Jon Faine’s well-chronicled good relations with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews may have just taken a hit on Sunday, after Faine gave Dan an uppercut in his weekly column in the Sunday Age.
The subject was Andrews’s furious description of participants in the now-infamous Melbourne engagement party a few weeks back as having made “shitty choices”.
The former ABC Radio Melbourne morning host was not amused by Andrews’s outburst, and decided some tough love was in order: “Dan Andrews lost his cool last week, swore and turned an unattractive shade of pink in frustration as the new case numbers doubled.
“He needs to park his personal emotions and regain the composure that was his earlier hallmark. The public ought to focus on what he is saying rather than how it is said.”
Faine revealed to Diary on Sunday it was the unlikely figure of ex-PM Tony Abbott who had best summed up his stance on politicians.
“Abbott introduced me to his wife Margie once at the cricket at the MCG Boxing Day test: ‘Margie, this is Jon Faine, he’s the ABC’s Melbourne morning guy. He’s an equal opportunity mongrel: he gives everyone a hard time.”
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Saint Jacinda’s halo slips with NZ media
In May, “Saint” Jacinda Ardern was riding high after being named Fortune magazine’s “world’s greatest leader”, largely for her handling of the pandemic.
“Jacinda Ardern had already sealed her position as a great leader early in her premiership of New Zealand,” Fortune gushed of the NZ PM. “Then the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and Ardern targeted not just suppression of the virus, but its complete elimination.”
What a difference three months makes. With an outbreak now in the hundreds, her bid for “complete elimination” of Covid-19 looking naive amid strict lockdowns and glacial vaccination rates of just over 20 per cent that make even Australia’s rollout seem record-breaking, the Ardern media halo is slipping.
Even the Wellington-based NZ press gallery, seen by some to have given Ardern a saloon passage through her four years as PM, has turned on her.
Last week’s coverage of Ardern would rank as some of the toughest she has had as PM. From respected business and political columnists to NZ’s breakfast radio king Mike Hosking, the media’s knives have sharpened to even accuse Ardern of “misleading” the public with her tightly-controlled daily Covid-19 press conferences and poor vaccine rollout.
As a member of the NZ gallery tells Diary: “From a media point of view, the worm has started to turn. She has been coming across as stage-managed. She hasn’t been as polished, hasn’t been as good as in the past, and there’s been more political grandstanding.”
And this time, the NZ media is not letting Ardern off the hook. On the weekend, stuff.co.nz’s well-regarded political editor Luke Malpass, (the former Sydney-based editorial writer for the AFR) accused the NZ PM of trying to fool the NZ public by presenting a “concocted headline number” to inflate the appearance of action on vaccines.
“Ardern has turned the top of the 1pm (Covid-19) update into a misleading advertorial about the vaccine program, in which she or the minister fronting produces a huge headline figure of the number of New Zealanders who ‘have either booked or had at least one vaccination’,” Malpass wrote.
“It’s a nonsense number. Being booked and being vaccinated are not the same thing. Trying to pretend that the rollout is quicker than it is by blowing up a concocted headline number does no-one any favours and hurts the government’s credibility.”
Defending New Zealand's vaccination rate, @jacindaardern says it's accepted we wouldn't be the first rolling out vaccines because of NZ's relatively positive Covid situation. #NZQandA#nzpolpic.twitter.com/9ZDUTol2eM
— Q+A (@NZQandA) April 11, 2021
On a similar theme, prominent NZ Herald business columnist Fran O’Sullivan told Ardern there needed to be “less podium performance and more facts”, accusing her of “massaging the messaging”.
O’Sullivan skewered “Ardern‘s irritating habit of failing to ‘just get to the point, Prime Minister’ when she indulges in lengthy preambles prior to making the only announcement that the country really wants to hear”.
Even New Zealand’s traditionally left-leaning national radio broadcaster, RNZ, brought back Ardern’s past words to haunt her: “In April, Ardern told parliament New Zealand‘s delivery schedule was slower than other countries’ as its people were ‘not dying while they wait’,” RNZ noted in a piece that described NZ’s vaccine rollout as “staggeringly slow”.
Meanwhile, shock jock Hosking (a kind of Kiwi amalgam of Alan Jones and Ray Hadley), last week turned up the volume on Ardern both on his show and in print, lashing both her performance on vaccines and her vision for reopening the NZ economy as inferior even to Scott Morrison’s.
“If those who support this approach of ours are honest, they have to admit that we are now captured by our own arrogance and incompetence,” Hosking wrote in the NZ Herald. “We are trapped in last year‘s response, as the world moves on. Scott Morrison gets it and has said sorry. Let’s open a book, and take odds on when we get the same from our government.”
