The Murdoch Paradox: One Family Owns Most of Australia's Newspapers — and It Buys Less Power Every Year

Transcript

Alex: Here's the thing I can't get past. Australian media is among the most concentrated on earth — one family owns most of the newspapers — the laws meant to stop it got repealed in twenty-seventeen, and yet the barons keep losing elections.

Sam: Wait — the most powerful press in the country is more powerful than ever, and it keeps losing? That's not how that's supposed to work.

Alex: It isn't. The empire kept getting bigger and its grip on the result kept getting weaker. The two things came unstuck.

Sam: Okay, that's a sentence I need pulled apart slowly, because on its face it's a contradiction.

Alex: Welcome back to Dan's Rabbit Holes.

Sam: This is the show where Dan picks one thing he genuinely can't stop thinking about and just — climbs all the way down into it until it actually makes sense. Could be politics, could be a person, a business, a bit of science — whatever's grabbed him that week. Today the rabbit hole is the Australian media.

Alex: I'm Alex, here with Sam, and the puzzle that pulled us down this one looks like a flat contradiction until you see how it's wired. The Murdoch paradox: one family owns most of Australia's newspapers, and it buys less power every year.

Sam: And I want to put the obvious objection on the table first, because I think everyone listening has it. The whole fear about Murdoch is that if you own the front pages, you own the country's mind. That's the nightmare. You're telling me that's wrong?

Alex: I'm telling you the nightmare is half right and half a decade out of date. Here's the trigger that cracked it open for me. May twenty-twenty-two: every major Murdoch masthead in the country backs a sitting prime minister to the hilt — and the country elects the other side anyway, plus a wave of independents the same papers had treated as a joke.

Sam: So the megaphone was at full volume.

Alex: Full volume. And the crowd had wandered off. So the question I couldn't put down isn't "is Australian media concentrated" — it obviously is. It's the deeper one underneath: if owning all those mastheads doesn't let you pick the prime minister anymore, then what actually does defend a democracy from media capture — and is that defence going to survive what's coming next?

Sam: And I'm guessing "what's coming next" isn't another billionaire.

Alex: It is not. We're going to travel from the six o'clock news, to a teenager's TikTok feed, through a two-point-two-billion-dollar sale and a three-point-three-billion-dollar family settlement, to a Californian company that would rather switch the news off than pay a cent for it. And the real twist is who the dangerous one turns out to be.

Sam: By the end we should understand why the thing everyone's scared of is in retreat — and why that might be the bad news, not the good news.

Alex: Stay with us, because that last turn is the one I genuinely didn't see coming.

Sam: Okay. Before we touch ownership — why is media even the story here? Plenty of countries have concentrated media and we don't make whole episodes about it.

Alex: Because in Australia the media isn't a spectator on power. It's one of the instruments of it. Think about the two stories we've already told on this show. A mining magnate whose single most valuable asset turned out to be a political party, not a mine. A slice of the workforce barely two per cent of the country that can end a prime minister's career.

Sam: Right, both of those.

Alex: Both of those run through newspapers and television as much as through any boardroom. The media is the channel a narrow interest uses to convince the wide public that its private fight is the public's fight. That's the job it does in the system.

Sam: So when we ask "who owns the media, and does owning it give you power" —

Alex: — we're not asking a trivia question about logos. We're asking "who runs Australia" from a different doorway. Same question, different angle.

Sam: And let me name the stakes, because I want to feel why this matters and not just file it. If owning the media equalled holding power, then Australia is a country a handful of men could basically steer whenever they liked.

Alex: That's the fear. And the interesting thing — the thing this whole episode turns on — is that it mostly isn't true. Working out why it isn't tells you more about how this democracy actually holds together than any amount of shouting about Murdoch does.

Sam: Okay, I'm in. So where do we start — the ownership?

Alex: We start with something more basic that almost everyone gets wrong. What the media even is now. Because the picture in your head is about ten years stale.

