Mr Beecher, a former editor of The Sydney Morning Herald,a group that this week has made 100's of cuts in its staff, uses the announcement to question whether quality journalism can survive in Australia.
He goes even further than some by saying that the government should actually step in and
politicians need to look at it now and think, if we don't do anything, then in a decade's time the idea of well-resourced, quality journalism -- with hundreds of journalists covering parliament and business and investigative journalism and the courts -- will be gone".
Of course the question needs to be asked as to whether we are anywhere near this crisis in the UK.The up to now healthy competition in the media has up to recent times generated a competitive need to investigate and monitor.However the evidence is that with cut backs and cost savings,this may not continue.Yes we have the BBC here but their coverage of quality news has and will continue to be hampered by the tussles over the license fee.
Back to Australia though and it is rather worrying to find that after the cutbacks at Fairfax,it leaves Rupert Murdoch according to Beecher as
as the sole remaining commercially owned source of serious journalism
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