The Chaser Report - GUIDE to AUSTRALIAN MEDIA

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

As a sole-podcaster, Charles Firth gives a dramatic reading from section of The Chaser's 100th Edition called "The Chaser's Guide to Australian Media." If you would prefer an audible reading of this using the voice in your head, buy the whole magazine at https://chasershop.com/products/preorder-chaser-newspaper-100th-issue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello, you're listening to The Chaser Report for Monday the 18th of July. I'm Charles Firth, and that's it. I'm the only person here because unfortunately, every single other person in our organisation is completely sick. So it's just me, me and the microphone, me and you, let's just smash this out. This will be good. This is a great episode because you're in for a bit of a treat. What I'm going to do is I'm going to actually read you out

some of the Chaser newspaper 100th edition came out a couple of weeks ago. We're going to have a look at the Chaser Guide to the Australian Media, a bit of a wrap around all the different media organisations that are available in Australia. We'll get into it straight after this. The Chaser Report, news you know you know, You can't trust. And now something very special for our podcast listening audience, The Chaser Guide to the Australian Media.

The Australian media has the most concentrated media market in the democratic world. It's dominated by three main players, nine entertainment, News Corp and Friendly Jordies. Between them, News Corp and Nine account for 90.6% of Australian newspaper circulation in Australia, which does sound quite dominating, but pales in comparison to the size of Friendly Jordie's ego. So here's a guide to the major players in the Australian news media in 2022. Okay, and we'll start with News Corp.

Nowadays, NewsCorp is little more than a right-wing version of GetUp, but young readers may not realise that NewsCorp used to actually be considered a media company. Officially listed as a for-profit company, the company is actually a public broadcaster as it depends mainly on government handouts to stay afloat. It employs over 8,000 staff nationwide, including almost three proper journalists. Formerly the kingmaker of Australian news media, the ageing owner, Rupert Murdoch, made the crucial mistake of letting his son Loughlin manage News Corp's political coverage during the recent federal election, presumably because he hadn't watched succession yet.

The heir apparent Loughlin then spent the first five months jetting back and forth between Australia and the United States and bringing with him all his inherited genius to oversee News Corp's election coverage. As a result, the Murdoch Media suffered its first defeat in an Australian election in more than five decades. It didn't help. that Loughlin decided early on that all the staff should only use one-till phones during the campaign. News Corp also has a satirical arm, Sky News, which is a 24-hour character comedy, which parodies a real news network. The characters are completely unrealistic, to the point of being cartoonish,

including one character called Rowan Dean, plays a disheveled drunk uncle character. Then there's Chris Kenny, who plays an always-wrong-about-everything Dullard, and Joe Hildebrand, who plays the classic Manchild with a raging Coke habit character. News Corp also owns much of the cable network, Foxtell. There have been concerns in recent years that the previous jewel in the crown of this empire is now little more than a stranded asset. As a result, Foxtel has diversified into streaming services such as CO, binge and flash. though these services undercut Foxtel's cable offering,

the idea is to sell it off before the bubble in streaming services bursts. So a bit of a genius idea from Locke-Murdog. What he's going to do is just pump it up with the whole of the streaming services and then sell it before anyone realizes that streaming services are massive. Oh, wait a minute. It's already realized that it's too late. Anyway, well, maybe they can just get a, have a government handout instead.

Nowadays, the most successful News Corp Division is the cancellation departments at the Australian newspaper, which is thriving. The key assets for News Coralp are the Sky News, Herald Sun, Foxtell, Courier Mail, the Australian, the advertiser, Daily Telegraph, and of course the Australian Liberal Party. Its key liabilities is its CEO, Auckland Murdoch. Moving on to Nine Entertainment Company. Now, Nine Entertainment is named after its flagship Channel 9 television station, which made history with the first television broadcast in Australia in 1956. The television industry has been going downhill ever since.

While Channel 9 is nowadays known for its downmarket reality television formats, such as The Block, Love Island and Married at First Site, it actually used to broadcast high-quality journalism, such as Australia's naughtiest home videos, which brought animal sex times. tapes to the mainstream and chances, a high-quality television drama in which Graham of Thrones was actually based. When it comes to journalism, Nine is proudly independent, with the slogan of its newspapers being independent always. The chair of Nine Entertainment is, of course, former Liberal Party treasurer Petigostello, while the Nine Network's political editor is Cole Lobbyist Chris Ullman. In 2018, the Nine Network joined together with Fairfax. newspapers to create Nine Entertainment. Described at the time as a merger of equals, it was completely equal and that Fairfax got to keep everything except its name, management, independence

and ethos. In addition to owning the longest running television network in Australia, nine was famous for such quality content as The Cricket, which is now on seven, The Voice, which is now also on seven, Australian Survivor, which is now on 10, the Sunday program, which it axed, and of course, the Mick Muloy Show. Nine runs a number of tabloid newspapers, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, which trades in outing celebrities to drive traffic to its websites and promoting a long-running pyramid marketing scheme, also known as the Sydney property market.

