How the Don trumped all rivals in 2020

His time as US President is coming to an end, but Australians haven’t switched off when it comes to Donald Trump.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and US President Donald Trump were two of the biggest newsmakers in Australia in 2020. Picture: AAP/File

What a difference a year and a pandemic makes to Diary’s annual top 10 power list of the year’s biggest names in media, conducted annually for us by media monitoring group Streem.

In a record-busting year for media mentions, Australia’s biggest name in media for 2020 is not Australian at all, for the first time in memory. Instead, it’s US President Donald Trump who has easily knocked PM Scott Morrison off his previous top spot.

Trump — the 2019 runner-up — has had 167,034 unique media stories across TV, radio, print and online in Australia this year, dwarfing ScoMo (138,370) by nearly 30,000 mentions.

Interestingly, ScoMo had dominated the list for the first half as he managed the COVID-19 crisis and the aftermath of the bushfires. But things took a dramatic turn, when the US president taking the guaranteed headline-making step of catching COVID-19.

From that date on, there was a Trump media frenzy in Australia, the likes of which has never been seen from a non-local leader, as the end of a bitter presidential election campaign played out.

To give you some idea of the scale of Trump’s domination of the Australian media cycle by the end of 2020, he had 2.5 times as many mentions as ScoMo in October and November. This was, of course, amid the last weeks of the US election campaign, Trump’s subsequent non-stop claims of electoral fraud, and the small matter of a pandemic.

Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden may have actually won the election, but not the Australian media battle. In terms of local media mentions (80,581), Biden has had less than half of Trump’s during 2020. Biden is a lagging fourth on the 2020 list, behind Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews (89,812) — who was at the forefront of another trend: the surge of the state premiers into the top 10 for the first time.

\Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

Apart from Andrews, no less than three of his national cabinet counterparts, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (fifth with 44,964 mentions), Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk (sixth with 41,165) and WA’s Mark McGowan (10th with 27,785), all made the list.

That left federal cabinet ministers starved of media attention, with ScoMo and Josh Frydenberg (seventh with 39,736) the only Coalition frontbenchers to make the list.

The rise of the premiers has also guaranteed less attention to a couple of relevance-deprived ex-PMs. Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott, who were fifth and eighth respectively on the 2019 list, dropped out of the top 10 in 2020, along with Peter Dutton and cricketer Steve Smith.

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Diversity ‘prizes’: ABC does a Utopia

All the talk since last month’s Four Corners #MeToo story on Christian Porter has been on whether the ABC is politically balanced. But among the great minds of the ABC itself right now, there’s a focus on a very different type of balance.

Diary has obtained an urgent internal memo from one of the ABC’s most senior news executives, Gavin Fang, which lays down a hard December 31 deadline for Aunty to reach a 50 per cent gender diversity quota it had fallen behind on.

But the internal note also provides the sort of comedy gold which even the fictional Nation Building Authority from Rob Sitch’s hit ABC show Utopia would be proud of — filled with the type of bureaucratese that government-owned bodies do so well.

The memo from Fang, the ABC’s diversity lead and its managing editor of coverage, is part of a dramatic, end-of-year push for what Aunty calls its “50:50 program”: which is being used to boost “representation of women” in its on-air content up to 50 per cent for 2020.

To get one thing straight, no one disputes that there should be “50:50” representation of men and women on the ABC. But the point some newsroom staff have made to Diary is more about the way in which Aunty has gone about boosting its appearance of gender diversity.

Among the highlights of the urgent memo from Fang is an offer of “prizes” to staff “champions” who use as much female talent (and as little male talent) as possible in interviews and stories for the last weeks of the year.

But why is getting the female quotient up in ABC stories suddenly such an urgent priority late in 2020?

The answer lies in the numbers. Fang’s memo admits that the ABC had achieved just “47 per cent” female on-air representation by October. And that statistic has apparently rung alarm bells among ABC management looking to make its magical 50:50. To use a cricket analogy, Aunty had fallen behind the required on-air ‘run rate’ required to reach 50:50 by December 31.

Fang’s note immediately sets the tone: “The challenge is on to achieve our gender diversity goals … With 11 weeks to go, we are sitting at 47% _ so we are kicking off a 10 Week Challenge to refocus your team on the effort,” he says in the memo.

