Nine’s ‘must-see investigation’ anything but for two of its radio hosts
Is it any wonder free-to-air TV viewership is diminishing when two of Nine Entertainment’s prominent radio hosts openly admit they don’t watch the network’s prime-time programs?
It’s any wonder free-to-air TV viewership is diminishing when two of Nine Entertainment’s prominent radio hosts openly admit they don’t watch the network’s prime-time programs?
Melbourne 3AW breakfast host Russel Howcroft, a former Ten Network TV executive, and the station’s drive host Jacqui Felgate, a former TV newsreader, were happy to divulge their lack of interest in sitting down and watching prime-time news and current affairs on commercial TV, including Nine.
Howcroft and fellow breakfast co-host Ross Stevenson were chewing the fat on air last week over The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s reporter Nick McKenzie’s investigation into the CFMEU when Howcroft told listeners he didn’t bother turning on the TV the night before to watch the Channel 9 “must-see major investigation.”
Hours after McKenzie’s 60 Minutes expose aired, Howcroft openly told listeners: “I didn’t watch 60 Minutes, I really wish I had of … I found myself in bed”.
Diary wonders how that went down with Nine management; Howcroft would rather get his beauty sleep than watch a prime- time investigation by a journalist he was about to interview on live radio that morning.
Howcroft must have realised he’d put his foot in it because he quickly tried to dig himself out of an embarrassing on-air hole by saying he would “catch up maybe later” on the story on “the Nine catch-up platform.”
Several days later, when Howcroft and Felgate fronted a Commercial Radio & Audio conference in Melbourne, Felgate decided to take a brutal swipe at the irrelevance of the 6pm news, the service she used to occasionally host.
This is something not likely to amuse Nine’s weekday 6pm news anchors Alicia Loxley and Tom Steinfort,who often appear as guests on her drive program to discuss the news of the day.
“I don’t watch much six o’clock news anymore,” Felgate announced to hundreds of people at the radio conference.
“I was on it for 20 years and I thought when I left that would probably be it for me.
“What I’ve learnt is you can get that in other ways … the best bits are on social.”
Felgate was also happy to share her own glowing self-assessment on her ability to share breaking news, despite battling her own issues with a diminishing radio audience – she has shed 128,000 listeners since taking over drive from Tom Elliott this year.
“At times I’ve got stuff on my show that ends up as the lead story on the six o’clock news, the six o’clock news is not what it used to be,” Felgate boasted.
At the conference, Howcroft, who hosted a panel that included Felgate, asked her about her media consumption to which she immodestly replied: “I consume myself a lot of the time”.
“I don’t stop,” she added, referring to her use of Instagram where she has 332,000 followers.
Felgate never shies away from spruiking anything from teeth whitening to cleaning products and has 12 paid commercial partnerships to her name (her deals remain the subject of an investigation by the media regulator after Diary revealed they weren’t disclosed last year), and she was happy to give Chemist Warehouse a cheeky shout-out at the conference.
“Have you ever been to Chemist Warehouse and not spent $100 on other things when you go to get your prescription, it’s the ultimate trap isn’t it?” she told the audience.
But what Felgate didn’t reveal is that she has a lucrative paid partnership with, guess who? Yup, Chemist Warehouse
Time to brush up on ABCs of impartiality
The resurrection of former US president Donald Trump’s political career has certainly put some quarters of the media under pressure in being able to cover the upcoming election even-handedly, namely the taxpayer-funded broadcaster.
Early on, the signs for balanced journalism at the ABC seem to have well and truly hit the skids.
Days after Trump survived a failed assassination attempt after taking a bullet to the ear, he got up on stage at the Republican National Convention at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in his first public address on Friday.
Enter a conga line of ABC presenters willing to have a crack at the former US leader.
Step up John Barron, the ABC Planet America host who wasn’t leaving viewers or his followers on X in any doubt about his inner thoughts regarding the former Republican president’s convention address: “I think it’s the worst there’s ever been,” he chirped.
“This was a populist, Trumpist, MAGA takeover of conservative politics.” Ouch.
Barron didn’t hold back on X either, describing Trump’s address as “listless, rambling, weird”.
He added that “Donald Trump hates beards” like JD Vance’s before ABC presenter Jeremy Fernandez asked: “Does it help that his (JD Vance’s) wife has brown skin?” Barron said, “It helps with the optics”.
