How to takeover TVNZ and RNZ with pocket change
- Grant McLachlan
- 13 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Stuff was bought for $1. Newshub’s TV news operation was absorbed into it. NZME was infiltrated by Jim Grenon. Is TVNZ and RNZ next?
In 2020, one of the country’s largest news operations changed hands for the price of a chocolate bar: Nine Entertainment sold Stuff to its own chief executive for a single dollar.
In 2024, the country’s biggest commercial television newsroom, Newshub, was shut down outright — nearly 300 jobs gone — its 6pm bulletin handed to Stuff to produce for Three.
And in 2025, a Canadian-born billionaire walked into NZME and, within months, had reshaped its board and become its largest shareholder. Newsrooms have rarely looked so cheap, or so contestable.
So here is a thought experiment.
Suppose someone wanted not merely to own a newspaper, but to capture the two broadcasters New Zealanders jointly own — TVNZ and RNZ.
How much would it really cost, and what would the playbook look like? And would much of what we have watched over the past two years look any different?
Contents
A thought experiment
The first obstacle is that you cannot simply buy what the public owns.
TVNZ and RNZ are state assets, so there are no shares to accumulate on a Friday afternoon. The move, then, is not to purchase the broadcasters but to change the political and commercial weather around them until selling them looks less like a giveaway and more like a rescue.
The groundwork is already poured.
The Labour government scrapped the planned RNZ–TVNZ mega-merger in February 2023, yet the two are converging anyway: RNZ is spending roughly $11 million to move into TVNZ’s Auckland building. When that arrangement was first revealed, even NZME’s own Media Insider asked whether it amounted to a “merger by stealth”.
Two public broadcasters under one roof is also two public broadcasters that could one day be sold as a single lot.
And the price of entry, as I have argued before, is far lower than most people assume.
The logic of a siege
To take a stronghold without storming it, a besieger does three things in sequence: cut the supply lines, pick off the long-range weapons, then wait for the walls to weaken from within.
Translated into media terms, the campaign has three stages — isolate, infiltrate, integrate. None of them requires a hostile bid. Most of them have a respectable public justification ready to hand.
You do not need to storm a newsroom you can starve.
Starving the newsroom
RNZ runs almost entirely on public money. TVNZ runs on advertising and NZ on Air funding.
So you begin with the purse. Budget 2026 delivered a funding squeeze that left RNZ calling for voluntary redundancies, and the minister responsible was happy to take credit, telling supporters the government had “delivered a significant funding cut to RNZ” as a message to taxpayer-funded media.
At the same time the government moved to scrap the Broadcasting Standards Authority, removing one of the few guardrails that sits between a broadcaster and its critics.
A starved newsroom does not die all at once. The expensive, slow work goes first — long-form investigative journalism, the kind that takes months and annoys powerful people — a slow death I have watched play out across the sector.
Cheaper fare fills the gap.
The hypothetical besieger does not even have to organise the decline; the budget line does the work, and the redundancies look like prudence rather than strategy.
Picking off the watchdogs
With the supply lines cut, you turn to the long-range weapons: the journalists who still set the news agenda.
You do not need to silence them so much as exhaust and isolate them.
Here the public record is striking. Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour has built an entire “David versus the Media” series, filming his own interviews with his own cameraman and fundraising off a promise to help ACT “cut through the media spin.” He has questioned whether RNZ should have hired John Campbell to Morning Report at all, and suggested TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman could not remain in her role — while reminding everyone that he is a shareholding minister for both broadcasters.
Then there is litigation.
NZME’s largest shareholder, Jim Grenon, quietly funded a defamation case against TVNZ brought by anti-co-governance campaigner Julian Batchelor. The reporter at the centre of it has since written that Grenon phoned Batchelor about the story before Batchelor had even seen it, to suggest he sue. TVNZ won “wholly”; its lawyers called the case a “Trojan horse,” and the broadcaster is now pursuing up to $300,000 in costs from Grenon himself.
Even the Prime Minister has played a part, warning an RNZ host “I’d be careful” mid-interview before stepping back from TVNZ’s Breakfast altogether.
Funding a lawsuit against a newsroom is a cheaper way to discipline it than buying it.
From the outside in
Stage two is infiltration — turning the stronghold’s own governance to your purpose.
You do not need a coup if you control the appointments. Seymour has said the government is reshaping RNZ’s board specifically to change “management and direction,” adding that “there’s a few more appointments to come”. Boards choose chief executives; chief executives choose what gets commissioned. Control the slow machinery of appointment and you never have to be seen ordering a single story spiked.
Ownership of the people who tell the story matters too. NZME’s own media columnist, who reports on his competitors’ fortunes, discloses a small shareholding in NZME — a disclosure made in good faith, but a reminder that when commentators hold equity in one player, audiences are entitled to ask where loyalties sit.
Meanwhile Grenon has kept buying, edging his NZME stake close to the 20% that would trigger a full takeover offer. A would-be acquirer of public media would want exactly this: a friendly private platform already in hand, and influence over who sits on the public ones.
And a friendly platform is only as useful as the story it tells.
Since the board fight, NZME has been chaired by Steven Joyce — a former National finance minister and the party’s campaign chair at five elections.
Its commercial heart is increasingly property: it owns OneRoof, one of the country’s major listing portals, and real-estate advertising is among any newsroom’s most valuable revenue. The softer copy points the same way — the Herald’s society column, written by Ricardo Simich, son of the former National minister Clem Simich and, by the paper’s own account, a man with ties to the National Party, lovingly chronicles the wealthy whose fortunes are mostly made in land.
None of this is improper, and an outlet is entitled to its own mix. But it leaves NZME less a neutral observer of the media war than its narrator — the platform that gets to dictate the battlefield, framing which advances count as aggression and which as rescue. And while its noisier allies mount their diversions at the gates — the free-speech crusades, the running war on “media spin” — the patient work of scaling the outer walls, the boardrooms, carries on largely unwatched.
