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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

A new channel to the right of Sky News has launched in Australia, with powerful and cashed up backers.

ADH TV has all the hallmarks of far right American platforms, but with a very well known Australian at its centre: Alan Jones.

It marks something of a comeback for the 82 year old shock jock, who in recent years was dropped by mainstream media outlets.

Today, associate editor for The Saturday Paper, Martin McKenzie-Murray, on who’s behind ADH TV & whether Australians have an appetite for far right news.

It’s Wednesday, August 23.

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ANGE:

Marty, you've spent a week or so watching this right wing Australian channel called ADH TV. What has that experience been like? And are you okay?

MARTY:

Haha, thanks for asking. Yes, I've been watching a lot of ADH TV, which offers itself, I guess, as a niche rival to Sky News at night. I have a slight headache from the rants of angry prophets.

Archival tape – Daisy Cousens:

“Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres dramatically decreed that the age of global warming is over and we are now in the age of, wait for it, global boiling. Holy crap…”

MARTY:

And if that’s not the pose or the effect assumed by presenters the other very popular, kind of, schtick is the snide troll.

Archival tape – Damian Coory:

“We're having a referendum to change the Australian Constitution. This isn't like just bringing in a law. This is setting a permanent change that will affect all future laws…”

MARTY:

One thing that unifies them is an objection — a very passionate objection — to the Voice, which they argue will be incredibly divisive. Tyranny is invoked incessantly. It's kind of a shibboleth, or a catch cry, at ADH TV. There's a tyranny of everything, of government, of woke politics…

Archival tape – Alexandra Marshall:

“…we go off trudging through the overgrown jungles of work that are suffocating our nation…”

MARTY:

So typically they’ll open with a long monologue, and then they’ll have interviews on, usually they invite people on that ratify their own beliefs.

Archival tape – David Flint:

“Is there such a thing as climate science, Ian?

Archival tape – Ian Pilmer:

“No there isn’t.”

MARTY:

There's a lot of faces that people might have seen on Sky News. There's the Family First director, Lyle Shelton.

Archival tape – Lyle Shelton:

“There is now an epidemic of children presenting at child gender clinics around the nation.”

MARTY:

There’s the younger commentator, Daisy Cousens who kind of presents herself as a feminist apostate.

Archival tape – Daisy Cousens:

“…because the women who push these talking points are so privileged that they have literally nothing real to complain about. All in all, the Barbie movie was a colossal disappointment.”

MARTY:

…or Fred Pawle, for instance, who was a columnist for The Australian. It was only a few years ago that he was writing quite sober articles about mitigating COVID. Today, however, he's describing the global response to the COVID pandemic as one of the greatest crimes in human history.

Archival tape – Fred Pawle:

“They locked us up to protect us from a pandemic that barely existed, and forced us to be injected with experimental chemicals that did more harm than good.”

MARTY:

And at the heart of all of this is the 82 year old Alan Jones.

Archival tape – Announcer:

“Alan Jones. Direct to the people right across Australia.”

Archival tape – Alan Jones:

“Yes, it's me. I'm back. And I'll be more accessible than ever. Here we are.”

ANGE:

And so Alan Jones is the, kind of, star of this platform, right? And he's kind of fallen off the radar over the past few years. How did he end up here launching this YouTube channel?

MARTY:

Yeah, he has and he hasn't fallen off the radar. But it's true that he's experienced some successive professional losses in recent years. His career has been quite extraordinary, and I can't see it ever being replicated again. This is a man who started off as an athletics coach at some prestigious schools, Brisbane Grammar and King's School in Parramatta, became a schoolmaster, became a speechwriter for Malcolm Fraser when he was prime minister, was coach of the Wallabies, and it was in 1985 that he first broadcast, and has become a mythic broadcaster. So as mythic a career as Alan Jones has had, it's also been peppered by some quite disturbing scandals. He was found guilty of racial vilification for his role in inflaming the Cronulla riots in 2005.

Archival tape – Alan Jones:

“My suggestion is to invite one of the biker gangs to be present in numbers at Cronulla railway station when these Lebanese thugs arrive. It'd be worth the price of admission to watch these cowards scurry back onto the train for the return trip to their lairs. Australian's old and new shouldn’t have to put up with this scum.”

MARTY:

There are his comments about Julia Gillard's father dying of shame after he had passed away, his comment suggesting that Scott Morrison, as prime minister, jam a sock down the throat of Jacinda Ardern.

Archival tape – Alan Jones:

“She's a clown, Jacinda Ardern. A complete clown. I just wonder whether Scott Morrison's going to be fully briefed to shove a sock down her throat. I mean, she is a joke…”

MARTY:

What kind of got him in the end of his declining ratings. So he left 2GB, advertisers have become increasingly anxious about his railing against lockdowns and vaccines. He lost his column at The Daily Telegraph. It was said that Jones no longer resonated with readers. And then in 2021, he bitterly departed Sky News, where he'd been presenting a show four times a week for a number of years.

ANGE:

Okay, so he was dropped by these more traditional outlets, 2GB, The Daily Telegraph, and Sky, and instead of retiring, he decided to broadcast on YouTube, which I guess is an interesting choice for a guy in his 80s.

