Who owns the news you think you’re reading

Here is a number worth sitting with: 90.6.

That is the percentage of Australia’s metropolitan newspaper circulation controlled by just two companies. News Corp Australia accounts for 64.2 per cent. Nine Entertainment accounts for a further 26.4 per cent.

Not 90.6 per cent owned by the same political party. Not 90.6 per cent funded by the same advertiser. Ninety point six per cent owned by two corporations, one controlled by a family trust whose patriarch has spent the better part of sixty years using his papers to pursue his political and commercial interests.

That is not a media market. That is a cartel with a printing press.

And yet, in public conversations about why Australians feel unrepresented or manipulated, the ownership of the institutions telling us what to think rarely comes up. At least not in those institutions.

That is the point of The Rort. This is our first article. It will be one of the longest things we publish, because it needs to be said once, properly, so we can reference it forever after.

Let’s walk through who owns Australian media, what else they own, and what that means for every story they choose to run, or choose not to.

01Three companies. Most of Australia’s news.

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.

02The Murdoch Machine

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.

03Nine Entertainment: the ‘other’ concentration

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.

04Kerry Stokes: the conflict you haven’t heard about

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 holds a 30 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 a 30 per cent 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.

When Stokes’ papers cover mining regulation, environmental approvals, fossil fuel policy, or the green energy transition, they are covering the industries their parent company profits from. This is not an allegation. It is a disclosed corporate structure.

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.

Stokes’ empire operates through what Michael West Media terms ‘Dark Companies’: private holding structures exempt from normal ASIC financial disclosure. The full extent of his financial arrangements is legally hidden from public view.

05This didn’t happen by accident

The concentration of Australian media ownership did not come from the market alone. Parliament set the ownership rules, and in our reading the changes it made in 2006 and 2017, set out below, loosened the limits rather than restoring them.

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 October 2006, the Howard government passed the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Act, which received Royal Assent on 4 November 2006. ²¹ The new ‘two out of three’ rule allowed companies to own two out of three media types in a single market. It also removed the media-specific limits on foreign ownership; foreign investment in media stayed subject to the Treasurer's approval under general foreign investment policy. [21,22]

The changes came through.

In the years since, no government, Labor or Coalition, has reversed the architecture that produced the current concentration. The one major revisit loosened it further: in 2017 the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Broadcasting Reform) Act repealed the ‘two out of three’ rule itself, along with the 75 per cent audience reach rule for commercial television. ²³ 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.

Correction, 7 October 2026. This section said Rupert Murdoch had lobbied directly for exactly these changes and that his papers had given consistent editorial support to the Howard government. We could not find a reliable source for either statement, so both have been removed.

Correction, 7 October 2026. This section said the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Act was passed in 2007. Parliament passed it in October 2006 and it received Royal Assent on 4 November 2006 ²¹; the paragraph now says so.

Correction, 7 October 2026 (second). This section said every government since had failed to reverse or even meaningfully revisit the media ownership rules. In 2017 the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Broadcasting Reform) Act repealed the ‘two out of three’ rule and the 75 per cent audience reach rule ²³; the paragraph now says so. It also said foreign ownership limits were scrapped entirely. The 2006 Act removed the media-specific foreign ownership limits, but foreign investment in media remained subject to the Treasurer's approval under general foreign investment policy ²².

Update, 8 October 2026. Reference ²⁴, the ACMA media control page, has been removed because the page does not describe the 2017 repeal, and the 7 October (second) correction above no longer cites it. The repeal of the two out of three rule and the 75 per cent audience reach rule is cited to the 2017 Act itself ²³, in the paragraph above and in that correction. Nothing in the text has changed.

Correction, 8 October 2026. The opening paragraph of this section said the concentration was the result of deliberate regulatory changes, lobbied for by the people who benefited from them and implemented by politicians those people supported. No source we hold carries that, and the lobbying claim was already withdrawn on 7 October, so the paragraph now states only what the laws below show and labels the conclusion as this outlet’s reading. Separately, the Beach Energy stake in this article, given as 28.6 per cent and as the ‘single largest’ holding, now reads 30 per cent in the brief, the table, the chart, the passage on Stokes’ other assets and the notes, as Seven Group states on its own Beach Energy page ²⁴; the Michael West profile ¹⁴ is no longer cited for the figure, and the ‘largest’ wording is removed because we have no source for it. This is the new reference ²⁴, not the ACMA page removed earlier.

06The ABC: publicly funded, systematically attacked

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.

07Who is doing the work

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.

08Why The Rort exists

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.

If it’s a rort, we cover it.