With corporate rivals stalking him, his own board at loggerheads over his behaviour and reports of damaging anonymous emails circulating about him, it’s no wonder outgoing Nine CEO Hugh Marks was described as “emotional” this past weekend.
He even raised the question of whether “someone was out to get [him]”.
If there was, then the list of suspects could be very long.
At the top of the list would be Marks himself, who seemed to do a good job of blowing up his own career with not one but two questionable relationships with female staff in the past year.
While he has denied allegations of an affair with his executive assistant Jane Routledge, despite press photos of them enjoying a cosy picnic during a lunch break in May, he has now confirmed that he is romantically involved with former Nine executive Alexi Baker.
That admission — in an interview with one of his own reporters, respected gossip columnist Andrew Hornery — that sparked an emergency board meeting and the sudden announcement of Marks’ resignation.
The timing is interesting given that Hornery states clearly in the piece, written on Friday, “that the board had been made aware of the relationship”. So why the dramatic meeting on Saturday morning after the piece appeared?
All this only two days after the Nine AGM where chair Peter Costello was specifically asked about Marks’ relationship with an employee and dismissed it as “not breaching company policies or its code”.
This is hardly surprising given Nine doesn’t seem to have a specific policy or code on this issue, as revealed in a news story in their own papers last week.
Also we assume that Costello was then talking about the first allegation which Marks has denied, not the second one we didn’t know about yet — although to be fair, it is hard to keep up.
Marks seems to not only have divided his own board (meetings lacked “calmness”, he admitted Sunday) but perhaps his own staff; an anonymous email exposing the Nine culture appeared after the AGM.
But the main catalyst was that Nine was expecting another hatchet job from rival News Corp papers. The same gossip columnist who broke the picnic tête-à-tête in May was about to do another story in The Sunday Tele.
Marks pre-empted it by agreeing to speak with Hornery who already had the story. Interestingly, the normally sensitive editorial executives allowed him to run with it despite the enormous implications.
That brings us to the more disturbing question of what role Nine’s commercial rival, News Corp, played in bringing down the CEO with a campaign in its papers about his private life.
There’s obviously a febrile atmosphere for such stories, from the recent AMP scandals to last week’s Four Corners program about politicians having inappropriate relationships with staff.
At the time of the May story, complete with paparazzi staking out Marks and Routledge lazing in a park, there were questions raised about the role of News Corp in undermining the chief of its main media competitor.
It’s the type of intimidation that is routine for their tabloids on Fleet Street. Given the current outcry over News Corp’s nefarious influence on our political scene, and the half a million signatures for Kevin Rudd’s anti-News petition, it could raise new questions about misuse of media power for corporate gain.
At the very least it confirms the rank hypocrisy of the News organisation which has plenty of its own executives and editors who have had affairs with staff. The company also continues to hire men from other media organisations who have form.
With News Australia, in particular its Foxtel arm, in dire financial shape the paranoia about the growing success of their main rival at Nine has become palpable.
The other beneficiary of any destabilisation at the top of Nine is its main television competitor, the Seven Network. Seven is also going through turmoil. Just last month it was confirmed that, despite denials to the market, owner Kerry Stokes had indeed been shopping the network around to potential buyers — thus far unsuccessfully.
News might not be a buyer for Seven outright but the two have been rumoured to look at merging their news operations to give the struggling Sky News a free-to-air outlet after Lachlan Murdoch lost the takeover for the Ten network.
And in case anyone had forgotten Seven’s much more shameful history in CEO sexual misconduct, Hornery had an interview in The Sun-Herald on Sunday with Amber Harrison, the former lover of ex Seven CEO Tim Worner.
Despite sleazy claims of everything from cocaine snorting to expense rorting between the pair, it was Harrison who was hounded by the Seven legal team. Months later an independent probe cleared Worner of misconduct. He stayed on for a further three years as CEO.
The contrast with Marks’ swift demise is telling.
What do you make of Hugh Marks’ resignation, and what it means for Nine? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column.
What a wonderful turn of phrase “respected gossip columnist”
I’m sure Hornery would be delighted to have that on his business card.
Fair point of course, although muck-raking is often more likely than “investigative journalism” to compromise the demigods of business.
So funny that was the line that I picked up on too, surely an oxymoron! 🙂
Wonderful contradiction in terms but I’m curious as to why he was given the story.
If it was damage control, what’s the really damaging story being pre-empted/deflated?
Wow! Until this morning I had not heard of that Marks, now he rates a whole series if articles in Crikey.
Must be Earth shaking stuff.
Harpo’s cousin. Talks too much.
I’m afraid I must be getting too old for all this nonsense. How can “respected gossip columnist” not be an oxymoron?
I didn’t want to use your last word as it used to trip the Modbot – unable to distinguish a term of grammar from insult.
” …Hugh Marks…questions he leaves behind”.
Who cares?
I am not against workplace relationships. We are a strange species and there is no predicting when and where there will be an attraction between two people. I don’t think we have any real choices in who we are attracted to. Where we DO have choices is how we manage that and in the workplace, the one factor that is usually missing, which just happens to be the thing, I believe, which is fundamental to a relationship working, is being a grown-up. My rules with a workplace relationship are that the parties have to be discrete; they have to keep their relationship out-of-the-office; they can’t work together and the subordinate absolutely must not work directly with the more powerful party (staggering how often businesses really screw this up) and above all, neither should be surprised if and when it all “blows up in their faces”. In the case of people who are in prominent public roles, there is the additional pressure of media scrutiny and, typically, blatant hypocrisy (consider President Morrison’s frenzied attack on Emma Husar, but his pompous, inept, insipid if not absurd defence of Porter and Tudge).
Firms that manage this well either prohibit relationships (there is no set of rules that deal comfortably with all of the variables), or will have a clear policy that is enforced, but in. But, I have seen large professional firms utterly screw this up, by letting a person in authority (always male) directly supervise their partner (usually female). Where others know of the relationship, this changes the dynamic for the rest of the workplace, because the partner usually then has and abuses their quais-power, all the while doing immense damage to staff morale. All too often, the partner becomes the “spy” or fellow workers come to see them as a “mole”. Invariably, reacting to the damage being done is put into the too hard basket or ignored altogether – in the Tudge case, the Dept of Finance can’t act against the Minister in any case, which is why these matters are referred to that dept. It is nevertheless a really vexing issue and in most cases, the “employer” is always on the back foot, but where “doing nothing” still includes mounting a campaign against one or the other in the relationship this issue can become very sordid.