Lenore Taylor, political editor theguardian.com, Friday 9 August 2013
Rudd says the directive came from Murdoch envoy Col Allan at an Australian editors' meeting
The Daily Telegraph and its uncompromising headline sits next to Fairfax's Sydney Morning Herald. Photograph: GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images
Kevin Rudd has accused the News Corp chairman, Rupert Murdoch, of sending a senior executive to give Australian editors a “directive” to get rid of the Labor government.
Escalating the election campaign war between Labor and News Corp, Rudd alleged that at a recent meeting in Sydney, New York Post editor-in-chief Col Allan had told News Corp Australia editors: “Go hard on Rudd. Start from Sunday [August 4th] and don’t back off.
“The editors have reflected to us the content of the directive they’ve received,” Rudd said, referring to a meeting between the Australian editors and Allan who, according to a message to staff from the News Corp chief executive, Robert Thomson, had been sent on temporary assignment to provide Australian papers with “additional editorial direction at a particularly challenging time”.
Labor sources said their information had come from their own “sources inside News Ltd [now News Corp Australia]”.
“They are coming after us … the challenge is to shine a light on why they might be doing this,” they said.
On a day when the only Brisbane newspaper, News Corp’s Courier-Mail, headlined with “Send in the clown” its front-page story on the return of former Queensland premier Peter Beattie to stand in the federal campaign, Rudd said the front pages of News Corp publications were reflecting “a fairly consistent pattern” and Murdoch himself had been clear that he wanted to “get rid of the government”.
Rudd said that given News Corp “owns 70% of the print media in this country” he was raising the question “are both sides of the argument being put to the voters each day?”
The Courier-Mail headline comes after Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran a front page on Thursday that featured the deputy prime minister, Anthony Albanese, as the blundering Hogan’s Heroes character Sergeant Schultz and the headline "I know nuthink" (Albanese had had a beer with controversial former Labor MP Craig Thomson). Monday’s Telegraph headline said: "Finally you now have the chance to kick this mob out."
Rudd also repeated his assertion that the Coalition’s broadband policy, launched at Fox Studios, which is owned by News Corp, was better for the commercial interests of News Corp’s part-owned Foxtel than Labor’s NBN, and that this could be the reason for the anti-Labor campaign.
The Coalition leader, Tony Abbott, and his communications spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, have rubbished that claim, saying if fast broadband threatened Foxtel then the Coalition’s plan would be a bigger threat because it would be delivered to homes more quickly and more cheaply.
Rudd’s continuing attack against Murdoch’s news organisation in Australia came as News Corp Australia’s chief executive, Kim Williams, stood down after less than two years in the job.
Williams is being replaced on Monday by Julian Clarke, who has been described as Murdoch’s “favourite managing director”.
Rudd has adopted a deliberate strategy of "calling out" what Labor strategists believe is a concerted anti-ALP campaign, waged in particular by the Telegraph, which is widely read in the crucial western Sydney electoral battleground, and the Courier-Mail, in Rudd's home state of Queensland, where Labor must win seats if it is to have any chance of victory. Some believe the "hostile views" of those two papers are targeted to influence the outcome of the election, which will be decided in those two states.
Labor sources said they believed Murdoch was acting to protect his revenue from Foxtel because so many of his Australian newspapers were losing money.
“It is in their commercial interest to deny us a fair run at this election,” they said.
News Corp’s own paper the Australian reported that in a 10-minute address to the editors' conference, held a few days before Rudd called the September 7 election, Allan advised them to “rely on their instincts and create independent newspapers that set the agenda”.
Editors described the speech as "empowering" and a rally cry that has "fired everyone up", the Australian said.
News Corp Australia has been contacted for comment.
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