Queensland Press

"As D’Arcy would describe the manoeuvre, when the market opened that Monday, Murdoch bid $4 a share for shares that had been trading at $2.70. He made it known he was looking for half of the 63 million Herald shares on issue, and commissioned JBWere to buy them. Millions of shares changed hands, but by the end of the day Murdoch realised he could not force his way into controlling the company because Queensland Press and Fairfax were playing ‘white knight’ to rescue the Herald & Weekly Times. Fairfax mainly wanted to protect its interest in The Age, which far preferred to maintain its cosy competition with the Herald & Weekly Times than with a hostile News Limited. Stokes would later comment, ‘Egos made strange bedfellows.’ Fairfax threw millions at the market and secured enough shares to rebuff Murdoch, but made what Stokes calls a ‘technical error’ of flagging their intentions ahead. While the rescuers were buying with both hands, eyes wide shut, Murdoch sold them a dummy. Suddenly and silently, he started selling — but not through JBWere, the firm that had done the buying for him. Instead, he quietly briefed another stockbroker, May & Mellor. Before anyone at Flinders Street — or at Fairfax’s Sydney office or Queensland Press — realised what was happening, May & Mellor had quietly unloaded Murdoch’s 3.5 million Herald shares at a premium: $5.52 per share. By midday of day two, the shares had slid back to $3.75 and Murdoch had announced he was out of the race, at least for the time being. But he had made $3 million cash between breakfast and lunch."

"enemy more easily, Fairfax’s directors had sacrificed an irretrievable asset in their rush to defend the Herald & Weekly Times against Murdoch. As Stokes and the wily Ken Parker would find out, Fairfax had held a unique advantage for a decade: it enjoyed what was dubbed the ‘grandfathering’ exemption from media laws passed in the 1960s to prevent any one owner from controlling three television licences. Because Fairfax already owned interests in television stations in Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra — and what Stokes calls ‘a cobweb of interlaced shareholdings in regional TV stations’ — before the legislation was passed in 1969, it was allowed to retain the three capital city licences. Latecomers had to be content with two. By buying a 15 per cent stake in the Herald & Weekly Times to fight off Murdoch’s apparent raid, they had breached the ‘grandfather’ clause — and, in effect, would be forced to sell either QTQ-9 in Brisbane or CTC-7 in Canberra. Not only had Fairfax breached the rules, and in doing so abandoned an edge it enjoyed in the media marketplace, but it had also borrowed a fortune to do it. With Potter Partners leading the stampede, Fairfax had spent $50 million on 9.5 million HWT shares. Queensland Press had spent $20 million. Hindsight would show that in doing so they had both squandered the contents of their war chests — paying too much for newspapers that had reached their peak of influence and profitability and were now blundering towards a cliff no-one could then imagine, let alone see. Later, Stokes would link the decline of the once great house of Fairfax with this panicky response to the first Murdoch raid."