Kerry Stokes, who owns this particular picture, is an enigmatic character. Go to Wikipedia, and you find a couple of paras – not much for number 476 on the Forbes Rich List. Flick through google and you assemble a few more tantalising details, like this, from the ABC:

“Kerry Stokes who inherited not a cent, a teenager on the streets, surviving as best he could in post-war Melbourne, working a variety of jobs before the dawn of television saw him installing TV aerials on Perth roof-tops. Now he commands a television network, and though Mr Stokes would hate the descriptions of rags to riches and self-made man, his early life made him tough, shrewd, direct and independent, and an outspoken critic of business and government, a rarity among media CEOs.”

He was an orphan, who ran away from his adoptive parents when he was around thirteen years old, to live on the streets.

So how did he end up here?

“Through his private company, Australian Capital Equity, Mr Stokes has broad business interests and investments in a range of major business sectors, including property, construction, mining, oil and gas exploration, and manufacturing – including Westrac which is the Caterpillar equipment dealer for Western Australia, New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory and nine provinces in North eastern China.”

And of course he owns what is actually the largest television network in Australia, which airs more Australian drama than any of the others – according to his own reckoning.

Now he has sold a fifty percent stake in his organisation, including the Seven Network, the magazines and Yahoo7, to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, a “a New York City-based private equity firm that focuses primarily on late stage leveraged buyouts”, which savaged Nabisco and hurt its own shareholders grievously in the process.

Here’s a standard description of the deal:

‘KERRY STOKES’s Seven Network is now one of the biggest predators in the local media market, armed with a war chest of $3.2 billion after taking on a new partner, private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

Seven has sold a half share in its main media assets – Channel 7, Pacific Magazines and its online joint venture with Yahoo – to KKR and both partners have agreed to pursue further acquisitions in Australia and New Zealand together.

KKR, which was an underbidder for a half share in James Packer’s media spin-off last month, will invest $735 million for its 50 per cent economic interest in the new joint venture, Seven Media Group, which will also hold $2.5 billion of debt.

Mr Stokes, who owns 43 per cent of Seven, said yesterday the cash proceeds from the deal would be used to take advantage of the “dynamics” of the local media landscape, ahead of changes to ownership rules next year.

New acquisitions will be made via Seven Media, with both KKR and Seven tipping in cash to the new vehicle as needed. It also has the capacity to borrow another $350 million.

But Mr Stokes, who will remain executive chairman of Seven and take on the chairman’s role at Seven Media, was not forthcoming about which assets might be targeted.

He said Seven Media had not yet considered an acquisition of John Fairfax Holdings, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald…”

So Kerry Stokes has now become the kid with the biggest lolly bag on the block, able to buy and sell playmates as he chooses. There is a strand of altruism in him which is absent in his competitors, who are treating Australian television as a cash cow to be milked until it collapses in the back paddock unable to move.

What happens when he sits across the board table with the greed heads at KKR is another matter.

From a cultural point of view, he has done his bit to ensure that Australian television has been trasformed from a source of profits which could be used on local production to a debtor burdened by savage interest payments. The proprietors have found a way to cry poor and get rich at the same time, immune to the demands that they do something constructive with a medium they hold in trust.

Many people, of course, say this is hippified nonsense, proof that I have been supping with fairies at the bottom of the garden. In reply, I’ll quote the words of one of the most reviled people in British television – Charles Allen, who ran ITV until a month ago. He is speaking at the Edinburgh Television Festival, where he delivered the MacTaggart Lecture:

I’ll then address how the challenges facing ITV over the last 15 years – and into the next – demand radical thinking. But then I want to set out what I believe is the big question in British broadcasting – a billion pound question. How can we continue to enjoy the breadth and range and quality of British TV that we all grew up with, the programmes that moved us, the dramas that changed us, the shows that just made our lives a bit more of a laugh?
It’s a question that again will not be resolved by half-measures or fine-tuning.”

He is a completely commercial animal, a dealer and suit to the bottom of his hand-made shoes. He simply assumes that the business of British commercial television is first to deliver good British programs that honours a tradition which has been poured into our Australian heads since 1956.

Here, television is about output deals with American networks, ducking under the pathetic content regulations which Coonan wants to replace with laws about pornography. And about finding the money to pay the interest on all that debt those bastards have given their networks, as they sold the farm to foreign players.

We know what they are like. CanWest is useless to the spirit of Network Ten, sees it only as a disposable overseas asset which it will keep to sustain its own shivery share price in far Toronto.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Austrapolitics, journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.