Business of Media
Fox v Dominion: Mistakes and miscalculations
In August 2021, the Fox Corp. board of directors gathered in Los Angeles. Among the topics on the agenda: Dominion Voting Systems’ $US1.6 billion ($2.5 billion) defamation lawsuit against its cable news network, Fox News, report Nine Publishing’s Jim Rutenberg, Michael S. Schmidt, and Jeremy W. Peters.
The suit posed a threat to the company’s finances and reputation. But Fox’s chief legal officer, Viet Dinh, reassured the board: Even if the company lost at trial, it would ultimately prevail. The First Amendment was on Fox’s side, he explained, even if proving so could require going to the Supreme Court.
That determination informed a series of missteps and miscalculations over the next 20 months, according to a New York Times review of court and business records, and interviews with roughly a dozen people directly involved in or briefed on the company’s decision-making.
The case resulted in one of the biggest legal and business debacles in the history of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire: an avalanche of embarrassing disclosures from internal messages released in court filings; the largest known settlement in a defamation suit, $US787.5 million; two shareholder lawsuits; and the benching of Fox’s top prime-time star, Tucker Carlson.
And for all of that, Fox still faces a lawsuit seeking even more in damages, $US2.7 billion, filed by another subject of the stolen election theory, voting software company Smartmatic.
News Brands
The fall of Vice: private equity’s ill-fated bet on media’s future
When private equity investors put nearly half a billion US dollars into Vice Media in 2017, co-founder Shane Smith hinted that the cash would help his digital media company achieve a public listing that “would look very sexy”, report Nine Publishing’s Anna Nicolaou and Sujeet Indap.
Speaking at an advertising festival in Cannes, with sunglasses on and the French Riviera behind him, the blustering media executive joked with reporters that he “rounds up” Vice’s $US5.7 billion ($8.7 billion) valuation to $US6 billion “because it’s easier to say”.
For years, Vice had been widely regarded as the future of media. The injection of cash led by private equity group TPG and its then-partner Sixth Street was meant to propel the company towards either a splashy initial public offering or a multibillion-dollar sale.
Instead, the opposite happened. After a series of disappointing results, years of chaotic management, risky endeavours and a liquidity crisis, Vice has filed for bankruptcy. TPG’s $US450 million bet has been wiped to zero. Vice’s overall valuation rests below $US300 million.
”You put a big target on your back when you say ‘We know better, we’re the future,’” says a former senior Vice executive. “Shane was always out trying to be the rainmaker … Everybody bought into it. But it didn’t come to bear, and now look at the downfall.”
AFR bolsters coverage of companies, property and tech
The Australian Financial Review is delighted to announce several staff appointments to expand and enhance the masthead’s coverage of companies, markets and property under the leadership of deputy editor (business) Kylar Loussikian and companies editor Vesna Poljak, reports Nine Publishing.
Primrose Riordan will rejoin the masthead as a companies reporter focusing on private companies and family offices. She is returning to Sydney after several years with the Financial Times in Hong Kong, most recently as its South China correspondent. She starts in July.
Emily Day has been appointed deputy companies editor and will join the masthead from The Age, where she is currently deputy opinion editor. She starts in July.
Campbell Kwan has been appointed commercial property reporter. He has been a breaking news reporter at the Financial Review for a year, and will work closely with property editor Nick Lenaghan and the rest of the property team to expand our coverage of commercial real estate in Sydney.
Ayesha de Kretser has been appointed aviation writer after more than a year of news breaking in the financial services sector. She brings her proven ability to break stories to this critical sector.
Publishing
Cakes, frocks and war correspondents: 90 years of Australian Women’s Weekly
Since its original publication in 1980, the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake book has become a national treasure. So when Bendigo Art Gallery asked members of the public to send in photos of their attempts at the recipes, curator Lauren Ellis was flooded, reports The Guardian’s Kelly Burke.
“We did a call out thinking we might get a few dozen, that would be cute,” she told the Guardian. “We got more than 3,000 within a matter of days.
“We really didn’t realise what a phenomenal cultural icon this book was. And because it was published in the 1980s, it spans multiple generations. We got photos like, ‘Here’s me at my third birthday party in the 1980s, and then my parents remade it for my 40th’.”
The photographs are now on display in Bendigo Art Gallery, as part of the new exhibition titled the Australian Women’s Weekly: 90 Years of an Australian Icon.
