Meta faces down a media more obsessed with peddling influence than public interest

Just as in early 2021, when the Morrison government introduced its shakedown of the big tech companies at the behest of Australia’s corporate media, the level of gaslighting, self-interest and conflict of interest being served up by media over the role of tech giants in funding journalism is extraordinary.

Facebook’s refusal to submit to the shakedown — AKA the news media bargaining code — has elicited cries of outrage and demands for a declaration of regulatory war from News Corp, Nine and Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media, which continue to lie to their audiences that this is about tech giants paying for content they are stealing from news media.

What it’s really about is the way big tech has developed a new advertising model, one far more effective than its now rather quaint strategy of spraying advertising at as many people as possible in the hope of reaching the small minority interested in and capable of buying a particular goods or service. Moreover, traditional media companies have been the victims of a decoupling of news from whole asset classes of advertising, like property and cars, moved online, to sites owned by… erm… traditional media companies.

The logic of the news media bargaining code isn’t that of ending a rip-off perpetrated by foreign tech giants. Instead, it’s similar to Coles and Woolworths successfully demanding, on the basis of all the great work they’ve done for the community, that the government forcibly transfer profit from an international competitor that had successfully disrupted their business model.

At least in the case of the supermarket duopoly, selling necessities to the community is their core business model. In the case of Nine, public interest journalism is an occasional side effect of its main entertainment business model. In the case of News Corp and Seven, there is virtually no public interest journalism to speak of, only right-wing propaganda. The shrieks of rage currently coming from the media are like those of gangsters whose rich target has stopped paying protection money.

Like many Australian companies, News Corp, Seven and Nine devote as much effort to trying to influence regulatory outcomes in their favour as they do to providing goods and services to consumers and other business. From streaming content regulations, to cross-media rules, to the near-abolition of licence fees, to their resistance to gambling advertising regulation and — in the case of Seven and Nine — anti-siphoning, the big media companies are assiduous in lobbying, threatening, cajoling and otherwise encouraging major party politicians to look after them, almost always successfully.

Such efforts are now increasingly desperate because, unlike in the era of mass media that ended around 2008 with the arrival of social media, such regulatory favours are there not to maximise the profits of the big media companies but to minimise their losses.

The policy problem this creates isn’t — as the media corporations insist — how to prop up their dying oligopoly, but how to provide the collateral benefit that leaks as a by-product from their primary activities, public interest journalism. In Australia, government has long been seen (except by News Corp) as a legitimate source of support for public interest journalism, via support for the ABC and SBS (and, arguably, community broadcasting). Other mechanisms, like taxpayer-funded political party spending during election campaigns, have acted as de facto mechanisms of similar support.

Government remains the most appropriate source of support for public interest journalism, even as the existing media oligopoly dies. Imposing the responsibility on foreign multinationals on a fictitious policy pretext, and structuring that responsibility to prop up influence-peddling incumbents, is about the trading of favours among the powerful, not about delivering the public good of journalism that holds the powerful accountable.