Diary wonders how ABC chair Kim Williams feels about Barron’s on-air rants, given he said earlier this year, “If you don’t want to reflect a view that aspires to impartiality, don’t work at the ABC”.
But the take-downs of Trump didn’t end there.
Fernandez was curious to dig deeper into Barron’s thought bubble and asked him, “Worst by what measure, I’m interested?”
Barron grabbed the golden opportunity to give more oxygen to his scolding of Trump.
“There was nothing artful about what he (Trump) did, he simply recounted the events as it would appear in an FBI victim statement, that’s fine,” he said on the ABC News Channel.
“We heard a lot of talk about he’s making a unifying speech, he’s toning it down, he’s not even going to mention Biden once.
“Well he couldn’t resist, it took him 36 minutes to talk about ‘crazy’ Nancy Pelosi. (Said while inserting quotation marks with his fingers.)
“The real Trump asserts himself at certain times even when he is in shock and trying to keep a lid on it.”
Trump's speech;
— John Barron (@JohnBarronUSA) July 19, 2024
10 minute victim statement, thanks god
80 minute stump speech with Democrat names removed (mostly).
5 minute conclusion with a bit about "unity".
Listless, rambling, weird.
Then it was presenter Julia Baird’s chance to attack Trump, in fact you’d be forgiven for thinking she was talking about bumbling Joe Biden failing to make sense, but no it was the Republican candidate.
“From the reporting, I’ve noticed … people were saying actually, compared to his last campaign he’s not being as effective at rallies, he’s rambling, he’s losing his point, people are leaving,” Baird added.
Over on the 7pm news earlier in the week, finance presenter Alan Kohler was giving his frank assessments about Trump and flashed up a graph showing the “massive fundraising surge following his felony conviction”.
Kohler then moved on to the marital statuses of Trump supporters, which left him shocked that females could possibly even think about voting for the Republican candidate.
“I don’t know what to make of this, but Trump’s biggest group of supporters are divorced men, 56 per cent of divorced men are Trump voters versus 42 per cent of divorced women and 40 per cent of women overall, which is a bit amazing in itself,” Kohler said.
Humour misses mark
Meanwhile, over at Network Ten, they thought it would be comical to mock the attempted assassination of Trump on the quiz show Have You Been Paying Attention, hosted by Tom Gleisner, stooping as low as wishing the gunman had been more accurate in his shot at the former US president.
If you think the jokes about #TrumpAssassinationAttempt were in poor taste here, Australia put it on prime time.#HYBPApic.twitter.com/0Oz213AV3v
— AtlanticVamp (@atlanticvamp) July 16, 2024
Gleisner asked the contestants last Monday: “Chaotic scenes at a Donald Trump rally over the weekend, what happened?”
Comedian Anne Edmonds made a poor attempt at humour and said: “Very poor shot”.
Gleisner chimed in, “Well, depending on …”
The Front Bar host Sam Pang, didn’t go along with Edmonds’ offensive comments, initially, but he too thought it would be worth making a quip about Trump.
“As a staunch Republican I take offence at that,” Pang said.
“No, well, he was shot at Tom, it was an assassination attempt.”
He then added: “Tommy, how did they miss? It’s a massive orange head”.
When Ten were asked about the appropriateness of the segment, a spokeswoman would not comment.
The clip has since been deleted from Ten’s online platform, 10 Play.
Blazing a trail
Nine Entertainment chief executive Mike Sneesby is set to hit the French streets in the idyllic region of Essonne on Monday as he dons his sporting whites to run with the Olympic Torch ahead of the Games in Paris.
Forget that Nine staff are believed to be considering some sort of strike action this week over pay conditions and job cuts, Sneesby has bigger fish to fry, seizing the opportunity to take the torch and run with it, regardless of whether staff are fuming or not.
But just before Sneesby jetted off to France, he flew to the Sunshine State last week, to give TV and radio staff a much-needed pep talk amid the turmoil at the media company.
Putting aside 200 job cuts and the ongoing independent review into an “entrenched” culture of bad behaviour at the network, Sneesby arrived at Nine’s TV headquarters at Mount Coot-Tha and 4BC’s studios at Cannon Hill to energise staff.
Spies told Diary that despite Nine battling a falling share price, advertising challenges and widespread redundancies, Sneesby said the company’s investment in the Olympics would be well worth it, despite recent reports it was staring down a potential $60m loss from Paris.
