Ahead of the WA election, how barren is the media landscape under King Kerry?

To call Western Australia’s media market concentrated is an understatement — there are likely North Korean consumers with broader media diets. In much the same way that Queensland is owned by News Corp, the newspaper market in WA is dominated by billionaire Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media. 

A reminder: The West Australian is the only major local newspaper in Perth. As a voter looking to get informed ahead of walking into the ballot box for the state election on March 8, your options beyond that are limited. There’s The Nightly, also owned by Seven West. The evening television news, with a one-in-five chance of being Seven West. And then the local paper in your town or electorate, but — you guessed it — you’ll be lucky if they’re not owned by Seven West too.

This handy map care of Seven West’s advertisers webpage says it all.

So how has the media fared covering the election so far, with voting day looming?

Zempilas coverage

A recent ABC Media Watch segment, “Seven boosts Basil” — in reference to Liberal candidate for the super-marginal seat of Churchlands, Perth Lord Mayor Basil Zempilas — serves as a good taste of how media rolls in WA. The high-profile Zempilas has worked for Seven as a reporter and presenter for just about three decades and was a cult figure as part of its football coverage. 

When Zempilas first announced his political ambitions, the tight relationship between himself and the dominant media entity in WA was criticised at the time, including in Crikey. In late February, Media Watch went deep on Seven’s coverage of Zempilas, accusing it of being hostile to his opponents and soft on Zempilas himself. 

The ABC program cited an Independent Media Council ruling that upheld three complaints made by Zempilas’ opponent for lord mayor in 2023, Sandy Anghie, against the West Australian’s coverage of her. Notably, the Independent Media Council is made up entirely of Seven West Media-owned entities.

Another reminder: Seven West resigned its membership of the Press Council in 2012, with the West Australian’s then editor-in-chief Bob Cronin calling it a “cudgel with which zealots, bigots, academics and despotic politicians are able to beat newspapers which dare to depart from their view of the world”. 

The response to Media Watch from Christopher Dore, editor-in-chief of The West Australian and The Nightly, was equally as colourful as his predecessor’s descriptions of the Press Council, describing the ABC program as “gullibly” taking up “shameless local political and personal agendas”, and the claims as an “undergraduate hypothesis”. Dore described Media Watch’s sources as “troublemaking informants” and the suggestion of favourable treatment as “naive, deliberately misleading and wrong”. 

Price hikes

More options might have been available to media consumers in Western Australia had Seven West not made certain business decisions last year, namely doubling the printing costs for The Australian Financial Review, which is printed by Seven-owned Colourpress in WA. 

Colourpress, the only printer of major papers in Western Australia, made the move following critical coverage of, let’s call them Seven’s corporate practices, in the Financial Review’s pages. Seven maintains it was merely a business decision. That said, the same terms weren’t forced on News Corp, for which Colourpress also prints The Australian in WA. 

The resulting fallout resulted in a week of inside-baseball coverage over approximately 2,000 papers, with headlines like “Paper tigers rip and snarl over $3,000 a day”. 

Crikey founder Stephen Mayne has argued that Stokes should be made to sell off the company with its increasingly declining financial results and outsized impact on Western Australian democracy. 

Cosy with McGowan and falling financials

Stokes has always had a Murdoch-like relationship with whomever gains power in Western Australia. Indeed, Stokes had a very close relationship with Mark McGowan, who won the last state election in such a landslide that the Liberal Party in WA almost ceased to exist at all at a parliamentary level. It’s reported that the WA Liberals remain conscious of the importance of Kerry’s blessing, and both parties will be conscious of his influence heading into Saturday.

Meanwhile, Seven has been floundering (as have a number of media companies) in the wake of several challenges over the past 12 to 18 months. 

Unlike its competitors, Seven doesn’t have subscription streaming services to fall back on during an advertising downturn. It recently reported its worst-ever half-yearly profit figures, and the company slashed $100 million worth of jobs in June 2024, which CEO Jeff Howard foreshadowed following the withdrawal of Meta from its news publishing deals. However, Seven has seen some success on-screen with a bumper 2024 AFL season and competitive ratings for cricket. 

On March 8, at least when it comes to Basil, we’ll have an answer as to what kind of return on investment Kerry Stokes gets these days.