CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Newspaper group John Fairfax & Sons Ltd. on Wednesday threatened to take the government to court over proposed reforms to Australia’s strict laws on media ownership.
Fairfax chief executive Fred Hilmer made the comment to a Senate committee considering a bill introduced by Prime Minister John Howard’s conservative government that would ease limits on foreign ownership of media and end rules aimed at preventing multimedia monopolies.
As a safeguard of existing diversity, the proposed laws would also force media companies to maintain separate and independent editorial management of any new media assets that they may acquire.
Hilmer said that he supported the broad aim of proposed laws to liberalize media ownership rules but opposed the elements of the legislation requiring the editorial independence of media companies after takeovers.
“This is something we would not only resist through the legislative process but continue to challenge in the courts,” Hilmer told a Senate inquiry into the legislation.
Under existing laws, foreign companies in Australia are limited to a 15 percent voting share in television stations and 25 percent of a newspaper. So-called cross-media ownership rules limit to 15 percent the stakes that newspapers, radio and television companies in the same city can hold in each other.
The government argues that the wide variety of news and opinion available on the Internet make the current restrictions irrelevant.
Critics worry that relaxing the ownership restrictions would spark a series of takeovers of smaller companies by the country’s major media organizations.
Australia has a concentrated newspaper market dominated by Fairfax and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Three networks share the television market and a handful of companies compete in radio.
Hilmer told lawmakers that the Australian market was not large enough to support more than four major media companies and rejected concerns that a fall in the number of owners would reduce diversity.
He argued that Fairfax’s hopes of acquiring a television network would actually increase media diversity outside of Australia’s two largest states.
Fairfax is publisher of two of Australia’s major broadsheet newspapers, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and its national financial daily, the Australian Financial Review.
