What’s most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in Europe or many other countries that do have free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has implemented at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he’s doing as he does it.

Jacob Weisberg, Ignore Fox

In the midst of a perfectly reasonable article, Weisberg drops this inflammatory, obnoxious and ignorant bomb. I know Americans would like to blame some other land for the ills caused by American (not Australian) citizen Rupert Murdoch, but this exercise in contrasting media landscapes is glib and fails to take proper account of cultural nuance.

As Weisberg elliptically acknowledges in the same article (he refers to the “”tea parties” that Fox covered the way the Hearst press covered the Spanish-American war” — an allusion to the politically-influential press barons of the 19th century American media) bias in the American media is hardly new; it was indeed a 20th Century innovation that made American news more oriented toward the public interest.

While I can’t, and have no interest in, speaking for the British press, Australian newspapers have a strong independent and public service-inclined streak that shouldn’t be dismissed in the scurrilous way Weisberg does here. While we have undoubtedly had stronger and more enduring tabloids — of the American Hearst/Pulitzer mould —  here than in the States (major cities like Adelaide and Brisbane do not have local broadsheet papers), these publications are more concerned with serving the interests of a particular working class social class than pushing a political agenda, as Fox News does. And though sadly defunct news magazines like The Bulletin were not without a political agenda — that publication once had the slogan “Australia for the White Man” emblazoned on its masthead — these had long ago moved into modernity.

Papers like Fairfax Corporation’s Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Canberra Times remain respectably independent, and Murdoch’s own national broadsheet, The Australian, is filled with the kind of respectable reporting you would never find on Fox. (Its opinion pages lean heavily rightward, however, but then again, so too do American opinion pages like the Wall Street Journal — even before it was owned by Murdoch’s News Ltd.)

There is much to admire about American journalism, and a 20th Century commitment to independence is one of those things. Its continuing resistance to tabloid sensationalism is another. But the Fox News model of journalistic political advocacy cannot be sheeted home to Rupert Murdoch’s Australian birthplace; it was created in America, for Americans, by an American — Murdoch renounced his Australian citizenship in 1985, when he became an American — and if anything, it has distinct echoes of an earlier brand of American journalism, the kind William Randolph Hearst’s papers were deploying in the Spanish-American War.