So Nine Entertainment’s Nine network is going to investigate its “newsroom culture”, and Fiona Dear, the newly named head of news and current affairs, admits there is a culture of “power games”. So what?
Nine’s culture of “power games” is not news — it has been there since TV arrived in Australia in 1956.
To investigate properly, Nine will have to find someone capable of doing a deep cleansing inquiry and not a once-over tidy-up and a couple of symbolic whippings with a feather. The problems are deeply rooted in Nine’s history, starting with the Packer family and the way successive generations of men monstered people, including children and grandchildren, and then executives and staff further down the chain at their various companies — Consolidated Press, Publishing and Broadcasting, but especially the Nine TV network in Sydney and Melbourne.
And with so many top-draw offenders now dead, the field is wide open for a bit of reputation besmirching and to question some of the living about Nine’s culture.
As someone who worked in Nine’s news and current affairs from 1986 to January 2004 (when sacked by the unlamented Jim Rudder, a stumbling power games player at Nine and Sky News in the UK), the brutal reality about the Nine Network is that it always has been riven (and driven) by power games, power imbalances, sexism and misogyny, and a degree of ruthlessness.
It wasn’t just in the newsroom — the same games were played in ad sales, programming and other areas of the network, as well as at stations in other cities, especially Melbourne and Brisbane. Nine had many divisive executives, but the legend was Peter Meakin, still around and advising the Ten Network, who left Nine in 2003. Meakin had differences with the network’s then new boss John Alexander, who helped manage Crown Resorts into the ground and until 2022 continued on the board of the greatly diminished Seven West Media controlled by Kerry Stokes. Alexander always liked powerful people, especially rich powerful people.
Meakin famously referred to Alexander as a “24-carat cunt“ in a conversation he had with Kerry Packer in early 2003 after the Packers made Alexander the network’s CEO. And for years the Nine newsroom at Willoughby in Sydney was dominated by the late Ian Cook as news director — a man with the nickname “The Smiling Assassin”. He also worked at Sky News in the UK (with Chisholm) and the Seven Network in Sydney. Many reporters and news producers learnt their craft from him, but he was ruthless and played favourites.
That was something many people at Nine News have continued as they play the games he taught them — verbally or by example. His use of rosters, news broadcast slots and working hours and days to force people out was known to all in the newsroom — including camera people, sound recordists, ENG editors, reporters, producers and hosts. The late Brian Henderson helped make Cook’s time at Nine a huge success, not the other way around.
David Gyngell was a less divisive CEO and was eventually forced out (and ended up falling out badly with James Packer, his one-time teenage and early-20s best mate). His father, Bruce Gyngell, was a legend of Australian TV — famed for not only being the best-ever executive in Australian TV (and a legend in the UK) but also for running Seven after Nine. He earned fame as the person who spoke the first words on Australian TV in 1956 on Nine (for Frank Packer): “Good evening… and welcome to television.” He had two goes at running Nine and was very different to Chisholm, the Packers and most other executives at the network, but he was not adverse to using a bit of pressure and the odd game.
David Gyngell was kicked out in 2005 by the dynamic duo of James Packer and John Alexander. Gyngell and Packer later had an infamous Sunday afternoon brawl on a street in Bondi a decade ago this month — May 6, 2014. Gyngell came back to run Nine under private equity ownership and left in 2015, to be replaced by Hugh Marks, who had to walk the plank in 2020 over a relationship with a former colleague.
“Losers have meetings, winners have parties” was the oft-reported aphorism about the network’s culture — especially from the likes of Chisholm and Leckie (who repeated it when he was running Seven). That meant the culture was one of success. Anything would be done to maintain that success and to be seen to be successful.
At Nine, that meant being seen with the successful in the second-floor bar and dining room; the long lunches in the boardroom and the post-5pm drinks, especially on Friday night after A Current Affair ended the week at 7.30pm. Not to mention the drinking and lunches at the Bridgeview Hotel in Willoughby Road (a short walk away), or the plotting and posturing that went on at eateries in nearby Crows Nest, where Nine had permanent expense accounts for the favoured few. Two restaurants, in particular, were used for public celebrations, commiserations and for conning print media outlets at News Corp and Fairfax, who sent photographers and “entertainment” reporters to get the goss about the celebrations.
For years Sydney newspaper editors and journalists covering entertainment came to learn about the power games at Nine and marvelled at them, comparing them to the way the same games were played on the “back bench” or “Mahogany Row”, at Holt Street, at The Tele and The Australian, and in Melbourne at The Herald Sun.
Fairfax had its own, genteel games — not played with the same ferocity as at Nine and News Corp, but they were there — editors from the dying Sun, the all-powerful (thanks to those “rivers of gold”) Sydney Snoring Herald, the Financial Review and, for a brief while, The National Times. Some of Fairfax’s editorial heavies admired how Nine’s and News’ executives played the game and tried their hands at imitation in an odd form of flattery.
And above all this at Nine sat the Packers: Frank, Kerry and James. All three played power games and played with the careers of their executives and ordinary employees. The famous Christmas parties and hampers were part of this culture or terrorise and reward. The Packers and people like Sam Chisholm, David Leckie and John Alexander did the bidding of their bosses (who cared about boards?), at times without regard for the impact of their decisions and blunderings-about. And this is only in Sydney — in Melbourne the late and unlamented John Sorell was another serial power player whose rampant abuse only came to light well after his death in 2009.
And of course, what is a story by the media about the media without a dollop or 20 servings of hypocrisy, Murdoch-style? News Corp took power games to the ultimate in the UK phone-hacking scandals involving the now-defunct News of the World and The Sun (and which infected other papers such as The Mirror). For a media organisation that tolerated the breaking of UK law on numerous occasions, it still mounts its hypocritical high horse — as we have seen in its reports on Nine in the past week or so.
News, of course, has the global master at these games — Rupert Murdoch, whose antics over the years make all the breathless reporting about Nine by the News Corp tabloids and The Australian in the past week look like another gush of self-serving rubbish of Murdochian proportions. Just ask former News Corp CEO Kim Williams about the Holt Street power games. Ironically Williams is now running the ABC, another organisation riven by power games at all levels — staff, management and others.
