Rupert Murdoch's media empire in the USA has siphoned off $4.5 billion of cash and shares from his Australian media businesses in the past two years, virtually tax free. Over the past 10 years, Mr Murdoch's companies here have paid income tax equivalent to a rate of 4.8 per cent on $6.8 billion in operating cash flows, or just 10 per cent of operating profits. Normally a company will return cash to its offshore parent by way of dividends from shares or interest from loans. These however attract withholding tax. News has justified its practice of "repatriating" cash - $1.3 billion only last year - by making a "return of capital" to its New York parent.

"As a result of doing nothing more than putting a new $2 company at the top of the Australian group they later returned that capital in cash and shares with little tax consequence." Had these recent distributions been classed as dividends, News could have contributed a further $1 billion in tax to the Australian public purse. Dividends incur withholding tax at a rate of 30 per cent.

Darwin is poorly served by reporters (not journalists) working at the only paper (not newspaper) on clickbait churnalism. Not NT, not news. Every other media outlet in town follows the only daily paper, leaving locals with a diminishing pool of real news in a sea of nonsense cut-n-paste clickbait churnalism, designed to satisfy the juvenile short attention span of lazy online readers, while ignoring the fourth estate's responsibilities inherent in their privileged role in society.

American mogul Rupert Murdoch presides over a media empire that has undue influence and control over Australian media. This influence and control has been abused to reduce the fourth estate in Darwin to a pitiful semblence of news, that reflects badly on the esteme to which other tabloid journalism once aspired. The paper, while endorsing the war-and-pollution agenda of its owner's adopted USA home, trivialises real local issues, actively seeks to nurture racist hatred and class division in the local community, and drowns any useful information in a sea of trivia cut and paste from the dullest dives of the internet.