Another
attempt by the Nine Network’s Business Sunday to
remain on the pace – or to be ahead of the
pace – yesterday. Indeed, an aggravating overuse of the word “indeed” by host Ali
Moore at the start of the program when discussing the impact of
Hurricane Katrina: three times within five minutes. Arrrgghhh!

It was a solo flight
for Business Sunday. The Bulletin seems to have slipped from the program’s
consciousness – the tagline “With The Bulletin” was not
be seen, except for an ad in the last break just before 9am.

The program was again
dominated by Ali Moore who hosted and did a long feature on Gerry Harvey of Harvey
Norman and his managing director wife Katie Page in Slovenia. Moore
also did a live cross to New
Orleans with Nine reporter
Robert Penfold and then backed up with a studio
chat with economist Chris Caton, while Oriel Morrison did a superfluous story on the Forbes CEO conference.

Emphasising the shortage of
competent staff and the way Business Sunday has been run down, Nine
News police reporter in Sydney, Adam Walters did an average story on the
fortunes of construction group, Multiplex. That
was nothing more than a “stopper” to the promoted Four
Corners special report airing tomorrow night.

Ross
Greenwood, the putative Nine Network Finance Editor, talked to Stephen Lowy about
the future of Myer. On the pace but an average interview, short
on probing, difficult questions.


Inside Business on the ABC looked at the funny bid for
brewer Coopers by Lion Nathan. There’s
an old fashioned family feud in Coopers, some history of dodgy share agreements
from the eighties and a potential monopoly in South Australia that the ACCC would be
interested in. A successful bid would give Lion 70% of the South Australian
market. That might be a little too much.

But it
does explain that strange sharp jump in Lion Nathan shares ten days ago on the back
of investment bank sources’ speculation of a takeover bid. Nothing of the sort,
it was obviously a leak about negotiations with Coopers that was sanitised and
pushed out into the market.


Inside
Business talked to both Lion and Coopers for a unique view of both sides of what
could be a dirty and essentially meaningless takeover battle. But it
was current.

And it would have been a good story for
Business Sunday. But they obviously don’t have enough bodies, despite
Ali Moore’s good work. Business Sunday had good coverage of Katrina, while Inside Business
skipped this except in markets coverage which was superficial: the markets have
consistently missed the size and scope of what was happening in New Orleans and
concentrated too much on oil prices.

The
costs of the New Orleans clean up and righting
the scandal are bigger stories than petrol prices for the
US economy.
Inside
Business, though, did look at the scandal that’s the billion dollar collapse of
Sons of Gwalia that still is
unexplained.

So
overall, a good effort by the two programs: both sort of on the
pace.