News Corp.'s Tight Grip on Australia's Papers Shapes Its Politics

SYDNEY, Australia - A lot has happened since Col Allan, the editor in chief of The New York Post, returned to Sydney to provide “extra editorial leadership” for Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspapers.

Rupert Murdoch, left, and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Murdoch papers have had a central role in the race between Mr. Rudd, left, and Tony Abbott.

Since then, the chief executive of News Corporation Australia has resigned, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was shown on the cover of Sydney's leading tabloid in a Nazi uniform and the ruling Labor Party earned bipartisan jeers for accusing Mr. Murdoch of plotting to subvert the election.

It has been a busy three weeks.

News Corporation is the largest newspaper publisher in Australia, with a total audited circulation of 17.3 million newspapers, according to company figures - a 59 percent market share. (Its next closest competitor, Fairfax Media, had total audited distribution of 6.3 million papers, for 22 percent of the market.) Given the reach of News Corporation papers - particularly The Daily Telegraph in Sydney and the flagship paper, The Australian - they are often credited with having an outsize role in the country's politics.

They have been front and center in the current national election pitting Mr. Rudd and the Labor Party against the Liberal Party led by Tony Abbott. The papers have run a string of scathing front-page editorials since Mr. Rudd called for elections last month. The decision to portray Mr. Rudd on the front page of The Daily Telegraph as Colonel Klink from the 1965-71 television comedy “Hogan's Heroes,” sporting a Nazi uniform and a monocle, raised eyebrows and led Mr. Rudd to publicly call out Mr. Murdoch over the coverage.

Mr. Murdoch has made it clear, Mr. Rudd told reporters last month, “that he doesn't really like us, and would like to give us the old heave-ho,” adding that “I'm sure he sees it with crystal-clear clarity all the way from the United States.”

Although several Murdoch papers endorsed Mr. Rudd during his first successful run for the leadership in 2007, they quickly soured on his positions toward big business, like a proposed tax on mining profits and an emissions trading plan. The company was seen as instrumental in the media campaign that saw him ousted in a 2010 party coup amid record low approval ratings. Mr. Rudd returned to government in June after upheaval in the Labor Party.

One of the Labor government's plans calls for a National Broadband Network that would deliver high-speed Internet access to wide swathes of the country, a service that would broadly compete with News Corporation's subscription TV service, Foxtel, which remains the company's most profitable Australian venture.

Polling data from a number of leading firms suggests that Mr. Rudd is trailing Mr. Abbott's opposition Liberal-National coalition in the contest by a significant, but not overwhelming, margin.

Jonathan Holmes, a prominent media commentator on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, says that the kind of tabloid treatment given to Mr. Rudd and the election has a greater impact because a single company's papers are so dominant. They can effectively become, he said, a “political battering ram.”

“Behavior that would be completely O.K. in a genuinely pluralistic media environment is very much less O.K. in a market where you have such a dominant position,” he said in an interview.

But the politics are not restricted to the front pages of News Corporation's papers. Less than two weeks after Mr. Allan arrived, Kim Williams, who was a senior executive at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Australian Film Commission before joining News Corporation more than a decade ago, resigned from his position as the company's Australia chief executive after just 18 months.

In a statement, Robert Thomson, the global chief executive, said that “Kim feels now is the right moment to leave the company, which he has served for two decades, following the successful implementation of the first stage of News Corp. Australia's strategy to drive integration and improve efficiency, to invest in its editorial products and publishing system, and secure a path of growth in a multiplatform world.”

Mr. Williams was widely seen as a smart executive but one whose emphasis on data put him at odds with the brash, tabloid style of Australia's papers. “They're all running around saying, ‘This is a fantastic victory, we've saved newspapers,' ” said a onetime News Corporation employee speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly criticizing former bosses. (News Corporation is so dominant among Australia's newspapers that even some media analysts decline to speak publicly about the company.)

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: News Corp.'s Tight Grip on Australia's Papers Shapes Its Politics.