2 Media Companies will control 86% of Australia’s Media we need the ABC more than ever but they are demanding the LNP destroy it as well, Where is free speech when it’s privatised and becomes just another product to sell to corporate buyers. (ODT)

In the 1980s, Keating as Treasurer had overseen new media rules that prevented media owners from owning both TV stations and newspapers. They had to choose, as he said, whether to be ”queens of the screen or princes of print”.

Packer thus was ring-fenced into being a queen of the screen, while Rupert Murdoch gained more and more of the nation’s print outlets.

Packer, from a newspaper-owning family, wasn’t suitably gratified. He wanted to get his hands on Fairfax and what he called its “rivers of gold” — massive income from classified advertisements in its newspapers.

And so, a feud grew.

Keating revealed his old penchant for doing over his enemies slowly.

“Kerry Packer had the Nine Network chase me in private life,” he said.

“But I’m a big boy, I know how to punch. People said to me after a whole series of things on 60 Minutes. They said, ‘Mr Keating, are you going to take Mr Packer to court for defamation?’ I said, ‘No, I have more expensive remedies in mind for Mr Packer’.

“That was taking Fairfax from him, which I had [Senator] Brian Harradine do in 1997 to 1998. In other words, I made sure he didn’t allow Howard to get a majority to let Turnbull do what he did today.”

via Paul Keating’s loathing of all things Packer will never die