Who owns the news you think you’re reading

Australia’s commercial media landscape is controlled by three corporate groups and one foreign-owned network. Between them, they account for the overwhelming majority of what Australians read, watch, and hear on any given day.

That table is doing a lot of work. Notice the column labelled ‘Other Corporate Interests’. That is where the story really is.

News Corp Australia is wholly owned by News Corp (NASDAQ: NWSA). The Murdoch Family Trust controls approximately 40 per cent of News Corp’s voting shares (enough for effective control) despite the family owning a much smaller portion of total equity. This structure is designed to maintain dynastic control of a public company without the associated accountability.

In Australia, News Corp owns: The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, The Courier-Mail, The Advertiser, The NT News, The Mercury, 49 regional newspapers, Sky News Australia, a 65 per cent stake in Foxtel, Fox Sports, and a majority stake in REA Group, which runs realestate.com.au, Australia’s dominant property listings platform.

The property conflict in plain sight. REA Group is critical to understanding News Corp’s structural conflicts. News Corp’s Australian papers are among the country’s most-read sources of property news, covering housing affordability, negative gearing, developer behaviour, and real estate markets. They are also the majority owner of the platform that profits every time a property is listed for sale.

The incentive structure is obvious. You do not need to allege direct editorial interference to understand why this is a problem. The incentive itself is the problem.

The political record. The political activities of News Corp Australia are the most extensively documented of any Australian media organisation. The following are all matters of verified public record:

The Australian has endorsed the Liberal Party at each of the past five federal elections. Not one of News Corp’s four major metropolitan daily papers has endorsed the Labor Party since at least 2010.

On 5 August 2013, the first day of the federal election campaign, The Daily Telegraph published a front page dominated by the headline: ‘KICK THIS MOB OUT’. This was explicitly an instruction to readers on how to vote, published as a front page in a newspaper.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wrote in his 2020 memoir A Bigger Picture: ‘I wasn’t going to run my government in partnership with Rupert or Lachlan Murdoch or their editors, and I knew they’d resent that.’

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd launched a parliamentary petition calling News Corp ‘a cancer on our democracy’. It attracted 501,876 signatures, the most in Australian parliamentary history at that time.

The resulting Senate inquiry, reporting in December 2021, called News Corp ‘Australia’s clearest example of a troubling media monopoly’.

Academic research published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Communication analysed 1,613 News Corp articles and Sky News videos over 13 weeks during the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum. It found 68 per cent of all argument content was pro-No. The paper concluded News Corp did not merely report on the campaign. It functioned as a political advocacy organisation on behalf of the No side.

News Corp has no influence with the public but an acute influence with politicians.Kim Williams, former CEO of News Corp Australia [5]

Nine Entertainment is publicly listed on the ASX, which makes it structurally different from family-controlled News Corp. Its largest single shareholder is Birketu Pty Ltd (the private vehicle of Bruce Gordon, owner of the WIN regional television network) with approximately 20 per cent of shares.

Nine owns Channel Nine and its digital channels, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, Brisbane Times, WA Today, and Stan. Its radio stations (2GB, 3AW, 4BC, and 6PR) were sold to the Laundy family in January 2026.

The 2018 merger of Nine with Fairfax Media, which had owned the SMH and The Age for over 150 years, was a watershed moment for Australian journalism. Two of the country’s most significant mastheads became subsidiaries of a commercial television network.

The property conflict. Domain Group, Nine’s property listings platform, was sold to US firm CoStar for A$3 billion in 2025. Before that sale, Nine’s journalists at the SMH and The Age were covering Australia’s housing affordability crisis while their parent company collected fees on every property listing. The AFR, which covers banking, the ASX, superannuation, and corporate regulation, is simultaneously reliant on advertising from the very financial institutions it covers.

The talkback political machine. Nine’s radio stations, 2GB in Sydney and 3AW in Melbourne, were central to Australia’s political media ecosystem before their sale. Alan Jones, the former 2GB host, had documented direct access to multiple prime ministers and used his program explicitly to campaign on policy outcomes. Talkback radio in Australia is not background noise. It shapes policy debates and commands loyal audiences of older, high-turnout voters.

The third major player is the least discussed in national conversation. Possibly because the only major daily newspaper in Perth is owned by the person we are about to describe.

Kerry Stokes AC is worth approximately A$12.69 billion, making him Australia’s tenth richest person as of May 2025. He controls his empire through Australian Capital Equity, which holds 61 per cent of the ASX-listed Seven Group Holdings. SGH was the controlling shareholder of Seven West Media until its merger with Southern Cross Media in January 2026, creating a combined television, radio, and digital group.

What Stokes owns beyond television. This is where the story gets important. Seven Group Holdings is not primarily a media company. Its major assets beyond media include: WesTrac, one of the world’s largest Caterpillar heavy equipment dealers, supplying mining machinery to iron ore, coal, lithium, and nickel operations across WA and NSW. Beach Energy, where SGH is the single largest shareholder with a 28.6 per cent stake in an oil and gas producer operating in the Cooper Basin, Otway Basin, and Perth Basin. Coates Hire, Australia’s largest equipment hire company. Boral, where it holds a 20 per cent stake in a major building materials manufacturer.

