
Will Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s shiny “gentler, kinder politics” break News Corp? Or will News Corp, once again, triumph over the paradigm of nice? For the incoming government, it’s political. For News Corp, it’s existential.
Every day, News Corp (and its Fox sibling) makes its money out of the outrage story of the moment. Now, it’s confronting a new narrative: an election read as a direct repudiation equally of the News Corp business model and of the Liberal-National post-Tampa political strategy.
The Germans, as ever, have a word for it (or, in this case, a post-punk song lyric): “Angst, Hass, Titten und dem Wetterbericht” (“Fear, hate, titties and the weather report”). It captures the past two decades of News Corp’s and Australia’s conservative parties. Hate of political opponents and cultural dissidents, fear of the other from asylum seekers to African gangs, sexualised and homophobic panic, climate denial and obstruction.
Can Albanese’s politics of ‘nice’ break News Corp’s outrage machine?