News Media Chronicle, July 1998 to June 1999 Rod Kirkpatrick
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News MediaAustralian Chronicle Studies in Journalism 8: 1999, pp.197-238 197 News media chronicle, July 1998 to June 1999 Rod Kirkpatrick he developing technologies of pay television and the Internet Tplus planning for digital television provided the backdrop for the national debate on cross-media ownership rules to be revisited. The debate was continuing at the end of the 12 months under review, for the Productivity Commission was inquiring into media ownership rules, content regulations, licence fees and the impending switch from analogue to digital technologies. Some media proprietors were suggesting the new technologies were making the old laws obsolete. At John Fairfax Holdings, another year, another chief executive. Bob Muscat became the third Fairfax CEO in three years to resign. Editor John Lyons departed sacked or otherwise, depending on your source. And there was an exodus of other key Fairfax editorial personnel to The Bulletin in the wake of Max Walshs departure to become editor-in-chief. The major shareholder, Brierley Investments Ltd, sold its 24.4 percent stake in Fairfax, leaving the ownership of Fairfax almost as indistinct as the Herald and Weekly Times Ltd was before News Ltd took over the group. The Australian Broadcasting Authority found that the interests held by Brian Powers (chairman) and Kerry Packer did not breach cross-media ownership rules. It could be loosely said that during the year Rupert Murdoch buried his first wife, divorced his second and married his third. This raised complicated questions of dynastic succession that had previously seemed to be fairly straightforward. Lachlan Murdoch also married. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation fielded about two letters a week from the Minister for Communications, Senator Richard Alston, during his first two years in office. Documents show most of the letters deal with public complaints about programming that has 198 Australian Studies in Journalism offended for one reason or another. The Coalition lodged 17 formal complaints during the Federal election campaign about ABC news and current affairs coverage. (Kerry Philip Green contributes the section on the Internet.) ABC The former 60 Minutes interviewer and A Current Affair host, Jana Wendt, began the year as a controversial compere/interviewer on ABC-TV and finished the year in a similar role at SBS. The ABC screened Uncensored, Wendts ten-part, $1.1 million series, which began on 8 July with her interview with Toni Morrison, the American Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning novelist. Mid-term, the series drew strong criticism from the ABCs Media Watch, with Richard Ackland accusing Wendt of being overpaid and overhyped, and suggesting that her program had not delivered on its promise. Wendt said Acklands criticism had little to do with Uncensoreds content and everything to do with an internal ABC battle about the outsourcing of production. Writing in the SMH she said Media Watch was worthless if it could not conform to the standards it demanded of others. The ABC disclosed that four of the 10 interviewees on Uncensored were paid to appear. By years end, Wendt was the host of a revamped Dateline on SBS Television. So sensitive had she become to belligerent journalists that she was highly selective about whom she would talk to when her appointment was announced. Dateline was switched from 7.30pm Saturdays to 8.30pm Wednesdays and Wendts first program appeared on 16 June 1999. Errol Simper caned it in The Australian the next morning. The previous host of Dateline, Helen Vatsikopoulos, lost her role while she was on maternity leave. Documents obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) in July showed that in his two years as Minister for Communication, Senator Richard Alston, had written more than 180 letters to the ABC, with 83 percent of them dealing with public complaints about offensive, lewd or unsatisfactory programming. By far the maggest proportion of complaints 29 percent concerned the ABCs broadcasts of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. The broadcasts began in News Media Chronicle 199 1994 and ended in 1997. The next biggest group (16pc) involved offensive language on ABC radios Triple J youth network. Less than 8 percent of the Ministers letters related to the political bias that he and other ministers had said afflicted the ABC. During the September-October 1998 federal election campaign the Coalition made 17 formal complaints to the ABC of bias and unfair treatment. Documents obtained by the SMH under a Freedom of Information request revealed that during the election the Liberal Party sent up to two letters a day alleging that Liberal candidates, including the Prime Minister, were receiving unequal treatment from the ABC. The Australian Labor Party, the Greens and One Nation each complained only once. The Liberal Partys campaign director, Lynton Crosby, wrote 10 letters to the ABCs managing