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November 1st, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
AAP
Australian Greens leader Bob Brown has backed calls for the use of tax breaks to support a broader range of journalism for the Australian community.
In a submission to an independent inquiry into media and media regulation, Senator Brown said giving tax-deductible status to not-for-profit journalistic enterprises would increase media diversity and support quality journalism.
Such a system would help create a platform for investigative and in-depth journalism in particular, he said in the submission to the national inquiry released on Tuesday.
But he said more work was needed on how the idea, proposed by journalism academics, would work.
Senator Brown criticised media concentration in Australia, where Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited owns around 70 per cent of print media.
“I urge the inquiry to consider what further legal mechanisms or policies could be implemented to ensure more media diversity and that in the future no media proprietor owns more than 70 per of the print media,” he wrote.
Conflicts of interest could arise because a media proprietor’s wide business interests might “attract coverage by their media outlets”, Senator Brown said.
“This oligarchy headlines opinion on front pages and brazenly campaigns to make or break governments,” he said.
“If the elected representatives are not to rein in this debasing of the ideals of the fourth estate, who should or will?”
Senator Brown said self-regulation of the media had failed.
“It is my submission that the profession’s ethics are, in important aspects, undermined, that the public esteem for the news media is depressed and that the concentration of ownership, at least of the print media, is corrosive of the fabric of Australian democracy and ought to be remedied,” he said.
Senator Brown said print media owners should undergo a fit and proper person test as broadcasters do, and the Press Council needed funding from sources other than the industry, to handle complaints and criticisms.
More regulation of the press would be good for free speech, he said.
“Without some degree of regulation, the right to redress for those who have been misrepresented where the press has made an error cannot be assured, as for most people access to mainstream media to present a counter-argument or response is not guaranteed,” he said.
Senator Brown’s submission came with a two-page appendix listing 14 examples of criticism of him and the Greens for supporting a media inquiry, 13 of them by News Ltd writers.
The media inquiry is to report by February 2012.
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