The ABC is well accustomed to copping lashings from conservative critics. But Diary has noticed some of Aunty’s biggest bashings are now coming from the left: notably, wannabe left-wing shock jock Kevin Rudd.
In recent weeks, the ex-PM has embarked on a tweeting frenzy about the ABC, accusing Aunty continually and at length of anti-Labor bias. Last Monday, in Rudd’s eyes, the ABC was “leaning Liberal, denying a Labor voice, violating balance as mandated by the charter”. A day earlier, Aunty was “turning right”, on stories on indigenous subjects featuring “long grabs” from ministers but “zero coverage of Labor Party position”.
Last month, “Kevin 07” even accused the ABC Brisbane 7pm bulletin of running “10 mins uncritical propaganda for Morrison”.
“I’ve spent my life defending the ABC … But @ItaButtrose has had a huge impact on the national broadcaster,” he wrote.
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Alan Jones-free 2GB ditches ratings for TV revenue
Six months after television giant Nine took over radio’s Macquarie Media, the invasion by TV stars of the radio airwaves is complete.
As one insider joked to Diary last week: “Video has finally killed the radio star.”
Nowhere has the trend been more evident than at Nine’s largest radio station 2GB, once dubbed Australia’s “power station”.
With the high-profile departures of Alan Jones, Ross Greenwood, Steve Price and Chris Smith from 2GB weekday slots in less than a year, much of 2GB’s prime time line-up has now been hijacked by TV.
Former Today show host Deb Knight hosts 2GB afternoons, ex-Seven sports editor Jim Wilson is about to host drive, and ex-Sky News presenter Brooke Corte has taken Greenwood’s business show. Out of 2GB’s radio-dominated “power station” line-up of June 2019 (Jones, Ray Hadley, Smith, Ben Fordham, Greenwood and Price), just two: Fordham (who’s moved from drive to breakfast) and Hadley, remain today.
So why is TV invading 2GB? Because Nine believes a similar product to TV will attract new ad dollars to radio: from companies that already advertise on the box. Already, the Nine news theme starts every radio news bulletin, and 2GB’s 6pm sports show is called Wide World of Sports (and features a host of Nine talent).
As a well-placed source points out: “It’s very attractive for Nine. By showing content is similar, they only need one salesperson to sell ad packages across radio, TV and the papers. Previously, 2GB was just selling radio shows.”
And the TV bug has spread elsewhere, with ex-Nine sports reporter Neil Breen hosting Brisbane’s 4BC breakfast and ex-Today show weatherman Steve Jacobs taking over breakfast on all of Nine’s music stations.
It’s no secret Nine was spooked by big falls in revenues when online activist groups like Sleeping Giants targeted 2GB and some of Alan Jones’s controversial content.Its solution is to sacrifice ratings for revenue. Diary hears Nine radio boss Tom Malone is privately unapologetic about finding safer, ad-friendly content from familiar TV personalities that won’t be targeted by activists. That approach may be bearing financial fruit, with early signs advertisers who abandoned 2GB at the peak of recent social media firestorms may be returning.
But dissenting voices have a warning: that transplanting “softer” TV content to radio will ultimately damage revenue anyway, by sacrificing 2GB’s 20-year fortress at the top of the ratings.
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The Age’s factional war
In the same week that the front pages of Melbourne’s The Age was dominated by the Labor Party’s factional warfare, it’s somehow fitting the paper’s own factional war claimed its editor, Alex Lavelle.
A letter signed by 66 Age journalists a week earlier to Lavelle, Nine’s publishing boss Chris Janz and executive editor James Chessell had slammed what they saw as moves to shift the paper’s politics towards the right.
By last Thursday, it was all over. In an internal staff briefing that evening, Chessell refused to disclose “confidential” reasons for Lavelle’s departure.
But the staff letter underlined the factional differences over the paper’s politics: “We believe there is a growing public perception that we have become politicised, a perception damaging the reputation of The Age and, potentially, the viability of the business,” the letter stated. “Politicisation … hurts The Age masthead.”
Diary can reveal the letter was shunned by another internal faction: The Age’s best-known journalists. They included investigative stars, Gold Walkley winner Adele Ferguson, Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker, chief reporter Chip Le Grand, crime reporting doyen John Silvester and chief football writer Jake Niall. All wanted no part of the letter’s claims. By the end of the week, even the letter’s 66 signatories had splintered, with some regretting they had unwittingly helped trigger the departure of the well-liked Lavelle.There was a Sydney/Melbourne layer to The Age’s factional warfare. The letter claimed that a loss of “local editorial control” had made the paper “a subsidiary of Sydney”.
The letter appeared to blame the move of editorial control of The Age to Sydney for two mistakes: one in a front-page story about the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and another in an editorial about slavery in Australia.
But in his response to all staff at The Age on June 14, Chessell firmly slated home the blame for the demonstrations story to its Melbourne editors: “Nobody in Sydney was among the large number of people involved in the commissioning, writing, editing, production and publication of this story,” he said, adding that reporters “were let down by the editing process”.
Chessell also blamed Melbourne for the editorial: “While written in Sydney, the slavery editorial copy was handled in Melbourne.” Four days after that note, Lavelle was gone.
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Lavelle’s replacement
The Age’s world editor Michelle Griffin has taken over the interim editorship of The Age after Lavelle’s departure. That means for the first time ever, women are editing three of Australia’s most powerful mastheads at the same time: with last month’s elevation of Michelle Gunn to the editorship of The Australian and Lisa Davies continuing at the SMH’s helm.
