The rise of the vegans at The Age began with an internal battle a few years back, led by Bhakthi Puvanenthiran, then its small business editor (and now the boss of the ABC’s lifestyle website, Everyday), which was waged over the contamination of sandwich presses with meat products.
The problem, apparently, was that the steaks of “paleo diet” devotees were being warmed up in the same sandwich presses as vegan mountain bread wraps. Sacrilege!
The pitched newsroom battle for the sanctity of the sandwich press even made it as far as the internal workplace services department, Diary is told, with a formal complaint made about the meat-tainted appliances — and the lack of consideration given to vegans and vegetarians.
Puvanenthiran may now have left The Age, but her legacy lives on to this day, with the newsroom still featuring a special pristine sandwich press labelled ‘‘vegan-vego’’ to accompany two other presses where meat is allowed. Chalk up a win for the vegan-vegos.
Fast forward to 2021, and this time it’s The Age’s lactose-intolerants who have joined forces with the powerful vegan-vego faction to record another crucial win over the paper’s ruling animal products faction.
The Age is about to take its first delivery of almond milk in the fridges for some time after a heroic intervention by Age editor Gay Alcorn to overrule a decision by building management to supply only cow’s milk in the masthead’s fridges.
Reliable sources tell us that The Age used to supply almond milk, but at about $2 a litre — nearly double the price of cow’s milk — the newsroom bean counters deemed it “too expensive”, bringing a halt to milk alternatives.
Naturally, that didn’t go down well with the vegans and lactose-intolerants who got, shall we say, activated about their almond milk’s disappearance. So much so, that they started to grill the newsroom supplies people directly. There was apparently even a petition on internal message channels calling for “the reinstatement of almond milk in the fridge”.
We’re told the matter was eventually escalated to Alcorn and Nine executive editor James Chessell. The result is a win for the powerful new alliance. Almond milk will flow once more at The Age, with newsroom deliveries to finally resume on Monday morning. We keenly await The Age’s next inevitable dietary battle.
Senator to push for ABC ‘Twitter ban’ policy
ABC managing director David Anderson will face a torrid line of questioning in a lengthy three-hour Budget Estimates session in Canberra on Wednesday night, with a prominent Coalition senator pushing for the imposition of “Twitter bans” on Aunty’s staff through its enterprise agreement if they breach its social media guidelines.
NSW senator Andrew Bragg tells Diary he will use the Wednesday hearing to grill Anderson on whether disciplinary action the ABC is now taking against senior in-house lawyer Sebastien Maury — as first revealed in this column a week ago — will now become a “line in the sand” for all of Aunty employees that is incorporated into its enterprise agreement with staff. In a series of anti-government tweets, Maury labelled Scott Morrison’s regime as “fascist”, described the PM as an “awful human being” who was “dreadful at all the jobs to which he’s turned his clumsy hands”, and trolled Christian Porter over the Four Corners episode, “Inside the Canberra Bubble”, stating: “Honestly. If this doesn’t finish his career, then nothing means anything.”
Maury’s tweet followed a high-profile tweet by 7.30 chief political correspondent Laura Tingle, in which she directly trolled the PM with the sledge: “Hope you’re feeling smug @ScottMorrisonMP” and accused him of “ideological bastardry”.
Bragg, who is leading a Coalition push for more accountability from the ABC, says of the tweets by Maury and Tingle: “ABC staff can have strong opinions, but they can’t call people fascists, accuse them of bastardry, or use those sorts of terms.”
The Coalition senator is arguing that the disciplinary action being taken against Maury should now apply to all ABC staff, whether they be on-air or off-air. “That case has drawn a line in the sand for ABC employees, and puts them on notice,” he says.
“As a result, I am wanting to probe David Anderson about building greater accountability into the enterprise agreement process, to rein in the Sebastien Maurys of the ABC.”
Most notably, Bragg wants the ABC to mirror the BBC’s recently-imposed “take people off Twitter” policy if impartiality rules are breached, along with other disciplinary action.
ABC fury at ‘offensive’ McLachlan claims
A huge row erupted on Sunday between the ABC and Seven, after a special about Craig McLachlan implied that women speaking out against the actor on 7.30 had been manipulated by ABC staff.
During a Seven News Spotlight special featuring extensive interviews with McLachlan — who was found not guilty of seven indecent assault charges in December — Seven aired claims a week ago that the women interviewed by the ABC appeared to be “coached” by a producer and reporter in their answers, and included clips from the interviews themselves.
