The United States of Chris Mitchell: The Power of Rupert Murdoch and the Australian’s Editor-in-Chief

Chris Mitchell and Christine Jackman at the launch of Jackman's 'Inside Kevin 07', Walsh Bay, June 2008. Seated behind them (left to right) are the Australian's Dennis Shanahan, Paul Whittaker, Glenn Milne, and Nick Cater. © Alan Pryke/Newspix 
Talk to any journalist, commentator, politician or public figure in Australia, and it seems they all have a view of Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of the Australian newspaper, now widely regarded as the most influential news outlet in the country – one that polarises readers and infuriates targets with its relentless crusading journalism.
Visionary. Zealot. Grenade thrower. The last of the great newspaper men. Arch Machiavellian brute – this from Mitchell himself, delivered tongue-in-cheek, and for the purpose of denying it.
If there is one thing his detractors and admirers largely agree on, though, it is that Mitchell has styled himself as the most powerful media executive in the land and transformed Rupert Murdoch’s flagship into a journal whose political impact far outweighs its modest circulation of 130,000 on a weekday.
“The biggest story in politics at the moment is the relationship between News Limited and the government,” a veteran Canberra-watcher says. According to a News Limited insider, “Mitchell has inculcated a view [at the newspaper] that they are there not only to critique and oversee the government, [but also that] it is their role to dictate policy shifts, that they are the true Opposition.” An angry cabinet minister fumed recently, “The Oz doesn’t report the policy issues. It just reports that big business is shitting on the government, and Abbott is shitting on the government, it reports politics in any way that shits on the government, day after day.” Whether it’s climate change, asylum seekers, industrial relations, the schools building program or the National Broadband Network: “It’s just ‘let’s shit on the government’, every single fucking day.”
Chris Mitchell once told a colleague, “You have to understand – this is a dictatorship and I am the dictator.”
So who is the strongman at the helm of Australia’s national broadsheet? And have he and his paper overreached the proper role of the fourth estate in holding governments to account..?

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Sally Neigbour @'The Monthly'