Michael West is an Australian investigative journalist and the founder of Michael West Media, a small reader-funded news website published at michaelwest.com.au. Based in Manly on Sydney's Northern Beaches, he has spent more than three decades in financial journalism, beginning as a cadet at the Australian Financial Review in 1989 and later spending around eight years as a business columnist at News Corp's The Australian, where he wrote the "Margin Call" column, and a similar period at Fairfax Media's Sydney Morning Herald, where he served as Business Editor.
He won the business journalism Walkley Award in 2005 for his investigation into Macquarie Bank's role in the Beaconsfield gold mine collapse, a story Macquarie unsuccessfully sued the publisher over for several years. Made redundant by Fairfax in 2016, he founded Michael West Media that July with a stated focus on the rising power of corporations over democracy. He also holds an honorary appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, attached to the Sydney Democracy Network within the School of Social and Political Sciences.
Editorial focus
The publication has carved out ground that mainstream Australian outlets often cover only intermittently: multinational tax avoidance, electricity-network over-investment, lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, the revolving door between government and big business, and concentration in Australian media ownership. West's earlier work in these areas contributed to the establishment of Senate inquiries into corporate tax avoidance and into electricity networks, and his current outlet, though small, has had its journalists recognised at the Walkley Awards.
Independent media-rating service Media Bias/Fact Check assesses Michael West Media as "Mostly Factual" with no failed fact-checks identified, and across roughly a decade he has, by his own account, defended a steady stream of defamation threats without producing a payout or settlement adverse to the publication.
Fair criticism
The fair criticisms are mostly criticisms of style and disclosure rather than of substance. Michael West Media describes itself as non-partisan, but its editorial framing is consistently left-leaning and adversarial toward conservative governments and large corporations, and at times the line between investigative reporting and advocacy is harder to find than the masthead implies. West's prose can carry a polemical edge that suits opinion writing more comfortably than straight news, and his responses to critical coverage of him, particularly from the Australian Financial Review's Rear Window column, have sometimes been long, personal, and combative in ways that obscure the underlying questions.
Those Rear Window pieces have, in fairness, raised legitimate disclosure questions: whether he should have noted a connection to former CPA Australia chief Alex Malley in 2017, and, more awkwardly, whether his publication should have told readers that its 2023 investigation of class-action firm Shine Lawyers ran while Shine was concurrently representing his nephew in an underpayment claim against the publication. The legal question at the centre of that claim, whether the relative was an employee under the Journalists Award or an independent contractor, is genuinely contestable, but it sits uncomfortably alongside the outlet's own sustained coverage of corporate wage theft, and it is reasonable to expect a tighter standard of self-disclosure from a publication built on holding others to one.
Our assessment
None of this disqualifies the work. West is a credentialled, durable, and at times unusually persistent reporter operating in a national media landscape with very few sustained independent voices on his beats. The most useful way to read him is to value the investigations, keep the editorial slant in mind, and form your own view.
Michael West Review exists to help readers do exactly that: we independently verify the specific factual claims made in Michael West Media articles, so that the strongest parts of the journalism can be distinguished from those that warrant more scrutiny.