Media Ownership and Concentration in Australia

This chapter begins the section on countries in Asia and the Pacific. It examines media ownership and concentration in Australia. Following an overview of the Australian media landscape, the remainder of the chapter focuses on print media (newspapers, book publishing, magazine publishing), audiovisual media (radio, broadcast television, multichannel TV platforms, film), telecommunications media (wireline and wireless telecom), and Internet media (Internet Service Providers, search engines). Australian media ownership has been dominated by media families such as the Murdochs and the Packers. The mixture of concentrated ownership and powerful personalities means that media policy has been a contentious issue. In telecom, too, there have been contentious battles over policy between the government and the major network operator Telstra.