ABC MD Hugh Marks on Bluey, budgets and…MAFS | That’s Business with Alan Kohler

Commercial television is under pressure, newspapers have had to reinvent themselves, audiences are splintering across platforms, and the algorithms are doing their best to turn everyone into a partisan.
Into that comes Hugh Marks – a career commercial media executive, former Nine boss, and now the man running the ABC.

Read more here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-15/abc-boss-hugh-marks-on-tv-program-cuts-and-new-media/106678644

He joins to talk about the future of traditional media, whether commercial TV can still make money in a world of apps, short-form video and shrinking ad pools, and why he thinks the ABC’s great advantage is that it can be “agnostic” about where audiences find its content – even as staff are stretched across far more platforms than before.

There are reflections, too, on the ABC’s “mistakes” – including the decision to remove Antoinette Lattouf from ABC Radio Sydney – and perhaps its failure to take a risk on global success Bluey.
And then there are the more fun questions: whether Married at First Sight helped Nine pull off the Fairfax merger, whether the ABC needs its own version of it, and whether Hugh Marks can persuade Australians – and politicians – that the ABC is not just worth funding, but worth backing into the future.

ABC managing director Hugh Marks joins Alan Kohler to unpack it all on That’s Business with Alan Kohler.

00:00 – Intro to ABC MD Hugh Marks
01:15 – Trust and impartiality in media
02:55 – The rise of algorithms
03:55 – The business of media in a fractured landscape
05:50 – Radio challenges
06:24 – Commercial TV competition
07:57 – The rise of TikTok and Instagram
09:15 – Is there a place for 7pm news bulletins in the content mix?
10:46 – Launching Married at First Sight
12:45 – Fairfax and Nine merger
13:33 – Does the ABC need a ‘Married at First Sight’ to survive?
13:55 – ABC Charter and our content decisions
14:30 – ABC’s transition to other platforms
16:00 – ‘The ABC has trouble stopping things’
17:00 – ABC’s content challenges
17:35 – What does the ABC need to stop doing?
18:40 – Strike action at the ABC
21:00 – Did ABC go into the enterprise negotiations too aggressively?
21:55 – Staff concerns
22:30 – Antoinette Lattouf case was ‘reactive decision’ that was a ‘mistake’
25:00 – How will the MD measure success?
28:50 – MD needs to make sure that the ABC is serving all audiences
31:12 – Is the ABC biased?
33:15 – What happened with Bluey?

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