Network Ten has successfully landed a court order that would prevent Peter van Onselen, its former political editor, from airing criticism of it after he asked questions in a recent newspaper column about the network’s corporate viability.
Ten moved to expedite proceedings in the NSW Supreme Court on Monday, in response to a column written by van Onselen late last month in The Australian. The network argues the column put the political commentator in breach of his contract.
In the column, which carried the headline “Paramount woes raise questions about the long term viability of Network 10”, van Onselen called into doubt the network’s commercial prospects after its US-based parent company, Paramount, saw its share price tumble in the face of streaming headwinds.
The legal order, granted by Supreme Court Justice David Hammerschlag, will gag van Onselen and his “servants or agents” on issues related to the network that may bring it or its parent company “into disrepute or ridicule” until at least the end of the proceedings.
The case will be heard again on 29 June, when van Onselen is expected to be on holiday in Italy.
Van Onselen, known as “PVO”, left the “limping” Network Ten in March to return to academia, telling The Australian in an interview at the time that his stint as a daily news journalist had “run its course”. He is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia.
His career in television started around 2009 with appearances on Sky News as a commentator, before landing a job with the 10 Network as political editor. He writes a weekly column in The Australian since leaving the network, which have invariably included musings on news of the day both locally and abroad.
In the weeks leading up to his critique of the 10 Network’s waning ratings performance, van Onselen wrote about the need for tax reform, a defence of Stan Grant’s media critics, and a column headlined: “Florida governor Ron DeSantis may be Republicans’ lesser evil”.
The following week, he wrote that the network accounts for “such a small part” of Paramount that “losses or gains” at Network Ten “matter little to its American owners”.
“But even big companies that are struggling tend to cut their losses, dumping unprofitable parts of their businesses,” he wrote. “There certainly won’t be the sort of investments in the brand once thought likely when the CBS takeover was announced. Since that time the network’s ratings have slowly ebbed lower and lower, elongating the divide between it and its more successful commercial rivals in Australia.
“In Sydney just this month 10’s news share dropped to a meagre 6%, a new low that one rival news executive told me he’d ‘never seen in 30 years in the business’.”
