First it was Chris Uhlmann’s evisceration of Dan Andrews’ extreme Melbourne lockdown.
Now Diary has learnt of a second instance in which a critical snapshot of life under Dan has been chucked out by jumpy senior editors at Nine’s The Age newspaper. And as with Uhlmann, the item was pulled because it was deemed too sensitive in Melbourne’s current mindset.
In this case, it was a cartoon by The Age’s marquee cartoonist, Michael Leunig, scheduled for publication on Monday, September 7.
Leunig has since publicly revealed the cartoon was primarily about what he saw as “disturbing” force used by Victorian police against anti-lockdown protesters. But The Age dumped it at the last minute, without explanation. With no time for a re-draw, it was hurriedly replaced in The Age’s September 7 edition with a “vintage” Leunig cartoon.
Why was it pulled? Because, we’re reliably informed, senior editorial staff at The Age deemed it to convey views about mask-wearing that could upset readers. The cartoon by Leunig, named in 1997 as one of 100 Australian National Living Treasures, features six drawings at different stages of a pandemic, in an apparent questioning of Victoria’s strict enforcement of lockdowns.
The cartoon starts with a drawing of a mask-less person, then muses on the effect that progressively greater state control on mask-wearing could have on the person, with the subtitles progressing from “Fear” to “Mask”, “Gag”, “Handcuffs”, “Obedience” and, finally, “Depression”.
It was drawn just days after Ballarat woman Zoe Buhler was arrested and charged with “incitement” after posting a Facebook event that called on people to meet in Ballarat to peacefully protest lockdown restrictions.
Diary is told that when the cartoon was pulled, top brass at The Age were asked directly why. We hear the feedback came back that the cartoon was withdrawn because it would make some readers “unhappy” — not for legal reasons or bad taste.
We hear Leunig, whose cartoons generally run in the Age on Mondays and Saturdays, has told close colleagues that while he has previously had cartoons pulled from daily newspapers, it had always been in consultation with editors. He has also privately told them he has never, in his entire 50-year career, had a cartoon dumped because it could make readers “unhappy”.
The editorial decision was made four days before Gay Alcorn was announced as The Age’s next editor, at a time Michelle Griffin was still its acting editor.
Leunig was moved to write an article on his personal website about the contentious cartoon.
“I recently drew for the newspaper a cartoon about some disturbing aspects of the Covid lockdown in the state of Victoria,” Leunig wrote. “Dangerous territory. In my view there was nothing in the cartoon that anyone would need to agree with or disagree with. It was not an opinion piece, it was a mood piece. I was attempting to hold a mirror up to my society …. No value judgments, no opinions, no sneering. Simply witnessing the pity and the pathos that is plainly evident and undeniable.”
While it didn’t make the paper, the much-discussed cartoon is still online at The Age. But Leunig revealed in the article he had copped a “deluge of shaming, insult and righteous lecturing; the accusation that I am selfish, anti-mask, that I don’t know or care about people dying, that I’m a privileged ‘booma’ (I’m actually too old to be a baby boomer), a conspiracy theorist (and) an irresponsible idiot in a tinfoil hat”.
These were “amazing fantasies,” he said.
“I dare say I am a fairly co-operative law abiding citizen, I wear a mask … I keep the curfew, I do all the ‘right things’.”
But he quickly added that the grand traditions of cartooning meant not blindly accepting what leaders like Andrews said: “(I) have my duty as a cartoonist who cares about my society and believes that unquestioning blind faith in leaders and experts can be tragic folly.”
Insiders tell Diary the decision to pull the cartoon was a Melbourne one, with no input from Nine newspapers’ Sydney head office.
Aunty takes Huggies ad jingle
Some might say the relationship between the government and Ita’s ABC is soiled. So it’s appropriate that Aunty is forking out taxpayer dollars on rights to a tune best known as the Huggies nappies jingle.
The pop song “It Must Be Love” — made famous by British pop group Madness in the 1980s — had for many years been the Huggies anthem in Australia before making its debut on the new ABC campaign dubbed “ABC Love” last month.
In using the Huggies jingle, it’s interesting that the ABC has chosen a British hit song to succeed “I Am Australian” as its theme.
Until recently, the ABC had been running several singalong versions of “I Am Australian” as a rousing COVID antidote.
