35 years of Green Left — people-powered media standing up to the 1% |
Australia’s media landscape has changed a lot since Green Left first launched 35 years ago.
Successive neoliberal governments oversaw News Corp’s accelerated monopolisation of the newspaper market, the decline of print media and destruction of local and regional news outlets.
Australia has one of the most concentrated media landscapes in the Global North. Just four companies capture 84% of newspaper revenue — television (87%) and radio (77%) are similarly concentrated.
This concentrated, corporate-owned media reflects the narrow interests of its billionaire owners — to normalise and obscure the injustices of the capitalist system that only benefits a handful of people.
In particular, the corporate media’s reporting of Israel’s genocide in Gaza reveals its total allegiance to ruling class interests.
Despite the near-universal consensus among human rights groups that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians — deliberate starvation, bombing of schools and hospitals, forced expulsions, ethnic cleansing, military occupation — this barely rates a mention in the mainstream media.
Instead, it has uncritically parroted Israeli government lies, characterising the genocide as a “conflict” and downplaying horrific human rights violations against Palestinians. The Sydney Morning Herald’s front page headline on July 29 last year, “No starvation in Gaza, Israel insists”, is just one of countless examples.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the supposedly independent public broadcaster, joined the corporate media in platforming Zionists, uncritically accepting Israeli propaganda and downplaying the genocide.
ABC journalists revealed that they were instructed not to........