Some cynical ABC types believe the late-year urgency is driven by the fact that some senior executive bonuses — calculated on a calendar year basis — may ride on Aunty reaching 50:50 by month’s end.

Fang’s memo certainly states failure isn’t an option, stressing that “commissioning decisions” need to be driven by 50:50: “You should be recording your data and having daily conversations about it,” his memo says. “Every day, share your 50:50 data with your team and discuss what it means for your commissioning decisions.”

The ABC even has full-time staff devoted to reaching those 50:50 targets, as part of a military operation. Fang tells them to “reach out to Emma Pearce and the 50:50 team. They will be in touch with your 50:50 champions weekly.”

Finally, there’s Fang’s great prize giveaway. “As a bit of extra motivation — there will be prizes awarded for the best overall result, most improved, the best 50:50 story and the best champion.”

Fortunately for taxpayers, the ABC rewards for staff ‘champions’ don’t seem to be too lavish. Insiders tell Diary they believe the prizes are of the ilk of pizzas, rather than, say, Cartier watches.

But the big question: will the ABC’s champions still get their pizzas if Aunty doesn’t hit 50:50 in the next 10 days?

There’s definitely a Utopia episode in that.

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Preston’s Trioli stint a radio portent?

Could TV foodie Matt Preston be scouting around for an alternative media career, just in case?

Preston is still licking his wounds from the ratings dud that was Seven’s much-trumpeted Plate of Origin, better known as POO. No one blames Preston for POO’s failure, but it was still interesting to hear him moonlighting as Virginia Trioli’s stand-in on her ABC Radio

Matt Preston.

Virginia Trioli

Melbourne morning show last week. Preston’s smooth transition to radio — on a wide range of topics outside of food — didn’t go unnoticed among some senior industry executives we spoke to.

They hinted that if Preston were ever to move on from his TV career, a specialist radio gig may not be out of the question.

For his part, Preston is certainly clocking up some decent radio experience on his CV, having previously filled in on ABC breakfast radio. He’s privately confided he feels at home on the medium.

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Dr Chris Brown’s jungle heroics

The climax of Ten’s I’m a Celebrity in the wilds of northern NSW very nearly didn’t happen a few days back — and it’s all because of our old mate La Nina.

A serious flood event took place at the I’m a Celebrity site in Murwillumbah in northern NSW, after a whopping 500mm of rain in the downpours of the last week or so.

Luckily for Ten, which has already had to deal with a COVID-19 cluster on The Masked Singer, the cancellation of a series of Survivor and the relocation of The Amazing Race, the production squeaked in by a day before the real flooding took hold.

Chris Brown and Julia Morris.

But two “I’m a Celeb” names who were still very much in Murwillumbah when the biblical flooding started, were none other than its two hosts, Julia Morris and Dr Chris Brown.

And it was Dr Chris who returned to his roots as a vet to turn hero for a group of waterlogged animals. For one, Diary is told he resuscitated a possum with some very vigorous CPR, as well as ‘rehoming’ some other animals, including bandicoots, who had been displaced. Now the attention turns to the German version of I’m a Celebrity, with its crew forced to evacuate not once, but twice last week.

The German production team is still scrambling to get the site ready for their own “I’m a Celeb” season which is due to start filming any day.

On the bright side for the Germans, at least the rain will flush out some exotic creepy-crawlies (and no, dear reader, we’re not talking about the celebrities!) for the show’s ‘tucker trials’.

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Kochie’s great Andrew G coup

David Koch’s new-ish business streaming channel, ausbiz TV, is continuing to be a home for refugees of 2020s great journalism purge.

Departed ABC newsreader Andrew Geoghegan has been the latest to turn up at ausbiz.

The ABC refugee is now a full-time host on ausbiz, joining a team that includes Koch himself and Seven finance editor Gemma Acton.

David Koch. Picture: Tim Hunter

Andrew Geoghegan. Picture: AAP

On the business side, the venture has attracted some well-known investors, the highest profile being former treasurer Joe Hockey, his financial executive wife, Melissa Babbage and Koch himself.

The venture is now on the expansion route, with co-founder Kylie Merritt telling Diary it has raised $2.5m in recent days to fund the development of its streaming platform.

