Thakur was talking about the stupidity of lockdowns - views he has also aired on other media outlets, including the ABC. Last week he interviewed Ramesh Thakur, introducing him, with a flourish, as emeritus professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. But any scientific consensus is regarded with suspicion on Sky News - sometimes even taken as evidence of conspiracy. Jones, for example, says that all he does is present scientific evidence on Covid.
All of them draw regularly on the wider stable of News Corp journalists.Īt other times, we see split-screen “interviews” - more like mutual bolstering - with “experts” and other invited guests. Often the hosts interview each other: Credlin interviews Alan Jones Jones interviews Credlin.
#SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA SERIES#
The Sky News after dark format consists of a series of half-hour slots hosted by Bolt, Credlin and the others, in which they speak direct to the camera. According to figures provided at my request, Sky News on WIN reaches an average of 136,000 unique prime-time viewers across all regional markets in Australia each weekday.Īfter two weeks of watching Sky News, I am not surprised by those figures. But there, too, the audiences are only modest.
This might raise the spectre of a US-style political division, with rural Australians treated to a very different set of “facts” and opinions. Since 2018, rural viewers have been able to access Sky News free-to-air on either WIN or now Southern Cross Austereo. (The ABC’s Q&A, by comparison, regularly attracts more than 300,000.) Television ratings have long shown that Sky News’s line-up of right-wingers attracts quite small television audiences, with the most popular programs gaining about 70,000 viewers. Just 23 per cent of Australians subscribed to Foxtel in 2020, compared with 27 per cent in 2018.
#SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA TV#
Research by the Australian Communications and Media Authority in 2020 showed that Foxtel - the pay TV service that carries Sky News - was losing audience share in the subscription market to the streaming services Netflix and Stan. Unlike in the United States, pay TV news has never been mainstream in Australia, and seems to be going backwards. I certainly found a sea of spin and self-promotion, but my conclusion is: no need to panic - yet.Įstablishing a local equivalent of Fox News was always going to be hard. I wanted to see what was being put to air, and to assess whether we are watching the development of a fresh brand of media pathology. Underlying their comments is the assumption that the Murdoch organisation is succeeding in its attempt to establish an Australian equivalent of America’s Fox News, with all the fracturing of our body politic this would imply. The ban has provoked a fresh round of hand-wringing among media commentators about Sky News and its influence. I have been watching Sky News - a lot of it - recently, focusing particularly on its notorious “after dark” period, when the network’s mostly conventional live news service morphs into strident opinion from Alan Jones, Chris Kenny, Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt and other News Corp mascots. When YouTube announced last week that it was suspending Sky News Australia’s account for a week because it was transmitting misinformation about Covid-19, it felt like the social media company had tapped into my brain.
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