Media Diary: The ABC program 7:30 with Laura Tingle slammed for softball interview with Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus
The reality TV host admitted she is ‘biased’ and ‘will not platform a Zionist’ prior to hosting the TikTok awards last week, leaving frustrated staff criticising her at home.
Despite the majority of acceptance speeches at last week’s TikTok awards in Sydney encouraging acceptance and love, there was discontent about the event amongst local staff of the Chinese-owned social media platform.
Diary has seen a number of furious social media posts from TikTok Australia team members who did not attend the evening due to the choice of hosts, specifically, podcaster Abbie Chatfield.
As reported by Diary last week Chatfield - who hosts Binge’s reality show FBoy Island, is a judge on Ten’s Masked Singer and has her It’s A Lot podcast aired via Southern Cross Austereo’s Listnr streaming service - has declared on her social media accounts she is “biased”.
“I have said I am biased. I acknowledge that. I will not platform a Zionist. I will platform Jewish voices, as requested,” she wrote in response to a commenter.
Diary has also seen an open letter to Chatfield, published on private accounts by local TikTok members, criticising her anti-Zionist position.
During the event, which was live streamed, Chatfield and her co-host - another media personality who signed the recent anti-Israel MEAA petition in the ABC’s Tony Armstrong - did not mention the conflict. Chatfield did however make a flippant remark about not “knowing much about history”.
On the red carpet she gushed over Greens leader Adam Bandt, yelling: “Oh my god Adam Bandt. I’m so sorry, guys I’m with Adam Bandt!”
The minor party leader wasn’t the only politician who made it along, NSW’s youth minister Rose Jackson presented an award and gave a Bob Hawke-style rallying cry pumped up the Minns government’s commitment to the kids.
“I’m on TikTok because it is so important to me and the government that young peoples’ voices are heard in politics - sadly too often they are not. I want to be a Minister that meets young people where they are at. Having conversations on platforms and forums that work for them, not the political establishment,” Jackson told the crowd.” And that’s the power of social media - it isn’t just about cool dance moves, skin-care routines or douchebag ex-boyfriends - it is the power to change the conversation, to transform communities and to do good.”
Despite it being a nonpartisan and apolitical event her GRWM (get ready with me) video was littered with comments about the Israel-Hamas conflict. “Will the ALP condemn Palestinian genocide though? I can’t laugh at cutesy videos whilst thousands of children are unalived (sic),” one commenter said.
Meanwhile Chatfield has since doubled down on her position.
At the weekend she signed her name, joining thousands of other artists, singers, thespians, “healers”, tattoo artists and online influencers, to a #CreativesforPalestine campaign that will mimic the hijacking of an STC production where the performers donned keffiyehs on stage.
This new campaign is calling for all creatives to don the Palestinian flag on Wednesday.
ABC slammed for softball interview with Dreyfus
As if it wasn’t stunning enough that Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus lost his cool in a Canberra press conference on Wednesday with Sky News’ reporter Olivia Caisley when she pressed him to apologise to those impacted by the crimes committed following the release of criminal detainees from immigration detention, more bizarre behaviour followed on 7.30 that night, when the AG sat down with chief political correspondent Laura Tingle.
The seven-minute chat featured none of the usual interjections and interruptions by host Sarah Ferguson (on end-of-year leave).
Tingle did not ask a question about Dreyfus’s behaviour in the presser, which at the time had even seemed to alarm Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, who looked away as he jabbed his finger towards the young female reporter.
What followed with Tingle was a mind-numbing tete-a-tete about the emergency new lockup laws and the accusation by Tingle that the government had been: “ … panicked into its response to a really complex legal question by populist politics from the Opposition, that you’ve essentially sort of fanned the hysteria about this?”
Dreyfus didn’t carry on like he did with Caisley (he had called her question “absurd”); instead he just reiterated his earlier bluster in a more measured way to Tingle, Canberra’s doyenne.
Peter Dutton was invited to get stuck into Tingle when he fronted Ray Hadley on Sydney’s 2GB the next morning.
“I tell you what, if it had been a Liberal or National politician, the ABC would have been all over it as ‘misogynistic’ and ‘mansplaining’ and ‘talking over a female journalist’,” Dutton said.
“Mark Dreyfus goes on the 7.30 report last night with Laura Tingle. Guess how many questions he got about his conduct at the press conference and for shouting down a female journalist? Not one, of course.”
When Hadley joked that Dreyfus had “put a tablet under his tongue” to calm him down prior to the 7.30 interview, Dutton took up the theme.