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Aunty’s TikTok move at odds with ScoMo

First it was Four Corners; now the federal government has a brand new point of difference with the ABC. And this time, it involves the Chinese-owned video sharing app, TikTok, in a tale that also shows that Aunty is still hiring new staff despite its 250 job cuts earlier this year.

Yes folks, dust off your CVs, because Diary has learnt that Aunty is now looking for its very own “TikTok host”. But hiring a staff member to host an ABC version of the People’s Republic’s video sharing app could put it at direct odds with no less than Scott Morrison.

A few months back, the PM revealed he was looking “very closely” at TikTok, warning — as the ABC itself reported — that the app “connects right back to China”.

But ScoMo’s warnings have had little impact on the effortlessly cool Triple J crowd, who have now posted the new job opportunity on the ABC’s internal jobs portal.

Under the five-month contract job, Triple J is offering a “rare opportunity” to “shape the Triple J TikTok editorial strategy”. The youth broadcaster wants an “experienced creator” who “has mastered the art of making people laugh in under 15 seconds”.

In order to win the job, they also have to offer proof, via a “self-recorded video and/or show-reel” on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube of their abilities.

There’s just one question left — will the ABC cop another disapproving letter from Communications Minister Paul Fletcher?

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‘I speak ABC’: Probyn gets in a tangle

Andrew Probyn has given an early Christmas present to media lovers with a sense of humour.

As the political year wrapped up, the ABC’s political editor had a little nugget of gold wrapped up in a very serious question for PM Scott Morrison, as Probyn got himself hopelessly tangled in asking about how he would approach a belligerent Xi Jinping.

Andrew Probyn. Picture: Kym Smith

Chris Uhlmann. Picture: Kym Smith

It’s worth hearing the question in all its glory: “Prime Minister, Andrew Probyn from the ABC. These sorts of matters often have to be resolved man to man, woman to woman. Or woman to man, further. If this is allowed to fester, at what stage will you pick up the phone to President Xi?”

I speak ABC but struggled to keep up as my friend @andrewprobyn waded through a gender minefield in this question to the PM. @9NewsAUS #auspol pic.twitter.com/Wb1kX2P71S

— Chris Uhlmann (@CUhlmann) December 2, 2020

The hilarious question moved Probyn’s mate and noted press gallery joker, Nine’s political editor Chris Uhlmann, to tweet out a video of himself shaking his head after Probyn had asked it, with the caption: “I speak ABC but struggled to keep up as my friend @andrewprobyn waded through a gender minefield in this question to the PM.”

Uhlmann subsequently copped a massive pile-on from outraged Twitter followers for daring to tease Probyn about the question.  But when we caught a good-natured Probyn on Friday, he strongly defended his mate: “People who tell journalists they’ve got thin skins have often got very thin skins themselves — and very often, no sense of humour,” he told Diary. “I got myself into a bit of a tangle, and it was very funny. But Chris got towelled up by the Twitter trolls.”

The ABC political editor also has a telling message for his alleged “defenders” on Twitter: it was Probyn himself who gave Uhlmann the ABC footage to tweet. “I thought it was hilarious,” he told Diary. “And Chris is the biggest shit-stirrer in the press gallery. Gawd bless him!”

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March 23: 2020 bin fire’s D-day

Sunday was yet another dramatic chapter in the never-ending drama that is 2020, with Queensland, Victoria and South Australia all imposing pre-Christmas bans on Greater Sydney. But as dramatic as the weekend was, Diary reckons there is one day above all that best encapsulates the bin fire that is 2020: March 23.

Peter Overton.

Take Peter Overton’s read off the top of the Nine Sydney news bulletin at 6PM that night:

“88,000 people have lost their jobs, the NRL has suspended the 2020 season, the Olympics won’t go ahead this year, Queensland has closed its borders to us, 3000 Australians are stranded on cruise ships around the world, and we can’t go to the pub for a drink.

“If I told you six weeks ago this would happen, you’d think I was making it up.

“Well, all of these things happened in one day: today.”

Some year.

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A bumper 2021

After a bonkers 2020, this is the last Diary of the year. We wish our readers a very merry Christmas, and we’ll be back in the new year for what is sure to be a bumper — or is it bumpy? — 2021.