Herd ends his analysis in 2008, noting that the Howard government largely acquiesced to the network broadcasters’ plans for the introduction of digital television. He hints that this victory by the commercial powers may not mean that they have finally won ‘the struggle between the broadcasters and the State’. Perhaps not, but the networks remain powerful: as I write, all three are reported as refusing to air GetUp advertisements that call for a poker machine bet limit of $1 and draw attention to Coles’s and Woolworth’s investment in gambling. Herd’s book explains why ‘Seven, Nine and Ten’ can wield such power, apparently in concert and with impunity.

Australian commercial television has been ‘networked’ at least since Kerry Packer saw the promise of satellites to aggregate large, national audiences, confirming the cliché that television licences were licences to print money.

It is ironic that publication of Herd’s thorough history coincides with the Gillard government’s ‘Convergence Review’. Ironic, because the issues that the Review addresses are those that have worried Royal Commissioners, ‘White Paper’ writers, and bureaucrats since the introduction of television in 1956: local content and news standards, limitations on media ownership (the number of competitors in a given market), and the cost of station licences.

By definition, networks are broadcasting networks. But in the digital age, they must compete increasingly with a wide range of non-broadcast media services. So, rather bravely, the Review also recommends that the state make subject to regulation any ‘media company’ that has an audience base of half a million per month and/or revenues of $50 million per annum. However, as one of the Review’s three members commented (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 2012), it was ‘surprised to find that rather than the internet destroying media, it has often reinvigorated it’. Further, Louise McElvogue noted, broadcasters have enhanced their reach through digital delivery and new platforms, so ‘total television viewing has increased in recent years’.

Herd suggests that the reason for broadcasting’s resilience is the premium value to advertisers of live events, especially sport, and reality-based television – ‘those major events that bind us all together in space and time’. Unfortunately, though understandably perhaps, Herd doesn’t discuss the networks’ deep cultural and political significance – how they have helped to define, change, and reinforce our vernacular identity during the past half-century. Instead, he narrows his focus to show how supposedly competing commercial interests manoeuvred, threatened, and cajoled timid governments to achieve their aims.

Herd gets the detail of the bureaucratic reports and inquiries right and doesn’t lose sight of the drama of the confrontations and compromises that led to our commercially (and culturally) conservative television networks. Although the author is not explicit about this, the reader can’t escape the conclusion that the networks have exercised strong political muscle and have had deep cultural effects. They have resisted change, taken few risks. Their Australia is inert and insular, obsessed with the distractions of sport and consumerism.

Networking distinguishes three variable market relationships: the market for licences; the audience as market; and the ‘local program supply market’. While Herd mentions what he calls the ‘social profits’ of television, he finds it difficult to assess these. Although introduced early, this concept remains undeveloped.

Social profits refer to how the regulatory State considers that commercial television might contribute to national identity, social cohesion and to the dissemination of information, and how cultural workers might make use of television as a medium of expression.

Herd economically recounts how the networks emerged, the predatory successes of the usual suspects, including Packer, Murdoch, Stokes (as well as the red-faced failures of Bond and Skase), the political and economic contexts in which change did or did not occur, and even the technologies and infrastructure underpinning today’s mediascape.

This could all be very dry fare, so Herd has tried to breathe life into a history necessarily studded with acronyms. Larger-than-life moguls and magnates have had to be to be reduced to little more than surnames. Potentially dramatic skirmishes and tactical manoeuvres seem rather bloodless. I sympathise with an author obliged to list three pages of acronyms, ranging from AANA through NSWRL to VHS. Despite these obstacles, he does manage to make the narrative flow, although the reader will have to detour to the glossary as she stumbles across clunkers like ‘HORSCOTCI’ – ‘The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport, Communications and Infrastructure’.

The major difficulty for the general reader of Networking is Herd’s reluctance to risk drawing conclusions from his account: Why havesuccessive governments caved in to the power of media companies? Why did cross-media ownership and audience-reach provisions prove so weak against the powerful players? Why did Packer hold so much sway for so long? What were the quantifiable ‘social profits’ of local content regulations? Why have so many regulatory bodies been so ineffectual?

Networking gives readers the factual detail necessary to make their own interpretations, but it stops short of a theorised or polemical argument. This is the book’s strength, as well as its weakness. It might encourage a fatalistic attitude toward the seemingly endless, inevitable compromises that it describes. I am sure Herd believes that the ‘public interest’ can be shored up legislatively, but he under-emphasises the genuine successes of government regulation, for instance in boosting ‘local content’. Although he does not fall for the self-serving rationalisation of business that television gives audiences ‘what they want’, he fails to imagine what network television might have become had different choices been made.

On the evidence  Networking presents, one might ask whether governments should still exercise any role in ensuring the viability of commercial broadcasters, especially as the networks all provide barely distinguishable services for the one market. Maybe digital ‘convergence’ (or should that be ‘divergence’?) will throw this issue into clearer relief as the ‘death of broadcasting’ looms.

Networking could have risked more comparative insights by at least briefly addressing how Australia differed from Canada or the United Kingdom. How have comparable nations made their ‘fateful choices’? The deep consequences of government decisions are most patent when one country is compared to another. Anyone familiar with New Zealand television will know why. Similarly, the ABC and SBS networks contrast strongly with the commercials in terms of local content, minority oriented services, and regional reach. Is it possible to write the history of commercial television in Australia without attending to our complementary public broadcasters?

The not-for-profit Currency House has taken on the arduous task of transforming Nick Herd’s PhD thesis. It has accepted the risk that timid university presses too frequently avoid. Currency House is to be congratulated for its courage, but also for the impeccable editorial standards it has achieved. As well as detailed references, Networking tabulates metropolitan station ownership from 1956–98, selected financial results, program ratings, drama production data, and on-air (starting) dates for all commercial stations. It should prove as indispensable a resource for media scholars as Ken Inglis’s two-volume history of the ABC (1983–2006).