Media Diary: Buttrose’s post-ABC memoir is unapologetically Ita
Prepare for some candid truths and takes about life at the public broadcaster, with media maven and former ABC chair Ita Buttrose’s memoir out in late October.
Attention ABC executives, past and present: mark October 28 down in your Google calendars. On that date, Ita Buttrose’s post-ABC memoir, Unapologetically Ita, will hit the shelves, and you can bet the 368-page tome will fizz with some unvarnished truths about what goes on behind closed doors at the public broadcaster.
Buttrose served five years as chair of the ABC, and oversaw various scandals at Aunty during that time, one of which was the saga surrounding the sacking of Antoinette Lattouf – an episode that drew the 83-year-old media doyenne into the witness box of the Federal Court this year.
And like her courtroom testimony – which Justice Darryl Rangiah labelled “somewhat theatrical”, but Diary thought was “refreshingly candid” – Buttrose assured us that her book will entertain. “I can’t go into detail. But I think you’ll find it interesting,” Buttrose told us, with a healthy dose of understatement.
The blurb of the hardcover book, commissioned by publisher Simon & Schuster Australia, trumpets: “In this captivating book Ita reflects on everything from sex to leadership with her characteristic wit, compassion and razor-sharp intellect.
“Fresh from the toughest job in Australian media, Chair of the ABC, Ita frankly discusses her time at the place she calls ‘an incredibly special Australian institution’.
“She also looks at the strengths and challenges of Australian society, and has some inspiring words on how to succeed in the workplace. Closer to home, Ita opens up on motherhood, menopause, health curve balls, and what life is like for an older person.”
Buttrose told Diary she started writing the book – her eleventh – not long after she left the ABC, spending “a little under 12 months” on the project. “It’s the first time I’ve written a book when I didn’t have a full-time job at the same time, so it was a different experience for me,” she said.
Answers 60 Minutes didn’t want you to see
Nine flagship 60 Minutes promised to expose the “unpalatable truth” about the seedy side of the country’s best-known bars and restaurants. But the program is now accused of keeping dark secrets of its own and selectively censoring key details which didn’t align with its preconceived “narrative”.
Diary can reveal an almighty brouhaha has erupted between the Nine current affairs show and high-profile restaurant collective Swillhouse following the program’s much-hyped investigation into the underbelly of Australia’s billion-dollar hospitality sector last week.
The group was one of three restaurant and bar “empires” to feature in the full-length 60 Minutes special entitled Out of Order, with three former female employees – Britt Rowe, Alex Hooker and Rachelle “Rocky” Hair – claiming the firm turned a blind eye to rampant sexual harassment and drug use at its venues while workers were “abused and mistreated … in a night-life nightmare”.
Swillhouse, which runs a string of popular late-night hotspots in the heart of Sydney, vehemently denies the allegations and offered detailed responses to all the claims put to it by 60 Minutes before the report, fronted by journalist Eryk Bagshaw, went to air.
Not that you’d know that.
The group’s side of the story was given short shrift on the program – possibly because it seems no one from the company wanted to front for Sixty’s cameras, and it’s an interview show after all.
But viewers were pointed to 60 Minutes’ official website where they could read Swillhouse’s “full statement” regarding the serious allegations levelled at the company.
The only problem? 60 Minutes didn’t post the full statement online. Instead, it heavily edited the company’s responses – and removed key details of its reply – before posting a cut-down version in its place.
Swillhouse has now accused the program of unethically censoring its answers and distorting the company’s true position on the allegations to fit the show’s tabloid agenda.
So what didn’t 60 Minutes want you to see?
Well, when asked about Ms Hair’s allegedly “sickening” experience working as a bartender at the group, Swillhouse replied, in part, that it was “worth noting that Ms Hair left and elected to rejoin Swillhouse on three separate occasions, and sought to return on a fourth occasion in April 2024”.
Not that you’d know that from the “full statement” from Swillhouse posted on Sixty’s website, as that was all edited out.
When asked about Ms Rowe’s claims she was assaulted by a colleague at her home while working for the group, only for the company to turn a blind eye to the attack, Swillhouse explained they hadn’t even been aware of the July 2021 incident until it was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald last November. While Ms Rowe’s allegation was included in 60 Minutes’ television special, Swillhouse’s response was not … and it was also completely edited out of its “full statement” before it was posted on the show’s website.
And the list of cuts continues, with Swillhouse’s responses to three more questions either heavily edited or entirely excised.
What’s more, the Merivale Group, which also featured in the show, has accused 60 Minutes of editing its response before pointing viewers in the direction of its “full statement” online too.
Now, Diary isn’t suggesting these companies don’t have some very serious questions to answer regarding their workplace culture – only that they did answer them and that 60 Minutes took it upon itself to cut out and censor all the bits they didn’t like.
BlackBay Lawyers, which represents Swillhouse, fired off a searing legal letter to Nine’s executive legal counsel, Zoe Bateman, last Tuesday, accusing the show of having ”unilaterally edited Swillhouse’s responses” and demanding the full version be immediately reinstated on its website.
So far, that hasn’t happened.
We asked Nine why 60 Minutes had edited out key parts of Swillhouse’s response, but they didn’t reply … which is a shame, because we would have run their full statement online.
Members only
Groucho Marx once observed he didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.
Unfortunately, not everyone feels the same way.
Although Nine’s investigation into the hospitality industry delighted in rattling off the high-profile identities who were members of billionaire bar tsar Justin Hemmes’ exclusive private members club, Level 6, at Merivale’s Ivy nightspot in Sydney, it seems a few names somehow slipped off its list.
Sources said they apparently included those of Nine’s recently departed chief executive Mike Sneesby, who had only just left the media giant when Bagshaw’s initial investigation into Hemmes’ empire hit the press last October, and lobbyist David Miles, who just happens to be married to Nine’s all-powerful publisher, Tory Maguire.
Not that there’s any suggestion Sneesby and Miles are accused of any wrongdoing at all at the club – for the record, they’re not – but it still might have been worthwhile disclosing their connection … though Nine didn’t want to talk to us about that either.
Blame game at Ten
Late media proprietor Kerry Packer had a firm belief when it came to trialling new television programs: if you’re going to fail, fail fast. Ten has certainly managed to achieve that with the unmitigated failure of its over-hyped and underperforming replacement for axed nightly gibberfest The Project.
Indeed, the rollout of the new show, unimaginatively named 10 News+, has been such an unprecedented disaster, we hear a good, old fashioned round of the blame game is already under way at the network’s Pyrmont bunker.
So who is going to be left holding the unwanted can when it’s time to face the music?
Well, television insiders reckon it’s unlikely the show’s novice executive producer, Dan Sutton, will be held accountable given his well-documented lack of any previous show-running experience, nor the network’s top news boss, Martin White, who was seemingly given next to no time to get the new program up and running before its predecessor was given the chop.
Instead, word is that all fingers will ultimately be left pointing firmly in the direction of the network’s esteemed chief executive, Beverley McGarvey, who not only commissioned the program but reportedly earmarked a budget of about $15m to create the series. After all, almost never in the field of commercial television conflict has so much seemingly been spent on a show that has attracted an audience of so few.
In fact, 10 News+ has haemorrhaged viewers from the moment it first hit the airwaves, as it played an unenviable game of limbo with the ratings to see how much lower it could go with each successive episode.
After the program flopped on debut last Monday, audiences abandoned it in droves throughout the week. By Wednesday, it was being thrashed by SBS World News … by Thursday, it was getting thumped by Win News – even though the regional bulletin doesn’t play in any of the country’s five-city metro markets … and, by Friday, it had slipped out of the top 20 most-watched shows entirely.
Oddly, the ratings free-fall was so diabolically bad it was actually good for morale at Ten: little more than a week ago the network’s long-time staff were complaining they had been kept in the dark about the new show and hadn’t had a chance to be involved. But now they’re apparently over the moon to have been overlooked!
Why were audiences turning off?
Well, several experienced network news executives we spoke to accused the directionless program of not only showing an almost utter disregard for Australian audiences and ignorance of what they wanted to watch, but actually boasting about it as if that was a great thing. Indeed, in the lead-up to 10 News+’s debut, its inexperienced hosts Denham Hitchcock and Amelia Brace – both poached from Seven – were brazenly bragging about how the new show was going to break all old rules of nightly news bulletins.
“There’ll be less car crashes and factory fires, and more stories that really matter to people’s lives,” Hitchcock said. “I don’t think there’s been a format like this before.”
And for good reason. People like stories about car crashes and factory fires – that’s why Seven and Nine run them, and why they’re the top two rating programs every night.
After all, their news execs have spent decades studying the minute-by-minute ratings to develop the perfect mix of stories to keep viewers switched on and tuned in at 6pm.
With unbridled hubris, Hitchcock also boasted to both News Corp’s Stellar magazine and the Sydney Morning Herald that his first investigation – which kicked off the show – was “an absolute blockbuster … a story 60 Minutes, Four Corners and Spotlight would kill for”. But that wasn’t quite right either.
In fact, Diary hears Hitchcock actually pitched the yarn – about Melbourne mum Debbie Voulgaris, who is locked up in a foreign jail after being convicted of international drug smuggling – to Spotlight months ago and they knocked it back.
Not least because he had already filmed a similar yarn for them, about Perth grandmother Donna Nelson, who is locked up in a foreign jail after being convicted of international drug smuggling, this year (only to be scooped by the country’s slowest-moving current affairs show, Australian Story, two weeks before his story went to air). He’s also left behind another expensive, half-shot yarn about an Aussie businessman, who is, you guessed it, locked up in a foreign jail after being convicted of international drug smuggling (there seems to be a pattern emerging here).
