In The Media Its Survival of the Cannibals

Louise is telling me that history is important. She is very clever with words and says we must look back so that we can look forward. Her advice is timely. The crash of Wall Street in ’87 seems a long time ago and the lessons for the media are perhaps long forgotten.

But Louise loves to nag.

The collapse of all our great media companies in the late ‘80’s led to a change of ownership of all but one: News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch who went from strength to strength over the next 25 years apart from a blip of debt management when a small Irish Bank held out until the owners got the phone call.

The new media owners of the 80’s arrived like conquering giants and went to work enjoying the running of their new toys- Bond, Skase, Lowy, young Warwick Fairfax, the list goes on.

But back to Louise and the history lesson. What we saw then was people in love with the asset but no ability to run it. They had a burden of debt and an advertising market that was negative for four years. They were owners but not managers and they failed. And then the Australian media landscape changed again, mostly by the assets returning to the owners who knew what they were doing. This is the important bit of the history because many of the owners in recent years have let the experienced specialist media managers manage. Leckie at 7, Gyngell at 9, Blackley at 10 and McCarthy at Fairfax know what they are doing.

The end of the 90’s saw many changes in many sectors of our society. One of them was the emergence of our great Melbourne Museum in its award winning building in Carlton with its 16 million items and a dazzling exhibition program. In my time as President of the Museum, still the biggest in the southern hemisphere, one of the great shows was “Bugs Alive”. Not for arachnephobiacs though. There’s a new good word to look up, but not for regular readers of this column who will know what I mean.

What could the study of spiders and bugs tell us about the media landscape of today?

The answer is “everything”. Bugs are more than 10 million years old and they were probably here before us. The “Bugs Alive” exhibition included a few deadly tarantulas in a display case that was spot lit 24 hours a day – a bit like our present day media owners. As I was standing there looking at them with Dr Patrick White, CEO of the Museum I asked him what they ate. The erudite Doctor, and world renowned museum expert, pondered for a moment. His answer was as insightful as it was short - “mostly each other”.

So there it is Louise. History wins again and in all probability we will see a return to the millennia old tradition of the bugs eating each other and creating a new environment where the big strong ones will prosper until the next feeding frenzy begins.

In the world of the media, the smart ones, who are in a strong financial position and know what they are doing will expand, probably at the expense of the others, until we finish up with “ tarantulas giganticus medias”