May 30, 2017 12:00pm by David Farrar

StuffMe appeals

Media companies Fairfax New Zealand and NZME are appealing the Commerce Commission’s decision this month to block their proposed merger.

The companies announced the decision on Friday morning saying the commission had made errors with facts and law.

Fairfax NZ acting managing director Andrew Boyle said the commission’s ruling was a “breach of natural justice and procedural fairness”.

He said the appeal process would “take some time”.

Procedural fairness? It was the media companies that kept coming back with more and more submissions delaying things. The Commerce Commission bent over backwards to be procedurally fair to them. I wonder if the media companies kept making all these extra demands, just so they could try and appeal when they lost?

At this rate the media companies will be spending more on lawyers than they do on sub-editing.

Their appeal includes a statement that the Commerce Commission did not give enough weight to the competition the two media companies face from blogs and sites such as Scoop. Good luck with that argument.