Australia's other public broadcaster

Hi <<First Name>> -

Publicly funded broadcasters have been under threat in Australia for some time. Luckily, there is one publicly-funded broadcaster that continues to receive generous support from the government, even though its audience-base is narrowing, and it is becoming more and more of an opinion mouthpiece for a small group of radical misfits.

It's called News Corp, and over the past decade, it has received hand-outs of about $1.1 billion from the Federal government. Just last week, it received an extra $10 million to prop up its sports programming on Fox Sports, using money from a COVID response fund. This was on top of $30 million in 2017. There were no enforceable guidelines over how this money was to be used, and very little in the way of a paper trail.

This morning, News Corp announced that its print arm is losing $62 million a year. At this point, News Corp's Australian news operations basically only operates because of government hand-outs.

Now I know what you're probably thinking - it's the same thing that News Corp columnists have argued for years: Publicly funded media is a waste of taxpayer's money.

But hear me out. We basically already have a third public broadcaster in News Corp. We pay for it. Instead of getting rid of it, we might as well just take it over and keep it. 

Instead defunding News Corp, the government should just take it over, and formalise its role as Australia's third public broadcaster.

And in return for public money, it should be subject to the same editorial guidelines as the ABC, and operate under the same charter.

Of course, if people like Janet Albrechtsen, Peta Credlin, Alan Jones, Rohan Dean and Paul Murray still think we don't need publicly-funded broadcasters, they don't need to stay with News Corp. They can go and set up a blog or something. But as long as they do stay with News Corp, they need to start realising who's ultimately paying their bills.

MURDOCH DOCO UPDATE

By the way, thanks for all the offers to help us licence the BBC doco The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty for broadcast in Australia. As it turns out, another scrappy media startup called "the ABC" is in the running to get the rights to it, so it looks like we'll get to see it here soon. Stay tuned because it's a doozy. 

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Charles Firth
Managing Editor
The Chaser

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PODCAST - New episode out today

Nina Oyama learns how to become a “sovereign citizen” who doesn’t have to obey the police, Dom Knight uncovers Covid fines for drive thru and bush doofs, and Charles Firth adds a sprinkle of Bluetooth to ruin dinnertime. Plus Rebecca De Unamuno with our newest news. Stream it online on our website or at Nova or download it in any podcast app, including: