A debate about media ownership
threatens their business model.
Mediaworks’ US owners, Oaktree Capital, want to exit but can’t find a buyer. The same would apply if TVNZ was ever for sale, which it won’t be.
The traditional media’s watchword today is survival, and it expected that not only to be understood, but be a good enough reason to allow the NZME/ Fairfax merger to proceed.
The commission’s draft rejection of the proposal landed like a large rock in an otherwise placid pond.
Legal submissions lodged this week against that draft decision look strong:
The traditional media's watchword today is survival
both the Commerce Act and common law precedent suggest the commission is on weak ground refusing a merger based on detriments to media plurality that it says it can’t measure when the commercial benefits are clearly defined.
The point is not that media plurality doesn’t matter. It does.
The applicants and their critics agree on that, although they take different views about the impact on the variety and contestability of the news that gets reported.
The debate now emerging is whether it’s the watchdog’s role to care.
As the applicants and their critics have both pointed out, many countries regulate to deal with ‘social policy’ issues like media plurality and ownership.
That option remains open to a government, should it be concerned about concentration of news media ownership, just as it did in the case, for example, of other industries with a dominant player. Think Fonterra.
Asked this week whether there were any circumstances where the Government might get involved in response to the merger proposal, Prime Minister John Key gave what is either a revealing or a holding pattern answer: ‘‘It’s preferable if the Commerce Commission can adjudicate rather than the Government legislate. I can’t completely rule it out, just haven’t looked at it,’’ he said.
No doubt he would rather it stayed that way.