Sam: Stale how? When I picture "the Australian media" I picture front pages and a shouting match on the telly.

Alex: And that's exactly the picture that's out of date. Start with where people actually get their news. Television is still the single biggest source — thirty-seven per cent name it as their main one. But every line on that chart is bending the same direction, and last year something crossed over for the first time. Social media, at twenty-six per cent, overtook the open web at twenty-three. Social media is now a bigger front door to news than the websites are.

Sam: And print? The thing the entire ownership argument obsesses over?

Alex: Print is a rounding error for most people now. Newspapers survive as a minority habit — older readers, and digital subscriptions — not the physical paper landing on a driveway.

Sam: So hang on. The thing we fight about most — who owns the papers — is the thing fewest people read.

Alex: You've just put your finger on the whole shape of it. Let me give you the four blocks the institutions break into, because it's cleaner than it sounds. One: free-to-air TV, which is basically a duopoly of Seven and Nine, with Ten a distant third, and the taxpayer-funded ABC and SBS sitting alongside. Two: newspapers, what's left of them, dominated by two groups — News Corp and Nine. Three: commercial radio, held overwhelmingly by three networks. And four — the block that didn't exist a generation ago — the platforms. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Google.

Sam: And the platforms make none of the news themselves.

Alex: None of it. They produce nothing and they're increasingly treated as the news itself. Hold that thought, because it's the whole back half of the story.

Sam: Wait, before we move on — I want to make sure I'm not misreading the TV number, because it cuts against everything else. Thirty-seven per cent name TV as their main source. That's still the biggest single block by a long way.

Alex: It is, and that's the honest complication. Television hasn't collapsed — it's eroding slowly while everything underneath it churns fast. The four-company concentration in broadcast TV has actually climbed, from about seventy-nine per cent to eighty-seven. So in the one format that still pulls the mass audience, the ownership is getting tighter, not looser.

Sam: So the part of the media that's still strong is getting more concentrated, and the part that's fragmenting is the part people are leaving for. That's almost the worst of both worlds.

Alex: It's the tension that runs through the entire ownership story. The concentrated bit is shrinking in reach; the growing bit isn't owned by anyone you can name. Both of those are true at once, and you have to hold them together or you'll draw the wrong conclusion.

Sam: Can I test whether I've got "what's left" right? Because you keep saying the old stuff is shrinking. Is there anything in the traditional media that's actually still strong?

Alex: Two things, and they're revealing. The mastheads persist, but as digital subscription businesses serving a committed minority — Nine's three big papers, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Financial Review, together passed five hundred and ten thousand paying digital subscribers last year. That's a real, growing business. It is also a fraction of what those same titles commanded in print. And broadcast television still pulls the single biggest news audiences in the country, especially at six o'clock — which is precisely why the people who own it still matter.

Sam: And the second thing?

Alex: The second thing is the one the ownership map always leaves out, and it might be the most important fact in the episode. The most trusted news source in the country is the one nobody owns. The ABC sits at or near the top of every trust survey of the last decade, and more Australians turn to it in a crisis — a fire, a flood, an election night — than any commercial brand. In a market this concentrated, the institution people actually trust is the public one no billionaire can buy.

Sam: So the takeaway here is almost the opposite of the headline. The media everyone argues about —

Alex: — is increasingly a media fewer and fewer of them actually consume. The argument is loudest exactly where the audience is thinnest. Remember that, because it's the crack everything else falls through.

Sam: So we've established the picture is stale — TV still on top but everything sliding, print basically gone, and the one source people trust is the one nobody owns. Where does that go next?

Alex: Where it gets vivid is the generational data. And honestly the cleanest way to say it is that Australia isn't one audience drifting. It's three separate countries that happen to share a continent.

Sam: Three countries. Okay, walk me through the borders.

Alex: Country one — older Australians, roughly boomers and up. They still live inside the traditional world. Free-to-air TV as the spine of the day, talkback and music radio in the car, and for a committed slice, the paper. This is the audience the proprietors built the empires for. It's also the audience that votes in the highest numbers.

