Something different for today’s newsletter – you get to be first to read my latest Zee Feed article! It will be published on the website in the coming week. Quick summary: I scraped all the podcast appearances made by politicians during the election campaign to do some data analysis of the ‘new media’ landscape. The main takeaway? Australia’s alternative media has even less diversity than the mainstream media, with 88% of podcasts featuring only white hosts. Yikes, indeed. Read the full article below, and check the website this week for the exciting new articles as part of the Winter Issue of Zee Feed!

– Crystal
Founder & Chief of Everything at Zee Feed

Australia’s New Media Landscape Is Exciting… And Blindingly White

Australia has a serious media concentration problem. So the emergence and influence of new media throughout the 2025 federal election campaign was an exciting and important development. These voices were taken seriously by the political and media establishment for the first time – as they should – and almost all claim to be doing things differently to mainstream media and corporate broadcasters. They claim to represent something different too.

Is that true?

Zee Feed has conducted an analysis of the podcast appearances made by high-ranking politicians during the election campaign. The data reveals that the “new media” being courted by the political elite has some of the very same problems as mainstream and corporate media.

Namely: that it’s almost entirely white. 

We compiled a list of all podcast appearances between 1st January and 3rd May 2025, by the following politicians: ministers, and shadow ministers/portfolio holders for Labor, the Coalition and the Greens, and all crossbenchers (i.e: the independents and One Nation). We excluded radio shows that were shared to podcast platforms (i.e.: triple j’s Hack, and many commercial radio interviews). We also excluded YouTube-only shows, like the Ozzy Man Reviews interview with Anthony Albanese, which was likely one of the most-watched and influential new media slots of the entire campaign. 

It amounted to 183 podcast appearances made by this cohort of political leaders. 

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did the most podcasts with 16 appearances, followed by independent Allegra Spender (12), and former Greens leader Adam Bandt and ex-One Nation senator Gerard Rennick (11 each). 

Listnr news podcast The Briefing and The Independents podcast, produced by Climate 200 and hosted by Julia Zemiro, had the most guests with eight each. Betoota Advocate podcast Betoota Talks, which advised Labor on its podcast strategy, interviewed seven politicians during the period.

When it comes to gender, 45% of politician podcast slots had at least one woman hosting, and 58% at least one man. Forty percent of appearances were hosted by women only. 

It’s much more grim broken down along lines of race.

A whopping 88% of podcast appearances made by politicians were with white hosts only. Only 2% spoke to Indigenous hosts, and 11% to other people of colour. A deserved shout out to Yorta Yorta journalist Daniel James on the 7am podcast, and Mbarbrum woman Caroline Kell who hosts her own podcast, Yarning Up.

Peter Dutton was the only Coalition MP to speak to a non-white host; he gave an interview to journalist Latika Bourke on her podcast, Latika Takes. Anthony Albanese also gave Bourke an interview, and both episodes were produced in collaboration with SevenWest-owned conservative news publication, The Nightly.

At least two interviews featured hosts with disabilities: Dr George Taleporos interviewed then-NDIS Minister Amanda Rishworth on the Reasonable and Necessary podcast, and Adam Bandt spoke to Carmen Azzopardi of I’ve Always Said That. 

As I’ve written before, diversity of ideology is more important than strict diversity of representation – and I still believe that. But we surely can agree that a chorus of almost 90% white voices does not make for a healthy alternative to mainstream corporate media.

In fact, it replicates one of the biggest flaws of mainstream media.

A significant part of decision making responsibility (not ‘blame’) here lies with the politicians and their teams, who choose which podcasters were worth their limited and valued time. It was an election campaign after all, media opportunities that will get them in front of “target” audiences are prioritised. 

Senators Fatima Payman (ex-Labor, now independent), Lidia Thorpe (ex-Greens, now independent), and Dorinda Cox (then Greens, but moved to Labor after the election) each made multiple podcast appearances with Indigenous, South Asian, Middle Eastern and African descent. Only Dorinda Cox was up for re-election this year. 

It’s not surprising that these politicians were the only ones who appeared to make a concerted effort to ensure their new media appointments were not entirely white. 

In defence of these decisions, I’m sure some will raise the valid argument that the audience size of new media outlets matters; it’s not a smart choice for a politician to give a one-hour interview to a podcast that only has 100 listeners a month. If the biggest podcasters in Australia all happen to be white, so be it.

Audience size certainly matters, but the new media podcasts that scored interviews during the election campaigns weren’t all big hitters. 

