Chapter 22: 24-Hour News in Australia[1]: Public Service and Private Interest

Brian McNair

The story of 24-hour news provision in Australia is one of a competitive dynamic between two organisations: one public service media provider, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which produces News 24, and one commercial organization, News Corporation, which operates and owns the Sky News channel (alongside commercial operators Seven Media Group and Nine Entertainment Co).[2] These rivals attract relatively small proportions of the country’s TV viewers, and like other “legacy” platforms must now compete also with an expanding range of online news providers eating into audience share. This essay considers the ways in which News 24 and Sky News seek to distinguish themselves from each other, and also how they are adapting to the enhanced competitiveness of the digitized, networked media environment.

24-hour News in Australia: An Overview

Sky News was launched in 1996 (Young, 2009), the first domestically produced 24-hour news channel in Australia. ABC launched News 24 in July 2010. Paying subscribers to the Foxtel digital network may access a range of externally produced 24-hour channels, such as Russia Today (RT), CNN and Al Jazeera, but in the Australian public sphere, addressing Australian issues and events, ABC News 24 and Sky News comprise a duopoly of real-time news provision.

These channels have relatively low audience ratings by comparison with Australia’s free-to-air TV. Where an edition of prime-time news on commercial Channel 9 may achieve in excess of one million viewers, for example, News 24 rarely exceeds 1.1% of the total viewing audience on a given week. Sky News typically attracts even fewer viewers, averaging 0.4% of audience share in January 2015. ABC News 24 attracts nearly three times the audience of Sky News, then, the latter characterized by one senior ABC manager as “only ever a niche” (although the same could be said of News 24 itself).[3] One possible explanation for the difference in ratings, other than the power of the ABC news brand against that of Sky, is that ABC News 24 is offered free on Australia’s Freeview public digital platform, while access to Sky News requires a Foxtel subscription. ABC can also be accessed on Foxtel, but Sky is absent from Freeview.

These ratings understate the key role of 24-hour news in the Australian media ecology, however. A striking feature of Sky News is that its audience draws heavily on the political class in the nation’s capital, Canberra, and that broader elite of policy makers and movers across the country. It is indeed the “go to” channel for the political class, and a key platform for them to communicate their messages on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour basis. Sky News’ political editor David Speers remarks that

We deal very much with national politics, and make that our daily guide. We don’t have the biggest audience by a long shot, but we’ve certainly got a strong niche audience, an influential audience—politicians, lobbyists, business, people who are engaged in the political process.

When, for example, there’s a big political story happening during the day, and politicians know that the people watching Sky are going to matter – say for example there’s a leadership showdown—those for or against know that there’s really not much point in talking to anyone in the print media, because they won’t be publishing until the next day. If they want to influence their caucus colleagues, the one place to do that publicly is Sky, so you do start to get a hell of a lot of phone calls, people wanting to go on the record, and also people talking off the record, to try and comment, to influence the debate and the discussion. Because they know that they will be very closely watched. As journalists and hosts you need to be very mindful of that, that you’re being used.[4]

The Australian News Environment

Australia has one of the richest news cultures in the English-speaking world. Before the impact of digitalization and online journalism began to be felt on print circulations, the country supported a large number of mainly city- and region-based newspapers. Even in the era of declining print, per capita print readership in Australia remains comparatively high, although research conducted by the Reuters Institute in 2015 shows a familiar pattern of audience migration to online and mobile platforms for news (Newman et al., 2015). According to the report, 59% of Australians surveyed in 2015 accessed news at least weekly on a smartphone, 35% on a tablet. The report also shows that 44% of Australians now see online platforms as their main source of news, 35% identify TV as the main source, and only 7% go to print first.

Australia has been in the forefront of the global trend to access news online, therefore, but traditional platforms retain a sizeable audience. There are currently six free-to-air TV channels in Australia, delivered by the public service ABC and SBS, and commercial channels 7, 9, 10 and 11. With digitalization, these organisations have expanded into multimedia channels available on the public Freeview and commercial Foxtel platforms. ABC runs ABC2 and ABC3, for example, and ABC News 24. The commercial providers have catch-up and niche channels on Freeview, such as 7mate, and the platform also hosts National Indigenous Television, a public service channel devoted to indigenous themes.

News and current affairs provision on Australian free-to-air TV is concentrated in the ABC, and programs such as 7.30 Report and Four Corners which regularly deal with political, economic and foreign policy. ABC runs a weekly public access political debate show, Q&A. Commercial free-to-air TV, however, has largely abandoned the current affairs space. While there are occasional moments of engagement with key public issues in Australia on commercial TV, such as a 60 Minutes item on child sexual abuse within the Catholic church (an issue in Australia as in other countries), the majority of current affairs output on the commercial channels addresses stories concerned with consumerism, dramatic crime and human interest themes, and often includes product promotion of items about, for example, weight reduction. One primetime show, A Current Affair, exemplifies this move away from rigorous current affairs journalism in the commercial sector, presenting as more akin to advertising than journalism. As in many other countries, what was once a significant commitment by commercial broadcasters to investigative journalism and reportage around public affairs has been squeezed by competitive pressures for audience ratings, leaving the public service media as the core location for this key content.