But on Sunday, an ABC statement that strongly defended its reporter and producer, claiming the coaching allegations were “offensive” and that clips from the interviews were taken out of “context”.
The coaching is unlike anything I have ever seen. It is not normal journalistic behaviour and nor should it be normalised.
— Mark Llewellyn (@archiebombora09) May 23, 2021
However, the executive producer of the McLachlan special, Mark Llewellyn, doubled down on his allegations on Twitter after the ABC statement: “The coaching is unlike anything I have ever seen.”
Seven’s McLachlan special aired excerpts of a dialogue between ABC reporter Lorna Knowles and an off-screen producer before the 7.30 story screened in January 2018. It went as follows:
OFF-SCREEN ABC PRODUCER: And just the final one, I’m just looking for a sharp, short, you said ‘this is predatory behaviour, it wasn’t a one off, and when we all shared our stories we realised how calculated he was.’
KNOWLES: I don’t think we should be putting words into her mouth to some extent.
PRODUCER: These were the words that I wrote down.
KNOWLES: OK, so if we’ve got them why are we getting them again?
PRODUCER: Because it’s going to be a bit longer.
KNOWLES: OK.
When the complainant restarts the interview and stumbles over the word “predatory”, the reporter says: “Do that again, we want predatory in there.”
On Sunday, Llewellyn said of the exchange: “It is not normal journalistic behaviour and nor should it be normalised.”
Response to the Seven Network and Mark Llewellyn. The claims that ABC journalists "coached" women interviewed regarding actor Craig McLachlan are rejected. They are also offensive to the women who stepped forward to tell their stories. https://t.co/C94H7htrmi
— ABC Communications (@ABCMediaComms) May 23, 2021
But in a special section of the ABC website, Correcting the record, an ABC spokeswoman on Sunday claimed Seven had “selectively edited” raw footage. “The unedited footage shows the interviewee was asked to repeat in a more succinct way statements she had already made on-camera. This is a normal television industry practice in some cases to ensure content is presented in a clear way.”
Llewellyn, however, strongly denies the vision was selectively edited, saying it was run “as is”.
Roberts-Smith case could cost $10m in fees
The costs of the blockbuster 10-week defamation trial that starts next month between Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith and Nine newspapers could put others in recent history in the shade, Diary is told.
Reliable Nine sources have privately estimated the combined legal fees for both sides, up to and including the court proceedings themselves, could end up topping the $10m mark.
The man at the centre of the papers’ investigation into Roberts-Smith, The Age and 60 Minutes investigative reporter Nick McKenzie, says he can see both the positives and negatives of the high stakes involved in such defamation cases.
Speaking at a Sydney Media Club lunch at Sydney’s City Tatts club on Wednesday, McKenzie, a 10-time Walkley award winner and last year’s Kennedy Awards journalist of the year, said there was a “huge risk” in defamation proceedings that was now “hurting journalism”.
“It is more difficult to get stories up than ever before,” McKenzie told the lunch.
But at the same time, McKenzie said he could see some benefits in the added scrutiny that came with the rash of big defamation payouts in recent years. “On the upside, and I guess I’m an optimist, it ensures there’s an accountability that we’ve never had before,” he told the lunch.
McKenzie revealed that for years, he has tested himself with whether a story would stack up in court before publishing every story.
“The test for me is: ‘Can I prove it in a civil court?’ That’s a pretty good test, especially because we’re putting people’s lives and reputations on the line.”
Dan’s ‘mental health’ cops a grilling
The Financial Review’s Aaron Patrick has never shied away from asking the tough questions — and so it proved in a press conference on Thursday set up to discuss the $3.8bn mental health program announced by the Victorian government in its state budget.
It started when AMA Victorian vice-president Roderick McRae used a very prominent example to suggest why the spending was sensible. McRae suggested Victorian Premier Dan Andrews was “probably having a handful of mental health challenges” after his much-discussed fall in March.
Patrick opened by asking: “You just said the Premier had mental health issues?” McRae replied: “I did not say that. I said it wouldn’t surprise me.”
But Patrick subsequently took the grilling about Dan’s health up a notch: “So you think he’s going crazy? Is that what you’re saying?” In reply, McRae was emphatic: “No way.”
Patrick then had one last crack: “You’re obviously worried about his mental health?”
At this point, McRae clarified that what he meant was that “we look very quickly to physical injuries”, but that there was often a “mental” health component that went with them.