“Yeah, he got a jab in the arm before he went in … just to calm him down. But, you know, you go on Insiders or on 7.30, you can’t get four words out before they jump in to you and start interrupting. You get a Labor politician on there and it’s all, you know, nice and dandy. But anyway, that’s the way the ABC is,” Dutton said.
Mr Dreyfus has since apologised to Caisley. Tingle was contacted on Sunday but Diary received no response.
Triple threat to departure ABC
The king of modern Aussie music is abdicating.
Triple J’s group music director Richard Kingsmill is leaving the ABC after more than 30 years at the national broadcaster. His legacy includes discovering Australian musical stars Missy Higgins, Grinspoon and, more recently, G Flip.
Kingsmill, as the head of music, also launched the Unearthed concept.
All achievements which he called “great thrills and privileges for me.”
“I started with a lot of passion, but pretty modest skills to be honest. I’m incredibly grateful in how the ABC kept encouraging me to grow and gave me time to develop. I’ve worked with so many amazing and talented people, you can’t help but learn and be inspired every single day. I started with two main loves – music and radio. Those have been constants for me across all these years,” Kingsmill said on Monday.
“After all this time, the single thing I’m proudest of was seeing triple j increase its Australian music content from 30 to 60 per cent. And for years, all I ever heard from the commercial radio sector was Australian music was bad for ratings. Well, we did what we did, and more than doubled our audience reach in the process.”
Kingsmill said the highlights of his tenure included working with the Triple J team during live broadcasts and covering events like Splendour in the Grass and hosting the annual Hottest 100 countdowns.
He leaves behind a massive remit. As well as overseeing the music content on the triple j dial, he also reigned over triple j Unearthed, Double J, ABC Country, ABC Local Radio and Triple J’s Hottest station.
“I’ve given my heart and soul to everything I’ve done here. The best feeling now, at the end of all that, is knowing how much I’ve still got left in the tank in continuing to contribute to the Australian music industry,” he said.
His replacement is yet to be announced.
The king of Buzz is back
Close to six years since leaving BuzzFeed as the Australian boss of the news, listicle and cat meme outfit, Simon Crear is set to launch the next phase of his own digital publishing platform.
Crear has been busy working on a local news operation called PS Media which he founded in 2020 with journalists Karen Mahlab and Dr Margaret Simons.
The concept came about due to what they saw as a “market failure for local news”. After raising $1m in seed funding and completing thorough “tests” in three communities around the country, including in Jim Chalmers’ Queensland electorate of Logan, the results confirm what Crear tells Diary: “Strong public support for its collaborative model for local news”.
The testing, the results of which will be published in full on Tuesday, involved PS Media hiring seven reporters and operations staff who published close to 250 articles in the three locations which reached about 28,000 “unique users”.
These “test sites” for hyper local news of Logan, Port Phillip and Brimbank in Victoria, were chosen as they had all had local news services cut or diminished.
The findings also show, according to Crear, the pop-up operations had “considerable impact on powerful institutions in our areas of operation” and also engaged with community members and leaders.
The PS business model will rely on “community ownership structure” as well as philanthropic goodwill and has already had significant equity investment from private investors and families.
As transparency is a major pillar of the new venture, Crear and the PS Media team will release the 52-page report of its collated evidence which outlines its charter of editorial independence and “community responsibility”.
“Collaborative, community-owned local news startup PS Media was founded in direct response to the collapse in the business model for local news,” the Report for Funders states.
Former Foxtel executive director and outgoing Sydney Film Festival chair Deanne Weir was, and still is, a financial backer.
“There is clear evidence that quality local media is an important element for connected communities and a healthy democracy. If we value those things, then we have to value local media, and we have to find new and innovative ways to support it. The impacts of a globalising media market, new technology and changing business models are decimating local media businesses across the globe, we can’t pretend that isn’t happening,” Weir said.
Maybe the Guardian could learn a thing or two from this model of fundraising ‘eh?
Guardian crowd funding for $300,000 from readers
Notwithstanding the deep pockets of some of its backers, the UK-owned Guardian Australia, led by Lenore Taylor, has kicked off another of its online donation drives with a view to crowdsourcing about $300,000 to continue its “independent, high-impact” journalism.
This new fundraiser comes amid massive financial losses and its editor-in-chief Katharine Viner being granted a pay rise which now sees her taking home a base salary of about $1m according to its most recent published accounts.
A new pop-up on the homepage spruiks journalism that has “sparked government enquiries, highlighted injustice, exposed corporate greed and gave a voice to the marginalised. Vital funding from our readers helped fund it all.”
