Public set agenda on politics, not the press

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This was published 12 years ago

Public set agenda on politics, not the press

By Peter Martin

To listen to Rupert and his detractors, you'd think he could swing elections.

It's an assumption implicit in the media inquiries likely at both ends of the globe and in the decision cabinet is about to make on whether to grant his part-owned Sky News the licence to produce Australia's overseas television service.

It's beyond doubt Rupert has been on the winning side of elections. In 1972 The Australian gave the Whitlam campaign free advertising space and Murdoch himself drafted at least one of Whitlam's campaign speeches. Three years on, the paper campaigned so hard for Fraser its journalists went on strike.

In 1992 after the British Labour opposition promised media laws that would force Murdoch to sell either his share of the satellite broadcaster BSkyB or his newspapers, mass-circulation The Sun campaigned against Labour as if its life depended on it.

On election day its front page was filled with the face of the Labour leader inside a light bulb. The headline read: ''If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights''.

That night as the results filtered through to Hollywood, Variety magazine said a relieved Murdoch told confidants: "We won".

But being on the winning side of elections isn't the same as swinging the result. What little research there has been on the topic suggests we are not particularly influenced by newspapers - if anything, the influence runs the other way.

The most thorough study by Chicago University economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro categorised US newspapers by the terms they used. Some preferred Republican terms such as "war on terror", others Democrat terms such as "war in Iraq".

Then they examined registered voters postcode by postcode, along with circulation figures and found the Democrat-leaning newspapers serviced Democrat postcodes while the Republican newspapers serviced Republican postcodes.

When Australian National University economist Andrew Leigh asked similar questions in 2004 he found The Australian and Daily Telegraph somewhat to the right of other papers, but not particularly so. Only one outlet - ABC TV - was significantly different. It leant to the Coalition.

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Now a Labor member of parliament, Dr Leigh thinks the study understates the extent to which Murdoch papers now back the Coalition. But he has no evidence, and none that papers can swing elections. But Rupert's Republican-backing US television network can.

In a paper called ''The Fox News Effect'', University of California, Berkeley, and Stockholm University economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan made use of the uneven rollout of Fox News across the US in the late 1990s.

By the 2000 Al Gore/George W. Bush contest some cities had had it for years and others not at all. The vote for Bush was 0.4 to 0.7 per cent higher in the towns with Fox News, enough in that very close election to be "decisive".

For me the take-home message is that Murdoch is far from all-powerful, as anyone who saw his stumbling performance before the British House of Commons will attest. Newspaper readers are extremely good at making up their own minds. Reading isn't passive.

But television and radio are. Andrew Leigh's study found commercial radio and TV stations far more extreme in supporting the Coalition than either newspapers or the ABC (although the result is not statistically significant because of a smaller number of observations).

Since then it is clear to anyone listening that commercial radio has become more extreme, especially in Sydney. Gillard is getting slaughtered in the media, but not by the press. It's hard to fight back against a medium that caters to people who don't read.

Murdoch is the least of her

problems.

peter.martin@fairfaxmedia.com.au

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