More importantly, Seven told us stories about people locked up in foreign jails and convicted of international drug smuggling simply weren’t “blockbuster” ratings winners.
And in the winner-takes-it-all world of commercial television, that’s what truly counts.
Of course, McGarvey will be gambling that she has saved enough money – apparently about $5m a year – by cancelling The Project and replacing it with a cut-priced A Current Affair clone.
Still, she will doubtless already be facing some gruelling internal inquiries from her corporate overlords at Paramount.
Like, did she really believe there was a gap in the market for this sort of program? Was there any focus group research to back that hunch up? How long until advertisers flee the prime-time slot along with the viewers? And, if this was the answer to the all-ailing network’s problems, what precisely was McGarvey’s question …
And how long until she can ask it again?
ABC of hypocrisy
Don’t mention the war – at least not at the ABC – because their senior defence correspondent, Andrew Greene, still isn’t allowed to cover it.
The industrious reporter has been stood down for three weeks now as the ABC conducts a laborious internal review into revelations he filed a story about ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems without disclosing he had accepted business class airfares and accommodation from the defence contractor to cover a story about its German shipyards.
His treatment has already divided colleagues within the ABC, not least because the station released a public statement condemning his conduct as “unacceptable … if proven” before giving him a chance to defend himself.
And they’re not the only ones firing up. Liam Bartlett, who leads Seven’s investigative Spotlight team, says he is stunned by the way the ABC has handled the supposed “press junket” scandal surrounding Greene – and that it has exposed appalling favouritism and double-standards within the broadcaster.
Bartlett, himself a former ABC journo and one-time host of its nightly current affairs show 7.30 in the west, is the man who last year revealed the taxpayer-funded broadcaster had added audio of additional gunshots to alleged war crime footage to make it appear as though Australian troops were indiscriminately firing at innocent Afghani villagers.
And while Greene was immediately suspended and his behaviour publicly chastised by the ABC over his error of judgment in accepting a free ride, Bartlett points out no one was ever stood down – or has ever been punished – in connection with the vastly more scandalous doctored gunshot vision.
Indeed, the ABC’s top news boss, Justin Stevens, went out and publicly exonerated the whole team behind the manipulated story, including reporter Mark Willacy and his boss, Jo Puccini, of any wrongdoing before the matter was even properly investigated.
“This is extraordinary,” Bartlett told Diary. “So, Aunty can physically suspend an employee while it investigates a puerile travel junket – but when it falsely accuses an Australian combat veteran of being a war criminal AND chooses to add extra edited gunshots to maliciously damage him, there is no sacking, no wrist slapping, no naming and shaming and certainly no suspension, even at the end of an investigation. In fact, no accountability, full stop.
“It’s an appalling contrast the ABC should be ashamed of. Based on this, the only way the viewing public would have seen anyone take responsibility is if the entire Investigations unit had gone undercover at Club Med.”
Model idea
He may be jokingly known as the male model from Mudgee but debonair sportscaster Ken Sutcliffe is certainly more than just a pretty face.
Indeed, when Diary asked the retired Wide World of Sports star about reports NRL boss Peter V’landys was looking to build the code’s next broadcast rights sale around a decade-long deal, he had an exceptionally forward-thinking perspective.
While many industry “experts” questioned the practicalities of such an agreement given the rapidly changing face of free-to-air television, Sutcliffe told us this was actually all the more reason Nine should lock the sport in for the long haul.
He reasoned it was impossible to predict who Nine would have to compete against to retain the rights in a year, let alone five, in an era where new international streamers seemed to emerge every other month – like Hollywood superstar Whoopi Goldberg’s All Women’s Sport Network, which last month swooped on the rights show to Australia’s Super Netball competition in more than 65 new countries around the globe.
“I can’t believe what has happened in the industry in such a short period of time,” he told Diary. “When Whoopi is getting involved in Australian netball, who knows what will happen next. If Nine can get a 10-year-deal, they should probably take it.”
Warren piece
There’s an old adage that in the race of life you should always back self-interest – because it’s the one who’s trying. And commercial television is no different … usually.
Although former Seven newsman Neil Warren is often listed among the casualties of short-lived news supremo Anthony De Ceglie’s war on ratings, we hear that’s not quite the case – or at least not entirely.
A veritable Seven lifer who had given more than three decades to the media outfit, Warren had been running the network’s Sydney news operation when De Ceglie took charge last April.
Instructed he had to immediately cut millions from the newsroom budget, the veteran newshound made a snap decision to put himself at the top of the redundancy list in the hope that his departure might save the jobs of three younger members of staff who could lead the next generation of journos at the outlet.
A rare selfless act in the often cutthroat world of television.
The sad irony being Warren is precisely the sort of newsroom leader the industry needs more of. Not less.
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