Aspects of Hugh Marks’s record as chief executive of the Nine Entertainment Company raise questions about his suitability for the position of managing director of the ABC, to which he has just been appointed.

Those aspects concern political independence, internal culture and news leadership, all issues of pressing concern at the ABC.

On political independence, during Marks’s tenure as chief of Nine he hosted a $10,000-a-head fundraising dinner for the Liberal Party at which the guests of honour were the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, and communications minister Paul Fletcher. The event was organised by the Liberal Party’s fundraising arm, the Australian Business Network.

This came as a shock to journalists at the three major newspapers owned by Nine: The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review. They protested, and Marks admitted hosting the dinner was a mistake.

On culture, in May 2024 allegations came to light that Nine’s long-time news director, Darren Wick, had for decades got away with drunkenly groping women. This unleashed a cascade of allegations by women about the culture inside Nine that had existed for many years, including the period when Marks was chief executive. He has said he didn’t know anything about it and was shocked by what was revealed.

By the time these allegations emerged, Marks had been gone for four years, having abruptly left the company after The Australian newspaper reported that as chief executive he was in a sexual relationship with a subordinate.

Now he is to find himself leading an organisation that is in the midst of developing a response to an external review of its own culture, which found systemic racism across the ABC.

On news leadership, like his predecessors David Anderson and Michelle Guthrie, Marks does not have a background in journalism, yet becomes ex officio editor-in-chief of the ABC.

That has proved a weakness in the past – Guthrie once said publicly she was not responsible for every story that appeared on the ABC.

The appointment of Marks seems unlikely to remedy this weakness, which has laid the ABC open to accusations it fails to adequately protect its journalists from external attack.

Other aspects of Marks’s career, however, clearly carried decisive weight with the ABC board.

A graduate in law and finance from the University of New South Wales, Marks joined Nine as legal counsel in 1995. Two years later, he became director of film and television for the network and was recognised internally for his work on audience measurement.

In 2003 he left Nine to head a television distribution company, Southern Star Group. Under his leadership it produced hit shows such as Big Brother for Ten and Deal or No Deal for Seven.

A decade later he returned to the Nine network as a non-executive director, and was appointed chief executive in 2015.

In 2018, he engineered Nine’s takeover of the Fairfax media empire, creating Australia’s largest commercial media group with major interests in newspapers, radio, television and streaming services.

Nine’s takeover of Fairfax provided a lifeline for those three big mastheads, which had been caught utterly unprepared by the onslaught on their advertising revenues from internet platforms in areas such as real estate, employment and motor vehicles.

Those mastheads have continued to assert their editorial independence despite Nine’s questionable corporate-level management of political relationships and internal culture. However, the editorial content of the Herald and The Age, taken as a whole, has drifted downstream since the takeover.

Excellent pockets of public interest journalism remain, notably in their political analysis and the incomparable work of their investigative teams. However, soft news and lifestyle content have grown at the expense of broader coverage of political issues, leaving that territory more open to the propagandising of News Corp than is good for Australian democracy.

Given the repeated assertions by the ABC chair, Kim Williams, that the ABC needs to strike a better balance between lifestyle content and public-interest journalism, it is an open question how well-equipped Marks is to achieve this shift.

After his departure from Nine in 2020, Marks founded Dreamchaser, a successful television content production and distribution studio.

It is these business credentials that are clearly attractive to the ABC. In a statement announcing his appointment, the ABC said he was a standout candidate with a strong track record of leading media organisations and driving substantial and sustained audience engagement.

This might indicate a desire on the part of the ABC board to inject a more popularising approach to its entertainment content.

Williams has shown himself to be an activist chair, particularly in editorial matters, so perhaps there is an understanding that Marks will focus primarily on wider content strategy and corporate management. But the fact remains that when he takes over in March 2025, Marks will become the ABC’s editor-in-chief.

From the outside it looks like an odd appointment. But Williams is a change agent, and it may be safely assumed this is part of the new direction he has sketched out for the ABC, the ultimate destination of which remains difficult to discern.

