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Sky News Australia is a 24-hour satellite and cable news channel that exists in Australia providing news and opinion on the politics Down Under and in the Pacific. It is one of only two such channels in Australia, with other one being the public broadcaster ABC News channel. It is owned by News Corp Australia, who also owns much of the media in the Pacific including the several newspapers such as The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, the Advertiser and the Courier-Mail.
In the past it used to be affiliated with the British channel of the same name, Sky News, however Sky UK was purchased in 2020 by Comcast, which also owns MSNBC. The two now have no link and only share the name and a similar logo — Sky News UK is a fairly normal centrist news channel. Sky News UK occasionally takes the piss out of Sky News Australia.
It is probably the only real Jekyll and Hyde channel in existence. During the day, it is a straight up news channel like any other news channel like the American CNN or the British BBC World News. However, in the evening which it calls "After Dark", it turns in a local version of Fox News with Liberal Party and One Nation talking heads. Notable rent-a-gobs includes; openly racist newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt, sports caster Alan Jones who famously suggested that the prime minister Scott Morrison should put a sock down the throat of his New Zealand counterpart,[1] [note 1] Trumpian Paul Murray, Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin, and former Liberal media adviser Chris Kenny. The current chief executive of GB News Angelos Frangopoulos, worked beforehand at Sky News Australia.
The channel has been regularly criticised by the ABC's long-running media analysis programme Media Watch for conservative bias, agenda pushing and climate change denial.[2][3] The channel has been up for COVID-19 denial[4] and pushing unscientific remedies including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which has led to the channel being hit with a wet noodle banned from YouTube for a week.[5]