Evidence of the SMH’s lurch to the right

I started this informal survey in January after the green light was given by the competition watchdog to the takeover of Fairfax Media by Channel Nine, which is chaired by the former Liberal treasurer, Peter Costello.

The following is just a brief digest of things that struck me while reading the Sydney Morning Herald over the period of about four weeks up to the middle of this month. It’s not comprehensive and it’s hardly scientific. It is a quick glance in the direction that the SMH was taking. It seems however that the things that came to my attention in that period, including the shameless plugs for Channel Nine shows, have slackened off, so the alarm bells are no longer ringing. Probably the editors had lost enough disgruntled subscribers (who are mostly older progressives) and decided to tone down the fascism a bit for fear of losing more.

On 13 January, I wrote on Facebook:

When you know you're old (not when you're getting old, but when you are legitimately old): a "senior" journalist writes a serious story in a major broadsheet about the word "progressive" as it is used in politics. Completely straight face. No irony whatsoever. He gets all these academics from different universities to give him quotes on the record. Building up a case and weighing up the different ways that the term has been used in Australia by parties on the left and on the right over the past half-century. Reading it I felt like the proverbial grandmother who is being told how to suck eggs by a child. (To use an old saying ...)

On 15 January, I wrote on Facebook:

Have sent a warning to the SMH through their website. It noted the number of stories about Channel Nine shows that have been appearing on the SMH website in recent weeks. Also I mentioned a shift to the right I have noticed in the editorial approach used by the newspaper. If either of these trends gets noticeably worse, I will be unsubscribing.

On 16 January, I wrote on Facebook:

Peter Costello's hands are all over another headline from the SMH today: 'Australia has the world's third highest corporate tax rate.' Channel Nine's chairman showing he has no respect for the independence of journalists working in the news room. The SMH's tagline "Independent. Always." is shown to be a sham.

On 30 January I posted on Facebook:

Story on the SMH website about Tony Abbott in the race for Warringah by a guy named John Ruddick who is a Liberal Party booster. The story is labelled "opinion" which is at least honest, but this piece is just another case for me going against keeping my subscription to the paper. Cannot see any benefit to anyone from this sort of sorry partisan nonsense. No credibility, no objectivity, just stale rubbish from a true believer on a campaign to get the party elected later this year when the general election is held.

On 1 February I read a feature story on the SMH website that had been written by Tim Elliott. Elliott was familiar to me as the author of good-quality features, and he had previously done a cracker of a story about the Wentworth by-election, for which he had travelled around the electorate talking with people involved in the campaigns of the various political parties. That story had ended up with him at the Liberal Party election-day after-party talking with various people he met in the rooms.

For the new story, he had evidently been asked by managers at the newspaper to go and talk with people involved in movements on the far-right fringes of the political spectrum. So he duly set out, in good faith, and came back with his recordings, which he used to write a typically intelligent story that left the reader with the distinct impression that those who agitate on the right-wing extreme of the community’s margins are mainly a little strange. So all is not lost if this is what the SMH ends up producing when it tries to emulate the Australian. The moral is: if you give a good journalist his or her head, you’ll always get something reasonable. It’s when you try to force outcomes that you can end up with crap.

On 10 February the SMH ran an interview with Tony Abbott, the Liberal member for Warringah, that it labelled an “exclusive”. This kind of thing would have been reserved, in the past, for a News Corp outlet. There had been a GetUp! opinion poll, the day before, showing that 622 Warringah residents preferred the independent candidate, Zali Steggall, over Abbott by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent.