This was published 4 months ago
ABC rising star joins News Breakfast as morning TV wars heat up
By Karl Quinn
Bridget Brennan, one of the rising stars of the ABC, has been appointed co-host of the broadcaster’s flagship morning TV program News Breakfast.
Brennan’s appointment was revealed on the show on Thursday morning by Michael Rowland, who remains with the program, and Lisa Millar, who will leave on August 23 after five years on the couch.
Michael Rowland and Bridget Brennan. Brennan has been announced as the new co-host on ABC News Breakfast. Credit: ABC
“I’m delighted Bridget has agreed to take up this leading role,” said ABC director of news Justin Stevens. “Bridget is a formidable journalist and broadcaster and I can’t wait to see what she does on News Breakfast from here.”
Brennan joined the ABC as a cadet in 2010 and was based in Darwin from 2011 to 2013. She briefly worked for CNN in Hong Kong before returning in 2014 to the national broadcaster, with whom she has been employed in a number of roles, including as London-based Europe correspondent.
Brennan, who is from Victoria and of Dja Dja Wurrung and Yorta Yorta heritage on her father’s side, made headlines in 2020 when she criticised the ABC’s Sunday morning current affairs program for failing to include an Indigenous voice among its panel when discussing the Voice referendum.
In June of that year, she was invited on, becoming the first Indigenous panellist ever on Insiders.
In 2017, she said in a profile for ABC online that she had grown up with her mother and had sometimes found it difficult to connect with her culture. Working for the ABC afforded her the opportunity to meet, report on, and engage with Indigenous people and culture, and thus with that part of her heritage.
“It was tough at points when I wasn’t surrounded by my Aboriginal culture and family, and I think that’s actually a common thing for a lot of Aboriginal people,” Brennan said.
“But I did grow up with a mum who always taught me to be very proud of my ancestry. I always had a sense of who I was because of her.”
Millar leaves the role she first occupied in December 2018 while filling in for Virginia Trioli, who was on long service leave. Trioli had co-hosted the show from its launch in 2008. Millar moved into the role full-time in August 2019, as Trioli moved to ABC Radio Melbourne (a role she left last year; she is now presenting Arts programming on ABC TV).
Millar is another ABC veteran, having joined the broadcaster in the early 1990s. Long before they shared a couch, she and Rowland worked together as young ABC correspondents covering the 1996 federal election. She will stay with the broadcaster in a number of roles, including as host of Muster Dogs.
ABC presenter Lisa Millar with the stars of Muster Dogs.
Millar, whose father had been an MP for the Country Party in Queensland, was a popular host on News Breakfast but was subjected to vicious online abuse during COVID which ultimately forced her to quit Twitter in September 2021. She was one of a number of high-profile presenters, many of them at the ABC, who were viciously trolled at the time, and accused of political bias from commentators on both the Left and the Right of politics.
“I could not stop the constant barrage of criticism while we were on air,” she told this masthead at the time. “I do 15 hours of live TV a week – there are going to be words that come out of my mouth that aren’t exactly right.
“It got to a point where there was nothing I could do and the balance had totally swung.”
News Breakfast is currently the third-ranked morning show on free-to-air TV. On Wednesday it averaged 264,000 viewers nationally (249,000 on broadcast, 15,000 on BVOD) across its three hours. Seven’s Sunrise (417,000 viewers) is the most-watched in the slot, with Nine’s Today pulling an average of 338,000 viewers on Wednesday.
Those numbers are a long way down from the highs of May 2020, when COVID lockdown and a hunger for updates drove viewers back to television.
At that time News Breakfast soared to an average of 367,000 viewers – a rise of 47 per cent on a year earlier – to become the second-most-watched morning show, behind Sunrise (553,000 viewers, up 21 per cent on 2019) and ahead of Today (350,000, up 20 per cent).
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