With his boss, Rupert Murdoch, over in Britain battling to save his media empire in the wake of the phone tapping scandals unearthed in that country, News Ltd’s Australian chief John Hartigan used one of his local newspapers, The Australian, to assure readers that what happened in Britain couldn’t possibly happen here. And, therefore, there is no need to hold an inquiry into the media as mooted by the Greens and the Labor  Government last week. In the article, which also sought to address criticism of his papers’ political bias, Mr Hartigan played down the influence of his publications suggesting that Seven West Media executive chairman Kerry Stokes wielded far more power than Mr Murdoch and that Talk Radio “reaches out to all parts of the country,” moving beyond the relatively small coverage of The Australian. He failed to mention the enormous coverage of News Ltd’s tabloids, but that’s not the topic of this forum.

What Mr Hartigan also said was that The Australian‘s coverage of national affairs was feeding into “what strident radio broadcasters use as their diet for the day,” which set the tone for the day’s political coverage.

Whatever did he mean?

“Because of this somewhat strange link with people like (2GB announcer) Ray Hadley, The Australian then moves beyond a small but important readership,” he said.

Could it be that he is having a swipe at Radio’s reliance on his newspapers to provide the base material for their programs?

Before he got so comprehensively sidetracked by other events, Mr Murdoch was keen to make news aggregators, or at least those that aggregate his news, pay.

Should News, if it could, charge for the use of its newspapers as a key ingredient in Talk Radio programming.