Ominously, NZ journalists tell Diary Ardern will need to “stomp on” the current outbreak fast – or the media critiques will intensify.
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Zonfrillo’s publishers won’t sue over Nine story
It has been the question on the lips of locked-down foodies: will celebrity chef Jock Zonfrillo’s publishers be taking legal action against the Nine newspapers’ Saturday magazine, Good Weekend, over a lengthy feature casting doubt on parts of his life story?
Good Weekend senior writer Tim Elliott’s profile of Zonfrillo at the start of August caused a stir, when both named and unnamed sources in the story called into question the version of events the MasterChef judge recounted in his recently-released memoir, Last Shot. Among the colourful events Zonfrillo describes in the book are periods in his life of homelessness and heroin addiction.
But Elliott alleged in his Good Weekend story that people he spoke to for the article said “many of the stories that Zonfrillo tells about himself in the book and elsewhere differ markedly from their own recollections of events”.
In response to these claims, Zonfrillo’s publisher, a cranky Dan Ruffino of Simon and Schuster, said in early August he would consider taking legal action against Nine if he felt “our sales prospects have been harmed by this article”.
Well, the good news for Nine is this prospect now appears to be off the table. Sources close to the Zonfrillo camp now tell Diary there is “no reason” for the publisher to take things any further.
Why? Because the stir caused by the Good Weekend article apparently only served to drum up interest in Zonfrillo’s book.
As one source in the Zonfrillo camp puts it: “Readers responded in greater numbers (after the profile). It’s a bestseller, and it hit No.1 in the biography charts.”
The Zonfrillo camp had been worried the tough Good Weekend profile could have prompted booksellers to “take it off their shelves” – but that scenario never eventuated.
All of which proves one famous adage: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
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Welcome to PNN: the Palaszczuk News Network
“Hello to our Facebook viewers tuning in today,” says a meticulously made-up Annastacia Palaszczuk, as she hosts her daily 10am news conference beaming “LIVE” in block letters on her social media channels. Sounding more like a news anchor than a state premier, she is now offering an alternative to the major networks that has quickly become known as PNN — the Palaszczuk News Network.
The Queensland Premier’s army of spin doctors have morphed Palaszczuk from a mere state premier into the wannabe star of Australia’s newest 24-7 news channel, complete with taxpayer-funded corporate jets to reach even the most remote “stories”, and a direct telecast channel to the public.
Palaszczuk’s slick PNN news streaming service on Facebook and Twitter features news alerts, dedicated on-call camera crews, make-up artists, fancy graphics teams to put the Premier’s best foot forward, and live streaming of all her important events.
Keen observers noticed a clear network rebrand by PNN on Wednesday, when Palaszczuk seemingly amped up efforts to lure viewers away from the major TV networks and directly onto her own channel.
At 10am that day, she posted, in block letters on PNN, a “BREAKING NEWS” alert to her 299,000 Facebook followers and 185,000 Twitter fans. PNN wanted to be first with the news of Palaszczuk’s big two-fingered salute to pesky southerners: her announcement that Queensland hotel quarantine was now “full”, and had no room for any new admissions until further notice.
The announcement even had its own network branding: an outline of the state of Queensland, together with an “Annastacia Palaszczuk” watermark.
Soon after, a bunch of slick ABC-style graphics popped up, just to rub it in that “interstate arrivals from declared hot spots won’t be accepted into Queensland”.
By Thursday, PNN hit the road – or should we say, the government jet. Palaszczuk managed to blindside everyone from Toowoomba mayor Paul Antonio to PM Scott Morrison her announcement that she was setting up her own quarantine facility on the Darling Downs — with no federal government support.
And with no competition, guess who was first with the news? Why, PNN, of course, which featured another “BREAKING” graphic. Palaszczuk also magnanimously took along pool reporter Marlina Whop, Channel 7’s state political editor, who dutifully reported the announcement for Seven’s 6pm news on Thursday.
By Friday, back in Brisbane, deputy premier Steven Miles was channelling his new role as PNN co-anchor, telling his live audience: “It’s great to be coming to you LIVE, from Brisbane’s iconic Regatta Hotel to announce a further easing of restrictions.”
Kieran Gilbert and Joe O’Brien, eat your heart out.
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Age story deleted after anti-Israel rant
The Age’s features editor, Maher Mughrabi, is rapidly becoming the story.
Last week, it was his presentation to The Australian Palestine Advocacy Network (which proudly described him as a “Palestinian journalist”) about how they should write “great letters to the editor”.