What those “enquiries” were exactly is hard to pinpoint as all of the nominated yarns for this year’s Walkleys were additions to pre-existing reviews and campaigns, including first-person accounts about the Royal Commission into the Robodebt scam, the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum and Queensland’s youth justice system. The Guardian Australia, like its UK mothership, has the financial support of the Scott Trust but, according to a spokesperson, this was “created in 1936 to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and values of the Guardian, free from commercial or political interference. Its purpose is not to fund our day-to-day operations and business”.
“Reader revenue” is a central tenet of the left-wing news organisation’s business model and has generated more than 50 per cent of its profits since it launched in Australia seven years ago.
“We ask for reader support in lieu of a subscription paywall, which allows us to provide high quality independent journalism to everyone, whether they can afford it or not,” the spokesperson said.
Punters had kicked in more than $210,000 at the time of publication.
Foes on Dan’s mind
Dan Andrews should start charging former 3AW Mornings host Neil Mitchell and Sky News star Peta Credlin rent for the space they take up living in his head.
The former Victorian Premier occasionally overcomes his famous reluctance to engage with media: he featured on an obscure podcast called “Socially Democratic” last Friday.
During the close to 90-minute chat on a new episode titled: “Haters Hate and the Rest Vote Labor with Dan Andrews”, Diary learned his former foes of the Fourth Estate are still on his mind.
“I’ve never been one to pick up the phone and be having a crack at editors or reporters. I don’t think I’ve had a cross word with a journalist really, apart from back and forth during pressers … it was not my style,” Andrews said.
However, he then confirmed he and former nemesis Mitchell exchanged the odd iMessage. “I sent him a message when he announced that he was going and I meant it, ‘All best to you and your family’ and he sent something back. And then when I retired, he sent me a message ‘All the best’,” Andrews said.
“And then the next morning he’s on radio saying that I’m the most corrupt, awful, terrible person in the history of the world. Like, I don’t operate like that. So I’m not here to bag him or his (previous) program, or really to discuss why I didn’t go on his program. I had good reasons and I’m just not interested in continuing that.”
Andrews also confirmed he wasn’t a “regular Sky News watcher” but confessed to tuning into its Victorian election coverage.
“Peta Credlin does her usual thing she does about 8.30 every election night (telling the Liberal Party) ‘they’ve got to reconnect with conservative voters. Go further to the right’. You know, that’ll work,” he chortled.
Andrews then joked that the Herald Sun’s ongoing coverage of his post political life, including the news that he was denied membership to the exclusive Portsea Golf Club “must help sell newspapers”.
“We’ll wait and see what happens,” he said of his golfing future. “I don’t have any difficulty in finding places to play golf here and in other parts of the world.”
Climate spin
Say what we will about the management of the ABC but when it comes to spin and shuffling the deck of its enormous workforce, some ASX-listed companies should pay attention to how it’s done.
According to several ABC sources, who spoke to Diary on the condition of anonymity, Aunty has quietly built a new “Climate Unit” in order to please, well, pretty much everyone, from the greenies it harbours in its ranks to the National Party.
The taxpayer-funded broadcaster has deployed its regional and rural reporters to pitch and chase stories about the environment and climate change.
“This new set up is interesting. It gives the bloated regional network of journos, who rarely get national bylines, regular jobs to do for the wider business and it also means management can spin how all our climate and sustainability stories aren’t coming out of Ultimo, which gets the Nats off their back at Senate Estimates I guess,” an ABC reporter told Diary.
Curiously, this Captain Planet- style swat team lacks an obvious leader. Some likely contenders to helm this unit would have been experienced reporters like Michael Slezak, who’s won awards for his climate journalism, or veteran newshound Stephen Long.
Neither was awarded the captain’s guernsey.
Diary then discovered that after 25 years at the ABC, Long has since left the building, without fanfare. Late last month he joined The Australia Institute, the think tank that was the source of his last big (and controversial) 4 Corners investigation into international carbon credit markets.
The ABC was contacted for comment.
Prior warning
The West Australian journalist and national media section committee member of the journalists’ union who penned a scathing opinion piece about the anti-Israel petition endorsed by the MEAA will quit his post in disgust.
Neale Prior, a veteran scribe who has also spent 30 years studying and researching the Middle East, will not stand for re-election for the next NMS. Diary understands he is now agitating for more representation of Western Australian-based journalists on the committee.
He has lodged an official complaint with the MEAA’s federal board regarding the petition and how the motion came to be moved and endorsed.
Prior has previously condemned the campaign, signed by more than 300 journalists, as “woke”, “dangerous” and a “serious mistake”.
In the letter seen by Diary, Prior is calling for more transparency and for the union to adhere to its own code of ethics.
