Australian oligarchy

A review of Sally Young's new book about the Australian media

If you want to understand, not just Australian media, but the way in which our country works, Media Monsters (NewSouth Publishers), the new book by Melbourne University academic Sally Young, is essential reading. (It is the second book in a planned trilogy that began in 2019 with Paper Emperors, and that, too, is essential reading.)

Media Monsters is an immense a book, so let me try and convey its essence—and illustrate the way it tells its story—by concentrating on the section that covers the creation of the Liberal Party and the role the media played in that. The story stands as the perfect synecdoche of the book, and it is worth excavating.

The writer who comes to mind as I read Young—the best point of comparison—is US author, Robert Caro, whose books about Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson stand, not just as monumental portraits of powerful men, but as portraits of power itself.

Young is in similar territory, though she does not centre power in the way Caro does.

She uses the word its…