Now Diary has learnt Mughrabi has been saving some of his loudest pro-Palestinian activism to attack the stories of his own colleagues at The Age. And unsurprisingly, it hasn’t gone down well.
Mughrabi, the paper’s ex-foreign editor, used The Age’s internal staff electronic messaging site, Slack, to offer some brutal assessments of a comment piece written by the Nine papers’ foreign affairs and national security correspondent, Anthony Galloway, last month.
What has particularly raised eyebrows was The Age’s decision to delete from its websites Galloway’s piece about Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s attitude to the anti-Israel movement, soon after Mughrabi’s criticism.
Galloway’s piece also was mysteriously absent from the print edition of The Age on July 16 — despite the fact it ran both in print and online in sister newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald.
The comment piece made two key points: that Albanese had deemed “anti-Semitism is a scourge he will not stand for”, and that Albo had become a “staunch critic” of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
A furious Mughrabi hit the roof. Tagging Galloway on the internal messaging system, Mughrabi wrote his comment piece merely perpetuated a “Zionist argument”.
“I cannot for the life of me understand why there isn’t a Palestinian voice in this news report as it stands. As for the flat suggestion that the BDS movement is antisemitic, I consider it offensive.
“He (Albanese) will simply become an echo chamber for the positions of ECAJ and other lobby groups for Israel.”
The SMH/Age’s Canberra-based deputy federal political editor, Stephanie Peatling, defended Galloway, telling Mughrabi: “It’s a story about Labor politics – not an argument about whether or not BDS is antisemitic. We haven’t quoted any Jewish groups either.”
But that response only further riled up Mughrabi, who got on a roll with four cranky replies in four minutes to Peatling, and a mesmerised online audience of 120-odd Age and SMH journalists. He told her that her claim the story was about “Labor politics” was “disingenuous”, complained he had been “labelled an antisemite in my own workplace”, and concluded by arguing: “The Israel-Palestinian issue is not an in-house matter for white people.”
Mughrabi soon deleted the messages, but not before screenshots had been snapped for posterity.
When Diary reached The Age’s editor Gay Alcorn to ask whether Mughrabi’s messages had triggered the withdrawal of the Galloway piece, she replied: “Decisions about what is published in The Age are mine and I do not intend discussing them with The Australian.”
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Fall of Kabul hits Roberts-Smith trial
The shocking events of recent weeks in Afghanistan have also caused ripples in another major conflict closer to home: the Australian Federal Court defamation “trial of the century” battle between Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith and Nine.
Three of four Afghan witnesses Nine had called against Roberts-Smith gave evidence by videolink in a special sitting from Kabul law firm Kakar Advocates last month, just before the trial was adjourned because of Sydney’s lockdowns.
But a female Afghan witness was unable to give evidence before the lockdown, and now may not be able to give evidence at all given events in Kabul.
Diary hears the witness lives in a tiny village a couple of hours out of Kandahar, and it was already considered too dangerous to get her through Taliban checkpoints even before the fall of Kabul.
But now things are even worse after the Taliban conquest. A source close to the Nine camp tells Diary: “Who would have known that a few weeks later, the Taliban would have taken over that city and we wouldn’t have been able to get that evidence, perhaps at any point in the future?”. Despite this, Nine will call the witness if it can: “We reserve the right to call her in the future. If we can call her, we will call her.”
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Will Fordham’s ‘tough on Gladys’ stance work?
There was much hand-wringing at Nine in early July when 2GB lost its breakfast crown for the first time in 17 years to KIIS FM’s Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson.
Diary noted back then senior Nine radio executives had privately told star breakfast host Ben Fordham he needed to “get tough” with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, amid some internal perceptions the pair had become too matey on air.
The very next day, Fordham unveiled “Ben 2.0” on his show, raining down attack after attack on the NSW Premier over the damage she was causing to NSW businesses through her decisions, which he described as “red hot”.
Now this Tuesday will be the acid test for Fordham’s new-found aggression, when the first radio ratings since then come out. The question being asked in radio circles is: was the last survey just a blip for 2GB?
Diary hears 2GB remains hopeful the combination of a news-hungry audience during Sydney’s long lockdown and Fordham’s new “get tough on Gladys” approach will see him bounce back to No.1.
But elsewhere at 2GB, there’s a broadcaster with even more at stake. Drive host and media nice guy Jim Wilson has been stuck in a ratings rut over several surveys, finishing a well-beaten sixth last month, in the same slot Fordham used to win. Word is management will be watching closely on Tuesday.
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