De-westernizing Australia? Media systems and cultural coordinates

The mix is distinctive and dynamic despite very high levels of media ownership concentrationparticularly in print media, where Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation controls over 70 percent of the daily newspaper market-and evidence of further concentrations of power in response to convergence of technologies. It is also dynamic in spite of a tacit protocol of power-sharing in the modes of interaction between media power brokers and the state, which gives Australian media policy a strong corporatist flavor (also characteristic of other areas of policy, notably in the case of the Accord between the Federal Labor Government (1983-96) and the trade union movement) and elements of outright cronyism, or what Chadwick (1989) termed the “media mates�? approach to policy formation. Australia is also increasingly self-identifying as part of the Asian region, in spite of its original status as a British convict and colonial outpost and the “European�? orientation of much of its population. The extent to which its media performance and practices can and should be seen on a continuum with those of Eastern states and cultures can be treated as a case study in the project to de-Westernize media studies.