how you fare.  

The Holt Street brains trust will be satisfied they’ve ended the year having convinced the gallery to chin-strokingly believe that Labor — or at least Anthony Albanese — is in trouble.

“Labor limps to the end of an arduous year,” The Australian Financial Review’s gallery opinion leader Phillip Coorey pronounced in early December. “Anthony Albanese a drag on Labor’s recovery,” The Australian headlined its end-of-year Newspoll (which showed — to the extent polls this far out reveal anything — that the political landscape is largely unchanged since the last election).

How did News Corp achieve this framing? With a persistent boring away at the “Airbus Albo” meme. It’s become so central to the anti-Albanese campaign that it’s getting silly season spin-offs, with the prime minister’s dog Toto “on a VIP plane” and “tasting $500 bottles of wine”.

Sky News has been the key vector. Within a month of Labor’s election last year, the phrase was already on high rotation in interviews and commentary and on chyrons and hashtags. It’s not clear who was the first to release the nickname into the wild: maybe it was Paul Fletcher in a mid-June interview with Sky’s Laura Jayes; maybe it was a contemporaneous commentary from Sky’s Sean Hannity equivalent, Paul Murray.

It’s illustrative of the key role Sky News plays in Australia’s right-wing media ecosystem. Its key audience isn’t those hundreds — maybe a few thousand — who watch it live on the declining Foxtel platform, or its free-to-air broadcast in regional Australia. It’s the millions exposed to it through YouTube and Facebook. It’s on those platforms that Sky News both makes its money through programmatic advertising and builds an audience (and distribution network) for its right-wing talking points.

A look at its YouTube page reflects its key market: MAGA Republicans in the US, where Australia’s Sky News acts as third-party international validation for whatever Fox News is talking about at any given time (right now: Hunter Biden).

But the one audience it reliably delivers in Australia is the parliamentary staffers and journalists whose daily interactions shape how the political zeitgeist is channelled into the insidery commentary of Australia’s traditional media.

The focus on prime ministerial travel has the pretence of tough-minded journalistic accountability, but in reality, it’s all about the semiotics. “Airbus Albo” is an attempt to skewer Albanese’s self-made everyman image with the heavy-handed hint that he’s indulging in the trappings of power. It’s Albanese’s “ordinary bloke” image that Scott Morrison, as Sean Kelly wrote in The Game, worked so hard to replicate with his ersatz suburban Dad schtick.

As an attack, it appeals directly to the poorly educated regional demographic. The tag is on high rotation on One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain animated videos (often distributed through Gina Rinehart’s Hancock corporation). And for the Liberals, it’s as much as a defence as an attack, enabling them to brush off the enduring pain of Morrison’s late 2019 Hawaiian holiday with an “everyone does it” shrug.

Through much of the first half of the Albanese term, the attack was too blatant, too self-interested to get traction with the gallery as a whole. But eventually the commentariat was forced to reward persistence with attention. In November, the Nine mastheads tried laughing it off. As a tactic from the opposition, it became a criticised talking point on Insiders. It was even fact-checked by CheckMate.

For News Corp, that’s all a win. Its claims were amplified, while the ABC’s involvement opened the window for a further attack. And, bonus, one of The Australian’s Labor-linked contributors, Cameron Milner, was emboldened to bite, saying Albanese was “simply not in the country enough”.

But News Corp isn’t getting everything its way, with it being increasingly wedged from the populist right by the local franchise of Britain’s Daily Mail. If clickbait-able outrage is your go-to for news, then the Mail is just better — and free.

Launched as a joint venture with Nine in 2014, the Daily Mail split off two years later at the peak of the social media distribution boom. Its success ever since (it too was an early adopter of the “Airbus Albo” meme) has forced News Corp’s ad-supported free service news.com.au to shift right, with a recent hard-fought battle for ownership of the big political story of the moment: Toto’s “jet-setting lifestyle” with “Airbus Albo”.