Now Whittaker, as chief executive of Sky News Australia, is pushing deeper into YouTube, where the broadcaster publishes polarising content about the Bidens, Megan Markle and wider culture wars. Under his watch, critics say, Sky has turned into an antipodean Fox News for the streaming age.
And success has done nothing if not embolden him. Friends and colleagues who spoke about Whittaker for this profile suggested he has always seen himself as destined for higher things. Many in News’ orbit believe Whittaker, 54, has further to climb in the empire – either aspiring to be the company’s local boss or reaching for a seat at the top table in New York.
The Gold Coast media mafia
Paul Whittaker was raised in a family of five on the Gold Coast, an identical twin whose parents were once owners of the local newsagent. His first run in with the press was at Southport School, where in 1986 he was vice captain, and unhappy about the student newspaper, the Vigilante.
“One of the fundamental aspects of journalism is to report the facts as they are,” Whittaker wrote to the editor, Ben Widdicombe. “Your little rag is full of gross exaggeration, selected opinion ... and ill-informed comment.”
Widdicombe went on to become a columnist at the New York Post, also part of the News Corp empire. Whittaker ended up at The Gold Coast Bulletin.
There, he struck up a friendship with another young reporter, Hedley Thomas, who would later go on to be one of the country’s most decorated investigative journalists. “(Boris) was a bit unusual,” Thomas says. “I’d never seen anyone in that age group who was as well-read and as determined as he was to be a successful journalist.”
The reporters became roommates and best friends; eventually Whittaker would become Thomas’ boss at The Australian. In 1997, Whittaker also became Thomas’ brother-in-law, marrying his sister Kate. Thomas’ other sister, Rebecca Frizelle, is chair of the Gold Coast Titans, prompting one friend to describe the four as the Gold Coast media mafia.
“[Whittaker] was already mapping out this career that he saw taking him around the world ... rubbing shoulders with media barons and prime ministers,” Thomas says. On more than one occasion, Whittaker was found asleep holding his scrapbook of newspaper clippings.
Whittaker became known at News for his peculiar hobbies and personality traits. He invested in an ostrich farm. He co-wrote a book about the disappearance of a steel schooner. And he developed a love of horse racing, with a tendency of betting multiple runners to secure a winner. “He’ll be on some of the horses and then say, ‘I backed the winner,’” Thomas says.
Whittaker remains a competitive tennis player and picked up his nickname, Boris, from photographer Tommy Campion. “He had pasty skin and reddish hair,” says Campion, the first to compare him to the German tennis player. “I was a shocker for giving people names … but this stuck with him.” In 2009, Whittaker won a silver medal at the Masters Games.
Then there’s Whittaker’s love of talking. Nearly all who spoke about him mention how hard it is to make him stop. “On a personal level, he’s fun to be around,” former News chief executive John Hartigan says. “[He] has a view on everything. One annoying trait – he talks too much. Not a great listener.”
A defining incident of his early life came in 1994 when Whittaker published a story suggesting the Australian Federal Police had gone slow on investigating allegations of corruption made against Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson. The story suggested the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission was at odds with the police over the handling of the matter.
When the CJC sought to uncover the source of the leak, Whittaker refused to co-operate – and almost went to jail. Executives across News took notice.
In an attempt at humour, colleagues in the newsroom presented Whittaker with a rape kit, complete with condoms and lubricant in case he was sent to prison. That case was later dropped, and Richardson later went on to work for Whittaker, first as a columnist on The Australian, then at Sky News.
Rudd, Gillard and Abbott
In 2014, Whittaker hosted Tony Abbott at Portia’s, the Canberra restaurant favoured by journalists and politicians on budget night. Whittaker was the editor of the Telegraph and Abbott the prime minister. The third man was the paper’s political editor, Simon Benson. The moment was captured by another attendee – who posted it online before hurriedly taking it down.
Paul Whittaker with Tony Abbott and Simon Benson at a 2014 dinner.