Sam: And that's the bit that makes the old power real, right? Even if it's a shrinking audience, it's the one that actually turns up at the ballot box. A proprietor doesn't need everyone — he needs the people who vote.

Alex: That's the steel thread in the old model, and it's why this isn't a clean "the barons are finished" story. The audience that still listens through his channels is disproportionately the audience that decides elections. The empire's reach is narrowing — but it's narrowing onto exactly the people who matter most on polling day. Which is precisely why twenty-twenty-two was such a shock: even with that advantage, even aimed at the voters who turn out, it didn't land.

Sam: I feel like there's a "but" coming.

Alex: The but is actuarial. It's the audience that's shrinking by arithmetic. Country two is the hinge — millennials, now in their thirties and forties. They were the last to grow up with the evening news as a ritual and the first to walk away from it. They'll pay for a streaming bundle and maybe one news subscription, scroll headlines on a phone, and treat TV news as a thing that happens to other people. They're the group the mastheads are fighting hardest to convert, with some success.

Sam: And country three is the one that scares them.

Alex: Country three has left the building. Among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, Instagram at forty per cent and TikTok at thirty-six are now the primary gateways to news — and TikTok's share in that group jumped ten points in a single year.

Sam: Ten points in a year. That's not a drift, that's a stampede.

Alex: And here's the part that should keep a proprietor up at night. For that generation the news arrives de-branded. A clip, a creator's explainer, a screenshot — stripped of the masthead that made it and wrapped instead in the identity of whoever posted it. The brand the proprietor spent a century building is invisible at the exact moment of consumption.

Sam: So think of it like this — and tell me if I've got it. He built a beautiful, expensive bottle. And the kids are drinking the water with the label peeled off, out of someone else's cup.

Alex: That's exactly it. And it's worse, because a striking share of the young have stopped drinking the water at all — news avoidance among under-thirty-fives runs around seventy-one per cent, the highest of any group. And when you ask the ones who do worry about misinformation what they're most afraid of, they increasingly name influencers — not foreign governments, not the old media. The threat they fear is the new channel, not the old one.

Sam: So let me try the "so what," because I think it's brutal and I want to say it out loud. A media empire is basically a machine for gathering a big audience and renting out its attention. If the audience is ageing and the young won't inherit the habit —

Alex: — then the asset doesn't get sold. It evaporates. The value of owning the Daily Telegraph depends on the Daily Telegraph being read. Which is the first real clue to a mystery we haven't even named yet: why the proprietors have quietly been cashing out of the very things the public still fears them for.

Sam: Okay, you've teased "cashing out" twice now. But before the selling, I want the map. Who actually owns what? Make the word "concentrated" concrete for me, because right now it's just an adjective.

Alex: Fair. Three private groups and one public broadcaster carry almost all of it. Start with the centre of gravity in print — News Corp Australia, controlled by the Murdoch family. It owns the only general national broadsheet, The Australian. The dominant tabloid in almost every state capital — the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the Herald Sun in Melbourne, the Courier-Mail in Brisbane, The Advertiser in Adelaide, the papers in Hobart and Darwin, a long tail of regional Queensland titles. Add news.com.au, the most-visited news site in the country, and Sky News Australia. Put it together and News Corp controls something close to fifty-nine per cent of metropolitan and national newspaper readership.

Sam: Fifty-nine per cent. Nearly three in five. And — has that been falling? I'd assume in a dying print market the share erodes.

Alex: This is the counterintuitive bit. The share has risen. In the mid-eighties it was roughly a quarter. It's now about fifty-nine per cent. As the pie shrank, his slice of it grew.

Sam: That's such a strange fact. He owns more and more of less and less.

Alex: A bigger and bigger share of a smaller and smaller thing. And one more number that tells you what the newspapers are really for — News Corp also owns sixty-two per cent of REA Group, the company behind realestate.com.au. For years the family's Australian profits leaned as much on property listings as on journalism.

