The 2024 reporting season has demonstrated that two of Australia’s three major commercial free-to-air TV networks — Seven West Media and Ten — are now friendless, broke and without any buyer interest. The third, Nine, is eking out lower profits, but like Seven and Ten is cutting costs and jobs.
Worse for Seven and Ten, their owners do not want to rescue and recapitalise them. Indeed, year after year, Kerry Stokes continues to write down the value of his dominant minority stake in Seven — a now wholly disgraced and discredited outfit with a share price of just 16 cents, down from a height of 70 cents in 2022.
Right-wing billionaire Stokes controls Seven through a dominant minority shareholding of 40% held by his main company, Seven Group Holdings. Everyone knows about the hold the Murdoch family has over News Corp, which owns the dominant pay-TV broadcasters and contributes to free-to-air programming via its far-right Sky News platform.
Nine Entertainment has a mogul — Bermuda-based Australian tax exile, Bruce Gordon — on its books through a stake of almost 20% in shares and financial derivatives. Gordon, in his nineties like Rupert Murdoch, doesn’t exercise a strong role at the company, but he controls the country’s biggest regional television network, WIN.
Ten — the financials of which we don’t know but that can’t be any stronger than Nine’s or Seven’s — is controlled by US media player Paramount Global, which has troubles of its own. Earlier this month it wrote down the value of its cable TV networks by US$6 billion (A$8.8 billion).
Paramount looks set to be acquired by a company called Skydance Media, which is controlled by David Ellison, the son of US tech mogul Larry Ellison, reportedly the world’s fifth richest person. According to US media reports, Larry has invested US$6 billion in his son’s deal for Paramount.
Ellison Sr is a close friend of Elon Musk and part of Donald Trump’s coterie of election deniers, having been a strong supporter of Trump in his first presidential term. Ellison is backing Trump this time around as well.
If, as seems inevitable, the Skydance deal succeeds, moguls will control or have large chunks of all four major free-to-air and pay TV broadcasters; three of them will be controlled by right-wing billionaires, and two of them by people who have supported Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine US democracy. What chance is there of unbiased coverage from outlets controlled by Coalition and Trump supporters in the lead-up to this year’s US presidential election or next year’s federal election?
Arguably television broadcasting is now reaching the stage where moguls are the only real source of investment, given the entire business model is dying at the hands of Google, Facebook and streaming services, locking broadcasters into permanent cycles of job cuts and diminishing audiences.
But as Stokes’ lack of interest in rescuing Seven shows, even moguls have their limits. It leaves the national broadcasters in an ever more crucial position as a source of independent public interest journalism, especially in regional areas — which makes the craven performance in recent years of the ABC’s news division, and its willingness to be cowed by the Coalition and News Corp, even more damaging.