The dinner marked the Coalition’s first budget back in government after six years, and was the culmination of a campaign waged by News against Labor. Led by the Telegraph, the publisher’s mastheads pursued Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s marquee policies, chief among them the carbon tax and the National Broadband Network.
The photo was also the perfect portrait of that era in politics. Abbott provided exclusive stories, Benson would write them and Whittaker put them on the front page. Those stories would dominate the news – the then communications minister, Stephen Conroy, portrayed as Joseph Stalin for his efforts to regulate the media; Rudd dressed up as a Nazi, Colonel Klink, for a story about Anthony Albanese meeting disgraced Labor MP Craig Thomson at a German beer hall.
Launching the 2013 election coverage, Whittaker ran a front-page editorial urging voters to “kick [the Rudd government] out”. Some of that campaigning was put down to the arrival of Col Allan, a former Telegraph editor who had gone on to The New York Post.
“He just had a bunch of ideas,” Allan says. “He was always keen to pick my brain and I didn’t mind that at all. He had a strong view about politics and popular culture. He gave me the sense he understood an audience, which is half the battle.”
One reporter on the Telegraph at the time says there was a sense that “Boris was running the government”, with Abbott and his chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, taking advice from Whittaker. They described the access as “unprecedented”, with policy shared before it had been approved by cabinet. Credlin is now one of the highest-rating Sky News stars.
Despite the emphatic 2013 win, Abbott’s standing was damaged by his first budget, with voters abandoning the Coalition. By 2015, Abbott was out.
Still, Whittaker had proved himself to the Murdochs. In 2013, News’ then chief executive, Kim Williams, pushed for the company to embrace digital platforms and ditch underperforming print products. The former Foxtel chief found himself up against Whittaker.
The Murdochs ultimately sided with the editors and against their chief executive. It was a sign of where the power in the company ultimately lay. Williams exited Holt Street.
“For some, Paul is an acquired taste,” Williams says. “In my experience, it was an unattractive brew of unusually idiosyncratic strange, often unpredictable vindictiveness and boorish cliche.”
When The Australian‘s veteran editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell retired in 2015, Whittaker was chosen to run News’ flagship publication. He brought an edge to the national masthead, better known for its staid, policy-driven pieces. Headlines were louder, angles sharper. The campaigning went harder.
After Malcolm Turnbull limped across the line against Labor in the 2016 election, conservatives turned against him. Turnbull believed News was also turning, later recounting how he had confronted Rupert Murdoch and accused his publications of agitating for Abbott’s return to the prime ministership.
“I think Boris is the only one who wants that,” Murdoch responded in a personal phone call, according to Turnbull.
Anger-tainment
Since it took full control of the broadcaster in 2016, Sky News had been considered a second-tier citizen among News’ local stable. The budget was low, and the studios were in an unremarkable corporate park in Sydney’s north, nowhere near the company’s Holt Street headquarters.
When Whittaker left The Australian in 2018 to replace Angelos Frangopoulos as the chief executive of Sky News, many believed the editor had been demoted. Insiders, however, knew the move was designed to give Whittaker more commercial responsibility. He would have his own balance sheet, and it would be a step to the top.
In 2021, Whittaker brokered deals with WIN and Southern Cross Austereo to take Sky News into the regions. The launch of Sky News Regional – a free-to-air channel – took the service into the homes of up to seven million residents in the country. It meant the broadcaster was no longer reliant on Foxtel subscribers. There were grandiose plans to challenge the ABC.
But Whittaker – the self-styled streaming pioneer – was also aggressively pursuing a digital strategy on YouTube. The platform shares revenue – some 55¢ of every $1 spent on advertising – with news organisations. And YouTube’s algorithms find the videos which are gaining traction, and amplify them, driving significant surges in viewership.
Whittaker sensed an opportunity. Sky News leaned into the platform, with producers instructed to find the most polarising videos and publish them regularly. As part of an outreach to video publishers, YouTube met with Sky News producers and digital strategists to talk them through the best ways to maximise views, according to two people familiar with the matter.