Sam: Wait — so the great newspaper empire was, financially, partly a real-estate website wearing a press baron's hat?

Alex: That's not far off. Which reframes what the papers are: less a money machine, more an influence machine kept alive by a money machine next door.

Sam: And that actually changes how I read the whole "he owns fifty-nine per cent" panic. If the papers don't make the money — if they're propped up by property listings — then owning them was never really a business decision.

Alex: That's the second-order point most people miss. If a newspaper were just a profit centre, a rational owner sheds it the moment it stops paying. The fact that proprietors keep loss-making mastheads alive tells you the papers were always bought for something other than profit — for the leverage. Which is exactly why "how much does he own" was always the wrong question, and "how much can the thing he owns still move" is the right one. Pole two is Nine Entertainment — the only true cross-platform major. The Nine Network in television; the three quality mastheads it swallowed when it took over Fairfax in twenty-eighteen — the Herald, The Age, the Financial Review; the streaming service Stan; a stable of digital brands.

Sam: A TV network owning the country's most respected newspapers. I have a vague sense that used to be illegal.

Alex: Hold that exact thought — it's the next movement, and it's the heart of the whole "rulebook" question. Pole three is television-and-radio rather than print. Seven West Media — long the vehicle of the Perth billionaire Kerry Stokes — owns the Seven Network and The West Australian, and it's been folding itself into a merger with the radio-and-TV group Southern Cross. Between them, Seven, Nine and Southern Cross dominate commercial broadcast, and just three networks hold close to ninety per cent of the metropolitan commercial radio licences that set the morning conversation in every capital.

Sam: And then the one you keep coming back to — the part nobody owns.

Alex: The ABC and SBS. The ABC runs on roughly a billion dollars of public funding a year — about one-point-zero-one-six billion in twenty-twenty-five-twenty-six. Keep that number in your head, because a national broadcaster outside any proprietor's control, reaching into every market including the regional ones the commercial networks have abandoned, is the single biggest structural fact the ownership map leaves out. When people say Australia is "second-worst in the world" for media concentration, they're counting the private holdings and quietly discounting the public broadcaster sitting in the middle of the market that no billionaire can buy.

Sam: Okay but here's what I notice listening to that whole list. You said "swallowed Fairfax," "folding into a merger," "controls sixty-two per cent of." Everyone's moving. Which way?

Alex: That's the real tell, and almost nobody reads it right. Every private proprietor has spent the last two years selling down. Murdoch out of pay-TV. Nine out of property and radio. Stokes folding into a merger. The empires aren't expanding into the digital future — they're consolidating around a shrinking core and harvesting the proceeds. Follow the money and the story isn't accumulation.

Sam: It's a retreat.

Alex: A managed retreat. And the clearest single example of it has a name everyone in the country knows.

Sam: The name being Murdoch. Okay — because the Murdoch name carries this whole debate, I want to be precise. What does that empire actually control right now, and what's it let go of?

Alex: Let's be exact, because twenty-twenty-five was the year the details changed more than they have in decades. What it controls is real — that fifty-nine per cent of newspaper readership, the only national broadsheet, news.com.au, and Sky News Australia. And Sky matters more than its modest live ratings suggest. It's the closest thing the country has to a partisan cable channel, and it sets the agenda for a committed conservative audience far beyond the number of people actually watching at any moment.

Sam: So that's the grip. And I want to understand why Sky matters if barely anyone's watching live. That seems like a contradiction in itself.

Alex: It's the most misunderstood asset in the whole empire. Sky's live ratings are modest. But it doesn't work by reaching a mass audience directly. It works as an agenda-setter — it tells a committed conservative core what to be angry about this week, and those takes then ripple outward through talkback, through the tabloid front pages, through politicians who watch it religiously. Think of it less as a TV channel and more as the engine room that sets the day's outrage, which bigger outlets then carry to people who've never tuned in.