But Aunty’s newest pitch has unashamedly been turned into a lovefest about itself. Apart from the catchy nappy jingle, it also features a feast of gushing quotes from random Australians about why they love Aunty.
Some of the quotes written on screen in one of the ads include: “Simply essential to all of us”, “Literally saving lives”, “ABC iView is the best”, “Thank you for the marvellous work you do”, “Wonderful”, “Exemplary”, and “Perfectly delivered”. Another ad almost exclusively focuses on the ABC as a “lifeline” in emergencies, with lots more platitudes.
Anything to do with the ABC’s other relentless campaign: twisting the arm of the federal government to give it more money for emergency services broadcasting?
If so, it’s not working, with nary a zac for the ABC in the budget from the government — when even SBS and AAP got some dough.
And Aunty had better get used to sharing its newest theme with nappy corporations. When Diary rang a spokeswoman for Huggies’ parent company Kimberly-Clark, she emphatically replied: “Yes Huggies does still use the song.”
Roxy’s ‘poo jogger’ joins cold case pile
Saturday marked the first anniversary of one of the great whodunits of the Australian tabloid media — and Diary can now reveal it’s no closer to being solved.
It all started when celebrity publicist Roxy Jacenko drew screaming front-page treatment when she posted videos to her social media profile on October 10 last year, showing an early morning jogger defecating on the street outside her office in Paddington, in Sydney’s city’s inner-east.
The relentless Roxy had asked her 250,000 adoring Instagram fans at the time: “Do you know who this person is?”
Diary’s colleague Lilly Vitorovich never flinches from the burning questions. So she asked Jacenko the obvious poser: had she found the phantom pooper?
Roxy frankly admitted she never got to the, ahem, bottom of the mysterious defecator. “It happened about four or five times, and I had security cameras all around,” she confided in Vitorovich. “But the cops never found her.”
Jacenko has, however, been doing some pooper profiling. She’s concluded the attack was not targeted, but rather the actions of a random thrillseeker. “We researched that and apparently you get some sort of a rush when you do that kind of thing in public. God knows why.”
She says her friends are adamant that the culprit is a certain eastern suburbs identity who just randomly happened to be running past her Sweaty Betty offices when nature called. “A few people messaged me, saying it’s this person. But I’m not exactly going to tap on her door and ask if it was her.”
Looks like Roxy’s mystery of the steaming turd is in danger of becoming a cold case.
North Face jacket marks ‘Dandrews’ ton
Just when you thought it had been put away in mothballs for the summer, the North Face Dandrews Jacket is back!
Daniel Andrews marked the 100th episode of Dan TV on Saturday by dusting off his signature Dandrews jacket and wearing it for maybe one last time before the summer.
As Diary revealed a month or two back, the jacket has become a big seller for The North Face since Andrews started wearing it to his TV appearances, with a clamour of Baby Boomers looking for authentic Andrews wear. But in recent weeks, he’d been sporting a more formal look with a suit jacket.
As he donned the Dandrews jacket to mark his 100th Dan TV appearance, even the ALP Twitter handle celebrated, with a tweeted photo of him with the caption: “100 press conferences in a row”.
That tweet about Andrews’s century wasn’t so well received by some high-profile Victorians.
Basketball star Andrew Bogut probably best summed up the reaction when he tweeted, with a dizzy face emoji: “This bloke and his party think he is playing Cricket!”
Unsurprisingly, wannabe Victorian Liberal leader Tim Smith also chimed in to lambast Labor for getting out the champagne glasses to celebrate “that he’s lied for 100 days straight”.
Saturday Night Live pays audience US$150
COVID-19 is rapidly changing how TV shows source studio audiences.
In the US, NBC’s ratings stalwart, comedy juggernaut Saturday Night Live, has blazed a potential trail for Australian shows by actually paying a live audience to attend.
A seat in the audience at SNL’s season premiere a few days back — with a satirical version of the presidential debate with Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump and Jim Carrey as Joe Biden — was worth $US150 a seat to some audience members who attended, according to The New York Times.
SNL apparently complied with New York guidelines now requiring audience members to be vetted as “cast” through a third party screening process, and compensated for their time.
Their requirements included being given a rapid virus test and asked to sign health forms indicating that they did not have COVID-19 or symptoms of it.
It could just be the blueprint for audience-reliant Australian shows who went crowd-free in 2020, like The Voice and The Masked Singer.