The Greens’ Peter Whish-Wilson, and independents Zali Steggall, Allegra Spender and Sophie Scamps all made time for one-on-one interviews with the Surfers for Climate Audio podcast. While no publicly available listenership data is available for this podcast (as is industry standard), it has only 11 reviews across Spotify and Apple Podcasts, the two major listening platforms. While the Surfers for Climate Instagram account has 38,900 followers, the podcast clip video with the highest views is from Steggall’s interview – it has 1300 views and no comments. This suggests that Surfers for Climate Audio has a small podcast audience.

None of this should be read as a slight against this podcast. It’s good and important that politicians speak to people with small, niche audiences too – not everything is for mass consumption. The problem is when it’s only the small, niche audiences of white creators that are considered “valuable”, amplified by the mainstream media and given access to politicians and those in power. 

The whiteness of the new media landscape seems particularly pronounced on the centre-left of politics.

It was evident in Labor’s controversial decision to invite new media digital creators to the federal budget lock up, giving them preferential treatment over working journalists and older news media. Alicia Vrajlal of Missing Perspectives says she was one of only two women of colour included in this group.

It was evident in the “influencer debate” video by SBS The Feed, which featured only white “progressive” creators – Abbie Chatfield, Hannah Ferguson and Konrad ‘Punters Politics’ Benjamin – arguing with a comparatively racially diverse panel of conservatives, Freya Leach, Trisha Jha and Joel Jammal.

It was evident in an incident concerning an interview I gave to Marie Claire in the final week of the election campaign. I was interviewed, along with Ferguson, for a piece about the rise of new media in informing women about politics. Although my knowledge and expertise were clearly valuable enough for the article, Marie Claire ran it with an image that featured a picture of every single woman mentioned in the article – even picturing Ferguson twice – except for me. I’m Asian, and was the only non-white woman who was interviewed or mentioned in the article.

The mistake by Marie Claire was not personal or malicious, but an example of the subconscious undermining of non-white journalists, writers, podcasters, creators and new media outlets in Australia really is. As I wrote at the time, it is systemic: “When our expertise is called upon – like in this Marie Claire piece – we are hidden and buried, so that our platforms don’t grow at the same pace as white voices. In turn, having a ‘smaller platform’ is used as the excuse to exclude us.”

It should be a serious concern that the growing new media ecosystem replicates the overwhelming whiteness of the legacy media. While race is one of the most obvious weak spots, it’s not limited to this: there is also the celebrification of new media personalities, the reliance on opinion and commentary over journalism or real analysis, the sensationalised language and “hooks” optimised for engagement, the lack of journalistic rigour especially when interviewing politicians or analysing policy. Is it only a failure for legacy outlets to commit these journalism sins?

Based on this snapshot of new media podcasts, it seems the only corporate media failing that the new media ecosystem addresses is the gender imbalance. We need to remain aware of the fact that it still provides news and analysis through the lens of white women and men.

Smart stuff on the Internet 💭

All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:

How Fleetwood Mac Won the Classic Rock Wars on Hearing Things
“One reason that Fleetwood Mac “won” the classic rock wars, in the pop cultural sense, is because their songs operate from both the man’s and the woman’s point of view. (Multiple women’s points of view, actually: In Nicks and in Christine McVie [RIP], listeners get complementary archetypes: the poised but modest McVie hiding out behind the keys, the defiant and diaristic Nicks blessedly traipsing through the spotlight.) I don’t see viral videos set to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Stones, or any of the other English rock groups beloved by Boomers. This is a shift from even 20 years ago, when anyone who picked up a rock magazine was told, among other myths, that Jimmy Page was the greatest guitarist of all time. Now rock magazines don’t exist, it’s common knowledge that Page “dated” a 14-year-old girl, and the harder-edged Boomer rock canon has lost its grip on teenage boys with guitars.”

TikTok's unspoken rules of overconsumption on Keep Scrolling For substack
“There is an argument that men manage to avoid [the ‘overconsumption'] label because they are stereotypically seen as ‘collectors’ rather than consumers. Collecting involves acquiring and organising items based on a specific interest, while overconsumption refers to consuming in excess. In a patriarchal society, women are more likely to be stereotyped as frivolous shoppers who buy without much thought. In contrast, men are perceived as building carefully-curated collections that will (maybe) appreciate in value. When men do make unnecessary purchases, they are often given far more grace.”

The ultra-wealthy have exploited Australia’s tax system for too long. It’s time to ensure everyone pays their fair share on Guardian Australia
Next week the federal government is holding discussions about potential economic reform. This is a pitch by trade unionist Sally McManus about the policies Australia needs: “We need a minimum 25% tax on gas export revenues, a minimum 25% tax for trust funds and individuals earning more than $1m, and a one investment property limit for negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount benefits, with the grandfathering of current arrangements for five years. These changes have a simple intention: to make sure everyone pays their fair share, so productivity gains flow across society fairly … Our proposed reforms are targeted and achievable.”

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