Vested Interest in News
How Does Money Influence the Agenda?
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When journalism academic Margaret Simons wrote a clear eyed account of the australian media landscape at the four year mark of the Guardian Australia, her findings were both reaffirming and alarming.
As the population’s views fragment based on polarized ideologies founded in fact, fiction or half-baked assumptions, good journalism matters more than ever before. Good journalism, the account states, is ‘our modern cultural conscience.’
This is reaffirming the role that journalists should play in a healthy democracy. Journalists should speak the truth to power, money and influence. But the alarm comes in when the question arises — what happens when this very same power, money and influence is funding our modern cultural conscience?
At a time when news reporting is more scrutinised than ever, when ‘fake news’ is as prevalent as news that is falsely labelled so by the powers that be, when we need reporters to be honest and without an agenda, the landscape is littered with journalists and media moguls that retain a vested interest that detracts from honest news reporting. It’s a prevalent problem across the global media industry, so much so that the question is not whether money influences the agenda, but how?
A good place to start when examining vested interest beyond impartial reporting is News Corporation. Then owned by Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the group’s UK tabloid, News of the World (NoW), was at the centre of an infamous phone hacking scandal, when reporters hacked into the mobile phones of celebrities, the royal family and a teenage murder victim in order to obtain information, which they would then publish in the newspaper.
When Andy Coulson, the journalist given an 18-month prison sentence for his part in the hacking scandal, was hired as PR adviser for Telegraph Media Group (proprietor of Australia’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph) in March 2017, journalists at the Daily Telegraph knew that a blow had been struck against their credibility. The Guardian reported journalists from the Daily Telegraph as saying: “This cannot do anything but harm to our brand. It will deliver a severe blow to the credibility of our journalism.”
The NoW scandal is, unfortunately, neither new or unheard of. Australian reporter Ben McCormack has a catalogue of dishonest reports for Channel 9’s A Current Affair (ACA), including reporting that a north-west Sydney mall had become “all Asian” — which was condemned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) — and a 2011 story on a YouTube video showing a teenager tackling a bully, which involved a ratings war with rival station Channel 7. Both stations were criticised for opening their cheque books to get the kids on camera, bringing into question where our ‘modern cultural conscience’ was leading us as journalists and viewers.
More severe accusations of vested interest journalism in Australia, do, of course, relate back to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. According to the Herald Sun’s David Penberthy, The Daily Telegraph reported “that Kevin Rudd was white-anting Julia Gillard and readying himself for a challenge early [in 2012]”, which garnered this response from Senator Doug Cameron: “The Murdoch press are an absolute disgrace, they are a threat to democracy in this country… Day in and day out [they] are putting false headlines out there… it’s absolute lies and nonsense that is getting printed in the Murdoch press.”
This response is no surprise, given the history between Rudd and Murdoch. According to the Guardian’s Stephen Mayne, Rudd has “attempted to neutralise the all-out war being conducted by News Corp’s Australian newspapers”. In 2009, he took it further after the now discredited “utegate” affair, directly attacking the Murdoch press and calling out the individual stories and mastheads that ran the discredited story. News Ltd didn’t leave it at one extremely questionable ‘reveal’, they also trashed Rudd’s government’s school building stimulus program and the National Broadband Network.
When a media heavy-weight like Rupert Murdoch can wage war on an Australian politician, the space for neutral, honest reporting grows significantly smaller.
In 1987, a student from the University of Alberta reported that “Journalists have become obsessed with scandal and titillation rather than information and education.” This is largely just as true today: indeed, journalists often have a vested interest in obtaining and spreading news stories based on defamation. In Murdoch’s case, this means using the power of owning a media behemoth to bend the rules of “good journalism”, instead utilising monetary power to influence public knowledge and perception of the wider world.
At InPress, our interest is to be a true modern cultural conscience for the people. InPress uses integrity, honesty and dedication to hold monetary power to account and works actively to stop vested interest from influence public knowledge and perception of the wider world.
All journalists that publish on the platform are vetted for quality and integrity, so you can be sure that whatever the subject, you are getting real information from real professionals in the field.
What InPress doesn’t do, however, is favour one side or the other through editorial angles. Instead, we publish from all sides of the discussion to give people the whole story.
This leads to a press that is free from vested interest — because with the whole story, you can’t hide the truth. By reading a news outlet like InPress that publishes from all angles, you are giving yourself the opportunity to learn the whole truth, not the version the highest bidder wants you to hear.
We’re sick of everyone living in different information bubbles, filled to bursting with different agendas that aren’t transparent to readers. InPress is a place where information, news, journalism, and people come together to find out what’s important — from the world, to the country, to you — InPress is the place you will find good journalism.
