The removal of the cross-media rules in 2017 facilitated the take-over of Fairfax Media by Nine Entertainment in a AUD 4 billion deal, which subsumed the separate identities of the famous independent news mastheads, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian Financial Review:
On 7 December 2018, the merger of Nine and Fairfax Media Limited was completed. At September 2019, Nine commenced purchasing the remainder of the shares (that it did not acquire via the Fairfax merger) to fully own Macquarie Media and increase its cross-media ownership by adding radio. (ACMA, 2020: 36)
Overall, the company has two radio licences and a newspaper in Melbourne, and two radio licences and a newspaper in Sydney, the two most populated cities of the country.
Concentration will very likely increase, as a tie-up between the Seven TV network and News Corp, for example, can already be anticipated. Because of the economics of digital media, the concentration in legacy media is duplicated offline. Legacy brands such as News Corp Australia and now Nine Entertainment run the most-popular online news sites (Media Pluralism Project, 2019).
Source: ACMA, 2021
As Figure 5 shows in an infographic from the Australian Communications and Media Authority, a handful of corporations and interconnected family interests control much of Australia’s media.
