Australian journalism and its British and American connections

Early Australian journalism relied on British conventions, practices, and even equipment. As part of the British empire, Australia’s international news was also dominated by British sources even into the 1930s. But from the 1860s, Australian publishers had also been looking to the US, adopting its penny papers format and “new journalism” style. During World War II, as news flows to and from the US increased, Australian newspapers adopted several other American innovations, including opinion polls and front-page columns. By the 1950s, some more distinctively Australian elements were apparent in journalism. Not all of these were positive, including media ownership concentration and the Murdoch family dynasty. By the early 1970s, the four largest media empires in Australia spanned newspapers, magazines, radio, and television stations. And Rupert Murdoch was starting to push transnational flows back the other way – from Australia to the UK and the US – after he burst onto Fleet Street in 1968–1969 and then headed to the US, where his Fox News cable news channel became the epitome of Murdoch’s distortion of journalism from 1996 through to the Trump era.