director, Brian Johns, demanding urgent responses, apologies, and corrective actions. The Prime Minister, John Howard, openly accused the ABC of bias. Michael Kroger, an ABC board member and the president of the Victorian Liberal Party from 1987-92, joined in the attack on the ABC. Johns described the Coalitions accusations as an unprecedented attack on the national broadcaster. The chairman of the ABC, Donald McDonald, incensed his own staff when he gave a ringing public endorsement for John Howard at a Liberal Party fund-raising lunch on 23 September during the federal election campaign. The ABC staff went on a union-organised strike, demanding McDonald resign for a blatant and injudicious public breach of the ABCs political independence. The SMH suggested that even to have attended this highly political event was unwise. When the ABC board next met, a few days before the election, note- takers and staff were sent from the room for a period while the other directors spoke with their chairman. No statement was issued and nobody would comment. A few weeks after the Howard Government was re-elected, the Government announced it would fund the ABCs entry into digital television by making good any deficit in the $44 million it would cost for the first stage. The Government, however, expected any money raised by the ABC from property sales, such as the Gore Hill (Sydney) 200 Australian Studies in Journalism site, to be put towards the cost of digital television. McDonald himself criticised his own staff at an Asia Society lunch in Sydney. He mentioned the disturbing ignorance displayed in an ABC radio report on Malaysia and said a former federal minister had attacked him about the ABCs very unbalanced reporting on Asia in general. The final early edition of PM was broadcast on ABC radio on 18 December. The 10-minute edition, which used to go to air at 4.05pm, was discontinued after managers of the ABCs 57 State and regional radio stations had decided against continuing to take it. The early edition began during the Gulf War in 1991. The hour-long edition of PM at 6pm continued. Lateline, the only single-issue current affairs discussion program on Australian television, continued into 1999 after its survival was under threat from a proposal for a late-evening news bulletin. The Federal Governments debt-retirement program received a boost when it sold for $650 million the nationwide transmission network used by the ABC and SBS television networks. A British company paid about $250 million more than the expected sale price. An ABC whistleblower, John Millard, continued his campaign of keeping the public informed about the erosion of the independence of the national broadcaster. In the SMH (20/1), Millard wrote that under Johns and McDonald the ABC had embarked in the past two years on the most comprehensive outsourcing program in its history. Fully funded ABC production areas have been decimated. The empty offices and dismantled facilities are the remains of vigorous, in-house, independent productions. During the Balkans war, the ABCs correspondents in Belgrade came under siege from foreign broadcasters desperate to use their material because most Western journalists had been expelled from Serbia. At the end of March, ABC correspondent Greg Wilesmith was one of the few remaining English-speaking TV journalists still filing from Belgrade after the Serbian Government had banished all foreign journalists working for NATO countries. Belgrade accused the journalists of spying or spreading lies. A month later the ABCs News Media Chronicle 201 highly acclaimed coverage of the war had blown out the news and current affairs budget and the ABC board had automatically approved additional funding to keep the team on the ground. At the end of June the ABC withdrew its television news service from the Seven Networks Asian satellite signal, Australian Television. Seven refused to pay the ABC about $1 million a year for the service. An all-party Victorian parliamentary committee on economic development conducted an 11-month inquiry into whether the ABC had a bias towards Sydney. The reports findings were hardly surprising such bias was detected; and the committee accused the ABC of withholding information on finances and staffing from it. Fairfax There continued to be upheaval in the upper echelons of the management and editorial control of John Fairfax newspapers during the year. In August Bob Muscat became the third chief executive in three years to resign from Fairfax. A former News Ltd senior executive, Muscat left to become chief executive of the magazine publisher, PMP Communications, chaired by former News Ltd CEO Ken Cowley. Fairfax found itself searching for a chief executive for the 10th time in 11 years. Even before the hunt could begin seriously, Fairfax was rocked by other departures, the most notable being that of the editor, John Lyons. Editor-in-chief Gregory Hywood dismissed Lyons on the day that he was photographed lunching with Lachlan Murdoch, then the News Ltd CEO, and Col Allan, editor of the Daily Telegraph.