Sam: So the audience for Sky isn't really the viewers. It's the rest of the media.

Alex: The audience is the agenda. That's the influence that survives even as the direct audience shrinks.

Sam: Okay, that lands. So that's the grip — what's he let go of?

Alex: For thirty years the family's most visible Australian asset was Foxtel — the pay-TV operator. In April twenty-twenty-five, News Corp completed the sale of Foxtel to the British sports-streaming group DAZN, in a deal valuing the business at around two-point-two billion Australian dollars. They kept a roughly six per cent minority stake and a board seat. And that's it.

Sam: So the most famous media proprietor in the country just — walked away from the television platform with his fingerprints all over it.

Alex: Walked away, and kept only a sliver — about six per cent and a board seat. Thirty years of building, sold down to a rounding error. And then the family itself got settled, which is the part that genuinely surprised me. The Murdoch Family Trust had been built so that on Rupert's death control would split four ways between Lachlan and his three siblings.

Sam: Which sounds like a recipe for a war over whether the empire stays right-wing.

Alex: Exactly the war everyone expected. In late twenty-twenty-three Rupert moved to rewrite the "irrevocable" trust to hand sole control to Lachlan. The other kids resisted. And in September twenty-twenty-five the family reached a settlement of around three-point-three billion US dollars — Prudence, Elisabeth and James sold out, taking roughly one-point-one billion each, and Lachlan took control of both News Corp and Fox.

Sam: So the succession that obsessed every commentator for a decade ended — not in a courtroom drama, but in a cheque.

Alex: In a buyout. The editorial direction is now locked to one son, and the others are gone. But here's the thing I want you to hold onto — the direction of all of it.

Sam: Let me try, because I think I see it. The popular image is Murdoch endlessly expanding, tightening his grip on Australia. And the actual twenty-twenty-five reality is — he sold the pay-TV business, he settled the inheritance with a cheque, and he's consolidating a narrower print-and-opinion core for the next generation.

Alex: That's it precisely. The grip on the newspapers is as tight as ever. But the newspapers are the part of the business the country is walking away from. So the empire is being inherited at the exact moment its central asset matters least.

Sam: There's something almost tragic in the timing of that. You win the family war for the crown jewels right as the jewels stop being worth much.

Alex: And that timing is the quiet answer to the loud fear. But it raises the obvious question — wasn't there a law that was supposed to stop any of this getting so concentrated in the first place?

Sam: Right, that's been nagging me since you said a TV network bought the country's best newspapers. Surely there were rules. What happened to them?

Alex: Here's the part that should unsettle anyone who assumes the law is what protects Australia from media barons. For the most part it doesn't — and what did exist was largely repealed. For decades Australia ran two specific structural rules. The first was the "two out of three" rule — no single owner could control all three of newspaper, television and radio in the same market. The whole point was to stop exactly the cross-platform empire that shapes opinion from every direction at once.

Sam: That's a smart rule, honestly. And the second?

Alex: The "seventy-five per cent reach" rule — no television owner could broadcast to more than three-quarters of the national population. Together those two were the load-bearing walls of media-diversity policy. And in October twenty-seventeen, the Turnbull government repealed both of them — on the argument that streaming and the internet had made them obsolete.

Sam: And let me guess what walked through the hole the second it opened.

Alex: The twenty-eighteen Nine-Fairfax merger. A television network swallowing the country's most respected newspapers — a deal the old rule would have forbidden outright.

Sam: So when you said "Nine swallowed Fairfax" two movements ago, that swallow was literally only possible because the wall came down the year before.

Alex: One year before. Now — to be fair and accurate, something does survive, it's just thinner. There's a "minimum number of voices" rule: at least five independent owners in each metro market, four in regional ones. There's the competition regulator, the ACCC, which can block a media merger that substantially lessens competition. And there's foreign-investment screening — an overseas buyer of an Australian media asset needs government sign-off.