Money is only half of it; a campaign like this would also want legal firepower — people who have taken on the state broadcaster before and know how to win.
The pool of such talent is small. Lady Deborah Chambers KC, one of the country’s pre-eminent silks, is the kind of figure any such effort would prize: years ago she acted for Richard Prebble in his landmark defamation case against TVNZ, which ran all the way to the Privy Council. Her public profile is, as it happens, rising on both sides of this story at once — she now writes a regular column for NZME’s NZ Herald, and was, days ago, the subject of a warm 1News profile.
This is a neat illustration of how small the cast is, and how the same names recur on every side of New Zealand’s media wars.
The rescue that isn’t
Stage three is integration — and this is where the thought experiment turns genuinely cheap.
Floating weakened public broadcasters would be politically toxic. But a private buyer riding to the rescue of a failing service is a story politicians can sell.
The precedent is recent. After the Commerce Commission, upheld by the Court of Appeal, blocked an NZME–Fairfax merger, Stuff ended up sold to management for that famous single dollar.
A regulator that once looked like the villain of media consolidation may be reluctant to play that role twice.
The template for absorbing a broadcaster’s newsroom on the cheap is already proven.
When Newshub, the country’s main commercial television news operation, was axed in 2024, its nightly bulletin did not so much vanish as change hands: it was handed to Stuff, rebranded ThreeNews and kept on Three with only a fraction of the original staff.
Stuff — now, through ThreeNews, the chief commercial rival to both TVNZ and NZME — had demonstrated that a broadcaster’s news can be dismantled and its output picked up by someone else for a fee in the low millions, rather than the cost of buying the whole operation.
You can also squeeze a media company without owning a share of it.
Businessman Troy Bowker bought the Petone building that houses Stuff’s printing presses and issued notice to quit — a move Media Insider itself described as a “masterstroke” that helped push Stuff to consolidate its printing in Christchurch and shed jobs.
Bowker, a self-described free-speech champion and critic of “left-wing” media, is also a political donor, giving $50,000 to ACT in its recent $600,000 donations surge.
In this version of events, the besieger never owns the assets outright; he simply makes a sale the only sensible exit, then a sympathetic buyer absorbs the wreckage at a bargain.
Following the money
Which brings us to the question that matters most: why?
Who would want any of this, and what would they gain?
Follow the money.
The country’s governing parties are awash with donations from people and companies that want influence, and a weakened watchdog — above all a weakened press — lowers the risk that the influence is ever traced.
A cluster of well-funded advocacy outfits already works that seam. The Taxpayers’ Union and the Free Speech Union were co-founded by the same lobbyist, Jordan Williams — the Free Speech Union grew out of the Taxpayers’ Union’s own office — and Williams also runs a campaigns-for-hire firm, the Campaign Company, whose clients have included Hobson’s Pledge and which has been repeatedly accused of running “astroturf” campaigns that manufacture the look of grassroots support (the firm says it merely provides professional campaign services).
David Farrar, the National Party’s pollster, co-founded the Taxpayers’ Union; the commentator Ani O’Brien sits on the Free Speech Union’s council and in the Campaign Company’s leadership. The same circle even supplies the political weather — the monthly Taxpayers’ Union–Curia poll that drives so many headlines is run by Farrar’s firm, also the National Party’s own pollster, which now operates outside the polling industry’s standards body.
The “Free Speech Union” is an unusually effective piece of branding: a banner that makes a campaign for a narrower set of commercial and political ends look like a principled defence of open debate. (The Free Speech Union says it is a genuine, non-partisan advocate for free expression, funded by its members, that makes no political donations.)
What such branding obscures is how routine quiet influence has become.
In mid-2024, Fonterra and Z Energy hand-delivered a briefing note to the Prime Minister’s then chief policy adviser, Matt Burgess — a former economist at the business-funded New Zealand Initiative think tank — proposing a change to climate law that would have defused a major lawsuit against big emitters. The note was not handed over when environmental groups asked for it under the Official Information Act; it surfaced only through a court discovery process.
That is precisely the sort of arrangement a strong press exists to drag into the light — which is why, for anyone who would rather operate in the dark, the media is the biggest threat of all.
The case for the defence
Fairness demands the other reading, applied to every player.
Grenon insists he is not mounting a takeover and says he wants to improve journalism, with less opinion and a wider political spectrum. The Takeovers Panel cleared him of any code breach. His lawyer says he funded the Batchelor case as a concerned citizen performing a “civic duty,” not as any kind of Trojan horse.
Bowker, for his part, frames the building purchase as ordinary commerce and has since sold out of NZME entirely.
ACT argues it is simply holding publicly funded media to account on behalf of taxpayers, while RNZ has publicly defended its editorial independence and TVNZ won the case brought against it.
Each of these facts, on its own, has an innocent explanation.
The point of the thought experiment is not to allege a conspiracy among them — it is to notice how neatly the innocent explanations, lined up in order, would also describe a siege.
The question that remains
Add it up and the bill is modest.
Capturing public media in this country would not take a fortune; it would take patience, a chequebook for lawyers and political donations, a handful of board appointments, and a broadcasting sector already softened by budget cuts and shrinking newsrooms.
The expensive part — the journalism itself — is being defunded by other hands.
And while the watchdogs are distracted, policy keeps drifting toward the people who fund it.
None of this proves a plan. It only shows that a plan would be affordable, that the tools are lying in plain sight, and that several of them have already been picked up. So the question is not whether a billionaire could buy our public broadcasters with pocket change. It is whether we would notice in time to stop him.
The cheapest way to take something is to convince its owners they were always going to lose it anyway.
