A foreign buyout of the Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – mastheads that wield enormous power and oversight of the corporate sector – sits uneasily with many business journalists.

Gerard Noonan, former AFR editor, said the three papers have been “very robust” and even “quite acerbic” in coverage of their current owners. He feared this independence would be curtailed, at the expense of the public’s right to know what goes on in the world of finance.

It will become “much more difficult” for Australian journalists to hold their masters to account if either of the two private equity bidders, TPG Capital or Hellman & Friedman, is successful in buying and delisting Fairfax Media, Mr Noonan told The New Daily.

“In a privatised Fairfax, I think that culture of robust treatment of their own owners will be one of the early things to come under internal scrutiny. And it will be compounded by the removal of many, many layers of top flight journalists who’ve long stood up for their professional values.”

Mr Noonan knows a thing or two about pressure from above. He was sacked in 1992 as AFR editor by Fairfax’s part-owner, Conrad Black, because he commissioned and published an article critical of Black’s business empire.

Former AFR editor Gerard Noonan is concerned about a Fairfax Media buyout. Photo: Supplied

Baron Black, a British lord, later served 37 months in a US prison for mail fraud and obstruction of justice.

“There will be far greater pressure on those editors who survive to discipline their journalistic staff when ‘the boss’ – whoever that turns out to be – doesn’t want something revealed, or wants particularly favourable coverage for the company, or for one of their mates,” Mr Noonan said.

TPG Capital, in a consortium with Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and an unnamed third partner, is understood to have made a preliminary and non-binding offer of $1.20 a share, totalling $2.76 billion, for the entire company.

Another US corporate raider, Hellman & Friedman, has answered with a rival hypothetical offer of $2.87 billion.

The bidding war has pushed Fairfax shares from 89 cents in January to above $1.25 this month.

Dr Alex Wake, a journalism professor at RMIT, said the Australian Financial Review in particular holds an “incredibly important” place in the public debate.

“It’s going to be very different if their paymasters are from overseas,” Dr Wake told The New Daily.

“It takes excellent journalists of the likes of Michael West and Adele Ferguson to hold big business to account. We require that kind of investigation and probing of business interests, especially foreign interests.”

Dr Margaret Simons, an award-winning investigative journalist and now academic at The University of Melbourne, was less worried about editorial intervention and more about how many business journalists would survive the takeover.

“Private equity has no reputation for heavy-handed intervention in editorial; rather for the opposite: neglect. Its goal is profit in the medium term, usually through cost cutting.”

Alan Kohler, publisher of The Constant Investor and former editor of The Age and the AFR, was more optimistic. He did not think either of the foreign bidders would “fiddle with the journalism”.

“Apart from anything, private equity owners of any company are temporary. They don’t regard themselves as longterm owners. All they want to do is make profits and sell it. So they’re not in it to change journalism or change the world,” he told The New Daily.

Former AFR editor Alan Kohler doesn’t think foreign ownership will make any difference. Photo: YouTube

Mr Kohler acknowledged the owners themselves might go unscrutinised, but he said this would not be unusual.

“For a journalist at the Financial Review or The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald to specifically investigate the tax affairs of TPG might be a bad career move. That’s probably right. But that would apply to whoever the proprietor was.”

One question that remains is whether the Australian government will even allow a foreign buyout of Fairfax.

Under Australian law, any formal bid will need the approval of the Foreign Investment Review Board.

A potential snag is the personal feud between Prime Minister and former Fairfax board member Malcolm Turnbull and Hellman & Friedman chairman emeritus Brian Powers.

The two fell out in the 1990s during Kerry Packer’s attempted takeover of Fairfax. Mr Turnbull started out on Packer’s side, but the two had a falling out. He briefly got a board seat out of the deal: between July and November 1991.

Mr Powers was so angry at Turnbull’s betrayal, he reportedly threatened: “You’ll never work in an English-speaking country again.”

Presumably, the government could not be seen to favour TPG over H&F, so there remains the possibility that both bids could be blocked.