Sam: That doesn't sound like nothing. Why doesn't that count as the defensive wall?

Alex: Because — and this is the crucial distinction — those are competition-and-foreign-control rules, not diversity-of-opinion rules. They stop one owner reducing a city to a single voice. They would not have stopped the existing concentration, they did not stop Nine-Fairfax, and the rules actually designed for the job of limiting opinion concentration are the ones that are gone.

Sam: So the comfortable assumption — that there's some legal wall stopping a billionaire from just buying up outlets and making them parrot a line —

Alex: — is right about the outcome and wrong about the mechanism. There's no robust legal wall. The specific walls were torn down in twenty-seventeen. And remember the mining billionaire from our earlier episode? When she wanted political influence, the efficient move turned out not to be buying a newspaper chain at all — it was bankrolling a party. Because the newspaper increasingly doesn't deliver the audience.

Sam: So if the law isn't the thing defending the country — and clearly something is, because the press lost in twenty-twenty-two — then what is?

Alex: That's the question the whole episode has been walking toward. And twenty-twenty-two is where you can see the answer in the open.

Sam: Okay. Take me back to that twenty-twenty-two election properly, because that's the experiment, isn't it.

Alex: It's the cleanest test the proposition has had in a generation. A conservative government, an unpopular prime minister, going to an election with the full, unambiguous backing of the Murdoch press — the same press that in twenty-thirteen ran the notorious "Kick this mob out" front page to help end a Labor government. Every incentive of ownership aligned behind one result.

Sam: And the country produced the other result.

Alex: A Labor majority, and a historic crossbench of "teal" independents and Greens — who won precisely on the issues the friendly press had spent years minimising: climate, integrity, the treatment of women. One careful account called Rupert Murdoch the election's "surprise loser."

Sam: So is the lesson just "media power is a myth"? Because that feels too neat, and you keep refusing the neat version.

Alex: It's too neat, and it's wrong. Media power plainly shaped which issues got oxygen and which politicians got savaged for a decade. The lesson isn't that it's a myth. It's about the limits — and there are three sources of the limits, and not one of them is the ownership law.

Sam: Three again. Go.

Alex: One: the voting system. Compulsory voting drags the entire electorate to the booth — not just the motivated base a partisan outlet can inflame. And preferential voting lets you rank a teal independent first and still have your vote count. That structure rewards exactly the insurgents a hostile press can't strangle.

Sam: So the very design of how we vote defangs the megaphone. What's two?

Alex: Two: the public broadcaster. With the ABC and SBS at the top of the trust tables and reaching everywhere, no private proprietor owns the whole conversation. There's always a credible, unbought alternative on the dial.

Sam: And I want to dwell on the ABC for a second, because earlier you called it the single biggest fact the ownership map leaves out, and I think I finally see why. A billion dollars a year of public money buys a newsroom that no proprietor can fire, can't be bought out, and reaches into the regional towns the commercial networks have just abandoned.

Alex: That's the whole weight of it. Picture the market as a room full of microphones a billionaire can buy one by one. The ABC is a microphone bolted to the floor that isn't for sale at any price — and in a fire or a flood or on election night, it's the one the country actually turns to. You can buy up every commercial outlet in the land and you still haven't bought the most trusted voice in it. That's why "second-worst in the world for concentration" is technically true and quietly misleading: the count leaves out the one institution sitting in the middle of the market that does the most to break the concentration.

Sam: And it's load-bearing in a way that's invisible until you imagine it gone.

Alex: Which is exactly the kind of defence you only notice in the negative — and worth filing away, because the new threat we're about to get to goes after precisely the thing the ABC can't fix.

Sam: And three is the one we've been building all episode.

Alex: Three is the audience drift. You cannot move an electorate through mastheads a majority no longer reads and the young have never once opened. The megaphone only works if the crowd is still standing in front of it.

Sam: Can I tell you the thing that strikes me, putting those three together? Not one of them was designed to fight Murdoch. Compulsory voting, the ABC, people drifting to their phones — those are just... features of the country. The defence is almost accidental.

