Fox model prompts debate over future format of Sky News

The appointment of News Corp Aust­ralia’s first director of broadcasting has prompted speculation about Sky News.

The recent appointment of Siobhan McKenna as News Corp Aust­ralia’s first director of broadcasting has prompted speculation about a possible brand reset for its newly acquired asset, Sky News.

Will it be “Foxified” — that is, turned into a Down Under version of America’s most watched and controversial cable news channel, Fox News? Will its nightly formula of opinion, opinion and more opinion be modified for a return to its core values of straight news? Will Alan Jones and Mark Latham turn their program into “Whose Kitchen Rules?”

It is passing strange that News has not had an Australian broadcast division prior to McKenna’s appointment. The global multi-billion-dollar monolith started in Australia in 1952 when Rupert Murdoch inherited Adelaide’s The News newspaper but overseas its spectacular growth since the 1980s has been built on broadcasting.

Assets such as Sky UK (formerly BSkyB) and the Fox Network in the US were split from News Corp in 2013 and now reside in 21st Century Fox.

The split removed from the broadcast assets the weight of market negativity about the long-term prospects of print. But for geographic and management ­reasons the Australian pay-TV ­operation Foxtel, half-owned by Telstra, remained with News Corp.

News Corp has been hamstrung in developing broadcasting assets in its homeland because of the Paul Keating-inspired 1987 legislation that forced proprietors to decide if they wanted to be “queens of the screen” or “princes of print”. For more than the past quarter-century it has been locked out of free-to-air television. Foxtel has a mere 13 per shareholding in Network Ten.

Parliament is currently considering changes to media ownership legislation but Labor and enough Senate crossbenchers appear unlikely to accept the government’s proposal to abandon market limits. Thus, artificiality is likely to continue to reign in medialand.

The Keating laws did not cover pay-TV services and Foxtel has become the nation’s biggest subscriber business, with almost three million customers.

Sky News, which produces a main channel, several local services, the APAC current affairs channel and a business channel, was one-third owned by the Seven and Nine networks and BSkyB, but on December 1 last year News Corp purchased full control for about $25 million.

This move, which took two years to finalise, has brought Foxtel, Fox Sports, Sky News and the Ten interests (which include advertising sales though the sub­sidiary Multi Channel Network) into McKenna’s new broadcasting division. McKenna knows media inside out. She was previously Lachlan Murdoch’s wingman in Australia, running his investment firm Illyria and its Nova Entertainment radio stations during his decade outside News Corp. Now that he’s back as co-chairman of News Corp, and executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, it makes sense for News Corp to harvest her skills.

Locally, Sky News has just come through a period of heavy investment in technology and talent. Two years ago it reported a pre-tax profit of $12.1m on sales of $53m but last year this was down to $5.6m on the same level of sales due to costs involved with the conversion to high definition and the signing of additional talent, in­cluding Graham Richardson, Alan Jones, Mark Latham, Ross Cam­eron, Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin and Kristina Keneally.

This expansion of the talent pool was required to provide near wall-to-wall opinion programming in the prime viewing hours from late afternoon to late night. It bolstered the line-ups of pres­enters and guests to back up Sky staffers such as David Speers, Kieran Gilbert, Paul Murray and Janine Perrett.

Sky’s shift to full prime-time opinion programming — or “engaging conversation” as insiders characterise it — broadly follows the highly successful Fox News format in the US, frequently criticised for is strong conservative leanings.

But there are key differences. In the Australian market, Fox News is just a click away from Sky, so there is no point in aping what is already available. Also, US viewers have a greater choice of news channels, each with a distinct political leaning, whereas for local content it’s Sky or ABC News 24.

Our Sky presenters generally lean towards conservative — sometimes disconcertingly so. Paul Murray, for instance, presents as far right by wearing his admiration for Pauline Hanson on his sleeve, yet he regularly tops the viewing numbers for all Foxtel channels at 9pm, proving that viewers will tune in to disagree as much as agree with a presenter.

The high value of opinion is also reflected in Latham and Cameron’s Outsiders which regularly wins its Sunday morning slot.

Unlike the ABC, where it is hard to find a conservative pre­senter, Sky has a fair representation of those from the left of centre — ­notably former Labor identities Richardson and Latham (though both might have drifted a trifle right in their dotage) and the most recent signing of former com­munications minister Stephen Conroy.

I have been an occasional guest freely dishing out my opinion on Sky panels but increasingly I have felt that opinion programming may have gone a step too far. Would it not be better to pull back to the core function of providing more news, at least part of the time?

Sky has affiliations around the world and hundreds of hours of news material flows into the newsroom every day. A fraction of it is used. Why not easily and cheaply package half an hour on news from Europe, or Asia or North America each evening? Why not packages on war zones, science news or the ways the world’s climate or ­environmental problems are being addressed in other nations?

We don’t see this material now because the numbers show audiences prefer opinion and debate programming. That is, more people want debates and controversial points of view than straight news reports of muggings in Melbourne or car crashes in Katoomba.

But that doesn’t mean there is zero demand for news and news features. Why not both, then? That’s the beauty of cable delivery; you are not limited to a single broadcast; you can add as many channels or services as you like. Opinion or straight — it all adds up to increased viewer choice and (in my opinion) that’s no bad thing.

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