Old divisions at Nine still show as journalists question The Age and SMH editorial judgment

Senior journalists at Nine Entertainment are publicly questioning the editorial judgments at the media company’s two biggest print assets, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s slip on his party’s NDIS policy received little or no attention in the SMH or The Age. Picture: Liam Kidston

Senior journalists at Nine Entertainment are publicly questioning the editorial judgments at the media company’s two biggest print assets, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, following the newspapers’ decision to give little or no coverage to Anthony Albanese’s widely publicised slip-up on a key policy last week.

Despite the Labor leader’s gaffe – he was unsure about the details of his party’s six-point plan for the National Disability Insurance Scheme – attracting prominent coverage on ABC radio and television, across the nation’s commercial TV networks and in News Corp publications, The Age did not run a single word about the incident in its news pages.

The SMH ran a small six-paragraph story on page 5. Every other major metropolitan newspaper in Australia ran the story prominently in their news pages.

On Friday morning, with the issue dominating radio talkback, Nine’s 3AW mornings host, Neil Mitchell, criticised company stablemate The Age for not running any stories on Mr Albanese’s NDIS error in its print edition.

“The Age doesn’t think the NDIS stuff-up was worth putting into the paper today,” he said.

“They have got endless reports on Josh Frydenberg (a reference to the Treasurer’s debate with Kooyong independent candidate Monique Ryan) and they’ve had the (Albanese) stuff-up online, but it’s not in the paper.”

Nine’s 3AW mornings host Neil Mitchell. Picture: Nicki Connolly

Nine television political editor Chris Uhlmann appeared on his network’s A Current Affair on Thursday night to tell host Tracy Grimshaw that Mr Albanese’s NDIS gaffe was a significant news story as it highlighted “a pattern of behaviour and that worries his party”.

“It certainly is an issue, it runs the risk that it will entrench the government’s talking points that he’s not ready for the job and yes, some of his colleagues say he’s notorious for not being across his briefs,” he said.

Uhlmann also rubbished the defence – which was mostly circulating on left-leaning social media platforms like Twitter – that journalists were unfairly targeting Mr Albanese with “gotcha” questions.

“If you go back to his (Mr Albanese’s) original mistake, I don’t think that being asked the unemployment rate in Australia is a gotcha question, or the cash rate, because … we just saw the cash rate rise this week, that affects ­millions of Australians who have mortgages and it also affects the unemployment rate,” he said.

Both The Age and the SMH did run an opinion piece on their commentary page on Friday by chief political correspondent David Crowe, who wrote how a “gotcha question turned a press conference about climate change into a media frenzy about whether Albanese knew his own policy”.

“Albanese had a decent answer about the NDIS but could not recite all six of the dot points under the glare of the camera lights,” he said.

“His answer addressed the core of the policy but was not enough for reporters who want to test him before polling day.”

The Age editor Gay Alcorn did not respond to questions from The Australian, nor did SMH editor Bevan Shields.

A spokesman for Nine also ­declined to comment.

But the public swipes at Nine’s newspapers – particularly The Age – by some of the company’s own broadcast journalists point to the lingering unease within the media giant about the 2018 marriage between the broadcaster and the former Fairfax Media, which owned the newspapers.

The Australian has been told that sharp divisions remain on the Nine board, between those previously linked to Fairfax and the majority who have ties to the broadcasting division.

Nine Entertainment’s share price has slumped 17 per cent since the beginning of the year.

Originally published as Old divisions at Nine still show as journalists question The Age and SMH editorial judgment