After scooting around the studios and having a cuppa and cookie with staff, Sneesby was off to the Origin decider at Suncorp Stadium, where there was a sombre mood among staff following the death of broadcasting legend David Morrow.
Diary was reliably informed Sneesby was mingling with staff in Nine’s corporate box, and among those to get a guernsey included two members of the troubled 4BC breakfast trio – Laurel Edwards (accompanied by her husband, country singer Troy Cassar-Daley) and Gary Clare. Mornings host Bill McDonald and drive’s Peter Gleeson were also present.
Interestingly though, afternoons host Sofie Formica was nowhere to be seen, so perhaps her invite to the Origin decider got lost in the mail.
Word is the 4BC breakfast trio’s days at the station are well and truly numbered – their contract is up at the end of the year and their latest dismal ratings result will surely see radio boss Tom Malone andNine’s head of content Greg Byrnes end their tenure after 2.5 years.
Cold call
You know something’s up when you get a call from one of the biggest media executives in the country – Seven West chairman Kerry Stokes.
Diary has been told that sacked Brisbane newsreader Sharyn Ghidella last week received exactly that, a bell from Stokes just a week after she was given her marching orders from the network she had served for 17 years.
She is one of the latest casualties in Seven news boss Anthony De Ceglie’s cost-cutting mission, and it’s understood Stokes spoke directly to the former news anchor, but the contents of the call remain a mystery.
Ghidella was given the chop via an early morning call from Seven’s news director Michael Coombes while she at her hairdressing salon getting a cut and colour.
They say TV is a brutal game and this sure was a harsh way to show someone the door after nearly two decades.
Curiously, over at Seven’s newspaper arm, the West Australian Newspapers, which is being headed up by Christopher Dore, the paper has gone from calling him acting editor-in-chief to dumping the “acting” and calling him editor.
Sounds like he’s permanently got the gig, but when Dore and Seven were contacted by Diary on Sunday they would not comment.
Dore was previously editor-in-chief at The Australian before he left in November 2022.
Seven’s newspaper arm, which also includes its digital publication The Nightly, is also hunting for a deputy editor after the departure of Natalie Wolfe who has moved on to run Seven’s news website.
Apology granted
A social post shared by a Victorian regional councillor about the transgender community quickly escalated into a furore when the ABC incorrectly attributed the comments as being made by the woman sharing the tweet.
Councillor Melissa Ferguson, from the Latrobe City Council, was left pretty annoyed to say the least after the ABC published an article titled: “Latrobe City councillor Melissa Ferguson suspended for not apologising for anti-trans tweets”.
The problem is the taxpayer-funded broadcaster said Ferguson made the comments herself, which wasn’t the case – she had reshared someone else’s post.
The tweet in question that Ferguson shared read: “Trans people in general are predators, perpetrating perversion and abuse, and preying on children”.
But the irony of the whole matter was not that Ferguson didn’t apologise for posting tweets about transgender people, but that the ABC instead ended up being the one to apologise.
Breaking News : ABC apologises to me
— Freedomiseverything (@Melferg246) July 12, 2024
Thank you ABC I accept your public apology for the defamation of my character and I share here to clarify how I was wrongly shamed via the media. All is forgiven and I appreciate the public apologies and letter. pic.twitter.com/HRyzIZavIk
Following the publication of the story, Ferguson contacted the ABC to vent her disgust with it.
“I am writing as extremely distraught to have my name defamed with a completely fabricated direct quote which was lifted from what others said and crafted as if I had in fact said this offensive statement,” she told the ABC.
“I am extremely upset and am writing to demand a public apology for the clear-cut case of defamation by Gippsland ABC journalist Bec Symons.”
After Ferguson took action, she told Diary she was left pleasantly “surprised” that the ABC fixed the error.
The ABC found there was a problem with the story and admitted the tweet shouldn’t have been attributed to Ferguson.
“This was a characterisation of the alleged meaning of a retweet by Cr Ferguson, as opposed to a direct quote from the retweet,” the ABC published on their “corrections and clarifications” page.
“Cr Ferguson strongly disagrees with the characterisation of her retweet, describing the quoted words as an “offensive statement” which she did not make.
“The ABC apologises to Cr Ferguson for the error.”
When Diary contacted Ferguson, she accused the ABC of having “strong links with political activists” and said they should be more focused on reporting in an “unbiased fashion.”
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