It was far more than just a thin veneer, there used to be genuine divergence of opinion prevalent in areas of the Australian mainstream media (ABC, SBS and Fairfax). Those dissenting voices have been made redundant (there has been a lot of redundancies, especially in the print media), moved on or had their shows cancelled.
Take “The Age” (Melbourne centric Fairfax newspaper) for example, former bastion of “The Left”. Gone are the proper journalists, replaced by rebranded articles from Bloomberg, Reuters, Washington Post and the like. Comments section have been locked down, as they were full of disgruntled readers calling the stories out as BS, and reiterating why they have already cancelled their subscriptions. You know things are bad when they now have former Liberal party hag Amanda Vanstone as a columnist. Mainstream news here is ugly. Really ugly.
I should try and find some time to research and write up a blog post about the AU media. Might take me a while though, as I have a busy full time day job.