Disclosure statement
Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Republished from The Conversation, Dec 17, 2024

https://johnmenadue.com/hugh-marks-does-not-have-a-background-in-journalism-yet-becomes-ex-officio-editor-in-chief-of-the-abc-is-he-the-right-person-for-the-job/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

If only for Australia’s own security concerns, the strict application of ABC Editorial Policies in regard to Syria is vitally important. For the ABC to display bias for radical Islamist groups cannot bode well for us. It contravenes Australian beliefs and values meant to unite us.
[This text below is a complaint sent to the ABC on 23 December 2024.]

After the start of the “Arab Spring” in Syria, ABC reporting on Syria exhibited a blatant bias towards insurgents intent on overthrowing the Syrian Government. Such breaching of ABC Standards continues.

In the ABC TV news report “Syrians return to areas destroyed by the Assad regime” (16 December 2024), Eric Tlozek presents a single point of view on two critically contentious issues, namely the overthrow of the Assad Government in Syria by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a group proscribed as terrorist by our government; and the alleged sarin gas attack on 21 August 2013 in Ghouta, Damascus, an incident that President Obama was advised could have been a false flag committed by insurgents.

When Syan Vallance introduced Tlozek’s report on ABC Victoria, she declared: “… with the Assad regime gone, there is hope for the future.” Perhaps, she was simply echoing Tlozek, when he said: “…residents are now starting to contemplate a future free from fear”.

However, Tlozek ignores the reasons many people in Syria (a country with a diverse, mostly liberal population unused to morality police) have to greatly fear the agendas and violence of the rebel and foreign jihadi groups (including “jihadists” from Xinjiang, China). They ignore, for example, Syrians opposed not only to the Assad Government, but also to the militarisation of the opposition and the Islamisation of the political system.

Vallance and Tlozek’s positive comments do not present news with ‘due impartiality’, and so breach ABC Standard 4.1.

From such comments and Tlozek’s report itself, ABC viewers might reasonably conclude that the “rebels” now in control of Damascus were benign “moderates”.

However, the “rebel” predecessors to HTS, were responsible for killing hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians in Damascus by firing mortars at residential areas, abducting people, and detonating bombs.

One such mortar attack was reported by the ABC: 15 students in a Damascus University cafeteria were killed.

Another was reported by BBC’s Lyse Doucet from Damascus: four pupils and their school-bus driver were killed by mortars that fell on a mainly Christian area.

A Los Angeles Times article reported that “five musicians were killed and others were wounded” when showing up to rehearsal became a “deadly prospect” because the Damascus Opera House was “in range of missiles and mortars”.

Criminality was rife. When an Orthodox priest acted as an intermediary for the family of a kidnap victim, the kidnappers abducted, tortured and killed the priest.

In 2013, after the elderly Sunni imam Sheik al-Buti and 41 students were killed by a suicide bomber, the bias in the ABC report of their murders displayed a lack of respect for the esteemed Sunni scholar. Yet, it could be claimed the cleric’s assassination pointed to a clash between a scholarly, Sufi form of Islam prevalent in Syria and a more fundamentalist form of Islam exemplified by clerics from Saudi Arabia, for example, and the prominent Egyptian cleric Sheik Qaradawiconnected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The extremist ideology espoused by the numerous rebel groups, such as ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army, was on display in August 2013 when about 200 civilians were brutally murdered and the same number abducted. The victims were Alawite villagers.

This atrocity was detailed by Human Rights Watch, and then picked up by the BBC, but I could find no evidence of the ABC reporting it.

Other aspects of the war not reported by the ABC included the thousands of Christians who fled Homs when insurgents established a base there, and the fatwas issued by extremist clerics permitting the rape of non-Sunni women.

ABC reports didn’t deny there were extremists among the various insurgent groups. Nevertheless, ABC programs maintained a general bias towards so-called moderate rebels even when such rebels co-operated with extremist groups when it suited them – as it did in the sectarian attack on Alawite villages.

In what seems to be a perverse editorial decision, ABC management allowed its correspondents to extol the so-called revolution in Syria and to eschew analysis, impartiality and the presentation of a range of perspectives. It’s perverse because ABC bias for what are basically radical Islamist militias could potentially foster sectarianism and extremism in our own community.

