ABC strategy, lock up Coonan and media assets could fall
July 22, 2008
Here are Stephen Mayne's three stories from the Crikey edition on Wednesday, 15 March, 2006.
2. How the media assets could fall
By Stephen Mayne
The crazy thing about Helen Coonan's proposed minimum number of owners in a prescribed area rule is that it is so utterly arbitrary in terms of what is included and what is excluded. Here's a table detailing the rationalisation she is proposing:
| City | Current Owners | Coonan's Minimum Owners |
| Sydney | 12 | 5 |
| Melbourne | 11 | 5 |
| Brisbane | 8 | 5 |
| Adelaide | 7 | 5 |
| Perth | 8 | 5 |
| Hobart | 6 | 4 |
| Bundaberg | 6 | 4 |
| Cairns | 7 | 4 |
| Ballarat | 6 | 4 |
| Dubbo | 6 | 4 |
| Mildura | 6 | 4 |
| Newcastle | 6 | 4 |
| Rockhampton | 6 | 4 |
| Toowoomba | 6 | 4 |
Take Melbourne for example, which supposedly currently has 11 different owners but can be reduced down to five. One of those five can be Sport 927, the AM talk station which attracts about 1% of the audience. Another could be Pacific Star, owner of 3MP and the other sports talk station SEN, which together attracted 5.5% of the audience in the first survey of 2006.
For some bizarre reason, pay-TV and magazines are completed ignored even though they are commercial media. Therefore, with Graeme Samuel's blessing, which doesn't seem too hard to get these days, the new rules would make it perfectly okay for News Corp to buy Channel Seven and Austereo, leaving a foreign company with the following empire:
- 70% of Australia's newspaper including the most influential paper in Victoria, the Herald Sun
- Pacific Publications, Australia's second biggest magazine stable
- Australia's biggest radio network including Fox and MMM in Melbourne which have a 19% share of the audience
- The Seven Network, the highest rating station in Victoria so far this year
- 25% and management control of Foxtel
- Control of Australia's largest internet property site
- Channel Nine, Australia's most watched television network for the past 40 years
- ACP, Australia's biggest and most powerful magazine group
- John Fairfax, still arguably Australia's most influential newspaper empire with The Age in Melbourne
- APN's large stable of regional newspapers, outdoor advertising and radio network including Gold and Mix in Melbourne which had 16.5% of the audience in survey one
- 50% of NineMSN, Australia's fourth most visited internet network
- 25% of Seek.com, Australia's dominant jobs website
- 50% of Hoyts
5. Coonan should have been locked up
By Stephen Mayne
Despite what some critics regard as the light-weight generalisations in yesterday's Helen Coonan "discussion paper" on media laws in Australia, there were some substantial reactions on the stock market, such as Southern Cross Broadcasting leaping 6.5% to $12.25 and Network Ten gaining 2.8%.
And given all the debate about Telstra and continuous disclosure of late, surely the Government would have learnt the lesson about the way to release market sensitive information. Yesterday was a shambles because, according to the Minister's website, the discussion paper was published at 12.53pm yet Coonan's speech, which put some flesh on the bones, was online from 9.03am.
Surely the market sensitivity of the announcement should have lent itself to a lock-up with detailed briefings for analysts, media executives and journalists that expired after the market closed at 4pm. We could have then had all the analysis and commentary digested in time for this morning's market opening when the pronounced share price moves would have unfolded.
Why do state and federal governments continue to lock-up journalists for hours to present and analyse annual budgets which these days contain very little market sensitive information, although substantial tax reform this year could change all that? If budget lock-ups are still to be justified, surely the Howard Government should have been more sensitive to continuous disclosure in yesterday's effort.
The media policy formulation process remains an insider's job. Labor's Stephen Conroy was right to claim that media moguls have been consulted for a year, whilst the public is only given one month to make submissions.
It will be interesting to see if PBL and News Corp even bother to make a public submission because failure to do so would just reaffirm the perception that they can do backroom deals with politicians.
Senator Coonan apparently wanted to go a lot further but was reigned in by the Prime Minister in a meeting in Sydney last Friday after he returned from India. It doesn't appear that the broader package even went to a full cabinet meeting, once again highlighting how policy comes down to the PM dispensing largesse to different media moguls depending on their level of political support.
The public interest has once against finished a distant last as Australia shuns news technologies and policies that would clearly be of benefit to consumers, despite threatening the empires of the moguls.
6. The great ABC diversion strategy
By Stephen Mayne
Did you hear the one about the national leader who wanted to do another go-slow on media reform to help the richest bloke in the country but needed a diversion to distract attention from his latest grubby act of corporate kow-towing?
Welcome to Australia in 2006, a nation that for decades has seen media policy designed to help those that proffer political support come election time, but now has the extra dimension of media moguls helping construct the diversions when this happens.
The grubby deal is another highly cautious embrace of no-brainer digital technologies that would open up new competition to the Packer family's media empire and the diversion is all this stuff in PBL's Bulletin magazine today about advertising and board appointments at the ABC.
Helen Coonan should have been aggressively grilled on The 7.30 Report last night about the lack of substance in her discussion paper and Australia's pathetic embrace of digital technologies. Instead, Kerry O'Brien spent half his interview talking about the ABC because of this diversionary interview that Coonan granted to The Bulletin for an aggressive cover story.
Media Watch host Monica Attard labelled it a diversion when talking to ABC Victoria's Jon Faine this morning but ABC presenters across the country were sucked in.
The PM has already killed the idea of advertising on the ABC, not because it would be a good way to increase funding for Australian content but because the Packer family and the other free-to-air networks would not be happy to surrender a slice of the advertising pie.
The Packer forces lobbied hard to get Trevor Kennedy, the troubled Offset Alpine shareholder with the Swiss bank accounts, appointed ABC managing director when Richard Alston's mate Jonathan Shier was sacked in 2001 and now The Bulletin is pushing PBL director Sam Chisholm as the man to replace Donald McDonald as ABC chairman.
McDonald remains a personal mate of the Howard family but is not well regarded in Cabinet because he "went native" and didn't try to "change the culture" – a euphemism for curtailing ABC criticism of the government's performance.
The ABC board is well and truly stacked with conservatives such as Ron Brunton, whose Indigenous bashing almost sent the IPA broke, and Janet Albrechtsen but there has been no discernible change to the content and presenters. The simple fact is that the public likes the ABC as it is and there aren't the conservative journalists and presenters out there prepared to work for a pittance.
Rather than spending $75 million a year subsiding digital upgrades and simulcasting, perhaps the Federal Government should belatedly bite the bullet and actually increase Aunty's funding. After all, it seems KPMG has indeed concluded that the national broadcaster is efficient and chronically underfunded, but the only solution so far from Helen Coonan is to fly an improbable advertising kite through the Packer empire which was published on the day she had to defend another pathetic media policy effort.
Oh, and don't forget the policy was released on the eve of the Commonwealth Games too. After 10 years in power, the cynicism knows no bounds.
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