I have long been convinced now that Sky News Australia doesn't exist to bring any news to the people of Australia, much less the world. This week I happened to run into a set of viewership figures which kind of confirm my hypothesis.
These are the Top 20 shows on Foxtel and to be fair, that's absolutely dire.
The highest rated show on Foxtel for the 24th was Rockwiz on Fox 8. With a paltry 40,000 people across the country, Rockwiz must miss the dizzying heights of the numbers of half a million people on SBS.
Admittedly Credlin got 38,000 people watching it but that may have been because it came on at dinner time. The real proof that Sky News Australia isn't produced for Australians, are the two shows Erin and The Rita Panahi Show which both scored just 22,000 people.
Now 22,000 people watching a thing would be perfectly fine if it was a football team playing at a suburban football ground. 22,000 people at a sporting venue like the SCG, Stadium Australia or the MCG, would feel empty and sad. 22,000 people for what supposedly is a national television station which claims to be the self-confessed cutting edge of news and opinion in Australia, is hilariously sad. I love it.
For a national news station, 22,000 people works out to be less than 146 people per electorate. For every thousand people in the country, that's not even one person watching Sky News Australia for these programs.
Women's Cricket and AFL Practice matches are outrating both Erin and The Rita Panahi Show. A 55 year old movie is outrating both Erin and The Rita Panahi Show. Formula One pre-season testing; which isn't even a motor race, has scored 90% of the viewership figures of Erin and The Rita Panahi Show. The empiric data quite simply, states that Sky News Australia is at best a very very small niche. I love it.
Sky News Australia which draws its hosts and guests from within its own pile of steaming compost (from places like The Australian, Herald-Sun, Daily Telegraph, and Courier-Mail) basically repackages its own corporate opinion pieces as news items, then holds talk fests to drive home the point. Apart from the news bulletins, Sky News Australia has proven itself to be practically unwatchable and the statistics tell the story that not many people do as a result.
The question then, is the most obvious question of all - why? Why bother going to the effort of producing television programs if they're watched by so few people? It depends who is watching and what they do as a result.
In the case of Fox News in the United States, which appears as part of basic cable plans and in a nation where cable TV take up rates were always far higher than in Australia, spewing whatever propaganda they could to make people vote in a certain way, swings elections. The hope is that in Australia, this will also be the case but my suspicion is that that Sky News Australia has a minimal effect on voting intentions.
If it is not that, then the other option is to make people in power think that that's what the people think. My suspicion is that just like The Australian which has an outsized circulation in Canberra (which is almost a zero newspaper town), Sky News Australia exists as a propaganda tool to make politicians think that that's what the people think. If most of those 22,000 people are in Canberra though, then Sky News Australia basically acts as very tiny fence which politicians are too afraid to jump over.
The other major reason that Sky News Australia exists, is to make the people of the United States think that that's what we think. Sky News Australia looks different to Fox News in the United States and as such, if Sky News Australia is shown via its YouTube Channel or played as clips on Fox News, then it automatically gains a colour of the exotic. Audiences generally accepting that a news program which appears to look genuine, is.
As for the shows themselves, for me this is commenting on things that I have not seen. The only comments that I can make are based on other things that I have seen these people in. I know that Peta Credlin was former Prime Minister Tony Abbott's secretary but I know nothing of her TV show. Erin Molan is on 2Day FM in the mornings with Ed Kavalee and Dave Huges, and given that I can not imagine that her TV show in the evenings would be particularly hard-hitting. Rita Panahi writes somewhat illogical pieces in News Corp's daily tabloids which toe the company line for the day; and given that I have seen glimpses of her program with Rowan Dean also toeing the company line for the day, I can not imagine that The Rita Panahi Show would be all that informative.
Not only have I not seen these three programs, given the data it looks like not many people have either. Foxtel by nature has everything behind a paywall and with the rise of Kayo and Stan Sport, the biggest drawcard to even get Foxtel is gone. Why would you bother if you could pay less and not bother paying for the things you don't need. Ultimately these ratings figures reflect that position. Foxtel likely knows exactly how many people are watching any given thing at any given time; so with just 22,000 people watching, the benefit to producing these shows must be seen by the corporate bean counters somewhere.
All of this assumes that anyone actually is watching. A pay-TV unit sending data back to the monitors, has no idea if there's anyone actually sitting in front of the screen. It could very well be that a lot of these screens are in places like pubs and clubs where they have just been left on in the background, or perhaps as is the case with a hairdressers' shop across the street from where I work, the screen is left on and playing something, even after the shop has closed and the lights have gone off.
Maybe that's the saddest set of affairs at all. Erin and The Rita Panahi Show could very well have numbers of 22,000 but there might not be people actually watching. It's not impossible to suggest that there are thousands of screens on around the country, in pubs, clubs, food courts, corporate building lobbies and foyers, and closed shops and premises, where Erin and Rita are actually speaking to an audience of nil. I love it.
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