The Nine Network’s newfound commitment to stamping out sexual harassment in the wake of allegations against its former news head is a wondrous thing to behold. It is a moral tale which, as it unfolds, tells us much about the failings of commercial television and its capacity for hypocrisy and pompous self-delusion.
It also marks the end of an era for Australia’s little Hollywood: a star factory where swaggering execs could make and break careers.
Channel Nine has always been a place of magic and illusions. While professing its profound concern about allegations of alcohol-fuelled sexual harassment of female staff by its former news head, Darren Wick, it is simultaneously able to broadcast Married at First Sight, where sexed-up strangers get thrown together for booze-fuelled frolics which occasionally also turn nasty.
The bloodbath of MAFS is legitimised as being somehow a ‘social experiment’. As ratings-hungry network executives know, this is garbage. The same applies to another Nine money-spinner, Love Island, a soft porn effort where young hotties “flirt up a storm in [a] Mallorcan villa.”
This double-think is in the same league as pretending that Nine hasn’t always harboured sexual predators and bullies. Of course it has. It is a place which has run on adrenalin, ambition and power. All you need to do is add booze, with a side dose of fear.
For all this, the slick Nine machine is now really listing because of a second crisis: a precipitous fall in revenue which may mean the loss of up to 200 jobs. The network points to a loss of advertising revenue during a time of “economic headwinds”, as well as the loss of millions of dollars from Meta’s decision to pull out of its agreements with Nine and others. Just as menacing though is the long-term trend in viewer habits, with younger people in particular turning to other media platforms.
Nine has begun the process of culling numbers. Almost half are set to come from its publishing businesses, with 40 job losses already announced from Pedestrian, the youth-focussed publisher acquired by Nine in 2018. A further 40 jobs will come from television news and current affairs and the remainder from digital and head office.
Unsurprisingly a despondent mood has taken hold at the network which has been used to winning and winning big for decades. The legendary, buccaneering Nine boss, the late Sam Chisholm, would scoff that “losers have meetings, winners have parties.” Now there’s a management huddle wherever you look. Nerves are jangled.
The current Nine Entertainment Company was formed in 2018 as a merger between Nine and Fairfax. Like a MAFS relationship, the ‘NineFax’ partners put their differences to one side and perhaps didn’t know all about each other’s past. Under pressure old misgivings have re-emerged.
As The Scrum understands it, there was consternation at the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age end of the hallway at how the Nine board reacted to questions from journalists covering the fallout of the Darren Wick saga.
The Scrum was told that a legal letter was sent to the newspaper after a journalist provided questions relating to board member Catherine West. West at the time was deputy to then chairman, Peter Costello. She replaced Costello last month.
For anyone raised in the tradition of the old Fairfax, the board’s action in threatening its own journalists crossed a line. It was out of place in a media company committed to robust reporting on public interest questions.
The issue received one paragraph coverage in the Nine-owned Australian Financial Review which quoted a Nine spokeswoman saying that West was “committed to the editorial independence of Nine’s newsrooms”.
“When contacted about any story in relation to herself, the response has only ever been to correct inaccuracies,” the spokeswoman had said.
Misgivings about the NineFax merger – or Nine takeover as many in the old Fairfax camp see it – have also been amplified by the prominent Fairfax family member, John B. Fairfax, who spoke last month of his bitter disappointment that the Fairfax name no longer exists in connection with the mighty mastheads which his forebears created. John B., a strong financial supporter of independent journalism through a family foundation Jibb Foundation, excoriated the management of Nine as the Wick scandal unfolded.
“Culture permeates an organisation from the top,” he told journalists at the Walkley Foundation mid-year awards. “Good leadership is paramount. Our media leadership needs to be held to account.”
The extent of the Nine spiral has been unimaginable for staff from both sides of the cultural divide at Nine.
For decades the Nine television network was a colossus. It created outsized celebrities and then paid them outsized salaries. Bit by bit, that extravagance has ebbed away, leaving just a handful of glamour names. But how much longer can the network justify paying millions to a star, while axing a dozen lesser paid employees? How many staff would you get for a Stefanovic?
For their part, those from the newspaper side have been left to rue what the cultural baggage their partner brought to the arrangement.
The horror for Australian news consumers is that in the wasteland of commercial television Nine has been the one outlet to pursue serious public-interest journalism, in print and television. Channel Seven limps on, terminally wounded by revelations on what Spotlight did to get an interview with Bruce Lehrman.
Meanwhile there is yet more bad news in store for Nine with an investigation into the television network’s sexual harassment and bully culture due to report its findings in the next few months.
As one insider noted to The Scrum, there will be no news on that before the Paris Olympics, for which Nine has the Australian rights.
Which executive in their right mind would not want to be on that plane out?
Please contact David Hardaker on dhardaker@protonmail.com to pass on any tips, scandal or gossip. All contributions gratefully received.
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