It is in this context that the role of Sky News in the Australian public sphere has become significant. The channel, though available on subscription-only Foxtel, has become de facto the main space in Australian commercial TV for sustained, well-resourced coverage of domestic news and current affairs. Without its presence the public service ABC would be, not only the single provider of 24-hour news in Australia, but the only broadcast organization providing sustained TV news and current affairs coverage of the quantity and quality one would expect of an advanced capitalist society drawing heavily on the British model for its journalism provision.

The ABC News 24/Sky News duopoly parallels that in the UK, where the BBC and Sky compete in a similar manner if against a very different environmental background. The BBC is bigger and better-resourced than the ABC on a per capita basis, although the latter defines its role as a public service media organisation in very similar terms. Moreover, the performance of Sky News in Australia compares to that of the British equivalent in being perceived somewhat differently than the majority of the parent company’s outlets. In Australia, as in the UK, News Corp press journalism is seen as bound up with the ideological proclivities of the Murdoch family, to the extent of verging on the flagrantly propagandistic. But Sky News in both markets has occupied a different space in the cultural terrain—still predominantly right of centre in its editorializing, of which the channel supports a great deal—but nonetheless respected across the ideological and political spectra as a quality provider of real-time news, current affairs and analysis.

The Political Context: News Corp and the ABC

The real-time news duopoly of ABC News 24 and Sky News has evolved in the context of ongoing criticism of and hostility towards the ABC by News Corporation press outlets in Australia. This can be seen as part of News Corp’s broader assault on public service media in general, which in Australia has a particularly fierce tone. As part of the public service system, ABC News 24 is often criticised in News Corp’s flagship national outlet, The Australian, as a source of left-wing bias, competitive over-reach, and managerial incompetence. A recurring theme of News Corp coverage of the ABC in recent times has been its alleged over- expansion into journalistic and other spaces which Murdoch and his managers see as rightly theirs (including 24-hour news). A June 2010 piece in the News Corp flagship daily, the Australian, cited an OECD report documenting opposition, or “pushback” to European public service media organisations expanding inappropriately into the online arena. In Germany, it was noted with some approval, German public service organisations ARD and ZDF had been subject to new legislation to protect commercial media from public service expansion. In Australia, on the other hand, “the ABC has expanded its online offering without any of the kind of parliamentary debate that has been witnessed in Europe. While Europe is updating the legislative rules around public broadcasting to take account of the age of digital platforms, the ABC Act has had no such renovation.” An Australian editorial of December 13, 2011—“They are our ABC and SBS”—launched a widespread attack on the scale and cost of the ABC and SBS (Australia’s other PSM provider). Noting that the ABC now comprised seven TV channels, the same number on radio, online services and the transnational Australia Network, the editorial called for:

an independent inquiry into the future of public broadcasting. The original rationale behind the national broadcaster—to provide countrywide access to information—either is redundant now or, at least, has changed substantially. Yet the ABC expands its platforms while complaints persist about content quality. It is time for a clear-headed debate about whether its charter has kept pace with the digital age and whether, instead of spreading itself so thinly, it should concentrate on some clearly identified objectives.

Another key theme of News’ coverage in this period has been that of “content quality” in ABC journalism. ABC news, including News 24, has been accused of being dominated by a left-of-centre ideological perspective, particularly in key policy areas such as climate change and border protection. This was the theme of an article by the Australian in November 2011, which accused the ABC of “campaigning” rather than merely reporting. On climate change, “the ABC's extensive reporting has now been revealed as jaundiced and counter-productive. Developments in the public debate have exposed the national broadcaster's misleading alarmism on global warming and handwringing over border protection. Its hyperbole on these issues has polarized public sentiment, made sensible political discussion more difficult, and created a backlash.” As in the UK debate on the future of the BBC, the perception of a certain quality of impartiality or objectivity in its journalism is key to continuing public support for the ABC. Were that perception to weaken, the obstacles to News Corp’s colonization of much of the PSM space in Australia would be significantly lower. Consequently, the Australian and other News Corp outlets maintain a constant assault on the corporation’s journalism, as exemplified by the following editorial:

Any observer contending that the ABC is a paragon of objectivity does not deserve to be taken seriously. This government-funded organisation habitually derides the views of mainstream Australians on issues such as border protection and climate change, and too often its army of journalists acquiesces to government spin. (The Australian, March 3 2012)

News’ Australian newspapers have also attacked the ABC on the grounds of inept governance and management. In June 2015 the debate show Q&A—similar to the BBC’s Question Time in its live studio public participation format—came under attack for allowing a Muslim extremist in the audience to ask a question of the panel regarding proposed new citizenship laws designed to combat home-grown support for Islamic State. The questioner made a follow-up remark deemed offensive by many people, and the episode was read as further evidence of the ABC’s mendacity by the Coalition government and News Corp press outlets.[5] Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a government review of the program’s production processes, and demanded that the ABC decide “which side it’s on.” This incident was a reminder that in Australia, perhaps to an even greater extent than is the case in the UK (where the changed fortunes of News International and News Corps post-phone hacking and Leveson have muted the more strident anti-PSM lobbying which was familiar in the past [Davies, 2014]), the role and rationale of PSM is being challenged at core, with the assertion that commercial operators do the job better than a bloated, protected public body can.

Notwithstanding the war of attrition waged on the ABC by News Corp’s Australian press outlets Sky News maintains a distance from such views, at least in its news and analysis. Both organisations display mutual respect and regard in their assessments of the performance of the other. The head of editorial policy at the ABC observes that Sky News is a “competitor,” and an important contributor to the Australian public sphere.