DWYER, Timothy. Australian media academic on Murdoch media: "Inaccurate and unbalanced. And that's just typical of the Murdoch outlets, they're clearly very biased in favor of the Trump Republican Party"

Associate Professor Timothy Dwyer (Sydney University academic and a specialist in media ownership diversity) on Murdoch media and former PN Kevin Rudd’s petition for an Australian Royal Commission into media diversity (2020): “You have outfits like Sky News, which is essentially the Australian version of Fox News, making reports, for example, you know, Biden's recent speech and Trump's speech, for that matter, which are inaccurate and unbalanced. And that's just typical of the Murdoch outlets, they're clearly very biased in favor of the Trump Republican Party… Things have only just got worse. So we've got a highly concentrated media now, which is essentially a duopoly of two major players with News Corp and Nine Entertainment who totally dominate the news landscape. What we need are mechanisms, laws, policies put in place to see that there is no further media concentration. You could have regular reviews by an independent regulator to look at the threshold of those cross-media market shares, and they can be actively monitored to ensure that diversity is maintained. And then a public interest test. I mean, Australia does not have a public interest test when it comes to mergers to assess the public interest merits or otherwise of...mergers of media organizations. I mean, if Australia continues to head down a path, which is so concentrated, and where there's a duopoly controlling news provision, the end result is just increasing polarisation of viewpoints” (Timothy Dwyer quoted in Ahmed Yussuf, “Kevin Rudd’s petition for inquiry into Murdoch media reaches 500,000 signatures. The US election has brought into sharp focus former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s petition for a Royal Commission into Australian news media’s diversity”, The Feed, 8 November 2020: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/kevin-rudd-s-petition-for-inquiry-into-murdoch-media-reaches-500-000-signatures ).