It was all good news in The Australian yesterday: “Abbott cabinet to drive trade”, “Abbott plans early Jakarta talks”, “More women planned for Abbott ministry”, etc, etc. We haven’t seen such positive press about an incumbent since Pravda.

Just to see if I was imagining anti-Labor bias in The Australian, I did a little poll of the letters page over the weekend.

Out of 21 letters, 17 were anti-Labor. Three of the others concerned various ongoing right-wing campaigns: the hoary ABC-bias meme, and the bogeyman-academic of the month, currently Jake Lynch.

There was a single non-right-wing letter, but they were forced to publish that as the result of a complaint to the Press Council.

That’s not a good look, and that was just the letters page; the rest of the paper, even the news, followed the same pattern.

The media has a special place and a special responsibility in a democracy. The more powerful the player, the bigger the responsibility. It is not a defence to say that because Rupert legally owns most of the newspapers he can do what he wants, and if you don’t like it read something else. That’s like saying that because Kim Jong-un is the recognised ruler of North Korea, if the North Koreans don’t like his style they should stop complaining and move. Mere brute capability doesn’t confer legitimacy.

The staff at The Australian are journalists; I wonder if any of this makes them uncomfortable? Maybe they just have to do as they are told, or maybe they were hired because they really believe it’s OK to warp democracy to achieve certain ends; I don’t know. I just wonder how they explain it to themselves.

Simon Heffer (“Why anti-media crusader Tom Watson should come down off his high horse”, The Australian, 1/8) reveals in passing what local News Corp outlets have been flatly denying for years: that Rupert Murdoch actively directs his Australian newspapers to pursue his political agendas. In case you missed it, here it is in black and white: “Murdoch has had the temerity to ask some of his newspapers in Australia … to come out fervently against the re-election of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister”.

To concerns that Murdoch’s interference is commercially-motivated, also hitherto dismissed by NewsCorp outlets, Heffer’s response is shockingly blunt: “so what?”.

Defenders of democracy would see this as more than mere “temerity”. It is an abuse of the responsibility of all media, private and public, to ensure the free and fair political communication which electors need to make their decisions. The bigger the player, the greater the responsibility. To accept anything less is to resign ourselves, as Heffer evidently has, to living under a plutocracy.

Nick Cater (“Rudd poised to win media land”, The Australian, 6/8) is concerned that journalists as a group depart from various demographic averages. His biggest worry is that they are more educated and progressive than average, because this might “distort the national debate”, which Cater presumably thinks should be conducted by taking a survey.

Mr Cater need not worry, if indeed he really does. With 70% of the nation’s press under its control, News Corp, with Mr Cater’s help, has done somewhat more than is necessary to redress the balance.

Ben Macintyre (“Reporting the news without fear or favour”, The Australian, 6/7) is surely right to assert that fiercely independent former Times journalist William Howard Russell would have been “shocked … by the politicians and lawyers now swarming to control and regulate the press by law”. But it is equally likely he would be appalled by corporate or proprietorial interference in press content. A case in point: the recent secret recording of Rupert Murdoch, which has been a prominent and ongoing news story across the globe – except in media outlets he owns.

The Australian, for example, buried a small story in the Media section (“Murdoch dubs hacking probe a ‘disgrace'”, 4/7) which failed to canvass the key issue that the recording revealed the insincerity of Murdoch’s contrition before the Leveson Inquiry. Instead, it reproduced News Corp’s official line that Murdoch was motivated by “empathy” for his staff. Other News Corp outlets carried the exact same story, and not a single opinion piece on the subject.

Was this a result of fear, favour, or both?

It is difficult to divine exactly what  the ABC could do to satisfy Marc Hendrickx (“ABC lacks balance in its climate coverage”, The Australian, 5/6).

His first gripe concerns Karoly et al’s 2012 “1000-year study”, which was found by its authors (not “online climate sceptics”) to have a subtle methodological error and is currently under review (it was not “short-lived”). He complains that the ABC did not sufficiently emphasise this on their “online website”. However, it does not seem to bother him at all that The Australian’s only coverage of the ground-breaking research concerned the error.

Hendrickx is also bothered by the ABC’s publication of dissenting views alongside recent reports of a Canadian paper which posits CFCs as the cause of warming. In this case he seems to prefer The Australian’s approach of reporting the controversial theory with no balancing view (“CFCs ‘are the real culprit in global warming'”, 3/6).

Nick Cater is entitled to his opinion of the recent Whitlam doco “The Power and the Passion” (“Warning: this program contains sexed-up history and very few facts”, The Australian, 4/6). He is entitled to accuse its makers of being too young to remember the events it covers, even though he himself arrived in this country fifteen years later. He is entitled to question its historical neutrality, even though his own book (“The Lucky Culture”) attempts to shoehorn the distinctly collectivist history of Australian egalitarianism into his preferred but quite alien neoliberal view.

But Cater crosses the line by belittling participant Andrew Denton on the basis of his educational background. This is especially demeaning coming from someone who, although tertiary educated himself, has written an entire book complaining of educational snobbery.