According to a report in The Age, the Australian government has made an extraordinary intervention in an official tender process to stop Rupert Murdoch’s part-owned Sky News Australia winning a $223 million contract to broadcast Australia’s overseas television service, Network Australia.
It is understood Sky News proposed setting up a dedicated channel for China to run separately from the rest of the network as a way of expanding Australia’s reach in the Asian powerhouse, where censorship limits foreign news broadcasts. This helped push Sky News over the line in a fierce contest with the ABC to win the rights to the station.
An independent panel of public servants set up to evaluate the competing tenders saw Sky’s as the better bid, only for the government to baulk at the prospect of stripping the contract from the publicly funded ABC to hand it to a company part-owned by Mr Murdoch’s News Ltd, Channel Seven and the Nine Network. The government then made late changes to the tender rules, sidelining the role of the independent panel and throwing the legitimacy of the process into doubt.
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