News Corp Australia

Owned by News Corp, a multinational mass media company formed as a spin-off of the former News Corporation, which was founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1979. News Corporation was split into two companies in 2013 — 21st Century Fox (the entertainment arm which includes a Hollywood film studio) and the publishing arm, a new News Corp, following the phone hacking scandal at News of the World.

News Corp stated in its 2015 annual report that revenues hit AU$8.6 billion (US$6.2 billion) for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2015, signaling a 1 percent increase. Recent quarters have shown falling profits in the core media segments of the conglomerate, countered by the success of the company digital property business.

News Corp has two classes of stock: A, which hold no voting rights, and B, which hold voting rights. Rupert Murdoch controls 39.4 percent of Class B voting stock, although Murdoch owns just under 14 percent of the company. Shareholders have lobbied to have this system abolished.

News Corp Australia (formerly News Limited) is Australia’s leading publisher. It operates about 140 newspaper titles in the country including the Australian, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, Herald Sun, Herald Sun Sunday, the Courier-Mail, the Sunday Times, and scores of magazines including GQ Australia and Vogue Australia. In 2013, News Corp had about a 60 percent share of newspaper circulation in Australia.

Its interests also include digital media, book publishing, digital real estate services, cable network programming, digital education and pay-television distribution in Australia. It controls news.com.au (which is constantly rivaling with Fairfax Media’s smh.com.au for the top spot in the online news ranking), Business Spectator and Eureka Report digital media, among many others. News Corp also has a 45 percent stake at the Australian Associated Press (AAP) news agency.

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire started with News Limited, an Australian-based public corporation, which he inherited from his father, Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch, who died in 1952. Its only key asset at the time was a majority interest in the number-two daily newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia. Murdoch acquired various newspapers in Australia and New Zealand in the 1950s and ’60s, and has since expanded his empire in both the UK and the US. News Corporation was created in 1979 as a holding company for News Limited. In 2013 it separated into two distinct, publicly traded companies — 21st Century Fox and News Corp.

Murdoch faced serious scrutiny in July 2011, when it was alleged that his company’s UK publications, including News of the World, had been hacking the phones of celebrities, royalty, and public citizens. Known for his right-wing politics, Murdoch has often been slammed for his statements, as well as the angles that News Corp often takes in its articles and headlines. In 2014, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard accused Murdoch’s newspapers of bias and inaccuracy. "Some of the things that got published as facts were just so ridiculous that it distorted the public discussion," Gillard said. Murdoch has also been slammed for many of his controversial tweets, including ones that claimed Muslims must be held responsible for their "growing jihadist cancer."

Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.

— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 10, 2015

World seems transfixed by 777 disappearance. Maybe no crash but stolen, effectively hidden, perhaps in Northern Pakistan, like Bin Laden.

— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) March 15, 2014

A veteran newspaper executive, Clarke is the current CEO of News Corp. He has been working at News Corp and its associated companies for 30 years, most recently as chairman of the Herald and Weekly Times. Clarke was asked by Rupert Murdoch to come out of retirement in 2013, to assume an interim appointment which would cool down the unrest of some editors that occurred under the leadership of Clarke’s predecessor, Kim Williams. His first move was to unwind the centralized advertising sales structure adopted by Williams. He said in September 2014 that "some discipline needed to be put back into the business, which is what we’ve done." Clarke will step down at the end of 2015, after holding the role for two years.

A columnist for News Corp’s Herald Sun newspaper, Bolt is known for his conservative rhetoric, but rejects the term “right-wing.” He runs Australia’s “most read political blog” and hosts Network Ten’s ‘The Bolt Report,’ a Sunday morning political discussion show. His pieces are also run in the Daily Telegraph in Sydney and the Advertiser in Adelaide. A staunch supporter of Tony Abbott, Bolt was recently mocked for an article which stated that the loss of Abbott as prime minister was a “time of sorrow.” The article prompted a series of tweets ridiculing him for displaying his “gushy lust” for the former leader.

Congratulations to Andrew Bolt in publicly declaring his gushy lust for Tony Abbott. Hopeful they can get married soon. #weirdos #creeps

— Ciaran Wilcox (@wilcoxinterlude) September 27, 2015

Bolt is no stranger to controversy. In 2002, Deputy Chief Magistrate of the Magistrates’ Court of Victoria Jelena Popovic sued Bolt and the publishers of the Herald Sun over a December 2000 column in which Bolt said she had "hugged two drug traffickers she let walk free." The jury cleared Bolt of malice, but found that his claims were untrue, unfair and inaccurate, as Popovic was actually shaking hands to congratulate them on completing a rehabilitation program. Popovic won the defamation trial and over AU$220,000 (US$160,000) in damages.

In September 2010, nine individuals brought a class-action against Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times, publisher of the Herald Sun, over posts on Bolt’s blog which asserted that light- or white-skinned people who identify themselves as Aboriginal do so for personal gain. The court ruled that Bolt had contravened the Racial Discrimination Act.

Bolt’s recent comments during the debate surrounding AFL star Adam Goodes on the ABC’s 7.30 prompted a storm of angry comments on Twitter.

really #abc730 - having Andrew Bolt on to tell Aboriginal people how they should celebrate their Aboriginality? sick just reading transcript

— Susan Metcalfe (@susanamet) July 30, 2015

Andrew Bolt says that Aboriginal people are "racial artefacts" on #abc730. Why do we let a convicted racist speak as an expert on racism?

— Glen RH (@GlenRHHW) July 30, 2015

The American-born columnist and writer is known for her conservative stance on a number of political and social issues. She is a leading columnist with the Daily Telegraph in Sydney and Herald Sun in Melbourne. She also hosts the Miranda Devine Show, a weekly syndicated radio show on Sydney station 2GB.

