Can Hugh Marks survive the ABC of minefields?

The ABC will have a new boss in the new year and the big question is not what Hugh Marks will do for Aunty, but whether the former Nine Entertainment CEO can survive one of the toughest gigs in the country.

On paper, Marks looks a good pick. He has plenty of experience running hefty media organisations with Nine, the owner of this masthead, the largest commercial media company in Australia, and he understands content.

Hugh Marks is not the first ‘commercial’ outsider parachuted into ABC’s most senior executive role.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Sure, his departure from Nine was ungainly, with his romantic relationship with a member of staff forcing the exit. But his performance as CEO, particularly with the value of hindsight, will be judged favourably by history.

What makes a good CEO in a listed company can be assessed fairly easily: the metrics of success are profit, return on capital and, ultimately, share price. As for governance, shareholders of public companies such as Nine are happy to outsource full governance control to the directors they vote in and the chief executive the directors appoint.

However, the ABC is a different beast. It doesn’t have a profit motive but an engagement motive, says chairman Kim Williams, a man whose work history spans a vast spectrum, from not-for-profit organisations to the ultimate commercial machine, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

One issue Williams and Marks will have to contend with is that the ABC board is appointed by the government of the day, which also decides how much funding the public broadcaster gets. That makes governance at the ABC an inherently politicised affair. The additional wrinkle is that a sizeable cohort of the Australian population takes the view that as a public broadcaster, they own the ABC and are entitled to an opinion on its content.

So dictating content policy at the ABC can be a daily walk through a minefield, including managing the expectations of the government, the public and a staff that often expects an outsized input into editorial decisions.

In choosing Marks, Williams has already received blowback from the ABC’s audience, accusing the chair of attempting to commercialise the organisation. “Using ‘commercial’ as a term of abuse is something I don’t understand,” Williams said on Tuesday.

Williams doesn’t make the distinction between public and private ownership. He says the magic metric is the quality of a media organisation’s engagement and the key goal is capturing a larger share of the audience by being more broadly appealing to the public.

Williams calls it the quest for performance, relevance and excellence. It’s a quest that is under way at the ABC and, in layman’s terms, means the public broadcaster needs to give the public what it wants, and make the ABC a more contemporary organisation that pitches its wares at a broader church.

ABC chairman Kim Williams has made a captain’s choice in appointing Marks as managing director.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Seen through this lens, Williams’ captain’s choice to appoint Marks is not surprising. It would seem that there were no internal candidates that threw their hat in the ring, and of the outsiders, there wasn’t a long queue of executives that had the same level of experience as Marks.

But Marks’ appointment won’t be a popular one. Here is a taste from the SMH/Age reader comments: “Your new-look ABC – 7.30, Four Corners, Foreign Correspondent, Media Watch and Q+A to be replaced (respectively) by A Current Affair, 60 Minutes, Love Island, The Block and more Love Island. Planet America to be hosted by Scott Cam and Kyle Sandilands.”

Marks is not the first ‘commercial’ outsider to be parachuted into ABC’s most senior executive position. Lawyer and ex-Murdoch executive Michelle Guthrie assumed that role in 2016 and was sacked by then-chairman Justin Milne, two years later.

She was replaced by internal pick David Anderson, who has been in the position for six years. The longest-serving ABC chief executive from outside its ranks in recent history was former Fairfax executive Mark Scott, who ran it for 10 years until 2016.

If being a denizen of the commercial media world is a mark against Marks, then his leadership of Nine during a period that has drawn questions about company culture will be a bigger target for the critics.

The cultural scandal that is currently engulfing Nine wasn’t publicly apparent during Marks’ tenure and on Tuesday he said he wasn’t aware of the issues. But given he was the CEO, he probably should have been.

The culture question will linger as Marks finds his footing and steering the broadcaster to the destination cherished by Williams won’t be a walk in the park. And Marks will have plenty of backseat drivers, from every corner of the country, telling him how to do his job.

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