Sky News Australia is increasingly pushing conspiracy theories to a global audience online

As Australians look back on 2020, they will remember the defeat of Donald Trump, who was never popular in their country. But they may also reflect on how parts of Australia’s media, including some ostensibly subject to government regulation, have become effective second fronts in the Trumpist culture wars.

A key example is Sky News Australia. For years the channel was little more than an oddity: an artefact of broadcasting regulation, only watched by momentarily distracted channel-hoppers, travellers beset by airport delays, and those involved in the dismal craft of professional politics. Around 2013, while daily programming went on as usual, at night the channel was given over to a pretty sad bunch of hard right ideologues. One program in particular, Outsiders, became a kind of revolving door for white male reactionaries in the twilight of their relevance, whom Sky would finally put out to pasture after an unforced gaffe.

But as Cameron Wilson pointed out in a crucial piece of reporting in November, since mid-2019 Sky has transformed itself into “one of Australian media’s digital leaders” by “focusing on producing highly partisan opinion content targeted at a global audience”, especially YouTube videos on “topics favoured by America’s right-wing media ecosystem”. Though its “after dark” opinion presenters – who are exclusively on the political right – achieve risible ratings for their cable broadcasts, when repurposed for online consumption, they supply the bottomless demand for pro-Trump content.

This has attracted a large international audience to Sky’s online offerings. On YouTube, in the last month, Sky attracted 100,000 or so new subscribers and now has 1.06 million in total, putting it just behind the ABC at 1.2 million. Importantly, as Wilson pointed out, Sky’s success is partly premised on partnerships with YouTube and Facebook, who are sharing the spoils of the eyeballs and advertising money the new focus has yielded.

This, surely, means that the social media companies must share some responsibility for the content they are profiting from. And a look at some recent videos posted by the channel shows that some of this content crosses the line into conspiracy theories. On 3 December, for example, Alan Jones interviewed businessman and former ABC chairman, Maurice Newman, on topics related to Trump’s electoral defeat and the incoming Biden administration.

Though their conversation ranged well to the right of mainstream, electoral conservative politics, the rhetoric was instantly recognisable. At one point, Jones asked Newman for a “quick one to my viewers about what’s called the Great Reset”, which he claimed that “everyone’s writing to me” about.

Newman responded with baroque conspiracy-theorising, worth quoting at length:

“The Great Reset is going to be the segue from the pandemic. Now that they’ve got everybody obedient in terms of not leaving the house and doing what they have to do, and we’ve seen actions from the police in Victoria which are unthinkable in this country, there’s a segue from there into making sure that we control our emissions, that we do what we’re told to do with regard to what they call the Green New Deal.”

In response, Jones reminded Newman that “I think your words were, ‘a fascist experiment being pushed by controlling elites’”, to which Newman replied “I don’t think that’s an exaggeration”.

The Great Reset theory is, in reality “a hodgepodge of one-world-government fears that has gained steam in the wake of Biden’s win”, which, in the manner of QAnon, remixes elements of longstanding conspiracy theories that misconstrue phenomena such as “Agenda 21” and the Bilderberg Group. Promoted by Trump acolytes like Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, and Diamond and Silk, it is sure to be deployed against whichever much-needed measures that the Biden administration might take in relation to climate change.

Thanks to Sky News Australia, 461,764 people and counting have been exposed to Newman’s explication of it.

As Wilson reported in November, Jones has been particularly successful in terms of traffic. And he’s hardly alone among Sky broadcasters in pushing Trumpist conspiracy theories. Other recent examples include:

• Paul Murray on 8 December insisting that the US election was “still contested”, Trump had not yet definitively lost, and those who disagreed were engaged in “vote fraud denialism”.

• In the same program, on the basis of a fragment of a translated speech in China, Murray suggested the Biden family could be colluding with the Chinese Communist party, which he insisted was “not a conspiracy theory”, and which is not being probed by the media.

• On Rita Panahi’s Inside the News program, Adam Creighton insisted that Sweden’s “herd immunity” strategy had been successful and that there “is very little correlation between the harshness of the lockdown and the trajectory of the virus”. That claim is flatly contradicted by published epidemiological research.

• An Outsiders panel on Sunday involving Panahi; Daily Telegraph opinion editor, James Morrow; and Rowan Dean were bolstering narratives of election fraud, with, for example, Morrow citing the discredited idea that a statistical law suggests the vote is anomalous.

• Sky has also continued to platform far right figures whom even Fox News may shy away from, including Katie Hopkins, who in February promoted her latest documentary about white farmers in South Africa. She falsely described the situation as a “genocide of the whites”. Lauren Southern, meanwhile, who as a YouTuber also pushed a conspiracy theory about a plot to replace the white race, is a frequent presence on the channel, and is listed on recent videos as a “Sky News contributor”.

Some of this is simply dead ender-claptrap: straw-grasping and copium for Trumpists who are struggling to assimilate the new reality. But some of it is racist conspiracy theory, and Sky’s new business model means that Australia is effectively exporting it.

In theory, subscription television, like other broadcast media, is regulated by the government through the Australian Communications and Media Authority. But as David Hardaker reported in Crikey in November, oversight has largely been farmed out to Astra, a subscription television industry body which is dominated by News Corporation employees.

There’s no indication that the Coalition government has any interest in policing the Sky-to-internet fake news pipeline. The companies that host Sky’s viral far right disinformation bombs are in cahoots with them. Nothing about this is likely to change in 2021, outside the unlikely event of massive pushback on the channel from an Australian public that hardly knows the channel exists.

It’s enough to make you wish for the good old days of 2020.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Guardian can be found here ***