Palaszczuk’s ex-foe now her attack dog
As Annastacia Palaszczuk’s spinner-in-chief, Shane Doherty is at the frontline of defending some of the weirder double standards she is imposing on Queenslanders and others during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For example, he has taken on Palaszczuk’s critics to somehow explain why she has one rule stopping interstate people from attending their own parents’ funerals, while Hollywood stars like Tom Hanks are allowed to breeze past strict hotel quarantine requirements altogether.
But with the Queensland election campaign now in full swing, Diary has now obtained video evidence proving that Doherty, in his former role as Nine’s state political reporter, was once a vocal Palaszczuk critic.
One story we’ve turned up from a couple of years ago features Doherty attacking the Queensland Premier about her obsession, then and now, with pleasing Hollywood.
It concerned her government’s secrecy in suppressing the amount it was offering in huge subsidy incentives to Hollywood giants like Disney to make blockbusters in Queensland.
Doherty had plenty of barbs for the Palaszczuk policy: “Disney wanted its deal with Queensland kept a secret. Even though the company’s worth $US50nn and it’s made more than $US10bn from its Pirates and Marvel movies, it still needs the help of Queensland taxpayers to get its blockbusters made.”
Contrast that feisty reporting with her soft run from Nine’s current crop of Brisbane political reporters — who, led by Lane Calcutt, were even caught on tape talking about dishing up “Dorothy Dixers” to Palaszczuk in the midst of the pandemic (see Diary last month).
Stan fills the ABC China gap
Stan Grant was recently appointed as the ABC’s international affairs analyst. Now Diary has learnt the full reasoning behind the new role: filling the ABC’s China void.
That void has been left by the forced departure from China of the ABC’s correspondent Bill Birtles, and also from the inability of Sarah Ferguson to get there to take up her marquee posting as the ABC’s Beijing bureau chief because of unprecedented political tensions.
As Grant tells Diary: “There’s a vacuum — both at the ABC and more broadly, in Australia generally — in terms of China coverage.”
The one-time Seven current affairs anchor is already filling that vacuum, using his experience of more than a decade working for CNN in Hong Kong and Beijing.
Grant confides that he is already in the middle of putting together a Four Corners instalment on China. He’s also looking at filing long-form stories on the economic and military giant for Foreign Correspondent.
“I loved living in China, but it’s very important to understand its role in the world right now: as a rising authoritarian superpower at a time America’s place in the world is damaged. And Australia finds itself at a hinge-point of history.”
Daily Mail’s career obit for Kochie
Sunrise host David Koch learnt an important lesson last week: be careful about how you frame your sentimental messages on social media … or the Daily Mail might just start writing your career obituaries.
It started when Koch made a seemingly innocent post to Instagram to celebrate yet another year on Sunrise.
The post read in its entirety: “18 year anniversary co-hosting @sunrise7. It has been an unbelievable experience and privilege. Thank you for the opportunity. Looking forward to what’s ahead.”
For the Daily Mail, that was enough for the screaming headline: “David Koch sparks fears he’s QUITTING Sunrise after 18 years as he shares an emotional Instagram post”.
Koch had made the post just before boarding a two-hour flight from Adelaide to Sydney.
By the time he landed, and turned his phone on, it was maxed out with “come back Kochie” messages.
Thankfully, he assures Diary: “Reports of my premature demise have been greatly exaggerated.”
For the record, Kochie — who along with co-host Samantha Armytage still hasn’t lost a ratings day in 2020 — says he has zero plans to fly the Sunrise coop.
“For one, I’ve only just signed another two-year contract, so it’s an odd time to be leaving,” he says. “I put out a post on October 3 every year to show the viewers how grateful I am to be doing what I do. It’s the viewers who will decide when I retire — not the Daily Mail.”
‘Pressure from above’: ABC executive pushed by Buttrose
Christopher Oliver-Taylor was under pressure to sack Antoinette Lattouf after Ita Buttrose made clear she was ‘deeply unhappy’ with action taken on the stand-in radio host, the Federal Court has heard.
Aunty in race row with unionised staff
Hundreds of unionised ABC staff passed a resolution on Thursday demanding the national broadcaster acknowledge that Lebanese, Arab and Middle Eastern people can be subject to racial discrimination.