Its key assets are Channel 9, Stan, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and its key liabilities, well, its key liability is Bevan Shields. Moving on to Channel 7. Seven Group Holdings is a highly successful tractor supply company, which also enjoys a side hustle distributing white nationalist propaganda, which naturally makes it the highest rate in television network in Australia. Notable companies in Seven Group Holdings portfolio includes Westrack, which supplies cat-branded tractors and equipment to mines,

Boral, which supplies building materials across Australia, all-light Sykes, which supplies lighting and de-watering equipment to mines, SGH Energy, a gas company, beach energy, another gas company, and Seven West Media, a media organisation that for some reason defends mining interests. Home to Australia's longest-running drama, Home and Away. Channel 7 is also home to Australia's second longest-running drama. Will Koshy ever stop being a condescending. winning dickhead. Most Australians are forced to watch seven at some point during the year because of

the many sports whose broadcast rights it holds, including the AFL, cricket, the Olympics and the Melbourne Cup. The multi-billion dollar investment in those rights hails in comparison to the amount that mining interests have saved in mining tax in the past decade. Seven Group holding's key liability is David Koch. Less news, more often. Moving now to the public broadcasters. Australia has two publicly owned media organisations, the ABC and SBS,

which exists mainly to annoy Liberal Party senators and allow get-up to raise money trying to save them at the time. Here at The Chaser, well, frankly, too many of us either work at the ABC or want to work at the ABC, to the point where We're not exactly going to come here and tell you that Bluey is just a rip-off of pepper pig, that insiders should have been shot in the head years ago, or that moving Q&A to Thursday night was the stupidest programming decision of the past decade. We're just not going to say that.

Sure, the chaser was founded on the principle of biting the hand that feeds us, but, you know, it becomes more complicated when you're biting the hands that pay your mortgage and deliver a comfortable middle-class existence to which you've run accustomed. All decisions at the ABC and SBS are made with reference to what it would look like if it came out in Senate estimates. Moving to the independence now, the Guardian and the Saturday paper. In recent years, there have been a number of notable new entrants to the Australian media space in Australia. The Saturday paper is run by Schwartz Media and was initially founded as a life raft for Fairfax journalists. But since then, reading it

has become a way to virtue signal that you're not a complete dickhead. In recent years, it has moved into original reporting and high-quality investigative journalism is therefore considered a niche publication in Australia. Also of note is The Guardian, founded in England. It is ironically the most anti-colonialist of all the media in Australia, and it really, really, really wants you to know that. The publication is tediously correct about everything,

including race, gender, class, climate, and not enjoying anything about the modern world. The Guardian rails against the power and influence of social media giants, such as Facebook and Google, while mainly being funded through its deals with Google and Facebook. Oh, look, I almost forgot Channel 10 also exists, isn't it? In the 1990s and early 2000s, Channel 10,000s, Channel 10. ran a highly profitable business model. Unlike 9 and 7, it decided it wouldn't try and appeal to all viewers and would instead only chase younger under 35s,

which advertisers highly value. Then, sensing a shift in the media landscape, it changed strategy and decided it wouldn't try and appeal to any viewers at all. In this, it has been remarkably successful, even to the extent that it managed to go bankrupt in 2017. Since then, it has been taken over by US conglomerate, biocom CBS and is now a valuable asset in their television station portfolio, one of 28 television stations that they own. General 10 Australia has about the same amount of independent

decision-making power as CBS2 Pittsburgh or CBS 62 Detroit. Very, very powerful. Until recently, Channel 10 was home to Australia's longest-running soap opera Neighbours. However, the production ran into trouble after a Viacom executive in New York bothered to sit down and actually watch a whole episode resulting in its immediate cancellation. The key assets for Viacom CBS are, of course, CBS St. Louis and CBS New York. Its key liabilities is, of course, Generalton, Australia.

Moving now to the radio companies. There's three main radio companies in Australia. SCA is, of course, home to the Hit Network and Triple N, and it is a charity that gives TV personalities a chance to get a taste of what it's like to have nobody listen to you. ARN owns Golden Kiss, including the Kyle and Jackie O's show, which proves that hate listening is a viable business model. And Nova is Lockland Murdoch's greatest ever investment, is a true, and it is a testament

to the fact that even a broken clock can be correct twice a day. And finally, let's have a look at the streaming platforms in Australia. Let's kick it off with Stan, which is Australia's premier platform for accessing content that's also available on other streaming services. Over at Amazon Prime Video, that's the only service in Australia that is cross-subsidised by the emisseration of American warehouse workers. Binge is, of course, the Foxtel streaming service. Its deal with HBO is set to expire next year, at which point it will be the only streaming content provider in Australia to not have any streaming content to provide.

Paramount Plus was of course recently set up to provide a way for users to pay for content that nobody watched when it was free on Channel 10. Netflix is of course the original streaming service and now also the worst. ironically Netflix which killed the DVD rental market nowadays only churns out made for DVD content and finally Disney Plus it's a great service with genius bosses really really great bosses who often acquire old media companies who have a lot of IP but you know not a lot of energy left in them and they pay them billions of dollars more than their world and that's what they do. That's their business model.

They acquire these IP for billions of dollars. So, you know, if Disney wants to give us a call, the Chaser that, you know, keen to chat. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. Anyway, that's it. That's the Chaser Guide to the Australian Media for Monday, the 18th of July. We'll be back with a normal episode tomorrow, hopefully, unless everyone dies from their terrible sicknesses. I'm Chosforth.

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