Alex: That's a genuinely sharp way to put it, and it's exactly why people have circled this for years without naming it. The Senate's own media-diversity inquiry — prompted by a petition for a royal commission into News Corp that drew more than five hundred thousand signatures — concluded that concentration was genuinely dangerous to democracy, and that the regulatory environment was "weak, fragmented and inconsistent." And then nothing happened, because neither major party wanted the fight.

Sam: So both things are true at the same time. It's dangerous enough that a serious inquiry calls it a danger —

Alex: — and weak enough that the press it indicts could lose the very next election outright. And think about who let the recommendation die: even a government that had just won despite the Murdoch press wasn't willing to take it on legislatively.

Sam: Which sounds like cowardice until you reframe it — maybe they didn't bother because they'd just proved they didn't need to. You don't spend political capital disarming a weapon that already missed.

Alex: That's the sharper read, and it's a little chilling in its own way. The reform didn't happen partly because the problem appeared to be solving itself — the audience was draining out of the barons' channels faster than any law could. So the country quietly decided to let the market do what the legislature wouldn't. That's the actual shape of media power in Australia. It was never a simple function of how many titles you own. The way we've put it on this show before — it tracks leverage. The credible ability to hurt someone who crosses you. And a proprietor's leverage decays the instant the audience stops showing up to be influenced.

Sam: Which would be a tidy, almost reassuring ending. The barons are losing, the system holds, roll credits. But you've been hinting all episode that this is where it gets worse, not better.

Alex: This is where it gets worse.

Sam: Okay. If the old proprietors are in this managed retreat — who inherits the leverage?

Alex: The unsettling answer is: companies that don't want it, and feel no duty to it at all. The pivot point was Australia's News Media Bargaining Code, passed in twenty-twenty-one — and genuinely world-first. It gave the government the power to force Google and Meta to the table to pay Australian publishers for the news carried on their platforms.

Sam: That sounds like a win for journalism. The platforms make money off the news, the platforms pay for the news.

Alex: For a few years it worked exactly like that — funnelling well over a hundred million dollars a year into journalism. And then the platforms read the bill and decided the news wasn't worth it. Meta announced it wouldn't renew its Australian news deals, switched off Facebook News, and signalled it would rather block news links entirely than pay — the exact move it had already made in Canada under a similar law.

Sam: They'd rather have no news on the platform than pay for it. And you said they'd done this before — in Canada?

Alex: In Canada, faced with a near-identical law, Meta simply blocked news links across the country rather than pay. So this wasn't a bluff or a one-off tantrum — it's a tested playbook they'll run anywhere a government tries to make them pay. Australia is just the latest table they walked away from.

Sam: So we already know how the movie ends, because it's a sequel.

Alex: It's a sequel. And it's worth sitting with why walking away is even an option, because it reveals what news is actually worth to them. To a newspaper, the news is the entire product — it's the thing they sell, the whole reason anyone shows up. To a platform, the news is one sliver of an endless feed of everything else. So when a law says "pay the publishers for that sliver," the platform can simply look at it and decide the sliver isn't worth the cheque — and remove it.

Sam: So the bargaining code mispriced the relationship. It assumed the platforms needed the news as much as the news needed them.

Alex: It assumed a symmetry that wasn't there. The news desperately needs the platform — that's where the audience went. The platform doesn't particularly need the news. And when one side can walk and the other can't, that's not a negotiation, that's just who's holding the leverage. Google's been more emollient but no more committed — declining to renew some deals, routing money through its own programs on its own terms. And the Albanese government has had to design a "news bargaining incentive" — effectively a tax on platforms above a revenue threshold that don't strike deals — just to drag them back to the table.

Sam: So the state is now having to coerce the new gatekeepers into carrying news at all.