This year, Sky News has released hours of “original” content for YouTube, compilations tackling the most politically charged issues online –videos including “Biden’s Burden: Inside the troubled and tragic life of Hunter Biden”, “War on Women: The radical left’s assault on female athletes” and “Durham Report exposes the ‘witch hunt’ against Donald Trump”.
It has been a lucrative business. Sky News now makes between $10 million and $20 million from YouTube annually, according to three people familiar with the matter. And it is pushing further. More than any publisher, Sky News has leaned into YouTube Shorts, a video service akin to TikTok.
Since November, Sky News has published more than 760 videos to YouTube’s Shorts platform – about three per day. More than 280 of those videos are about politics in the United States – and feature pundits who are aggressively supportive of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and highly critical of Joe Biden.
One video, “Biden family are a group of ‘drunks and drug addicts’ ” , was a particular hit, with many viewers outside Australia.
Other regular features of Sky’s YouTube output are Megan Markle and Prince Harry, and transgender and gender issues. There were only 34 videos published about any topic relating to Australian news or politics – almost half about Indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe. There are more videos – 44 – about Bud Light’s decision to work with a transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney.
The star of Sky News’ YouTube strategy is Megyn Kelly, an unfamiliar face to most Australians. Kelly left Murdoch-owned Fox News in 2017 and briefly appeared on NBC before her show was axed. Among her other commitments is appearing regularly on the YouTube channel, where she has been in 86 clips over eight months.
In one, Kelly makes baseless claims about Biden’s behaviour toward younger women, including that he took “inappropriate showers” with his daughter.
“It doesn’t make me feel comfortable and if I don’t feel comfortable, there’s probably something wrong,” Kelly says, referring to a diary that has not been verified as real. “I want people to dig further, but they won’t,” she adds. It has been viewed millions of times.
“There is no question that Sky News has become an Australian version of Fox News,” says Turnbull, now the convenor of a campaign to have the Murdochs brought before a royal commission. “It’s a media platform in the anger-tainment business whose business model is to keep people riled up and keep them engaged,” the former prime minister says.
Unsurprisingly, that is not how the company sees it. “Under Paul’s leadership Sky News has become a nationally significant news business,” Siobhan McKenna, News’ chief executive of broadcast and the chairwoman of Foxtel, says. “He has become a brilliant CEO.”
Running the show
Last year, Whittaker caught COVID-19. In the midst of a coughing fit, he fainted and was taken to hospital. A scan later showed he had bleeding on the brain. Some feared the worst, but surgery was a success.
The incident gave Whittaker, who is known to be fond of drinking, a wake-up call. He returned to a company that was facing a reckoning – three senior men in a month had been forced out amid claims of inappropriate behaviour. The most senior was The Australian’s editor-in-chief Chris Dore. It left a vacancy at the masthead, one eventually filled by the editor, Michelle Gunn – the first woman to take the job in the publication’s history.
But there was a twist. News would create an entirely new editorial board to sit above Gunn, helmed by Whittaker. Almost a year later, it remains unclear how the board works. The board is scheduled to meet monthly sources say that it is a way for Whittaker to act as a “sounding board” for Gunn due to his relationship with the Murdochs.
Some suggest the only reason he has yet to replace Michael Miller as the company’s most senior executive in Australia is because there is no obvious candidate to replace him at the broadcaster.
“He has developed and if I get asked about people he’d always come to mind as someone who could [be executive chairman]. He’s ambitious. He should be ambitious,” Miller says.
“I’ve always said that if I had a public company and needed someone to run it, he’d be the first person I’d go to,” says Peter V’landys, the Australian Rugby League Commission and Racing NSW chief executive.
“A lot of people see this rough intimidating exterior. But once you break the facade, he’s a beautiful human being.”
This article has been updated to clarify that Sky News has only been fully owned by News since 2016. It was previously owned jointly by BSkyB, Seven Network and Nine Network.
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