A Different Country: Seeing Who Built the Story You Believe ( part3)
Who Tells You What To Think?
Before you have a political opinion, someone else had it first. That is not an insult. It is the reality of how information reaches most of us, and how ideas become common sense. The question worth asking is who that someone else is, and what their interests are.
Australia has one of the most concentrated commercial media landscapes in the democratic world. News Corp Australia — part of Rupert Murdoch’s global empire — controls the majority of the daily print newspaper market in this country, including The Australian, the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail, and dozens of regional and suburban mastheads. A 2021 Senate Select Committee inquiry into media diversity in Australia found this concentration genuinely alarming. Multiple witnesses — including former prime ministers from both major parties — described the situation as a structural threat to democratic function. The committee’s final report called for a permanent news media regulator with real enforcement capacity. The recommendation was not implemented.
This matters because media ownership does not just determine which stories get covered. It shapes which questions are treated as legitimate, which voices are heard as authoritative, and which communities are effectively invisible. Research on agenda-setting — the study of how media determines what audiences consider important, developed over decades of communication scholarship — has consistently found that the issues given the most prominent coverage are the issues the public ranks as most pressing, regardless of whether that prominence reflects actual social urgency. You are not just absorbing information. You are absorbing a hierarchy of what matters. And that hierarchy was constructed by people with interests.
Consider the way housing affordability has been framed in mainstream Australian media over the past decade. The dominant narrative has centred on supply: we need to build more homes. This is a genuine part of the picture. But sustained research — including from the Grattan Institute and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute — consistently finds that tax policies, particularly negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, dramatically inflate investor demand for residential property, driving up prices in ways that supply alone cannot address. A household that can negatively gear multiple investment properties has structural advantages in the market that a first-home buyer cannot match, regardless of how many homes are built. This analysis receives far less sustained coverage than the supply narrative. It is worth asking why, when many of the people who benefit most from negative gearing are concentrated in the ownership and readership class of major commercial media outlets.
Social media has complicated this picture. Platforms like Facebook and X have broken the monopoly of traditional media gatekeepers and given ordinary people unprecedented ability to publish and distribute information. That is real. But the same platforms that enable grassroots organising are optimised, algorithmically, for engagement. And engagement is reliably produced by outrage, fear, and identity threat, not by accuracy or nuance. A 2018 study published in the journal Science, examining the spread of verified true and false information on Twitter, found that false information spreads approximately six times faster than true information, and that this difference was driven primarily by human behaviour rather than automated accounts. We are drawn to the alarming and the novel. Platforms profit from that tendency. The people who understand that system most clearly are the best positioned to exploit it.
In Australian political discourse this dynamic is not abstract. The algorithm that surfaced mining industry fear campaigns during the 2010 resources tax debate, that amplified culture war content during the 2023 Voice referendum, that keeps ‘boats’ and ‘crime’ in perpetual circulation regardless of the actual evidence — is the same algorithm rewarding the same emotional triggers every time. It does not create the tribal identities Piece One described. It feeds them, accelerates them, and makes them harder to step back from. The outrage you feel scrolling is not accidental. It is the product. And it is doing the same work that the mining industry’s television ads did in 2010, at a fraction of the cost and with far greater reach.
None of this means reliable information is inaccessible. It means you have to be deliberate about seeking it out, because the default will not bring it to you.
In Australia, the ABC remains consistently the most trusted news source across multiple independent polling series, including Essential Research’s ongoing social and political tracking. That trust is not unconditional: the ABC has its own institutional limitations, has been subject to significant government funding pressure across successive administrations, and is not immune to the blind spots of its own culture. But it is publicly funded, operates under an editorial charter with real accountability mechanisms, and is structurally not required to serve advertiser or shareholder interests. That structural difference matters.
Beyond broadcast news, independent policy research is publicly available and more readable than most people assume. The Grattan Institute, the Australia Institute, and the Parliamentary Budget Office all publish evidence-based analysis of policy questions in plain language, with their methodology and funding sources disclosed. None of these institutions is perfectly neutral — no human institution is. But they show their working, which puts them ahead of most opinion columns.
The most practical skill in a media environment designed to keep you reactive is a simple pause. Before sharing something, before letting it settle as your common sense: who produced this, what are they trying to tell me, and who benefits if I believe it? That is not paranoia. It is the basic civic literacy that any functioning democracy requires of its citizens. It is also, not coincidentally, exactly what the people who benefit from your inattention are hoping you will not bother to develop.
You are allowed to decide for yourself what matters. But that starts with knowing that the hierarchy you were handed was built by someone, for reasons that were not yours.
