As this blog reported this last night, Channel has Nine finally given up on its attempts to suppress Mark Llewellyn's affidavit and has ended its proceedings in the New South Wales Supreme Court. Accordingly Nine has also dumped its attempt to force Fairfax and News Limited journalists to disclose their sources for the leaked copies of the affidavit. Read more here. And you can, at long last, read the affidavit here, courtesy of Crikey (The Weekend Australian has also published extracts from the affidavit).
The media's attention now turns to the damage this week has done to the Nine Network. The Weekend Australian had three such articles this morning (including the editorial).
Errol Simper looks at the "Network's soap opera":
KERRY Packer's treasured Nine Network is beginning to look eerily similar to the way the ABC looked under one of its former managing directors, Jonathan Shier. It has come close to resembling a media circus.
Nine staff instructed to prepare negative stories about the proprietor of the rival Seven Network, Kerry Stokes. Executives plotting to "bone", or fire, Today program host Jessica Rowe. Desperate efforts by Nine lawyers to suppress salacious affidavits from fired or threatened presenters and executives. The boss, James Packer, playing polo in England while 100 Nine employees are being sacked. Headlines in Sydney's The Daily Telegraph such as "Home James".
Ye gods. It's all a bit like one of those soap operas during which viewers get this uncomfortable suspicion the scriptwriter went quietly mad halfway through the second episode.
And what does Simper concludes?
You know what Circus Nine needs, do you not? You're absolutely correct. It needs Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer.
Read the full article here.
Brad Norington focuses on the enormously difficult task that Eddie McGuire now has:
The immediate management shambles McGuire confronts at Nine is a direct result of budget cuts demanded across the network's news and current affairs shows early last month by Nine's owners, Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd.
Fear and loathing among staff has reached alarming levels since PBL's chief executive John Alexander and chairman James Packer insisted that McGuire slash $15million and shed 100 staff - about 20 per cent of the news and current affairs team - to lift Nine's profitability.
But the underlying story of what is happening at Nine is related to the death on Boxing Day last year of its chief patron, Kerry Packer, and the network's failure to come to grips with a changing media market.
Read more here.
Norington also looks as the bizarre attempts by nine to suppress Llewellyn's affidavit:
Among the oddities of the past week has been the desperate attempt by Nine to try to suppress public dissemination of embarrassing information. Nine's lawyers rushed to the NSW Supreme Court seeking an injunction when Llewellyn's affidavit was leaked to The Australian, internet newsletter website Crikey and other media organisations.
Justice Joe Campbell granted one temporarily on Monday. But the absurdity has been clear from the start, with Crikey's versions still being circulated by email, and newspapers, including The Australian, publishing the affidavit's contents outside NSW.
The difficulty Nine has in maintaining its journalistic credibility was underlined in the Federal Court on Thursday afternoon when Justice Steven Rares effectively mocked the network.
When Nine barrister Tony Bannon sought protection from the release of "untested allegations", Rares said: "That's an interesting submission for a media organisation. They are not normally seeking to suppress information from the public gaze."
Rares also pointed out to Nine that "embarrassment was not a sufficient reason to block publication of information and the network had standard things such as public statements to rebut untested allegations".
Read more here.
This point is also taken up in the editorial, "The empire crumbles: Television's Rome burns while Nine's emperors fiddle". For example:
There was pure madness in Nine's method this week. The broadcaster's strategy of handing to lawyers what began as a spat with gun producer Mark Llewellyn over his contract backfired badly, leaving Nine damaged in a way that could set back for years its battle to recapture its former ratings dominance. A speedy settlement with Llewellyn, a watertight confidentiality agreement and a large dose of spin from the media organisation's personal phalanx of publicists would surely have seen the controversy vanish. Instead, Nine resorted to a ludicrous court process to suppress in NSW an embarrassing affidavit by Llewellyn the rest of the country was free to read and is anyway available on the internet. The document is believed to contain a series of ugly discussions between senior Nine figures revealing possible plans to sack Today presenter Jessica Rowe and hinting at editorial interference at Nine by Mr Alexander. But now everybody can read about the network's managerial mess when their exercise in idiocy was ended last night with the lifting of the suppression order.
Read more here.
Of course, the Fairfax papers also cover this story, see The Age here and The Sydney Morning Herald here, here and here.