Read that list again. A company that sells Caterpillar equipment to mines, holds the largest single stake in an oil and gas producer, and owns the country’s largest equipment hire business. It also owns the only major daily newspaper in Perth and a national television network reaching 98 per cent of Australians.

The cases that prove the point. In 2023, Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Future Industries formally complained to the federal Communications Minister that The West Australian was publishing what Fortescue’s CEO described as ‘biased, inflammatory and inaccurate’ coverage driven by ‘fossil fuel interests’ within Seven West Media’s ownership structure.

In 2019, when federal police raided the ABC’s Sydney offices (one of the most significant press freedom events in Australian history) almost every major newspaper ran it on the front page. The West Australian ran a short item on page six. Seven West Media was the only major news organisation not represented at the subsequent Perth press freedom rally.

Current and former West Australian journalists have reported a longstanding newsroom culture: photographs showing Komatsu trucks (Caterpillar’s main competitor) do not appear in the paper. WesTrac sells Caterpillar machinery.

The concentration of Australian media ownership is not a market outcome. It is a political outcome, the result of deliberate regulatory changes, lobbied for by the people who benefited from them, and implemented by the politicians those people supported.

Australia’s cross-media ownership laws were designed to prevent one company from owning multiple types of media (television, radio, newspapers) in the same market. In 2007, the Howard government passed the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Act. The new ‘two out of three’ rule allowed companies to own two out of three media types in a single market. Foreign ownership limits were scrapped entirely.

Rupert Murdoch had lobbied directly for exactly these changes. His papers had given consistent editorial support to the Howard government. The changes came through.

In the years since, every government, Labor and Coalition alike, has failed to reverse, or even meaningfully revisit, the architecture that produced the current concentration. The Senate inquiry triggered by half a million Australians’ signatures recommended action. Nothing happened.

When politicians fear the consequences of crossing organisations that could expose or embarrass them, they don’t act. That, in the words of former News Corp CEO Kim Williams, is exactly how the influence operates.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has no advertising. It answers to no proprietor. Its editorial independence is enshrined in legislation. This is precisely why it has been under sustained attack for decades.

The Coalition government cut ABC funding repeatedly between 2013 and 2022. In 2019, federal police raided the ABC’s Sydney offices searching for the source of the Afghan Files, a report on alleged war crimes by Australian Defence Force soldiers. The raids were internationally condemned. Charges were ultimately not laid.

A government review completed in December 2024 explicitly acknowledged the need to protect the ABC and SBS from ‘funding cuts and political interference’. A formal admission that political interference has historically occurred.

The attacks on the ABC’s funding and independence are not driven by a desire for better journalism. They are driven by the commercial and political interests of the people making them. News Corp papers have run consistent campaigns framing the ABC as institutionally biased, a characterisation that serves News Corp’s commercial interest in reducing publicly-funded competition.

Outside the oligopoly, a small number of independent outlets are doing the journalism the mainstream media won’t.

Michael West Media. Investigative journalism focused on corporate accountability, tax avoidance, and the revolving door between government and industry. Reader-funded. No corporate ownership.

Punter’s Politics. Grassroots independent media exposing corporate capture and gas lobby influence. One of the most important independent voices currently operating in Australia.

The Juice Media. Satirical but surgically accurate. Honest Government Ads has developed a global audience by saying plainly what the mainstream press dresses up in euphemism.

Crikey (Private Media). Subscription digital publication with a strong tradition of holding the media itself to account. Owned by Eric Beecher; editorially independent.

Independent Australia. Reader-funded investigative journalism covering politics and corruption from a perspective corporate media structurally cannot.

The Guardian Australia. Owned by the Scott Trust, a charitable structure that uses Guardian profits to fund journalism. Editorially independent of corporate or government interests.

The Conversation. Nonprofit academic analysis. Expert-sourced. No advertising. One of the most reliably evidence-based news analysis platforms in the country.

We are not the first to write about Australian media concentration. Academics, Senate committees, former prime ministers, and independent journalists have documented this landscape in detail. The research is there for anyone who looks.

The problem is distribution. The outlets most capable of reaching mass audiences are the ones with the most to lose from mass audiences understanding this.

The Rort is an aggregator and a watchdog. We feature the independent voices already doing this work. We provide context for stories the mainstream press under-covers or ignores. We ask, consistently, the one question that the concentrated Australian media has a structural interest in not asking:

Who benefits?

That question applies to every budget announcement, every regulatory decision, every policy debate that somehow always seems to resolve in favour of the same industries whose executives sit on the boards of the companies that covered it.

This is not about left versus right. It is not about Labor versus Liberal. It is about a media environment so structurally compromised that Australians cannot get a straight account of what is being done in their name, with their money, to their country.

The Rort is not neutral on this. A watchdog that is neutral about the rort is not a watchdog. It is furniture.