Sky News and the regional capture

Sky News Australia launched on 19 February 1996 as a joint venture between British Sky Broadcasting, Seven Network, and Nine Entertainment, each holding a 33 per cent stake. For its first two decades it operated as a relatively conventional rolling news service.

In December 2016, News Corp Australia acquired the channel outright. What followed was a significant editorial transformation. The daytime programming retains a broadly conventional news format. But from 5pm, the channel switches to what it describes as ‘opinion programming’: a primetime lineup built around commentators who have, between them, promoted climate change denial, COVID vaccine misinformation, conspiracy theories, and far-right content.

Andrew Bolt. Australia’s most prominent climate science denier, who has had a racial discrimination finding upheld against him under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Peta Credlin. Former chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who promoted false claims about the Uluru Statement during the 2023 Voice Referendum; claims debunked by RMIT FactLab. Chris Kenny. Former adviser to Liberal minister Alexander Downer. Paul Murray. Host of Paul Murray Live, now in its fifteenth year.

These are not news programs. They are opinion programs. Sky News Australia’s own press releases describe them as ‘opinion’. The distinction matters enormously when we discuss how this content reaches regional Australians, because they may not be making that distinction themselves.

Sky News Regional, the free-to-air version, launched on 1 August 2021. The timing was remarkable: it launched on exactly the same day that YouTube suspended Sky News Australia’s channel for one week for posting COVID-19 misinformation.

While Sky News was being sanctioned by a global technology platform for content it described as posing a ‘serious risk of egregious harm’, it was simultaneously rolling out a free broadcast service to millions of regional Australians with no subscription barrier, no parental controls, and no competing alternative on the same spectrum.

In July 2025, Sky News and Network 10 signed a new multi-year agreement to continue the service. The channel now broadcasts free on Channel 56 across regional Victoria, southern NSW, and Queensland, and Channel 53 in northern NSW and the Gold Coast.

In Sydney, a viewer dissatisfied with Sky News can choose from multiple free-to-air news services, paid streaming platforms, and a wide range of digital outlets. The ABC’s services are strong, local newspapers still operate, and internet access to national and international journalism is generally reliable.

In many regional and rural communities, the media ecosystem is thinner. Local newspapers have been hollowed out over two decades of consolidation. Regional television newsrooms have been gutted. Internet access, particularly in more remote areas, is slower and more expensive.

Into this information gap, Sky News Regional has positioned itself as ‘an essential news service for regional Australians’, the words of Sky News Australia Chief Executive Paul Whittaker. The channel broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, carrying a primetime lineup of News Corp opinion programming to communities that, in many cases, have no comparable free alternative.

COVID misinformation. On 1 August 2021, YouTube suspended Sky News Australia for one week for posting videos that violated its COVID-19 misinformation policies. YouTube said the content posed a ‘serious risk of egregious harm in contradiction with local and global health authority guidance’. Multiple Sky segments questioned the existence of the pandemic and promoted hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as treatments.

Climate misinformation: a global hub. In June 2022, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a British thinktank focused on disinformation research, found that Sky News Australia was a key ‘content hub’ for climate science deniers and delayers globally. The ISD described Sky News Australia as having a ‘disproportionate contribution to global climate misinformation’.

One example cited: a tweet from Canadian climate denier Patrick Moore promoting a Sky News segment (in which then-host Alan Jones described youth climate activists as ‘selfish, badly educated virtue-signalling little turds’) was retweeted 16,000 times. Sky News content was functioning as source material for international climate denial networks.

Far-right platforming. In August 2018, Sky News Australia gave a platform to Blair Cottrell, the leader of United Patriots Front (a far-right neo-Nazi organisation), in a one-to-one discussion about immigration. In December 2020, host Rowan Dean promoted the Great Reset conspiracy theory. In February 2021, American far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones used Sky News segments to support his claims.

There is a profound irony at the heart of the Sky News Regional model. The audiences most exposed to its content are the audiences with the least capacity to contextualise or counterbalance it.

Regional Australians generally have lower digital literacy rates, higher rates of internet access poverty, lower media plurality, and, crucially, greater reliance on free-to-air television as their primary news source. They are also, as a cohort, more likely to vote in closely contested regional electorates that determine federal election outcomes.

A Sydney viewer who encounters a Bolt segment on climate change has immediate access to counterpoint: the ABC, the Guardian, SMH, The Age, SBS News. A viewer in Griffith, Tamworth, Ballarat, or Bundaberg, watching the same segment on their free-to-air television, may not have that context. They may be watching because it is the only news channel available.

The geographic overlap between Sky News Regional’s broadcast footprint and Australia’s most marginal regional electorates is not a coincidence of map-reading.

In February 2026, News Corp Australia announced that Sky News Australia would be rebranded as ‘News24’ by the end of the year. The reason: the brand licensing agreement with Sky Limited (the UK company that originally owned the Sky News name) is expiring and will not be renewed.

The reason Sky Limited will not renew is instructive. Sky News in the United Kingdom is owned by Comcast and operates under British broadcasting regulations that require impartial news coverage. Sky News Australia, since its acquisition by News Corp, has increasingly broadcast conservative opinion content. The editorial directions have diverged so far that the UK parent no longer wants its brand on the Australian product.

Read that again. The UK company that originally launched Sky News, a company that must meet legally enforceable impartiality standards under British broadcasting law, has decided it no longer wants to be associated with what Sky News Australia has become.

The rebrand to News24 will do nothing to change the content. It will simply give a News Corp opinion channel a name that sounds more like a news service.

Sky News Australia is, in Australian cities, an expensive opinion channel for politically engaged conservatives. That is a legitimate product in a media market. People are entitled to pay for content that reflects their views.

Sky News Regional is something different. It is a free-to-air channel, broadcasting on public spectrum to communities with limited media alternatives as their primary dedicated news service, that has been found by independent researchers to be a global hub for climate misinformation and by the world’s largest video platform to be distributing content posing a risk of real-world public health harm.

The UK company whose name it carries has decided it no longer wants its brand associated with the Australian product’s editorial direction. It will soon be rebranded as News24, a name designed to sound like news, worn by a product that its own heritage organisation considers too far from journalism to share a name with.

Three million regional Australians will keep watching it. Most of them will not know any of this.

That is the regional capture. And that is The Rort’s job to say plainly.