The fact that Communications Minister Mitch Fifield has got a package of changes to Australia’s media laws this far is remarkable considering the ill-fated recent history of attempts at media reform.
Indonesia’s media landscape may be a model which Australia is emulating as it looks to change media ownership laws. There are positives to this, but also causes for concern.
The Save Our Voices campaign argues that existing media rules are “squeezing the life out of our regional TV networks”. But the real story is more complex. Reform is necessary, but so too is local content.
Current regulations are a complete mismatch for today’s media practices and structures. While politicians shy from the debate, it’s time to heed public opinion and revisit the Finkelstein Report.
In the latest episode in the long-running saga that is the phone hacking affair, Dan Evans, a former journalist at the News of the World and Sunday Mirror, has received a 10 month suspended sentence after…
Major media players continue to dominate online news, current affairs and analysis, despite a proliferation of online news content sources, a government report has found. The internet has given established…
That media ownership rules have been progressively relaxed in many democracies is certainly not news. But that Australia, with one of the most concentrated media markets in the world, is thinking of further…
On the ABC’s Insiders on Sunday, discussion turned to media reform, and the panellists were in remarkable consensus. The consensus seemed to be that reform was long overdue: a sense that it is time for…
The media has wasted little time reminding the Coalition government that its rigorous scrutiny of the former Labor government was par for the course. Journalists are snapping at the Coalition’s heels on…
It is just a week since the Gillard government withdrew the four media reform bills for which it could not garner the necessary support from the crossbench MPs. The proposal that concerned me most as a…
To get an idea of how big an opportunity the federal government missed with its shambolic attempt at media reform, consider this: the last federal minister to achieve any substantive reform of media self-regulation…
It’s a great shame when political and commercial vested interests drown out compelling and principled arguments for free expression in this Australian media reform debate. First, I declare my own interest…
Australian media, and in particular the print media, stands out internationally among advanced democracies for its extreme concentration. Three owners – News Limited, Fairfax Media and APN News and Media…
It is a matter of public record in Australia that my grandfather was a communist spy. That he wasn’t really one doesn’t always matter. Manning Clark, famous Australian historian and my father’s father…
There are at least two points of convergence in this week’s parliamentary deliberations on media freedom in Australia and the UK. Both are driven by reports – Finkelstein and Leveson respectively – responding…
Anyone who has picked up the country’s biggest newspapers in the past week (and that of course includes the nation’s poll-fearing political powerbrokers) would naturally think communication minister Stephen…