MARTY:

Yeah, he seemed to anticipate, or acknowledge the age of his listeners, or his fans, because they're quite old, and in acknowledging that age I think he anticipated the difficulty of them following him to a purely online broadcasting. And so the start of his debut broadcast was this kind of gentle tutorial about streaming, and how they might follow him over to the internet.

Archival tape – Alan Jones:

“It's easy to watch. There are three ways. We all have devices, whether it be a smart phone, everyone's got one of those, an iPad, a smart TV…”

MARTY:

So there's this acknowledgement of this ageing demographic but the technology and the platform is grounded by youth. And I think Jones… Jones has said himself that his future rested online.

Archival tape – Alan Jones:

“…so you can watch on my Alan Jones Australia Facebook page, my YouTube page, or the website. This is simple…”

MARTY:

And so despite Alan Jones being 82, the man is kind of unstoppable, and say whatever you like about him, he is energetic and persevering.

Interestingly, he brought in very, very young talent to advise him in these new kind of broadcasting technologies. And so the CEO is 23 year old Jack Bulfin, a kind of protege, and adviser of Jones'. So there's a sniff of a vanity project here. But at the same time, some serious people, and wealthy people, are behind it. And more recently, that includes one of Australia's wealthiest men providing several million dollars to fund this.

ANGE:

After the break, who’s backing ADH TV, and will it take off?

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ANGE:

Marty, we've been talking about some of the content on ADH TV, but there's also serious money in this project. Can you tell me about where that's coming from?

MARTY:

Well, Maurice Newman, former stockbroker, former chair of the ABC, and kind of avowed believer in new world order, founded Australian Digital Holdings, and he signed Alan Jones. I think, as kind of a lifeboat for Alan Jones's career. And James Packer, one of the country's wealthiest men, has put an unspecified amount of money — but it's several million at least — into it. Packer says he adores Alan Jones, is a long fan of his, has enjoyed his counsel over years. Another thing is that when Alan Jones was on sort of terrestrial or more traditional platforms, advertisers were getting pretty nervous. And at 2GB, he was haemorrhaging advertisers, they were very anxious. At ADH TV it's kind of different in that advertisers aren't necessarily coming specifically for Alan Jones. They're just buying space or time on popular sites. And apparently they’re just breaking, breaking even.

A lot of comparisons are made to Newsmax, so Newsmax in America serves as a kind of a niche rival to Fox News. It's been around since the nineties. The Newsmax comparison is made in Australia. I guess it serves in one way that ADH TV is to Sky News at night what Newsmax is to Fox in America. But we're dealing with massively smaller, smaller numbers. You know, the hope for Alan Jones and Maurice Newman obviously is to grow that, but at the moment the numbers are fairly modest, and Jones's fans are ageing as well.

ANGE:

Yeah. Can you tell me a bit more about the reach of this platform? How big is it, and who are they reaching?

MARTY:

The numbers are a bit disputed. I've seen some that suggest they get between 120-140,000 hits a day, which for a relatively modest operation that has got a couple of studios in Sydney, there's a podcast studio, a small TV studio. The production values are fairly modest. I guess those numbers aren't that bad, but they're also not, kind of, earth shaking and they're far below what Maurice Newman's kind of bullish optimism was when they launched. So I guess, you know, there's a certain subjectivity here about whether or not that is an alarming number or not. It seems fairly modest to me, though.

ANGE:

And Marty, I guess they're not reaching the audience the founders would have been hoping for yet, but we've seen how projects like this, even if they're only reaching a relatively niche audience, can have harmful real world impacts. What is the potential, do you think, for these ideas that they're talking about to cause damage and actually take off?

MARTY:

There's a few things… I mean, I've been thinking a lot about this. I have complicated feelings, Ange.

I think in Australia, there are far more neutrals than combatants in the culture wars, and that's a good thing. Certainly I think that the conspiratorial style, or the paranoid style in politics, it draws a little bit from reality. And so if you have declining trust in democratic institutions, you're going to have increasing faith in angry prophets, and people that are spouting conspiracies. So I think it's upon all of us to improve the health of our democratic institutions. And when I say, like, it feeds a little bit on reality, we saw the flourishing of conspiracy theories generally increase massively during the pandemic.

But we're still, I think, now a few years on, at the point where extraordinary uses of power have still not been scrutinised properly. And I think if there's any failures in governance or there's any contempt for accountability by our leaders, it's in that space where conspiracists will thrive. So it's not just upon, you know, ADH TV, to restrain themselves or to be chastened or to have a commitment to fairness and openness. In places where conspiracy theories thrive and attention seekers thrive, they're fed by our own distrust in democratic institutions.

ANGE:

Marty, thanks so much for your time.

MARTY:

Thanks, Ange.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today….

New South Wales Upper House MP, Mark Latham, has accused One Nation of allegedly defrauding electoral funds.

Latham quit One Nation to sit as an independent, after he was fired as the party’s leader in NSW.

Mark Latham detailed the allegations in a letter he sent to the special minister of state, and tabled it in Parliament yesterday.

And…

Ita Buttrose will step down as ABC chair at the end of her current term in March 2024.

The media veteran was praised by communications minister Michelle Rowland for ‘outstanding leadership’ in five years as head of the national broadcaster.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back tomorrow.

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