Today, we must assume ABC management approves Tlozek’s reports on Syria even though “open-mindedness” — a hallmark of impartiality and good journalism — is missing in his reporting.

Tlozek’s reports from Damascus present crowds of people celebrating and looking hopeful. Some of them may support the agenda of HTS. However, many might be simply feeling elation as they hope now that the suffocating US-led sanctions that had impoverished up to 90% of the population will be lifted, and life will become more bearable.

The impact of the sanctions and the US occupation of resource-rich northeast Syria are aspects of the war that Tlozek ignores, and so ABC viewers are led to believe the joy simply relates to the removal of Assad.

Tlozek makes no effort to seek diverse perspectives as required by ABC Standard 4.2 to ensure “no significant strand of thought or belief within the community is knowingly excluded or disproportionately represented”.

The concerns of a significant strand of thought in Australia itself is ignored by Tlozek: Syrian Australian women — whether they are Sunni or Shia Muslims, Christians, Druze, or non-believers — who believe a secular state could best ensure the rights and freedoms of Syrian women and religious minorities.

They might justifiably consider the phrase “the Assad regime” to be a catch-cry, a red herring, used by ABC journalists to distract ABC audiences from the underlying causes of Syria’s war and from rebel violence and sectarianism.

By ignoring the perspectives of such Syrian Australian women, who would see no reason to “hope for the future” of Syria now that HTS is in charge and that hardline foreign jihadists aligned with HTS are roaming freely in Syria, Tlozek’s report breaches ABC standards.

Tlozek further breaches ABC standards in this report when he goes to Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus.

Referring to the alleged sarin gas attack in Ghouta on 21 August 2013, Tlozek explains that “multiple international investigations determined rockets filled with deadly sarin gas were fired” at Ghouta, “killing hundreds of people”.

Tlozek doesn’t name the international investigations, so it is not possible to check their funding, professionalism or biases.

Although the Australian Government maintains that Syrian Government forces were responsible for the alleged sarin gas attack, in a 2017 Sydney Morning Herald article, Canberra journalist, Paul Malone recommended scepticism. He quoted Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who had reported that US intelligence knew it wasn’t just the Syrian Government that had access to sarin gas: some insurgent groups did, also.

More importantly, Molane writes, “Pentagon analysts had concluded that the sarin that was recovered wasn’t the kind of sarin in the Syrian arsenal”.

Presumably, Malone did quite a lot of research on the alleged chemical weapons attack, and so he would have noted that President Obama had been cautioned by James Clapper, then director of National Intelligence, that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas was not a “slam dunk”.

When there was a possibility that Obama would order military strikes against Damascus, former US Congressman Denis Kucinich, an anti-war activist, warned against it, saying America would be acting as Al-Qaeda’s airforce.

Still, hundreds of people, including scores of children, were killed in Damascus in August 2013. Who were they? Who killed them? How were they killed and why?

Had, in the past nine years, ABC journalists been briefed to apply their journalism skills and ethics to research the alleged sarin gas attack, Tlozek would have been obliged to caution viewers about Mohammad’s claims.

In conclusion, Tlozek’s report breaches ABC standards in an unconscionable manner with ABC editorial approval, presumably. The issues raised in his report are extremely contentious and yet he treats them in a very off-hand way. His 16 December report contravenes the ABC’s statutory duty to be impartial and to present diverse sources of reliable information and contending opinions. His report doesn’t adequately equip its audiences to make up their own minds on the situation in Syria.

According to ABC Editorial Principles, the ABC takes no editorial stance other than its “commitment to fundamental democratic principles including the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, parliamentary democracy and non-discrimination”. These principles are flouted in Tlozek’s report which presents a bias for the “revolution” despite signs that it’s leading to the curbing of freedoms for women and minorities, increased criminality and sectarian violence.

ABC reporting on Syria is an example of cognitive dissonance that would confuse and disorient many Australians.

If only for Australia’s own security concerns, the strict application of ABC Editorial Policies in regard to Syria is vitally important. For the ABC to display bias for radical Islamist groups cannot bode well for us. It contravenes Australian beliefs and values meant to unite us.

https://johnmenadue.com/abc-editorial-bias-for-revolution-in-syria-and-its-implications/

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.