Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl (i read books .txt) 📕

news-centric commercial television network, and the most venerated weekly news magazine, not to mention his other business, sports and technology titles.

Packer could simply pick up the telephone at any time of the day or night and usually ask the newsmakers themselves.

And he did … literally at any time of the day or night. Executives knew they were effectively on call 24/7, and Packer had a positive genius (whose embodiment, from 1974–92, was his secretary Pat Wheatley) for tracking them down, anywhere on the globe.

In Park Street and the separate Nine Network executive office, a technology not universally understood in the 1970–80s allowed the Big Fella’s telephone to simply override any other live call on the recipient’s yellow ‘Packerphone’. One editor could be in the middle of a conversation with another editor, and suddenly have the chairman there instead.

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KERRYVISION

Frank Packer’s two sons were disparate characters. Clyde was urbane and intellectual, with a growing curiosity of the alternative culture around him, while Kerry—dyslexic, an academic failure, quick with his fists—seemed destined to be useful mainly for lifting heavy things. In 1960, Clyde was editor-in-chief of The Observer magazine, while Kerry laboured in the basement among the printing presses of his father’s cherished Daily Telegraph newspaper.

That same year, Sir Frank made the landmark acquisition of the GTV-9 television station in Melbourne. It would join his TCN-9 in Sydney, the station that had introduced television to Australia in 1956, and thus make the Packers unquestionably the most powerful people in TV.

Unsurprisingly, it was Clyde who was steered towards the television business. By 1970, he was joint managing director. The problem was that the other joint was his father. Their relationship exploded in 1972 when Sir Frank, never shy in using his media interests to express his political beliefs, forbade Nine’s A Current Affair from airing an interview with then-ACTU president, Bob Hawke.

Clyde’s subsequent departure in 1976 from Australia—and with it, the sale of his one-eighth share of the family business to Kerry for $4 million—sealed the future direction for Kerry Packer. But in fact, Kerry Packer had initiated the process a few years earlier.

In 1972, while Clyde was clashing with their father, Kerry was starting his bold and spectacularly successful magazine venture with Cleo. But for several years already, his goal had been to rid the business of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers—a masthead his father had acquired in 1936.

Sir Frank’s ailing health opened the door enough for Kerry to get his wish in May 1972. He and Rupert Murdoch had attended a boxing match together in Sydney and, sat in the car afterwards outside Murdoch’s hotel, discussed various means of merging their respective morning (Daily Telegraph) and afternoon (Mirror) papers to compete with Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald and Sun.

They agreed instead that Murdoch could buy the two Telegraph titles for $15 million. As the papers had regularly lost money, the deal was too good for even sentimental Sir Frank to refuse.

Beyond the state of the Telegraph titles, Kerry believed that newspapers themselves were yesterday’s news. He would say as much in a 1977 interview with Murdoch’s newspaper, The Australian:

‘To be perfectly honest with you, I think that you people who are involved in print media don’t quite understand that you are now the second-class media … your influence is nowhere near as great as the broadcast media.’

The interviewer asked: ‘Your father would never have agreed with that?’

‘No, of course he didn’t. But you see one of the greatnesses about my father was the fact that emotionally, the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to sell the Daily Telegraph. It tore him to shreds. But he stood back from it as a businessman and said ‘It’s a good deal’ and I was pushing him all the time to sell.’

Kerry Packer and television were made for each other.

He watched hours and hours of television each day—and, as many Nine employees would learn, at any hour of the night. One visitor to Packer’s Bellevue Hill home in the late 1970s told of Packer watching four televisions simultaneously; the advent of split-screen monitors must have been a godsend.

Employees paint a picture of Packer as Nine’s editor-in-chief, a one-man quality control department who—despite running magazine, rural, property and whatever other businesses—seemed magically able to perform this job 24 hours a day.

The image of an autocratic proprietor in the radiation haze of several television monitors, barking ‘get that shit off the air!’ down the telephone, seems quaint in today’s era of media empires owned by faceless pension funds.

Packer’s influence on television would not be limited to his own network—though most agree that the quality he demanded, and received, from his own stations, set the standard for rival networks. Like his father, Kerry did not hesitate to use political influence to further his business interests.

In many landmark examples, Packer was an undisputed winner, to an extent that even the impartiality of Prime Ministers was called into question.

It was Packer who, in August 1977, first approached Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to invest in a satellite for national television broadcasting. In turn, the 1985 launch of AUSSAT would lead to the overhauling of ‘two-station’ ownership restrictions and their replacement, in 1986 by the government of Bob Hawke, with new ‘cross-media’ ownership laws.

Packer had been instrumental in their drafting, and it was more than happy coincidence that the cross-media restrictions pertained more to the proprietors of newspaper and radio than to magazine barons.

National-network potential made existing two-station networks incredibly hot property, and Packer’s two Nines were the hottest. Thus would play out the biggest and best-known of Packer’s incredible business deals, the selling—and relatively prompt re-acquisition—of Nine to Alan Bond, for $1.055 billion. Kerry Packer famously said you only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime.

Into the 1990s, Packer was no less active in lobbying for terrestrial stations to be given a ten-year head start