The show celebrates a magazine which, across nine decades, has provided generations of women – and a fair few men – with what feminist writer Janice Winship aptly described as a manual of “survival skills and daydreams”.
Television
David Koch reveals he almost quit as Sunrise host in the past
It’s the end of an era as David Koch officially calls time on his two-decade breakfast TV gig, reports News Corp’s Lexie Cartwright.
The Sunrise co-host, 67, announced on Monday he was quitting after his final show on June 9, saying it was “now time to work in business hours” and “focus on our big family”.
It’s something the breakfast TV stalwart has been considering for some time, with Koch telling news.com.au he was actually ready to hang up his boots at the end of 2022.
“I’ve got too much pride in what we’ve achieved and too much gratitude to be part of it to just simply walk away, [but] I was very happy to leave at the end of last year,” he said.
“We talked about it internally – Seven have been just terrific – and we talked about it, and we came to an agreement that I would work through to June, and then sort of still be connected to the network for another 18 months.”
Koch signed a new, two-year deal with Seven around the same time as those talks, and will continue to feature on Sunrise as a guest, rather than host.
See Also: Kochie to leave Sunrise after two decades behind the desk
Several well-known television names in the running to replace David Koch on Sunrise
Several well-known television names are poised to step into the very big shoes of departing brekkie-show veteran David ‘Kochie’ Koch, reports News Corp’s Lisa Woolford.
Sports presenter and former Olympian Matt Shirvington looks to be the frontrunner to helm ratings-juggernaut Sunrise alongside Natalie Barr, after covering for father of four Koch several times while he was on holidays.
Network executives were said to be impressed with the 44-year-old’s natural presenting during a lengthy stint filling in as co-anchor.
While it had seemed that Weekend Sunrise star Matt Doran was Kochie’s heir apparent for years, his car-crash interview with British singer Adele in November 2021 – where he had flown to sit down with the chart-topping singer for Seven but admitted during the chat that he hadn’t actually listened to her new album 30 – has probably taken him out of the race.
Fellow Seven stablemate and golden boy Larry Emdur is another short-odds favourite.
The current Morning Show host took over the reigns of game show The Chase after Andrew O’Keefe’s fall from grace and has enjoyed stellar ratings in both roles. And sources say he can “do no wrong” at the network.
Here’s why Succession’s blindside finale was a masterclass of shock and awe
This excerpt contains no spoilers, however, the full article certainly does!
The Roy family knows better than anyone how easy it is to crumble under pressure, reports Nine Publishing’s Thomas Mitchell.
Time and time again, we’ve been forced to watch these people, blessed with excess from the day they were born, fall victim to their own frailties and fail to deliver.
Heading into the Succession finale, the stakes have never been higher, both for the characters on the show and the show itself. Succession has become the benchmark for prestige TV, a series that has managed to galvanise an audience fractured by streaming culture and usher in the return, for a while at least, of appointment viewing.
For those who have dissected, debated and discussed the series for the last six years, the Succession finale, With Eyes Open, was an appointment not to be missed.
Here was the chance to get all of our burning questions answered. Who would come out on top? Could Kendall “carpe the diem”? Might Shiv one-up her brothers? Would Matsson prove too much? And what to make of that eternal amoeba, Tom Wambsgams.
And yet, for all the questions posed in With Eyes Open, it answered the most important one in the most impressive way. Would the finale deliver a conclusion worthy of a series that has been so good for so long?
Thankfully, the answer is yes.
‘I’m not here to get an STD’: FBoy Island launches with a bang
It is possibly the best one liner in a reality TV dating show ever. Occupational therapist and unlikely dating show contestant Molly O’Halloran has spectacularly called it as it is in the first outing of Binge series, FBoy Island, reports News Corp’s Jonathon Moran and Mikaela Wilkes.
“I feel like you’ve got your finger in every pie and I didn’t come here for an STD,” O’Halloran bluntly tells obvious player Caleb in the climactic elimination segment of the first episode.
This is the tone for the Binge series, that has already been a hugely popular format in the U.S. but is new to Australian viewers.
FBoy Island is unapologetically irreverent, authentically crude, and isn’t afraid to make fun of itself.
Bachelor, Married At First Sight and Love Island, be afraid. FBoy Island is what fans of the format have been asking for.
It delivers on its promise to be funny, satirical of reality TV, and Australia’s next prime-time viewing hit.