Communications minister says he was not referring to the News Corp chief in his speech at the launch of the Saturday Paper

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Malcolm Turnbull has said he was surprised people thought he was referring to Rupert Murdoch when he said the publisher of the new Saturday Paper was not “a demented plutocrat” out to establish and run newspapers at a loss to peddle his own views.



The communications minister made the remark in a speech to launch the newspaper on Friday night, then made a point in a blogpost of denying he meant the News Corp magnate.

On stage with Morry Schwartz, who is also the publisher of the Monthly magazine and the Quarterly Essay, Turnbull said Schwartz’s publishing ventures operated at a profit so he was not a “demented plutocrat” looking to push an agenda.

There has been speculation online about who Turnbull was referencing and he says he was surprised people thought it could be News Corp chairman Murdoch.

“Rupert Murdoch has been publishing newspapers, including today some of the world’s most influential such as the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and the Australian, for more than 60 years,” he wrote in a blogpost on Sunday morning.

“And they have been and remain profitable. Far from being a rich man like [William Randolph] Hearst and many others who makes his money in some other area and then chooses to start a newspaper to promote his own political views, Rupert Murdoch started off as a newspaper man, the son of a newspaper man, and remains a newspaper man.”

Turnbull said he had referenced the Orson Welles character, Hearst, from Citizen Kane earlier in his speech.

In a copy of the speech – written before Turnbull delivered it, and sent by his office to Guardian Australia – the demented plutocrat comment does not appear.

In the speech he mulled over the state of the media, regulation and potential for profit, saying the launch of the Saturday Paper showed rumours of the death of newspapers appeared to be exaggerated, though the “rivers of gold” in classified advertising were drying up.

“These days few newsrooms have the luxury of ignoring where their funding comes from. In large part the industry is yet to settle on a single model, or even strategy, that guarantees viability,” he said.

“I have often said that in the digital age, perhaps the scarcest commodity of all is people’s attention spans.”

He noted the success of Guardian Australia, Buzzfeed Australia and the Daily Mail online as examples of Australia’s media becoming more diverse.

“While media companies jostle and vie in the new environment, the role of governments is pretty simple: to help, not hinder, new business models emerge and make it easier for companies to innovate,” he said.

“Across my portfolio the current media, telecommunications and radiocommunications regulatory framework is still fundamentally based in a mid-1990s world of relatively stable technologies and business models.”

He said the explosion of the internet, the ubiquity of the mobile device, the invention of social media, the rollout of a fast broadband network, the end of analogue television and the rise of cloud computing were all contributing to the changing media landscape.

“In heavily regulated markets, tight regulation usually helps incumbents – they have armies of lawyers to help navigate complex rules and lobby governments where smaller companies lack the resources,” he said.

“The pressures on the regulatory arrangements and the negative impact of out-dated regulation on the sector will only increase.”

Turnbull is overseeing a review of regulation in the industry and criticised former Labor governments for formulating policy to counteract media consolidation “in a time when the main trend has been towards diversity”.