“(The Board) should seriously consider whether it is right for the journalists’ union to tell its members and media outlets what they should report and what version of history should be attached to current events,” Prior writes.
He also outlines his concerns over MEAA staff releasing “misleading communications” and states that before the vote, “the News Corp house committee had not been told about the motion, nor had The West, The Australian Financial Review and AAP house committees”.
Prior declined to comment when contacted by Diary.
MEAA acting chief executive Adam Portelli told Diary the board had received a letter about “the NMS meeting on 23 November and will consider it in due course”.
An MEAA spokesman then reiterated that the petition “did not originate from the union” and does not have the support of the MEAA Board or “the union as a whole”.
“Only the National Media Section committee has,” he said.
While the confusion over who supports what inside the MEAA continues, it popped its head up on Friday on X to call out Prior’s employer, The West Australian, for it use of what it calls a “misleading and inappropriate use of (actor) Margot Robbie’s image” under the The West’s headline “THEY’RE A DUD” to illustrate the government’s new IR laws.
This is a misleading and inappropriate use of Margot Robbie's image. Furthermore, we can confirm that despite making her career in the US, she has not resigned as a member of #MEAAequity - and she is a member of @sagaftra! #proudtobeunionhttps://t.co/TQF0aSeDIy
— MEAA (@withMEAA) December 8, 2023
‘Waste’ of tax dollars
The way in which the ABC splashes its billion-a-year budget is often a hot topic of debate, particularly at prickly Senate Estimates’ hearings, leaving managing director David Anderson scrambling to explain why taxpayers are picking up hefty legal bills for journalists or spending money on pushing out questionable content on social media including TikTok.
However in a remarkable turn of events, one of the public broadcaster’s high-profile presenters, Media Watch host Paul Barry, is apparently in firm agreement that money indeed wasted on meaningless content that fails to pull a decent crowd on social media.
In the show’s “special edition of Media Bites” aired last week, Barry rolled out the best and worst moments of 2023 and featured a firm dig at the ABC’s spending on “farting TikToks”.
What appeared to irritate Barry was the ABC’s unnecessary spending on producing videos for the Chinese-owned platform that are a waste of time and effort.
He declared to viewers: “Our vote for the best piece of social media junk goes to the ABC Australia’s TikTok about mailboxes in rural Victoria”.
The short clip created by the ABC’s social media team included a range of odd-looking minion mailboxes and came complete with farting noises – it attracted 173 likes and just two comments.
Barry told viewers, “Yes. Your Tax dollars at work!”
Farting TikToks and crude shock jocks – Our best (and worst) moments of 2023. #MediaBites#MediaWatchpic.twitter.com/fdYmrpIYQL
— Media Watch (@ABCmediawatch) November 30, 2023
When Diary contacted Barry to ask him further questions about the ABC wasting money and what it should do about it, the TV veteran was uncharacteristically silent.
However, Diary managed to speak with Media Watch’s executive producer Tim Latham, who declared the segment simply based on “humour.”
During a cost of living crisis the taxpayers of Australia are unlikely to be laughing, nor were the ABC’s media team when they were contacted about Barry’s remarks.
They refrained from buying into Barry’s swipe at his employer and did not reveal whether his comments caused a stir, but instead defended the importance of social media use among younger Australians.
In October, Anderson was asked by Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson about the dumping of political editor Andrew Probyn who she said was replaced “with some TikTok journalists.”
Mr Anderson denied this was the case and said the ABC was in the process of advertising for new roles, “not just for a TikTok platform” but elsewhere across their news platforms.
Probyn said after his axing in June he was “shell-shocked” and blindsided by the news, but he’s since been hired by Nine Entertainment.
The ABC remains on the hunt for a political editor in Canberra.
Water off midge’s back
While Mitchell Johnson will be commentating for Triple M Perth at Perth’s Optus Stadium when the first Test against Pakistan commences on Thursday, mystery remains over why the legendary fast bowler’s name was not included in the M’s press release listing about 18 others, including Mark Taylor, Merv Hughes and Mark Waugh.
Suspicions were strong that Johnson’s recent scathing opinion piece for The West Australian may have had something to do with it: he argued David Warner should not have been named in the Aussie side for the opening Test, nor should he receive a hero’s farewell due to his involvement in “sandpaper gate” of 2018.
Then Johnson himself confirmed he would be there, as did Triple M. According to sources from Southern Cross Austereo – owner of Triple M – Johnson’s name was included on a draft release which was circulated for approval, only for his team to request to have it removed.
“I suppose he just thought ‘I’m only doing Perth so no point taking up space,” an associate at TLA – the talent agency which represents the Ashes hero – said.
Nick Tabakoff is on leave.
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