Google and Meta account for 70% of digital advertising and should pay a levy to fund traditional media, according to a new report on media concentration led by researchers from several Australian universities.
It’s the home of Murdoch, who is surprised?
The Murdoch organization is actually the comparatively more moderate and less insane megacorp in Australia’s News duopoly. I wish I was joking.
It’s like comparing Mitch McConnel to Tommy Tuberville.
Who is the worse one?
Nine
Both Nine and Murdoch believe the same things, but Nine is more openly corrupt and tacky i.e. directly hosting Liberal party fundraisers.
If you want to see how fucked up their media market is, and have time to kill, go search for Australian news newspapers, websites, and TV news networks.
And whichever ones appear well-funded and mainstream, check out the Wikipedia for corporate ownership.
Sometimes they’ll get sneaky, and they’ll just list a person to make it appear independent. If so, search for which Media group they were an executive in just before “founding” whatever outlet or publication you’re looking at.
But aside from their destroyed public broadcaster (ABC), it’ll be one of those two megacorps, or occasionally, one of their “former” executives fronting for an “independent” outlet.
the digital age of data-driven capitalism and AI and with the dominance of global digital conglomerates and the possible demise of the news media bargaining code, public interest journalism is in jeopardy
How should journalism look? Because we’ve had tycoons and capitalism involved since the earliest days of print. Why should we prop up the old system if it was always this?
I often wonder how long the ‘traditional media’ has left.
Newspapers? Radio? Television? Young people don’t do that.
I laughed when Meta stopped paying extortion to Australian media companies, and of course, now they want to find another way to force them to pay anyway.
Edit: actually, the government already has the power to do so. They simply need to ‘designate’ Meta, and can force them into mediating a deal. Meta is just taking the approach they don’t do news, so are calling the government’s bluff and I’d expect a court battle if the government tries to force it.
I also am a bit fearful of what would happen if Murdoch struck a deal for Meta to exclusively peddle only Fox/Sky News
Lastly, power hates decentralisation, as it is a loss of control. And these current media laws it’s actually a very small step away from preventing eg Lemmy from posting news articles. All the government needs to do is ‘designate’ aussie.zone, and that would force mediation to media deals…