Whether Griffin formally takes over the role permanently is unclear, as Nine starts an “extensive” internal and external search for a new editor. Some logical candidates would be News Corp alumni, although Diary hears the Nine papers’ executive editor James Chessell confided to colleagues last week he was “not keen” on poaching a new editor from Nine’s big rival. Chessell wrote to staff on Thursday that he wants a “strong leader” who’ll fight to maintain The Age’s “independence”.
Apart from Griffin, internal candidates include The Age’s investigations editor Michael Bachelard, Saturday Age editor Mark Fuller and Sunday Age editor David King. But Nine is also said to be keen to see what else the search process turns up.
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Aunty tops Calombaris
The ABC was lumped in with the likes of George Calombaris and Qantas, after it was announced on Friday it had finally reached agreement with the Fair Work Ombudsman to pay back current and former casual staff $11.9m to settle underpayment claims.
The most intriguing part of the settlement was the unexpectedly high $600,000 “contrition payment” forked out by Aunty to make up for the underpayment. In the scheme of big underpayment penalties, that was three times Calombaris’s $200,000 fine last July, and $200,000 up on Qantas’s $400,000 fine this year for a similar breach.
Ombudsman Sandra Parker said she “saw no justification in treating a public statutory company differently from any private sector company — all employers must comply with Australia’s workplace laws”.
The ABC’s “contrition payment”, she said, was on the scale of court-imposed penalties, “but without the cost and delay of drawn-out litigations”.
For its part, the ABC says its error was “unintentional”.
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ABC to cut muscle?
In a much-reprinted speech to the Melbourne Press Club two years ago, the ABC’s news supremo Gaven Morris said there was “no more fat to cut” at the ABC.
That declaration is about to be put to the ultimate test. Diary hears this will be the week that ABC boss David Anderson finally announces his long-awaited five-year plan for the public broadcaster, delayed since March by the coronavirus. But if there is indeed no more fat to cut, we’re about to find out which muscles will be removed.
Diary is reliably informed the cuts will be weighted across all divisions. Morris’s news and current affairs division is set to cop its fair share of up to 60 staff. But we’re told Michael Carrington’s entertainment and specialist division will also be hit hard.
Meanwhile, the other big unanswered question that remains is what services will be affected by the cuts. One thing we keep hearing is talk of an announcement on future resources for lifestyle website ABC Life in the five-year plan.
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Sixty’s new blood
Nick McKenzie’s admirable 60 Minutes investigation of grubby behaviour in the Victorian branch of the Labor Party has set the cat among the pigeons on the show’s on-air reporting team, Diary hears. McKenzie, a Nine print journalist, has broken by far the TV show’s biggest story of the year, claiming three Victorian ministerial scalps at last count.
Mischief-making Nine types wonder whether McKenzie might have now earned the right to strike a “blue steel” pose at the start of 60 Minutes, next to the tick-tick-ticking 60 Minutes clock.
After all, he’s now fronted three of the show’s highest-profile stories of the past year: the Victorian Labor story, as well as separate investigations into Crown casino (titled “Crown Unmasked”) and Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith.
Nine likes that McKenzie can forensically find headline-making stories from scratch, but also still presents well on camera. Intriguingly, McKenzie’s name has now even popped up on one of those “meet the team” sites for 60 Minutes on the Nine portal, no doubt making some of the on-air team feel more uncomfortable.
How long can it be before McKenzie earns the right to say, “I’m Nick McKenzie”, with his best blue steel pose, alongside Liz Hayes, Tara Brown and co?
Tick, tick, tick.
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MasterChef’s big bets
Has there been a leak from the MasterChef kitchen?
The question is being asked around media circles, with one-time outsider Emelia Jackson emerging as prohibitive odds-on favourite with Sportsbet to take the show’s big prize.
Early last week, Jackson was at $1.35, while viewers’ favourite and dessert king Reynold Poernomo was an unexpected outsider at $9.
Such a short quote suggests some degree of knowledge. But later in the week there was another radical twist in the betting with Poernomo by Friday seemingly backed for a fortune, from $9 into $3.50 — although Jackson remained odds-on favourite at $1.37.
Ten, for its part, insists the result of the MasterChef finale, filmed a few weeks ago, is held under extreme secrecy provisions. But the wild betting fluctuations present another interesting poser for authorities about betting on media events where results are already in the can.
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V’landys roasts Karl
With COVID-19 restrictions easing, the epic media schmooze-fest is back. And who better to kick it off at Sydney’s Randwick racecourse on Saturday than Sydney’s schmoozer-in-chief Peter V’landys (or PVL, as he’s better known)?
The NRL and Racing NSW boss assembled one of the great media tables in the Australia Turf Club’s Director’s Room on Saturday, overlooking the winning post.
For one, there was new 2GB drive host Jim Wilson, on the same table as the man he shocked almost everyone by beating to the role, Karl Stefanovic. Man of the moment, 2GB’s Ben Fordham, was seated near his breakfast radio rival Ryan Fitzgerald of Nova’s Fitzy and Wippa. And rounding it out was Seven news anchor Michael Usher and the Daily Telegraph’s chief sports reporter Phil “Buzz” Rothfield.
But it was the Stefanovic/Wilson pairing that caught the NRL boss’s attention. V’landys’ tongue-in-cheek speech didn’t miss Karl, who as Diary revealed last week, unsuccessfully lobbied Nine to pay him $1m a year to host 2GB drive.
“Karl Stefanovic is here, and my thoughts go out to him because he’s in the middle of contract negotiations with Nine,” PVL reportedly told the media-heavy room. “Unfortunately for Karl, Jim Wilson’s taken up all the money with his new contract.”
True things, as they say, are often spoken in jest.
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