that time. This was in line with the overarching political stance of all Fairfax Holdings owned newspapers, including The Sydney Morning Herald, which in the 1970s was also right-leaning in its political views. However, contrasting to The Australian, the AFR was still perceived as a newspaper with a strong sense of integrity in reporting facts, despite its editorial style leaning towards conservative business ideals. In the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, the Australian news media sector was blamed for overlooking corporate corruption and wrongdoings, whilst publishing primarily favourable news articles handed to them from corporate PR teams. Also during this time, The National Times who was Australia’s leading financial investigative journalism newspaper, shut down after the stock market crash. So during the 2000s, following the financial market failures and economic downturn of the 1990s, the AFR’s reporting focus steered more towards business investigative journalism, scrutinising big corporations, government power and corruption. This was viewed as the AFR making reparations for its lack of scrutiny over the corporate sector in the lead-up to the stock market crash. One major factor that allowed the AFR to undertake deep corporate investigations was that it did not need advertising revenue to stay afloat – its cover price was sufficient. On the other hand, all other daily mastheads needed company advertising to stay profitable. This afforded the AFR’s editors the flexibility to pursue and publish news articles that shed a negative light on major companies without needing to be concerned about its financial impacts. In the early 2010s, the AFR’s political stance has been labelled as neutral. During the controversial 2013 tax debate regarding taxes for ‘extraordinary’ profits generated by mining companies, major mastheads from regions with high mining interests had almost four-fold the amount of negative articles compared to positive articles. The Australian, the biggest national daily, had a large number of both positive and negative articles, but had a limited amount of neutral articles. Out of all the daily mastheads, the AFR published the most articles surrounding the tax debate and also the most neutral articles. See also List of newspapers in Australia Financial Review Rich List References External links Financial Review Smart Investor website AFR TV website 1951 establishments in Australia Australian news websites Business in Australia Business newspapers Fairfax Media Newspapers published in Sydney Publications established in 1951 Daily newspapers published in Australia Nine Entertainment 2018 mergers and acquisitions