Their news is your news up North

In a powerful first program for its new presenter and production team, Media Watch showed how the Nine Network has pulled the pin on almost all local news in Darwin. In a statement explaining its decision, Nine said that it was retaining a reporter and camera operator in Darwin ‘to tell the Territory’s stories to a national audience’. Media Watch said that, in practice, people in Darwin will get a bulletin made for Queensland audiences.

This decision by Nine looks like it might come with some regulatory risk. After all, commercial broadcasting is a heavily-regulated sector: there are rules requiring licensees to offer Australian content and children’s programs and captioning, rules limiting gambling ads and rules explaining how programs must be rated and when they can be shown. And there are some local content quotas that apply in regional areas but they don’t apply to Nine in Darwin.

So is this a result of media reform designed to help local services cope with the competition from international players and digital platforms? No, and if we want to understand where the problem lies, we need to go back further – to the 1990s, in fact.

Before the introduction of the Broadcasting Services Act in 1992, broadcasters were required to provide an ‘adequate and comprehensive range of services’. This was a serious obligation that broadcasters had to demonstrate at each licence renewal. Even then, the regulator of the time, the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, took into account other services in the area. Then in 1992 legislated licence conditions established that a broadcaster only needs to ‘contribute to’ the provision of an adequate and comprehensive range of broadcasting services in the licence area. The Explanatory Memorandum to the 1992 Bill makes clear this does not require each licensee to provide a service that is itself adequate and comprehensive.

As a result, there’s nothing to stop a commercial TV service ditching its news service altogether, provided it’s not otherwise affected by regional local content obligations.

In asking whether this is reasonable, we might consider all that’s been done – much of it with good reason – to address the impact of digitisation and internationalisation on local media. This includes the repeal of the cross-media rules, a reduction in licence or spectrum access fees and the pulling back of Australian drama rules. And this has been done while simultaneously offering state subsidies and passing laws aimed at redirecting advertising revenue from digital platforms to news producers.

Nine’s move in Darwin does not, of itself, invalidate these initiatives to support commercial TV. But the absence of an obligation to broadcast your own news programs now seems like something of an oversight.

Derek Wilding, CMT Co-Director