Alex: And that — the fact that you have to coerce them — is the whole story of where power has moved. Now here's why this is more dangerous than the old kind, and it's counterintuitive, so let me build it carefully. A press baron, for all his sins, at least wants the country to read his product. His bias is a bid for influence.

Sam: And a bid you can resist. You can expose it, you can vote against it, you can argue with it.

Alex: Exactly — it's a move in a game you're both playing. A platform's "bias" isn't a bid for anything. It's an engineering decision made in another country to maximise engagement or minimise legal cost. And its nuclear option isn't a hostile front page. It's the quiet removal of news from the feed of an entire generation that gets its news nowhere else.

Sam: So think of the difference like this. The old threat was a man with a megaphone yelling the wrong thing at you. The new threat is someone quietly unplugging the room — and you don't even hear it go silent.

Alex: That's the perfect frame for it. And there's a detail in the data that makes it almost eerie. Remember the young people who do worry about misinformation? When you ask what they're most afraid of, they increasingly name influencers — not foreign states, not the old press barons. The generation that lives on the platforms has correctly identified that the danger now comes from inside the feed.

Sam: So they can see the new threat more clearly than the people still arguing about Murdoch's front pages.

Alex: They can see it because they live in it. The argument we keep having in public — about who owns the mastheads — is being held in a room the young have already walked out of. They're standing in the new room, the one where the real leverage is, telling us what's actually scary there. And we're not quite listening. The eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old who learns about an election from a TikTok clip is one product decision away from learning about it from nothing. And here's the cruel symmetry: Australia's old defences — the voting system, the public broadcaster, the audience drifting off the mastheads — those were all built for a world of proprietors. They are not obviously built for a world where the dominant distributor of news would simply prefer there be no news.

Sam: The defences are calibrated against persuasion. And the new threat isn't persuasion.

Alex: The new threat is silence. Which is exactly where I want to land this.

Sam: Then help me pull the whole thing together, because I came in with one story and I'm leaving with a completely different one. Give me the three things to walk away with.

Alex: Three things. One — the fear is, on the facts, correct: Australian media really is among the most concentrated in the democratic world, and the laws that limited it really were repealed in twenty-seventeen. So when people are alarmed about ownership, they're not wrong about the ownership.

Sam: They're just a decade behind on what it buys.

Alex: Exactly — which is two. Ownership and power have come apart. The proprietors are in retreat — selling pay-TV, property portals, radio; settling their inheritances; consolidating around a core an ageing audience still watches and the young have abandoned. And the thing that actually defends the country was never the media law. It's three accidents downstream of it: compulsory and preferential voting, a trusted public broadcaster nobody owns, and an audience that quietly stopped listening through the barons' channels.

Sam: Which is why, in twenty-twenty-two, the most powerful press in the country could back a government and watch it lose. So what's three?

Alex: Three is the one that should change how you read the news from here. The barons aren't being replaced by new barons — they're being replaced by platforms that would rather carry no news than pay for it, and by a generation that would barely notice if they did.

Sam: So the thing to watch for isn't a billionaire telling Australians what to think.

Alex: It's a feed deciding they don't need to know. And our old defences were all built to resist persuasion — not silence.

Sam: That's the part I won't be able to un-see now. We came in worried about the wrong room entirely.

Alex: And that's the strange place this rabbit hole bottoms out. I hope you came away seeing a little more clearly how power in this country actually moves — and how quietly it's shifting under our feet. We spent years afraid of the man shouting through the megaphone, and we may have looked up too late to notice the room going quiet. It's a picture that's genuinely hard to see, deliberately so, and that's exactly the kind of thing worth climbing all the way down into.

Sam: And a quick, honest note about how this gets made, for full transparency: this show is AI-generated. Dan builds a custom stack of AI tools to chase the questions he can't stop thinking about — it started out made with NotebookLM and now runs on his own engine — mostly so he can understand this stuff himself, and he shares it with the people he'd talk to about it anyway.

Alex: So that's this rabbit hole. Thanks for climbing down it with us — we'll see you in the next one.