ANTHONY DE CEGLIE: Quality news more important than ever in a social media age. But we’re being taxed to death

Every single night across Australia the No. 1 and the No. 2 program on TV is the 6pm news bulletin.

Combined, 7NEWS and 9NEWS reach an astonishing 3.6 million people on average each night.

In fact, there’s only two events of the year that the massive audience reach of those two 6pm news bulletins combined is beaten — the AFL and the NRL grand finals.

Channel 7 and Channel 9 are news companies first and foremost.

It’s in our DNA.

It seeps out of our pores and into the living rooms of Australians.

We are the shining light on the hill in an increasingly dystopian world of conspiracy theorists and deep-fakes and anti-vaxxer cookers.

Elon Musk doesn’t care about the truth.

He revels in peddling lies and boasts about using his bin fire of a site to influence the US election.

Mark Zuckerberg is seemingly happy for Meta to profit off the page impressions that child sex offenders create when they routinely use his site to prey on their next victim.

Not even the parents of dead children are enough for Facebook to take seriously the harm it is doing to society.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has labelled Meta arrogant bullies who should fess up to the damage they cause.

NSW Premier Chris Minns has spoken many times about how social media platforms cynically use algorithms to push dangerous conspiracy theories onto impressionable people — creating a vicious spiral down a rabbit hole he calls the “dark corners of the internet”.

Against these evil forces — and calling them that is not an exaggeration — there is only one true antidote.

The news.

The truth.

The fourth estate.

In a world where the proliferation of misinformation has never been worse, our role as journalists has never been more important.

We are the only antidote.

But we can’t do it alone.

And the Government — who tell voters so often of their fears about social media — needs to realise this and step up to help us.

If the Prime Minister is genuinely worried about the toxicity of Facebook and Meta and X and TikTok, then give a helping hand to the journalism that fights for facts.

The Government needs to stop treating Australia’s news stations with disdain.

Every day across our nation, Channel 7 proudly produces about 26 hours of journalism.

But we can’t promise we can keep doing that forever.

The Government acts like newsrooms are still bathing in the rivers of profits.

It does this at a high cost and a high risk to journalism and the Australian democracy.

Free-to-air networks like Channel 7 still pay an archaic “broadcast tax” that was designed 60 years ago during an era of super profits that simply no longer exist.

At a time when a viewer can access 10 hours of news on Seven’s free-to-air channel on any given day the so-called Commercial Broadcast Tax is actually just a tax on journalism.

Even more so, it’s a tax on the truth and it’s a tax on facts.

And it’s a tax on the only antidote to combatting the rise and rise of harmful online platforms.

The cost of the Commercial Broadcasting Tax this financial year for stations like Seven, Nine and 10 will be a combined $45 million.

I ask the Albanese Government how many journalism jobs do they think that is.

How many TV newsroom shifts will disappear so we can pay for it?

How many regional reporters will be let go?

How many more redundancy callouts will be made because of a meaningless tax from a bygone era that is nothing more than a rounding error for the budget coffers?

No other comparable jurisdiction in the world places tax burdens of this kind on broadcasters.

Licence fees paid by Australian broadcasters are now the highest in the world at 52 times more than the equivalent per capita charge on our US peers.

I am calling on the Albanese Government and the Opposition to vow to scrap the Commercial Broadcast Tax immediately in the name of journalism.

The future of the news and the future of the truth in our democracy depends on it.

The Government must also immediately investigate a rebate for the costs of producing news and current affairs.

They already have a rebate for the production of Australian dramas like Home and Away and for Australian documentaries.

The Government has already decided that it’s so important to have this local content for our national psyche that it should be subsidised.

I would argue that it’s even more important for our residents to safeguard the future of Australian news.

There are all kinds of rebates in other industries.

And us journalists do a very good job of helping other industries like small businesses lobby for change.

It’s high time we did it for ourselves.

Our democracy literally depends on the strength of our journalism.

Journalism is the greatest job and the greatest privilege in the world.

But we need help.

And we need it right now.

Anthony De Ceglie is Seven’s director of news and current affairs. This is an edited excerpt of a speech he gave at the Melbourne Press Club