Patrick’s Dan-driven focus led to murmurs from other journalists present, and some irritation in Andrews’ office, we’re told. But Patrick has strongly defended his questions.
“You can’t police what journalists ask in press conferences,” he told us.
Doing a 180 on Wuhan
What a difference a week makes. On April 13, Nine newspapers ran a double-page spread pointed to off the front pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, variously headlined as “Weaponising a Wuhan conspiracy” and “Obscure book is the key to a COVID conspiracy theory”.
The online write-off to the 2000-plus word story pointed to the “discredited theory that coronavirus is a bio-weapon created in a Wuhan lab”.
But over the weekend, in a separate story authored by no less than the Nine mastheads’ North American correspondent Matthew Knott, the group’s Sunday papers had a very different take on the Wuhan lab theory.
In a story headlined: “Lab leak theory evolves from specious to infectious”, Knott concentrated on the view of Donald McNeil, the recently departed veteran New York Times reporter on infectious diseases, to point out that the Wuhan lab theory was rapidly becoming “mainstream” in the US.
In an article that also mentioned similar lines from scientists, Knott said that McNeil’s current view was that “the lab leak theory is plausible, and becoming increasingly compelling”.
Knott quotes McNeil as saying: “The Chinese have a very strong incentive to say, ‘Hey, here’s the proof this was an animal virus and not a lab leak.’ They haven’t found it … Sometimes, conspiracy theorists get things right.’’
The Australian’s investigations writer Sharri Markson later this year will release a book examining the theory that Covid-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab.
MasterChef spinoff as Ten chases celebs
Ten tried to cash in on the high ratings of last year’s MasterChef Australia — featuring the debut of its new hosting team led by food critic Melissa Leong, and the return of fan favourites like Poh Ling Yeow — by squeezing some more juice out of the franchise through a junior version.
But 2020’s Junior MasterChef only delivered Ten poor ratings, prompting speculation it would call it quits on future spin-offs of the cooking show.
Wrong! It turns out there will be yet another MasterChef spinoff in 2021.
Diary can reveal Celebrity MasterChef will anchor Ten’s fourth quarter, after the network secretly commissioned it last month. Ten reckons that well-known Australians failing in the kitchen work better than a bunch of unknown but camera-ready kids nailing it.
The hunt is already well and truly on to land the biggest names possible for Celebrity MasterChef, with filming set to start in coming weeks.
Some on the wish-list, we’re told, are prominent local and international names who have worked for Ten before. One is Lara Bingle, who of course featured in Ten’s memorable turkey, Being Lara Bingle, way back in 2012.
Another is Julie Bishop, our former foreign minister, who only last month featured in a two-part Ten special titled “What The Hell Just Happened?”
Sports stars, international actors grounded in Australia, and other politicians are being chased. Expect announcements soon.
Kenny off Media, for more political specials
Chris Kenny is to depart his Friday night media show on Sky News, Kenny on Media, at the end of June.
Diary hears Kenny’s move, after two and a half years, has been made to free up time for other pursuits, including making more political specials for Sky and writing more columns.
Kenny will hand over the media show to Sky’s digital editor, Jack Houghton — who has been his regular stand-in host on the program — from July 2, with the show’s new title as yet undetermined.
However, Kenny’s nightly 5pm show on Sky will remain unchanged.
We’re told Sky wants more political specials, after Kenny’s ‘‘Men in the Mirror: Rudd & Turnbull’’ delivered strong numbers in a Sunday night slot earlier this month.
After catch-up views nearly doubled its initial audience, Men in the Mirror has become Sky’s second highest-rating special in total numbers, behind 2020’s MH370: The Untold Story.
Sky has plans for a second Kenny-fronted political special in coming months.
When we reached Kenny on Friday, he said he’d miss the media show.
“It’s a bit like letting your children leave home,” he told Diary. “But I’ll still be having a focus on media in my 5pm show.”
News flash: Editor caught naked on camera
The national editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age performed an inadvertent strip tease during the mastheads’ news conference this week … before releasing his camera was still rolling.
Clemenger Group CEO steps down as buyout deal looms
Clemenger Group CEO Les Timar is the latest executive to depart the business as it prepares to be bought out by BBDO Worldwide and Omnicom.
Meat-tainted sandwich presses are out — but almond milk is most definitely in at The Age. The vegan faction at Nine’s venerable Melbourne newspaper may be relatively small in numbers, but it is building a fearsome track record in lobbying against animal-tainted products in the newsroom.