I graduated with distinction from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2003, and while it would be another 13 years before I'd ever put my degree to any use, the experience played a massive role in forming my opinions about the mainstream press.

One of the lessons I think about a lot came at the beginning of my two-week internship with Channel 10's Eyewitness News (now 10 News First) when I was watching the show's bedraggled news editor put everyone's story assignments up on the whiteboard one morning. I'd been paying a lot of attention to TV news at the time because that's what we were studying, and I'd noticed that the stories Channel 10 would cover were always exactly the same as the ones that would be covered by Channel 7 and Channel 9— usually in exactly the same order.

"Why do you guys always cover the same stories as Channel 7 and Channel 9?" I asked. "Do you guys phone each other to coordinate?"