Tuesday 23rd of April 2024
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selling the news by the desperates to the other desperates...

unfairfax...

The proposed Nine Entertainment Co’s takeover of Fairfax would be a disaster for journalism and for Australia. 

 

By John Laurence Menadue


PM Malcolm Turnbull’s changes to the 30-year-old "cross-media rule" mean one owner can control print, radio and television in one market. Of course, this will result in serious loss of diversity in information. That it is Nine that will take control of Fairfax is spine-chilling. It is a devastating outcome for those Fairfax journalists who have dedicated their careers to accurately informing readers who value objective professional reporting.

It can be said with confidence that Nine has not pursued Fairfax for its stable of investigative and principled journalists. They are the last consideration. This is about commercial profit. And with editorial control in the hands of Nine what follows is an example of what can be expected.

In the 1980s when I chaired the Children’s Program Committee (CPC) for the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT), I was the public face of children’s television standards and quotas that enraged the television industry — Kerry Packer in particular. He was apoplectic that his bosom-buddy Bruce Gyngell, then Chairman of the ABT, would have allowed such a thing to happen. Packer would not be told by anyone what his network could or could not do.

When, subsequently, I was appointed as inaugural director of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF), Nine began a concerted attempt to discredit me and unseat me from the CPC. Within days of the announcement of my new role, I was interviewed by Glenys Bell, a journalist with The Bulletin. The tenor of Bell’s article was that that I would have a paralysing conflict of interest in my two roles and that the CPC members were irrational, incompetent bureaucrats, denying stations their freedom to screen what they wished, as they did for every other hour of the day. The Bulletin’s editor, Trevor Sykes, told media journalist Jefferson Penberthy that the article would be "seminal", apparently meaning likely to lead to my resignation.

The Bulletin published its story in May 1982 and three weeks later, I was approached to do an interview for Nine’s Sunday program. The interviewer was Jennifer Byrne, a newcomer to television at that time. A crew arrived at my house on a Sunday afternoon with two cameramen and I was interviewed over a three-hour period. I was used to media interviews but had never encountered anything of this intensity before. Phillip Adams, who had already been interviewed for the program, and who had very good connections to the Packer empire, warned me what to expect.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/takeover-of-f...

a disaster for journalism and for Australia...

 

 

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/18507

 

 

 

 

a disaster for the world...

Australia’s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, has been revealed as a key funder of the right wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) — a major pusher of climate science denial.

Rinehart’s company, Hancock Prospecting Proprietary Ltd (HPPL), donated $2.3 million to the IPA in 2016 and $2.2 million in 2017, according to disclosures made to the New South Wales Supreme Court.

As part of a long-running legal dispute over the use of company funds, Gina Rinehart’s daughter Bianca had served a subpoena to access documents that would have shed light on the two donations from HPPL to the IPA.

The IPA is an influential right wing think tank with close ties to Australia’s governing Liberal Party. IPA fellows regularly appear in the media. The payments suggest that more than a third of the IPA’s income in 2016 and 2017 was from HPPL — majority-owned privately by Gina Rinehart.

According to Forbes, Rinehart was the seventh richest woman in the world in 2017 and Australia’s richest person, with current wealth estimated to be $17.6 billion.

The IPA is a registered charity but is not legally required to disclose its funders and has declined to reveal them in recent years, citing concerns that donors could be “intimidated.”

According to the court judgement, Bianca’s solicitors had been provided with a schedule of “donations and sponsorships” from HPPL where it was disclosed, the judgement said, “that HPPL paid or provided amounts to IPA in a total of $2.3 million for the 2016 financial year and $2.2 million in the 2017 financial year.”

The donations also raise questions about the way the IPA has disclosed the nature of its revenues. 

The IPA's 2017 annual report declared $6.1 million of income but said that “86 percent” had come from individuals. HPPL’s $2.2 million donation constituted more than a third of the IPA’s income that year.

In 2016, the IPA reported that 91 percent of donations were from individuals, but that year HPPL’s $2.3 million donation constituted almost half the IPA's income of $4.96 million that year.

DeSmog has emailed HPPL asking why it was supporting the IPA, if the donations were linked to specific work, and if it was still a supporter. DeSmog also asked the IPA about the donations and if supporters should be concerned that so much if its income is derived from one person. IPA spokesperson Evan Mulholland replied: “No comment.”

 

Read more:

Read from top.

 

I looks as if Gina bought into Fairfax to influence its views on global warming, digging coal and burning coal. 

"we don't compete"...

Mr Anderson further praised Nine’s “progressive” and long-term thinking as “good for our industry” and said Ten was not concerned about its rival’s move to become the biggest media company in Australia.

“We don’t compete against newspapers. The whole competition question, part of that competition is Nine and Seven and ABC and SBS, but a big part of that competition is a lot of the [subscription video on demand] platforms and all of these other Silicon Valley companies,” he said, referring to social media and search platforms like Facebook and Google.

New head of sales for Ten, Rod Prosser, who recently announced the free-to-air network's split from advertising company MCN, a joint venture with News Corp’s Foxtel and Fox Sports, did not see the Nine and Fairfax deal as threat to advertising revenues for Ten.

“Media buyers will say to me one plus one does not equal three,” Mr Prosser said.

“We’ve worked under a fairly scaled model with MCN and the truth is media buyers, it’s very separate.

“Of course you’ve got the opportunity to create ideas with scale through their sponsorships, no question, but the actual trading is still very separate.”

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/we-don-t-compete-against-newsp...

 

Read from top and remember back then:

packer

celebrating scales...

 

Homilies of scale

The new new thing is “scale”. We’ve been missing the importance of “scale” for so long, particularly when it relates to such things as the takeover of Fairfax Media by Nine Entertainment, two more culturally antithetical outfits being hard to imagine.

Percy Marks jewellery progeny and Nine boss Hugh Marks said “bigger scale” is good because it produces more revenue. Greg Plywood at Fairfax thinks that the fused company’s scale is the way to confront giants such as Google and Facebook. No wonder he’s sold his Maserati if he thinks like that.

Prime Minister Trumble and his sidekick, the Smiling Toilet Brush, are also big-scale men. The floor polish and soap powder salespeople are also aping the mantra. Everything can be saved if it has scale.

Of course, it’s a pile of bollocks. Think HIH, Kodak, Lehman Brothers and the Dutch East India Company, for starters. Scale will not save anyone if people don’t want to buy the product, or if it’s madly managed.

Lisa Davies, the well-regarded editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, did her best to spruik the changes in a message to subscribers: “… it is a reasonably straightforward ownership change of the company, designed to allow greater investment in journalism, greater scale to appeal to advertisers and increased opportunities for growth”.

Good luck with that. No one, surely, believes Channel Nine’s diet of fast food, power tools, and meat-tray advertisements will cross over to Fairfax readers. Nor will Fairfax’s “10 delicious things you can do with quinoa and kale” go down well with Nine’s programmers.

In any event, it looks as though the takeover has lost its market gloss as major shareholders watch the premium disappear down Mitch Fifield’s toilet.

 

Read more:

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2018/08/04/gadfly-homilies-scale/153...

 

The smiling Toilet Brush? Love it... Read from top.