There is nothing new about attacks on News Corp’s influence on policy and politics in Australia. There is nothing new about claims that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers are not just right wing, but distort and manufacture news, campaigning for favoured political parties without the obligation of fairness. There is nothing new about concern over the impact the company, which controls 70% of the country’s newspaper circulation, might have on democratic debate.

But this old story has a new twist as Australia prepares for an election, a hint that something is changing.

The opposition Labor party, which once believed it had no choice but to court senior News Corp executives, now openly criticises it, perhaps believing its power is waning as the media fragments, or that its bias might even help them at next Saturday’s poll.

Even more surprisingly, several respected News Corp insiders are speaking against their organisation’s bias, particularly at Murdoch’s flagship Australian newspaper.

“This sounds like the first time since 1975 that the journalists at the Australian have actually stood up and said something,” says associate professor David McKnight from the University of New South Wales, who has written extensively on Murdoch.

After the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1975, the Australian’s journalists went on strike during the subsequent election campaign over what they saw as the newspaper’s biased coverage.

A letter from journalists to management took issue with the “deliberate and careless slanting of headlines, seemingly blatant imbalance in news presentation, political censorship and, more occasionally, distortion of copy from senior specialist journalists, the political management of news and features, the stifling of dissident and even palatably impartial opinion in the papers’ columns…”

The tipping point this time was on Wednesday, when Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, the most aggressively anti-Labor masthead in the group, published a front-page story with the headline “Mother of Invention”, which criticised opposition leader Bill Shorten for “neglecting to mention” on the ABC’s Q&A program that his now deceased mother Ann, had an “illustrious” career as a barrister in mid-life. The suggestion was that he had manipulated his mother’s career for political gain.

Shorten has in fact discussed his mother’s law career many times, but his point on Q&A was to explain his motivation in politics. After leaving school, his mother gave up her dream to study law to train as a teacher because it came with a scholarship, which would help her working-class family. The omission of her later law career on this occasion, according to the Telegraph journalist, meant Shorten “comes off as the slippery salesman yet again”.

The “gotcha” moment backfired. Shorten’s riposte that he had never hidden his mother’s later legal work, and that she had struggled at the bar because of age discrimination, garnered him sympathy and, according to most political observers, countered a lingering critique that he could appear wooden.

On the brink of tears, Shorten called the Telegraph story a “new low” and “gotcha shit”.

“I can’t change what happened to my mum. But I can change things for other people. And that’s why I’m in politics,” he said.

Paying homage to Murdoch

For decades, Australian party leaders, including Labor leaders Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, travelled to New York to visit Rupert Murdoch before an election. But Shorten has declined, saying it was nothing personal, but that “I will deal with their local management, just as I deal with the local management of the ABC.”

Rudd, who the Australian supported in 2007 but turned sharply against at the 2013 election, now calls for a royal commission into News Corp, which he calls a “cancer on Australian democracy”. He said recently that Shorten’s decision was smart.

“The only time Murdoch tries to get into bed with federal Labor leaders is when his editors conclude that, despite News Corp’s efforts, the conservatives will not win anyway.”

At the 2013 election, the Daily Telegraph in particular campaigned ferociously against Labor. It’s front-page headline the day after the election was called read “Kick this mob out”.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sydney Daily Telegraph newspaper (right), alongside the Sydney Morning Herald (left) on 5 August, 2013. The Daily Telegraph urges readers to ‘kick this mob out’. Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images

Labor’s divisions and changes of leadership between Rudd and Gillard would almost certainly have cost the party election anyhow, but Rudd’s adviser Bruce Hawker has written about how News Corp “blew our campaign off course”. Radio and TV stations picked up the stories, distracting Rudd from his agenda.

That has not happened at this election. No media organisation followed up the Daily Telegraph’s hatchet job, except to condemn it.

What has happened is that a trickle of News Corp insiders has spoken out against the organisation they used to work for, or still work for.

There’s not a lot to read in the political news that isn’t biased in such a way that you think, ‘is this really true’?

Tony Koch, a 30-year veteran of News Corp until retiring in 2012, won five prestigious Walkley awards and the Sir Keith Murdoch News Ltd award. In a Guardian column, he wrote that once good newspapers had lost their way with the “biased anti-Labor rubbish that, shamefully, the papers now produce on a daily basis”.