Devine sparked controversy in 2011, when she used the news about Australian federal government minister Penny Wong’s decision to have a baby with her female partner to blame a "fatherless society" for the 2011 London riots. She made a similar "fatherless society" connection in 2005, in a piece titled ‘Absent father who bred a gaggle of monsters’, stating that rape activity was due to the absent father phenomenon.

She also attacked the leaders of the National Rugby League in 2014 for banning a player for homophobia, in a piece called ‘NRL bosses are totally gay.’ A change.org petition was launched calling for Paul Whittaker, editor of the Daily Telegraph, to apologize for Devine’s column, which was published in his paper.

Miranda Devine’s latest column is titled ‘NRL Bosses Are Totally Gay’. It doesn't get much better from there: http://t.co/d6uAoYWZkW

— Junkee (@junkeedotcom) May 7, 2014

.@TheRealPBarry Petition against Miranda Devine's recent column endorisng homophobic abuse. Will Media Watch examine? http://t.co/JSKLCVyMoF

— Chris Aronsten (@chrisaronsten) May 10, 2014

In 2015, Devine claimed that women abusing welfare were one of the main causes of domestic violence. "If you want to break the cycle of violence, end the welfare incentive for unsuitable women to keep having children to a string of feckless men," Devine wrote. The article prompted a wave of backlash in the form of both articles and social media posts.

Following the 2011 hacking scandal around News of the World, the first masthead Murdoch bought in Britain, and other British newspapers published by Murdoch’s News International, Australia’s then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard said News Corp’s local subsidiary News Limited must answer "hard questions" in Australia. "I do believe Australians, watching all of that happening overseas with News Corp, are looking at News Limited here and wanting to see News Limited answer some hard questions," Gillard said. News Corp Australia (then News Limited) responded by calling Gillard’s comments "unjustified and regrettable."

Responding to the 2011 hacking scandal, researchers from the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism reported that News Corp’s Australian papers gave the incident much less coverage than independent papers. It also noted that "all papers carried at least one editorial...on phone hacking," but that "not one editorial supported the idea that there should be an inquiry into Australia’s media."

News Corp titles have repeatedly been accused of bias, particularly from the Australian Labor Party (ALP). An analysis of Murdoch’s major mastheads coverage by Crikey in 2013 revealed that since the constitutional crisis of 1975, the Australian has endorsed 11 Liberal leaders and only two from Labor — Kevin Rudd in 2007 and Bob Hawke in 1984 — and the Herald Sun has endorsed Liberal candidates at every federal election since the merger of the Sun News-Pictorial and the Herald in 1990. The Daily Telegraph, however, endorsed four Coalition leaders and four Labor leaders.

The 2013 book ‘Murdoch’s Politics: How One Man’s Thirst for Wealth and Power Shapes Our World’ by David McKnight, a professor of journalism at the University of New South Wales, analyzed Murdoch’s political influence in Australia and around the globe. According to McKnight, after the 2010 election, which resulted in a minority Labor government, Rupert Murdoch called a meeting of his Australian editors and senior journalists indicating that he despised the Gillard government and wanted political change. In 2011, Murdoch met Tony Abbott and allegedly told his editors that he liked the would-be prime minister. From then on, his newspapers campaigned against the Gillard government.


The opening of the 2013 election campaign in Australia was marked by the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Kick This Mob Out’ headline, others being ‘It’s A Ruddy Mess’, ‘Kevin Deadly Sins’ and ‘Does This Guy Ever Shut Up?’ and the like. Rudd was shown in a Nazi uniform on the cover of the Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile, Tony Abbott was described by News Corp columnists as "the Oxonian Rhodes scholar" and the "hugely intelligent, hugely decent, down-to-earth bloke."


However, following the 2013 victory of the conservative Liberal-National Party coalition government, Murdoch distanced himself from claims that his newspapers influenced the election result. Instead, he stated that Labor’s "incompetence" lost the election.

@rupertmurdoch "Tele wot won it"! No, Australians just sick of Gillard'-Rudd incompetence and infighting wrecking great county.

— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) September 7, 2013

In March 2012, the Australian Financial Review, a leading business and finance newspaper published by Fairfax Media, revealed findings of a four-year investigation which alleged that a "secret unit" within News Corp subsidiary News Datacom Systems (NDS) promoted a wave of high tech piracy against both competitors and allies in the Australian pay TV market such as Austar, Optus, and Foxtel, and cost them up to AU$50 million (US$36.3 million) a year. The paper said that its claims were backed up by over 14,000 emails which "show NDS sabotaged business rivals, fabricated legal actions and obtained telephone records illegally." The "dirty tricks" were allegedly carried out by a secretive group of former policemen and intelligence operators within News Corp, known as Operational Security. NDS denied the claims issued in the report, saying that the company was actually a "leader in the fight against piracy." Murdoch also responded in a tweet, saying: "Seems every competitor and enemy piling on with lies and libels. So bad, easy to hit back hard, which preparing." The report prompted then-Communications Minister Stephen Conroy to urge that the claims be investigated by the Australian Federal Police.

In 2014, Crikey reported it had obtained confidential internal News Corp documents which allegedly showed how badly its Australian papers were performing. News Corp responded by bringing in lawyers, and eventually a legal agreement was made in which Crikey had to take down and "destroy" the information. The incident sparked criticism against News Corp, which has obtained and published confidential information in the past, but reportedly couldn’t take it when the shoe was on the other foot. In fact, competitor Fairfax Media pointed out that News Corp titles have "published the odd article based on internal Fairfax Media documents" in the past.