It was another disruptive year in Australian media as legacy outlets weathered digital disruption while facing renewed enthusiasm for defamation suits and the chilling effect of political pressure on journalism.
The media breathed a collective sigh of relief when Rebel Wilson’s whopping $4.6m payout was reduced on appeal to $600,000 this year, but the high-profile defamation suits kept coming.
There was the Wagners v Alan Jones case with its damages of $3.7m, the Geoffrey Rush v Daily Telegraph trial which is awaiting judgment, actor Craig McLachlan v Fairfax and the ABC, Ben Roberts-Smith v Fairfax and Sarah Hanson-Young v David Leyonhjelm.
Farewell to Fairfax
Fairfax Media was history before the year was out, thanks to the merger of the newspaper group with Nine Entertainment earlier this month. The marriage of the two brands moved quickly and this week saw the legendary investigative reporter Kate McClymont share a joint byline with the Channel Nine TV reporter Chris O’Keefe.
Nine showed its ability to be entirely pragmatic when it comes to advertising revenue. Now the largest locally owned media company, Nine unceremoniously sacked the Today show co-host Karl Stefanovic after the breakfast show’s ratings plummeted when he became tabloid fodder.
With his $2m salary package Stefanovic is the network’s highest paid star – and is still under contract – but no one is indispensable in commercial TV. The new Fairfax newspaper recruits should take note.
Nine’s lack of sentimentality was also evident when the chief executive, Hugh Marks, signalled on day one of the merger he was willing to offload any Fairfax assets which don’t fit his national advertising plans.
The Canberra Times, along with other respected regional titles like the Newcastle Herald and the Illawarra Mercury, are likely to be sold off within months because they only carry local advertising.
A group of websites now owned by Nine, including Business Insider Australia and Gizmodo, respected niche sites, were quickly stripped of journalists and taken over by the founders of Pedestrian TV, a site aimed at a much younger audience with an irreverent style, leaving open the question of whether those websites will be able to maintain their journalistic credibility.
Journalists on the legacy mastheads of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian Financial Review can expect more rapid change in the new year, although Marks has promised they will remain independent.
The end of Fairfax saw the departure of the architect of the publisher’s digital restructure, mass redundancy scheme and ultimate sale of the company: chief executive Greg Hywood. The former journalist walked away with a multimillion-dollar payout to holiday at a ski resort in Aspen, but not before he threw himself a lavish farewell party to cement his legacy.
Sky’s damaging blunders After Dark
With Sky News Australia now fully owned by News Corp, 2018 saw the 24-hour news channel move steadily towards a Fox News model of partisan commentators at night, albeit maintaining its journalistic credibility in its daytime lineup.
The pay TV channel was at the centre of some damaging programming blunders including a lengthy interview with a far-right extremist, some appalling sexist comments about the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young and racist remarks about the Chinese which led to host Ross Cameron’s sacking.
As the far-right extremist Blair Cottrell spoke about basing immigration on race, Sky live tweeted his ideas and management did not take action until after a video of the interview, posted on Twitter, provoked widespread condemnation. It led to Sky being removed from Victorian train stations, the resignation of a former Labor minister as a commentator and a temporary suspension of the host.
Sky’s chief night-time ratings draw Andrew Bolt, a popular Herald Sun columnist, echoed much of Sky’s After Dark rhetoric when he wrote an article arguing that a “tidal wave” of migrants was swamping Australia, forming enclaves and “changing our culture”.
But we do have to thank Sky’s Paul Murray for one of the best hot mic contributions in recent years. Believing the microphone was off during a commercial break, Murray admitted that Sky “is a Liberal echo chamber”.
“You can say Sky News at night is a Liberal echo chamber,” Murray said. “I will wear that badge if you will also attribute that badge to others.”
Aunty has an annus horribilis
You’d be hard pressed to find another year as disastrous as 2018 for the ABC. It was an annus horribilis which culminated in the departure of the managing director and the chairman, a very public slanging match and a widespread loss of confidence in the way the ABC board is appointed.
The public broadcaster enters 2019 with no fewer than five of the top positions vacant, a lawsuit from the sacked MD Michelle Guthrie and little hope of restoring the millions stripped out by the Coalition in May.
Although the removal of the first female leader of the ABC halfway into her five-year term came as a shock, the signs of dysfunctional leadership at Aunty were evident all year.
It was a case of more upheaval when the ABC’s content divisions were restructured along subject lines early in 2018, breaking down the historic barriers between radio, television and online and breaking up Radio National across several departments.
In the same month the Coalition launched a full-blown attack on the ABC’s economics correspondent, Emma Alberici, about her coverage of corporate tax policy.
It marked the beginning of a period of frequent formal complaints about ABC content by the government, the most intense since the Hawke government’s complaints about the ABC’s Gulf War coverage in 1991. The fallout continued all year, even playing a part in the resignation of the chairman Justin Milne who had called for the former Lateline host to be sacked and stood accused of political interference.
In May the ABC revealed it had shed 1,012 jobs since 2014, including 20 traditional newsroom jobs which were made redundant to fund more digital positions. But the newsroom cull went too far too fast and resulted in an urgent call for staff to fly in to fill “significant gaps in the production roster” for the 7pm news bulletin in Sydney. As valued staff were sent packing, and Guthrie’s new content structure wreaked havoc, staff morale fell to an all-time low.
Enter the absurd morale-boosting program involving “Larry” cards. Dubbed The Wiggles for grown-ups, “awesome” employees were rewarded with one of a range of bespoke cards: a People Focused Larry card, an Open & Transparent Larry card, a Straight Talking Larry card or an Accountable Larry card. It was typical of the corporate Google-style culture which Guthrie brought to Aunty.
But the ABC’s Walkley award-winning journalism, including Louise Milligan’s Four Corners report on the sexual assault on 18-year-old Saxon Mullins which led to a judicial review and a joint investigation with Fairfax into TV gardener Don Burke, kept on delivering despite the turmoil.
A hit podcast and a pivotal scoop
The Australian continued in its grand tradition of publishing some questionable stories designed to attack its enemies this year, perhaps peaking with an expose of the ABC’s political editor, Andrew Probyn, moonlighting as a Liberal politician by hiding behind a pot plant in a re-enactment on 7.30.
It was that paper’s veteran reporter Hedley Thomas whose true crime podcast The Teacher’s Pet scooped the pool at the Walkleys. Not long after picking up his gong the subject of the podcast, Chris Dawson, was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Lyn Dawson. Thomas is now fielding offers from Hollywood for a movie.
The Teacher’s Pet may have had 28m downloads but it was Sharri Markson’s story about the deputy prime minister’s infidelity which drew the attention of the political media. The Daily Telegraph’s “Bundle of Joyce” also took out the Walkleys scoop of the year. The front-page story on 7 February revealed Barnaby Joyce and his lover Vikki Campion were expecting a baby and were “madly in love”. The story, which was accompanied by a paparazzo shot of a heavily pregnant Campion, dominated the headlines for months, and sparked plenty of debate about Joyce and whether it should even have been written in the first place.
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