Rinehart feels that Australia’s carbon tax, which is due to go into effect on July 1, would negatively impact Australians and that “she remains concerned by the lack of understanding in the media on this issue,” it said in Hancock’s statement to Four Corners. It continued:
To lessen the fear the media have caused over these issues, Mrs Rinehart suggests that the media should also permit to be published that climate change has been occurring naturally since the earth began, not just the views of the climate extremists. It is a fact that there have been ice ages, then periods of global warming to end the ice ages for thousands of years, and these have occurred naturally, including due to the earth’s orbit, and not due to mankind at all.
“Ms Rinehart never gives interviews,” The Independent in the UK noted earlier in the week. “But her values - pro-free market, cheap foreign labour and tax concessions for mining, and anti-government regulation, red tape and climate change science - are well known.”
Mocking Hancock’s “white knight” characterization of Rinehart earlier in the week, The Economist argued that she is actually a “black knight … stalking Fairfax at its most vulnerable moment.”
Rinehart has the support of Australia’s most famous media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, however, who owns the rival conglomerate, News Limited. “Understand lefties worried by Gina R. But is she, or any other single person, to be banned from buying or starting a newspaper? Think anew,” he wrote in a tweet on Sunday.
A day later, according to The Australian (which is published by News Limited), Murdoch told Bloomberg that it would be “a nightmare” if Fairfax closed because it would leave his company in a monopoly situation, though a Fairfax spokesman said, “There’s no chance of that happening.”
Whatever the outcome, Fairfax’s restructuring plan has already taken a toll. The Sydney Morning Herald’s publisher and editor in chief, Peter Fray, and its first female editor, Amanda Wilson, as well as The Age’s editor in chief, Paul Ramadge, announced Monday that they are leaving the company. And the war between Rinehart and Fairfax is not over. In fact, this week’s battles are probably only a preview of the upheaval to come.
I have worked for both News Ltd and Fairfax in their editorial departments.
Both are in the process of major restructures and cutting potentially thousands of staff.
I think we are seeing the end of Fairfax in Australia and the Murdoch press will change significantly.
Murdoch is clearly moving his print business towards television outlets with the long term intention I believe, of combining broadcast and online editorial into a single news unit. The splitting of the publishing and entertainment units has multiple objectives but I suspect one is to eventually hive off the best people and assets and transfer it across into a new multi-platform newsroom.
Fairfax, by contrast, has very little options across the company. I suspect, but pray I am wrong, that Fairfax will collapse within the next three years. It will be broken up and sold as individual businesses. Only the community newspaper section remains a strong and viable component of the print empire.
In short, the management of both companies doesn't understand the internet, where the leverage within both companies lie to make money - and that is not behind blanket paywalls - and the assets that it has to turn around the current state of affairs.
I expect News, which currently dominates 70% of Australia print media and through a number of investments, a good portion of broadcast media, will soon have a near monopoly in Australia.
This is extraordinarily worrying situation as it is very obvious through both personal experience and the experience of the general public, that news consistently pushes an agenda which suits it's own interests and those of its allies.
I believe government funded media, like our ABC, may be soon be the only impartial news source available to Australians, which explains News Ltd's ongoing campaign to limit the reach of the public broadcaster, particularly online.
#1 Posted by Alvin, CJR on Sun 1 Jul 2012 at 08:54 PM