“One has only to look at the story selection and headlines on the front pages of the papers each day to see that an anti-Labor angle has been taken, however contorted had been the literary gymnastics required to finally arrive at that particular bit of stupidity … it grieves me to hear that the Australian has become little more than a laughing stock.”

Koch’s intervention was extraordinary. But then the newspaper’s current social affairs reporter, Rick Morton, gave an interview to journalism students at the University of Technology in Sydney, saying journalists at the Australian were uncomfortable with the paper’s cheerleading for the Coalition.

The “craziness has been dialled up” in the past six months, Morton said, with copy changed without reporters’ knowledge, and headlines spun to reflect a particular view.

“People will tell you going back a decade it used to be a very great paper, and in many ways it still is, but something has gone wrong.

“We know what the empire is, we know what the papers do, but something has changed in the last six months. I don’t know what it is. Death rattles or loss of relevance? And journos pretty much spend all day talking about it.”

Asked about Morton’s remarks on ABC radio, one of the Australian’s most respected political commentators, Niki Savva, said that “there are grounds for concern about the way that some of the coverage has been handled, there’s no doubt about that”.

“These are decisions that are made by the people who are running the newspaper and they don’t always make the right calls, just like politicians, they make mistakes and I think some very obvious mistakes have been made and I think that’s a great shame.”

Influence of the Murdoch heir

Such dissent has not been heard from News Corp employees for years. The company always says editors make their own decisions, and do not take orders from Rupert Murdoch. It may be that his heir apparent, Lachlan, has more influence now.

Chris Mitchell, a former long-time editor of the Australian, recalled in his 2016 memoir that “Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician”, with views often to the right of his father’s.

The media academic and journalist Meg Simons, who became a target of News Corp after criticising some of its practices, told the Guardian that the principal influence of News Corp was to stifle free debate.



“The main concern is that such behaviour by a media outlet discourages people from participating in public life – including voices that would enrich the dialogue. As a journalist I dish it out so have to be prepared to take it in return, within limits. But not everyone should have to tolerate such vendettas merely for speaking out.

“Such behaviour amplifies certain voices in our society at the cost of others. This is possible because of our highly concentrated media ownership. If we had more diversity of media ownership, there would be less reason to worry when one set of outlets goes rogue or off on some campaign of its own invention.



“I am strongly in favour of freedom of speech, which is so important that we should put up with a great deal before we limit it. But the principle of freedom of speech should not be used to stifle the speech of others. At times, News Corp’s behaviour has tended to do that.”

Whether News Corp’s campaigning at this election will matter won’t be known until next week. Despite the Daily Telegraph’s efforts, Labor’s vote did not collapse in 2013 in western Sydney, where the party felt most vulnerable. In Victoria, the Herald Sun campaigned against the state Labor government to no effect.

Similarly, in Queensland, the Courier-Mail’s bias did not hurt Labor. It is true that the papers are not always in lock step. The Herald Sun chose not to run the Ann Shorten story – although the Courier-Mail did – and the Melbourne paper’s best-known columnist, Andrew Bolt, said he supported that decision.

Simons says the influence of newspapers can be overrated.

“The bias against Labor in News Corp papers is clear to see, and indeed for some years now the tabloids have tended to go all out in frank anti-Labor campaigns during state and federal elections.

“But how much does it matter? A study of voting trends suggests that such campaigns, even at their most virulent, have had no discernible effect on voting behaviour. Probably, their main effect is to trash the reputation of the mastheads – which already rate below 50% in terms of public trust.”

But something has shifted at News Corp, particularly at the Australian, says McKnight. There’s a harder line, more obvious bias.

“I’ve never seen it quite so bad. You’ve always had to read between the lines, and in some ways, it was not a bad paper, it still had a big journalistic staff.

“But in the last six months, there’s not a lot to read in the domestic political news that isn’t biased in such a way that you just scratch your head and say, ‘is this really true’?”

As for the Telegraph, it has become a “comic book”, similar to the Sun in London, he says. Yet McKnight warns against predictions that Murdoch’s influence is waning. The Australian is still read by politicians and policy makers. It still often sets the agenda for radio and television. McKnight suspects the change is Lachlan’s influence.

“He’s always been more right wing than his father, always more purist and less pragmatic. I see somewhere either his hand or the hand of people who are desperate to please him.”