Budget hysteria. The Murdochification of Nine’s papers in full swing
· Michael West
The media campaign against the Federal Budget is unprecedented, not for its vehemence but it’s uniformity across Murdoch and Nine Entertainment organs. Michael Pascoe fears for the future.
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Peter Tonagh, the chairman of Nine Entertainment, is a former CEO of News Corp Australia. He is one of the four Nine board members who have Murdoch links. One of the remaining two was a senior advisor to Simon Birmingham when he was a Liberal Cabinet minister.
There’s a bit of that Liberal connection around the top ranks of Nine. The company’s director of communications and public affairs was a senior press secretary for Prime Minister Tony Abbott. The Australian Financial Review’s editor-in-chief, James Chessell, was a press secretary for Treasurer Joe Hockey.
Nine’s two top editorial executives – the managing director, publishing, and executive editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age – are ex-News Corp, as is its director of streaming and broadcasting. Chessell and the Sydney Morning Herald editor both had stints in Murdoch newsrooms earlier in their careers.
Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. Our very own Michael West won a Walkley Award for business journalism while at the Australian between posts at the AFR and SMH. Heck, I started on The Courier-Mail, but that was long before Murdoch got hold of it.
What has stood out, though, in the past two weeks is the similarity of the Murdoch and Nine campaigns. Has it been warranted, or is there a growing uniformity of culture in Australia’s two biggest media companies? In short, has there been a Murdochification of the former Fairfax?
Merger on the cards?
The dismal reality of news media economics in general and Nine’s particular challenges as it struggles for corporate clarity suggest the outrageous possibility that the two are on a path to eventually be folded into each other. No prize for guessing which would fold around the other.
Nine and News already share printing and distribution. In the never-ending search for costs to be cut, an ownership-agnostic Nine board with no printer’s ink in its veins could well look at how much of their back offices are needlessly duplicated, how many other resources could be shared. You know, it’s all just content in the end, just different brands. And you know Albo would let them.
The increasingly common culture was displayed by the ABC’s MediaWatch on Monday night as it paraded the fishwrappers’ hyperbolic budget reactions with the AFR and SMAge (also known as “this masthead”) fitting in neatly amongst the Murdoch rags.
The AFR has been reduced to trolling readers for reactions, none better than its (fake) fleeing yarn.
MediaWatch could have gone much further if time had permitted, the media swallowing and repeatedly repeating the Coalition’s “Death Tax” furphy a case study in itself.
Of course, bad news sells, but time and again dodgy claims were headlined across Murdoch and Nine papers, the only difference being that Nine tended to include Treasury rebuttals, albeit at the end of the stories relatively few read, while Murdoch’s tabloids don’t bother.
My personal favourite was the AFR prominently headlining the opinion of a single veteran stockbroker as “Yields hit 15-year high as bond investors damn ‘radical budget’”,
Savvy AFR readers might have been cognisant of a global bond market dive underway. Japanese 30-year bond yields hit their highest mark ever; US 30-year yields hit their highest since 2007; German 10-year yields were highest since 2011; UK and French 10-year yields highest since the GFC.
who knew Jim Chalmers’ budget would rattle the whole world?
For the record, the Australian 10-year bond yield was 5.04 per cent before the budget; it was down to 4.9 per cent by the end of last week.
Hat tip to the AFR’s Mark De Stefano for keeping perspective against the run of play, tweeting that the ASX 200 closed on 8670 before the budget and was 8670 ten days later.
So much for the end of capitalism Murdoch and Nine were promising.
Revolving doors of media
Culture in any corporation is an interesting animal to read, but the first instinct is to self-replicate, “to hire people like us”. Smart boards and management try to neuter that instinct, but it’s difficult.
Back at the Nine board, Tonagh became chairman in November, just 10 months after joining the board. His predecessor was lawyer Catherine West, who joined the Nine board after 17 years at Murdoch’s UK Sky network, finishing there as director of legal and business affairs. West had, of course, taken over from Nine’s best-known chairman, Peter Costello. The AFR reported “she soon became a close ally of Costello” upon joining the board in 2016.
Aside from Tonagh’s Murdoch links, there are two non-independent directors representing the company’s biggest shareholder, conservative Bermuda-based tax exile Bruce Gordon.
Andrew Lancaster and Chris Halios-Lewis are respectively the CEO and CFO of Gordon’s WIN Corporation, Nine’s regional broadcasting affiliate, but also the company responsible for taking Murdoch’s Sky News from subscription to free-to-air television around the regions, doing for One Nation what Murdoch’s Fox did for Trump.
Independent director Mickie Rosen was an executive at Fox Interactive Media in the US.
Former accountant Timothy Longstaff was the Simon Birmingham staffer. He was also appointed by the Morrison Government to the Snowy Hydro board and the Takeovers Panel.
Which leaves Mandy Pattinson, formerly an executive with Discovery Communications, as the only director without a Murdoch or Liberal Party link on her CV.
None of the board has printer’s ink in their veins. (Tonagh’s rise to the top of News Corp was via Foxtel and REA.) Yes, Nine took over Fairfax. It wasn’t a merger.
Matt Stanton was promoted from CFO to Nine’s CEO in March last year. He has what the Nine website calls “strong experience as a commercial CEO” across food and beverage (Barambah Organics), retail (Woolworths) and media (magazines with Bauer and ACP).
Shares tumble, assets being sold
In short order, the new chairman and CEO have sold off Nine’s radio stations and regional TV and paid $850m to buy outdoor advertising company QMS from private equity firm Quadrant.
That price tag compares with the stock market’s valuation of $1.48B for all of Nine.
Nine shares were worth $2.37 upon taking over Fairfax eight years ago. They now trade in the lower 90 cents.
Nine could be worse, of course – it could be Seven, sliding away towards nothingness until taken over, sort of, by Southern Cross Media, which has a market capitalisation a third of Nine’s.
Or it could be 10, sent broke under Lachlan Murdoch’s leadership in 2017 and still allegedly loss-making, depending on how Paramount arranges its taxes in Australia.
And then there’s News Corp. Apparently, it doesn’t make a profit either, or so you might think given that it doesn’t pay tax.
It’s a bleak landscape, one where cultural similarities can be like holding hands, a dangerous thing lest it leads to dancing.
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