The response to Labor’s appointment of a (gasp) woman as governor-general is a case study demonstrating how the right’s supply chain of nasty noise is targeting an audience of “angry young men”. And it’s forcing an increasingly blokey Liberal Party to follow along.
News Corp is the agenda-setting opposition. Talking points generated by the commentariat, nurtured deep in News Corp’s Sky social media feedback loop, are being backed up by the company’s mastheads (and Nine’s radio network), and amplified by the ABC’s foolish embrace of a clickbait “both-sides” sensibility.
All those worthy Liberal and National MPs and senators? They have to reconcile themselves to the more humble role of content creators in the right-wing noise machine — or get out.
More than a few of them see this as an opportunity, not a threat. A rising generation, particularly those whose elections depend on a diminishing pool of party activists, is embracing the trade-off, happy to abandon building broad political coalitions for the benefit of their profile — and the pay that comes with it.
Liberal preselections are reshaped into hunts for content-maker talent: in Western Australia, reality TV star and bang-bang war novelist Mark Wales has been tapped for the must-win seat of Tangney; in the southern Sydney seat of Cook, Tony Abbott — Lachlan Murdoch’s personal choice as a $500,000-remunerated Fox board member — helped deliver preselection to once-was McKinsey ideologist, er, “consultant”, Simon Kennedy; while in “don’t call it Radelaide” last month, the Liberals Senate preselection delivered top spot to “conservative firebrand” and Sky favourite Alex Antic.
In the United States, the market for right-wing noise is large enough for wannabe agenda-setters to build their own machines. Last week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz found himself on the front pages of the state’s newspapers with reports that his “free” work fronting a tri-weekly podcast was being rewarded with about A$1 million in ad revenues, paid into his political action committee. Good money, considering that an American senator’s annual salary, frozen since 2009, is US$174,000 (A$265,000).
In the much smaller Australian media market, right-wing content distribution depends on the old-media infrastructure of News Corp (with audio support from Nine), relying on downstream amplification from traditional media to reach potential new audiences outside the right-wing bubble.
Take Samantha Mostyn’s appointment as governor-general: Peter Dutton’s low-key commentary seemed almost written to be ignored. Mostyn, he said, was “somebody who’s been involved in business and sport for a long period of time and obviously is well known to many people within the government over a long period of time.”
Crank up the noise machine: “the worst of modern woke Australia,” fulminated Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian; “proof that affirmative action helps mostly a highly political class of women,” thundered Andrew Bolt in his column, networked across the US company’s poorly read local tabloids.
With that, the News Corp commentariat became the “other side”. By Sunday, the shrieks of “woke!” had all too predictably morphed into the big question to be concernedly chewed over on the ABC’s flagship Insiders — particularly by the male panellists.
It’s the Australianisation of a debate that Fox News has been inflating in the United States, as it translates anti-diversity rhetoric from social media (particularly Musk’s X) into the daily round of Fox programming.
“The right-wing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives,” wrote Media Matters last week, are “claims that DEI policies pose a risk to society by allowing high-level positions to be given to supposedly undeserving candidates who ‘Didn’t Earn It’”. (Remind me: how did the younger Murdoch “earn” his CEO gig?)
While the “special treatment” trope (as in last year’s Indigenous Voice to Parliament vote here in Australia) has been traditionally used to dog-whistle racism, the News Corp right has always leant into painting targets on women.
Blame it on demographics. The cohort of largely pre-boomer “grumpy old men”, who responded with enthusiasm to the Howard-era racist provocations, is dying off, shifting the once reliably conservative over-65s into a more progressive voting bloc. For right-wing media, survival depends on a pivot to “angry young men” infuriated by the opportunities they are eager to be convinced have been denied them by women.
For the political impact of this shift, start with South Korea, the first democratic country where elections — and media consumption — are dividing on gender, with appeals to young men mixing the rhetoric of meritocracy with the power of misogyny.
In the US, right-wing media voices like Trump-whisperer Steve Bannon are urging the Republicans down the same track, saying: “Don’t chase the marginal Karen in a suburb … when we have tens of millions of men that have punched out of the system because of the way immigration and all the society is stacked against them”.
Looks like News Corp has taken the lesson to heart. Expect their increasingly blokey political allies to fall into line — if they want the profile only the company can deliver.