One thing this election has made clear. The mainstream news media’s positioning of their election coverage revealed just how out of touch with their community they have become. Most, if not all, entirely misread the mood of the electorate. Most, if not all, were blindsided by the extent of the electorate’s rejection of the Coalition’s descent into what the ABC’s Jacob Greber memorably described as ‘bunyip Trumpism’.
On the day of the election, the disconnect was there for all to see as our newspapers lined up to endorse Dutton in their Saturday morning editions. The vast majority of our metropolitan newspapers, including most of the NewsCorp stable, dutifully took their place in that egregious queue. Of the majors, it was only The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald who broke ranks — and even then in a decidedly grumpy and begrudging manner so as not to be held too accountable if it all went pear-shaped.
Some takeaways from the commentariat
The Murdoch myth
This is the second federal election in a row where the Murdoch news media’s shameless campaigning for the Coalition has failed to move the electoral needle. Margaret Simons has been pointing to this failure for some time now in relation to state elections as well, and picked it up again in The Guardian on Tuesday. It may be ‘old news’ she says’, but people are ‘only just beginning to believe’ that NewsCorp has become ‘impotent when it comes to affecting the outcomes of elections’.
The myth of NewsCorp’s political power still hangs around nonetheless, but one imagines that it can’t pass the pub test for much longer. As their right-wing partisanship has become more relentlessly systemic, and as their discursive mode has become increasingly hysterical, it is possible that the anger the Murdoch media is striving to create may well be feeding back against them.
Do we dare to consider the possibility that we may be approaching a point where the Murdoch media’s crude campaigning is actually driving voters away from the conservative parties rather than attracting them? In much the same way as the extremism of the Trump agenda has spooked the rest of the world?
It would be good for Australia if that possibility could start to seep into the consciousness of our sitting politicians. If there is one thing that has clearly hamstrung the pursuit of progressive politics in Australia over the last decade or two, it is our federal politicians’ visceral fear of finding themselves the subject of a Murdoch media attack. Now, more than ever, that fear is looking like a form of tribal superstition rather than a realistic assessment of the likely political damage.
The Liberals’ search for a soul
As the news media searched for comment, any comment, from the Coalition which could explain their defeat, Tony Abbott was typically obliging. While empathizing with his former colleagues’ disappointment, he also warned them that whatever the Liberals might do in response, they ‘mustn’t sell [their] soul’.
Others, though, were saying that they might need to find it first.
Phil Coorey’s column in the Australian Financial Review provided a surprisingly acerbic take on the situation.
‘On Saturday night’, he wrote, ‘the Liberals said the party needed to do some soul searching but it has no soul to search. For the second successive election, it has been stripped of its frontline and emerging talent, almost all moderates. The broad church is no more. It is left with the same fools who keep arguing that lurching further to the right and engaging in culture wars is the answer’.
Mind you, as some have noted unkindly on social media, during much of the time he has written for the AFR, Coorey might himself be counted as among those ‘same fools’. He has been a consistent supporter of the Coalition over the years it has been lurching to the right, and has regularly parroted their talking points.
But, in any case, there is not much sign of soul-searching just yet. Those hunkered down in the echo chamber containing Sky News After Dark were in such a state of denial that we even had Peta Credlin claiming the problem with the campaign is that there wasn’t enough done to prosecute the culture wars.
The Nationals’ Senator Susan McDonald clearly drew the short straw for the Coalition. She bravely fronted up on 7.30 on Monday night and played a straight bat to Sarah Ferguson’s invitations to express her concerns about how badly the Coalition campaign was managed. She did her best to maintain her composure but the angry glare directed at Sarah Ferguson at the conclusion of the interview spoke volumes about the likelihood of any future renovations to the Coalition’s soul.
As 7.30’s Tasmanian correspondent remarked, from her observation of the state of the Coalition in that state, there seemed to be ‘more finger-pointing than soul-searching’.
The politics of sneer
Finally, and to draw on Frank Bongiorno’s excellent analysis in Inside Story on Monday, he offered some free advice about the Liberal Party’s presentation of its ‘soul’ into the future. They would do well, he suggested, ‘to lose the sneer’.
‘They should not sneer’ he said, ‘at teachers and public servants. They should not sneer at government schools and universities. They should not give the impression that they believe young people are irredeemably “woke” and that women remain second-class workers and citizens. They should not sneer at the unemployed: they might rather consider how they might outflank Labor on support for JobSeeker. They should not sneer about the deficits of First Nations communities: they should celebrate their achievements and support their aspirations’.
It is to their great discredit that so much of our news media have been happy to deploy those sneers as clickbait. They have been used routinely to drive headlines and frame reports. That lazy and irresponsible approach to reporting on our politics has extended the reach of these sneers and amplified their impact, while doing nothing to serve the public interest.
If the Liberal Party needs to reconsider the condition of its soul, then there are also large chunks of the Australian news media that would benefit from some serious, even existential, thinking about their purpose as well.
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https://unherd.com/2025/05/the-centrist-comeback-wont-last/
For readers with a focus on political economy, the implications from the Australian (and Canadian) elections, may be not much of a cause for celebration in the long run. Enjoy the celebrations!