News Corp defends 'kick this mob out' front page as PM urges voters to make up their own minds about 'fairness and balance'

This article is more than 7 years old

This article is more than 7 years old

Election 2013 has begun with a head-on confrontation between Labor and the nation’s biggest media group, News Corp Australia.

The biggest selling daily newspaper in the crucial battleground state of New South Wales, the Daily Telegraph, began its election coverage with a picture of the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and the banner headline: “Now you finally have a chance to kick this mob out.”

Rudd responded that it was “clear” that News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch wanted the government removed and Tony Abbott to become prime minister, and said people needed to make up their minds about the paper's “fairness and balance”.

A spokesperson for News Corporation said the paper was exercising its right to editorialise as it chose.

“Every newspaper in the free world exercises its right to editorialise its position before an election, often on the front page. The Daily Telegraph supported Kevin Rudd in the 2007 election. This time it does not,” the spokesman said in written comments provided to Guardian Australia.

The paper’s editorial blamed Labor’s economic management for the end of the economic boom times and said people smugglers would be “one of the few economic sectors that will be unhappy to see an end to Labor's rule".

It also accused Labor of trying to “muzzle the media and to intimidate a free people into docile, compliant silence”.

Labor immediately hit back, suggesting the paper, the company and its owner had an agenda.

Asked about the headline on the ABC Radio’s AM program, Rudd said: “Mr Murdoch controls 70%of the print media in this country. It is plain from what Mr Murdoch has said through his public statements that he wants to see the government removed and he wants Mr Abbott as prime minister … in terms of basic fairness and balance of reporting the Australian people will make up their mind.”

And his deputy, Anthony Albanese, said it was “an extraordinary intervention on day one of an election campaign”.

He said voters would "look for what the agenda is behind the headline”.

“It’s not terribly subtle and, in terms of the media, I reckon Telegraph readers will be picking that up and thinking I deserve better than that as a Telegraph reader.

“We do have a free media in Australia, but we also have freedom to look at it critically, and people will look at it critically. People will wonder what discussions have taken place in order for a headline like that to occur,” he said on the Nine Network's Today Show.

The Coalition leader, Tony Abbott, said there would be other publications that supported Labor and accused some in the Labor party of being “very sensitive to criticism” and of “seeing conspiracy theories everywhere”.

Hard-hitting New York Post editor-in-chief and former Daily Telegraph editor Col Allan has temporarily returned to Australia in recent weeks.

In a memo to staff, the News Corporation chief executive, Robert Thomson, wrote: “I have asked Col Allan, editor-in-chief of the New York Post, to spend the next two or three months working with [News Corporation Australia chief executive] Kim Williams and providing extra editorial leadership for our papers, which are in the midst of an important period of transition in our key markets.”

News Corporation publications have been highly critical of the government since the formation of the minority government, which the Daily Telegraph labelled “The Big Steal”.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard’s proposed media reforms were opposed by all media organisations, but many in Labor were particularly critical of News, and Williams said they were were “firmly aimed” at his company, which Labor viewed with “serious dislike”.

The Daily Telegraph ran a front page on that reform package, comparing former communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy to despots and dictators including Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

News Corporation paper the Australian reported that Murdoch signed four copies of the Conroy front page at a recent birthday bash for conservative thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs, also attended by Abbott and many of his front bench. One was a gift for an editor and the others were to be auctioned by the organisation.

The media laws were eventually abandoned due to lack of parliamentary support and Kevin Rudd’s new chief political strategist, Bruce Hawker – at the time a consultant – wrote an opinion piece for the ABC saying Labor itself was largely to blame for failing to explain or “sell” the package.

“Time and again, federal Labor loses the day because it fails to make a case for its reforms. When this happens it is left looking disorganised and weak. The latest example of this failure to formulate a plan and execute a strategy is the furore over Stephen Conroy's proposal for media regulation,” he wrote.