Dave Riley
Investing in media in this country is very good business indeed, and for some families it even seems a favoured pastime. In case you hadn't noticed, ownership of the Australian media is concentrated in a few wealthy hands. Any list of the richest capitalists in this country will generally feature our home-grown media barons in the top five profiteers.
This concentration has always been an embarrassment for those who advocate media diversity as a democratic adjunct. Despite the many attempts to loosen the hold that so few have over what we read, watch or listen to, the unbridled concentration remains the norm.
Just two companies — News Corp (with Rupert Murdoch at its head) and John Fairfax Ltd — account for more than 80% of the national newspaper market. Three corporations — Seven Network, Channel 10 and the Packers' Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd (PBL) — control the majority of capital city and regional television audiences.
Similar figures apply to other media sectors so that ownership of all media is controlled by 14 companies, with News Corp and PBL being the main players.
In 1992, the Bob Hawke Labor government sought to stem the trend towards absolute monopolisation by passing laws that limited cross-media ownership and market share. But today, with so many new media options on offer, the main players have been agitating for a rewrite.
Helen Coonan, the federal government's communications minister, this month announced a new plan in which the current restrictions on cross-media ownership will be ditched. This paves the way for one company to own a newspaper, television network and radio station in the same market. The current foreign ownership restrictions will also go.
While Coonan's plan also requires that there be five so-called "independent voices" in metropolitan markets and four in regional areas, the new scheme is engineered around market potentials rather than sentimental notions about a free press and media diversity, let alone community access. This is a business plan, not a formula for more freedom of speech.
The new laws also loosen restrictions on pay-per-view TV so that it can compete with free-to-air for the rights to broadcast sporting events. This means that to watch the next World Cup final you may have to subscribe to cable.
Such pandering to the already existing media players is sweetened by the generous use of the rhetoric that is de rigueur to hail the "new" technologies.
Digital television, for instance, is to be fast-tracked under cover of such progress - despite the fact that even with digital radio the consoles are so expensive that only the very well off will be able to afford them and digital TV remains a dead duck in most countries it has been tried. But hey, it's new isn't it?
This time around, the "new technology" mantra comes to us with the cover note that we are at the dawn of a new era of pluralism. As Murdoch put it in March, "A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it ... This new audience - and we are talking here of tens of millions of young people around the world - is already using technology, especially the web, to inform, entertain, and above all educate themselves."
Such enthusiasm is packaged along with the argument that we can now afford to weaken cross-media controls to encourage innovation and efficiency without our own freedoms being undermined.
The argument is one Coonan is keen to echo. While the big players may own the TV we watch, and the newspapers we read, or what we listen to, we are reminded that our views can always be expressed and our debates housed in such forums as the internet provides.
While we don't have the web to ourselves — Murdoch's company, for instance, already owns one of the web's 10 most popular sites, In a discussion paper for the Australian Institute, Christian Downie and Andrew Macintosh describe a reality that is a lot different from Coonan's or Murdoch's assertions.
Television, newspapers and radio are still the main source of domestic news and current affairs for more than 95% of the population. Of the roughly 25% that access the internet on a reasonably regular basis for domestic news and current affairs, approximately 90% rely on a small collection of websites that have a close association with traditional media providers.
The authors conclude: "It is estimated that as little as one per cent of Australians rely on an alternative media provider as their main source of news and current affairs. In short, to the extent that internet-based news and current affairs are a source of news and comment, it is little more than the old media repackaged".