Sky News Australia Rebrands to News24 Amid Controversies and Lawsuit

There are only three more sleeps until Sky News Australia disappears. But the shouty TV arm of the Murdoch empire will rise again on Monday with a new name and livery, News24.

“It’s a continuation of what we’ve already been doing really,” says host Peter Stefanovic in a promo. “It’s presenting and delivery of the news in a calm, truthful and accurate way.”

Calm, truthful and accurate are interesting words to use to describe Sky After Dark’s lineup of rightwing commentators Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin, Chris Kenny and Rita Panahi, who consistently take aim at one side of politics.

After 30 years on air Sky has been forced to rebrand before News Corp’s 10-year deal with UK Sky News expires in December and it loses the rights to the name.

In February Anthony Albanese and the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, opened News24’s new broadcast centre at the company’s Surry Hills headquarters with its eight studios and six control rooms. Lachlan Murdoch, who has been Sky’s biggest champion, was a no-show after his mother, Anna Murdoch-Mann, died.

News Corp bosses are anxious about losing a recognisable brand name like Sky News, especially when News 24 was once the ABC News channel’s name and many still call it by that name.

Although the ABC dropped the name in 2017, replacing it with ABC News Channel, the public broadcaster still refers to the rolling news platform as “ABC News 24” in some contexts because it is located on channel 24 on broadcast free-to-air TV.

Luckily, News Corp has newspapers to assist in the marketing of the new name.

On Monday The Australian’s media section ran a profile of Panahi, who was described as “the host of one of the nation’s most wildly successful social media segments”.

“The left give us so much to mock,” Panahi told reporter Steve Jackson. “There is such rich, abundant material and I think so many are fed up with the lunacy of the modern left.”

During the week the tabloids rolled out full-page ads featuring a countdown to Monday, with Sky hosts portrayed like Hollywood stars.

Concerned local

Just before it left its old identity behind, Sky News Australia ran a news feature about the Tasmanian town of Richmond in its series inviting viewers to have their say on the upcoming Bush Summit, sponsored by News Corp.

“Here we are in Richmond, Tasmania, just two traffic lights from Hobart,” host Jaynie Seal says, before going on to interview locals in the picturesque town.

“Really, not too dissimilar from what Australians are experiencing across the whole country,” says one woman in a coffee shop. “To be honest, you know, cost of living is a real issue.”

What the program did not disclose was that the woman is Pauline Hanson’s daughter, Lee Hanson, a senior adviser to the New South Wales senator Sean Bell in a taxpayer-funded role worth as much as $180,000 a year.

The interview was spotted by the trade publication MediaWeek.

‘I would have said something about Trump’

Socceroo turned commentator Craig Foster has been the face of World Cup coverage on SBS for 24 years and we were not the only ones who noticed his absence for this year’s tournament.

Foster stepped down as an SBS staffer in 2020 but returned as a commentator for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where he used the broadcast to highlight human rights abuses.

This week Foster revealed why he didn’t appear this year: “I didn’t do this World Cup because everyone involved knows that I would have said something about Trump … because he’s hosting the World Cup.”

Speaking to the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young on her new weekly podcast, Foster said his passionate activism was the reason he left SBS in 2020: “I was speaking too much about refugees.”

Foster told Hanson-Young there was “a line” SBS felt he crossed even though he insisted he was talking about human rights rather than being critical of the Australian government directly.

“But this is the sensitivity of corporate world, everyone has their line where it is,” he said. SBS is funded both by the government and by advertising.

Foster said he accepted he had to pay for his choice to be outspoken but he was happy with the decision.

An SBS spokesperson told Weekly Beast: “Craig Foster has made a significant and valued contribution to football broadcasting in Australia and to SBS over many years.

“SBS’s coverage of the FIFA World Cup has evolved across four decades, with each tournament bringing a refreshed on-air line-up and new voices.

“For 2026, the focus was on delivering a distinctive, high-quality experience for Australians through strong storytelling, diverse perspectives and continued broadcast innovation.”

A whimsical way with words

Robert James Dell’Oro Thomson has risen from being a humble copy boy on the Herald Sun to the global chief of News Corp at its headquarters in New York.

Given his particular turn of phrase it’s a pity he chose the corporate path because his copy is a wild ride. This week he produced a statement about News Corp’s lawsuit against the search engine Brave Software that would not be out of place in a book by the children’s author and illustrator Graeme Base.

“Brave are content crooks and brand brigands,” Thomson said. “They have shamelessly stolen and then perfidiously profited from that pilfering by illicitly fencing our journalists’ work. Instead of a licence, they have licentiously looted with blatant disregard to the severe damage done to the information ecosystem.

“This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future. These byte burglars and bootleggers, these content contrabandists are seriously undermining the integrity of AI and IP.”

Brave has argued that summarising News Corp content and indexing it to make it searchable amounts ⁠to fair use.

We can only surmise that Thomson is hankering for the days when he could exercise his skill as a feature writer for the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s.

Unwelcome spotlight

Seven’s Spotlight presented us with an ugly spectacle this week and it wasn’t just the sight of Pauline Hanson walking through the UK town of Luton with Tommy Robinson, described by Hugh Riminton as a “thug, a fraudster, a bully and a bigot”.

As we reported earlier this week, Spotlight inadvertently showed us how the tabloid current affairs sausage is made. The One Nation leader, furious at how the program turned out, posted Seven’s original pitch on Facebook.

It revealed that to get Hanson on board Spotlight had adopted a strong anti-immigration position.

But when reporter Liam Bartlett sat down with Hanson for the interview he challenged her views and was critical of her decision to meet Robinson, a convicted criminal. It was far from the sympathetic treatment promised in the pitch.

Hanson hated it, as did her fans and they lined up behind her in the comments.

“I had a lot of respect for Liam Bartlett until this episode last night,” one wrote on Facebook. “It was extremely biased and his approach was smug, combative and condescending.”

Another said: “Absolutely disgraceful that they diverted so much from what they said they wanted to cover and instead just tried to attack Pauline.”

Spotlight defended the pitch, saying it was one of hundreds of emails, phone calls and messages over more than six months.

“Spotlight is proud to have produced a balanced piece of journalism which fairly quizzed Senator Hanson but also allowed her views to be explored and heard in a high-rating special and we thank Senator Hanson for her candid access,” a spokesperson said.