Monday night’s season launch of Four Corners also sees the keenly anticipated return to the airwaves of not one, but two of the ABC’s best known personalities: the show’s ex-host Sarah Ferguson and long-time Q&A anchor Tony Jones.
The ABC power couple are still holding out hope they can make their long-delayed move to Beijing, where Ferguson was to have become the ABC’s China bureau chief more than a year ago.
But while they wait for Australian/China relations to improve, the pair are in the meantime firmly ensconced in the US, with Ferguson to front a Four Corners special titled Downfall — The Last Days of President Trump.
Jones told Diary from Washington DC on Sunday that once the pair’s visas were approved, they were on a flight “almost immediately … from almost COVID-free Australia to a plague-ridden US, fearful of civil war”.
He says they have turned the story around as a joint project “in 10 days”, with Ferguson reporting and Jones as “producer/writer”.
One interview to watch closely in Ferguson’s return will be her chat with Trump’s ex-chief of staff Mick Mulvaney about the storming of the US Capitol building on January, following Trump’s claims that the election was stolen. Diary hears Mulvaney tells Ferguson of Trump: “I think it’s going to colour his legacy forever, which is one of the things that disappoints so many of us that worked so hard with him and for him.”
Dan’s tricky spin on Covid
The spin cycle is alive and well in Dan Andrews’ Victorian government when it comes to the coronavirus, and how the state’s statistics on the pandemic are reported to the media.
While states like NSW, South Australia and even Queensland continue to report daily running tallies of the number of deaths since COVID-19 was identified last year, Diary has noticed that Victoria — the state which has 764 more deaths than any other Australian state — has entirely airbrushed the state’s cumulative deaths from the coronavirus out of its daily reporting.
The Victorian government’s daily dashboard to the media and the public now simply features the number of lives lost “in the last 24 hours”.
Conveniently, that means there’s no longer any need to mention the 820 Victorian lives lost to the pandemic during 2020 — largely due to the hotel quarantine debacle — in the Andrews government’s daily dashboard.
Instead, it has been bagels all around in recent weeks and months, as Victoria has upped its game on avoiding coronavirus-related deaths.
Meanwhile, full disclosure is alive and well in other states. NSW, for example, continues to every day faithfully report the 56 lives it has lost to COVID-19 since last March, despite the fact that number is a daily reminder of the state’s deadly Ruby Princess and Newmarch House outbreaks. Meanwhile, Queensland — to its credit — daily reports the six deaths it has had from coronavirus, and South Australia likewise its four recorded deaths.
But it seems that while other states are being fully transparent, the COVID-19 death toll in Dan’s Victoria has already been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Raf pushes back on Premier’s office
Dan Andrews isn’t the only one keen to forget Melbourne’s COVID-19 crisis last year.
A candid Rafael Epstein, ABC Radio Melbourne’s drive presenter, quietly revealed over the silly season that he was forced to resist some major pressure from the Victorian Premier’s office to stop releasing leaked, but accurate, coronavirus numbers each day before Andrews had a chance to announce them.
Epstein has revealed that he copped “furious calls and texts from government minders”, who “admonished me for tweeting the case number before the Premier’s press conference”. The line to him from Dan’s unnamed minders was: “People are rightfully scared and we have a role to play to try and minimise that.”
To his credit, Epstein pushed back: “I countered that this was our information, it belongs to the community and not the politicians,” he said.
Andrews’ office eventually found an alternative to guilting Epstein: “It took a few months but they started tweeting the number each morning,” he says.
Life as a Google guinea pig
Last month, Google Australia boss Mel Silva revealed the search giant has been running an “experiment” that limits access to domestic news content for the most prolific “one per cent” of its Australian users.
Well, your lucky diarist has returned from holidays to make the slightly annoying discovery he seems to be among the “one percenters” who have been Dr Google’s guinea pigs for that very experiment.
Diary’s simple Google search for major Australian news sites, including The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Daily Telegraph and the ABC brought up none of the sites’ home pages. Instead, we were sent to various Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Wikipedia handles.
But there are other interesting outcomes from being a Google guinea pig. Our search on the term “Coronavirus NSW” last week in Google news returned one single search result: from the niche entertainment “what’s on” site, Concrete Playground, showing an interactive map of case alerts for NSW restaurants and live venues.
There were zero stories on the virus itself, no Gladys — and once again, no access to articles from any of the major news sites.
The solitary month-old Concrete Playground article retrieved by Google was a paltry return for a search about a pandemic on allegedly the world’s most comprehensive search engine.
And apparently, Diary is not the only one to have had such outcomes. Nine’s publishing boss Chris Janz has also picked up on a similar trend on a separate Google search for coronavirus information, with his investigations revealing “critical updates from the ABC, 9 News, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian” were all omitted. Janz’s operatives instead retrieved “a single news story” from his coronavirus search: “a three-week-old update from Al-Jazeera”, he said.
The Nine publishing boss described Google’s denial of real news as “instant and disturbing”.
We agree. Rival search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo are seeming more attractive by the day.
Mel’s Silva lining
Meanwhile, full marks go to Mel Silva for timing. Diary hears she’ll be avoiding the worst of some very testy negotiations with the government and the ACCC in coming weeks about the search giant’s future in Australia.
Right in the middle of the heated political storm following her threats for Google to abandon search in Australia, Silva gave birth nine days ago to a baby boy. She has now taken to LinkedIn over the weekend to confirm she’ll be “taking some time over the next few weeks to enjoy our newborn bubble”.
But could it be more than a few weeks? There was some talk around Google’s Pyrmont bunker in inner-city Sydney last week that Silva has been assured by Google powers-that-be that she doesn’t need to be in any huge rush to get back to work, given Google’s generous paid maternity leave scheme.
And Diary is reliably informed her duties have already started to be shared around her Google colleagues.
Apparently, the search giant’s New Zealand boss Caroline Rainsford, will take charge of the bulk of Silva’s workload while she’s off, with senior sales executive Rhys Williams also temporarily taking on some of her commercial role. No rush, Mel.
Murpharoo’s tribute for Mark Butler
The “final observations” segment on the ABC program Insiders has long been a fascinating insight into what Canberra journalists really think, as opposed to what they report.
One of the more revealing views about a politician came on Sunday morning from the Guardian Australia’s political editor, Katharine “Murpharoo” Murphy.
She offered a fascinating tribute to Mark Butler, who was ousted last week from the shadow climate change portfolio last week in Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s cabinet reshuffle.
“Just quickly, I want to say as a citizen, I want to thank Mark Butler for his service over a couple of terms at least,” Murphy said.
“He has been relentlessly on the side of the climate science. He has tried to do the right thing by the planet and by the country. And I think that anybody in politics who you can say that about is worthy of our thanks.”
But Murpharoo’s not the only one who’s gutted that Butler is no longer the climate change spokesman. Diary’s chats around government circles suggest some from the opposite side of the climate debate are equally unhappy to see him go.
Senior Coalition sources told us on Sunday they were “devastated” that Albo moved Butler to the health portfolio.
The Coalition reckons Butler has helped them to win three elections on the trot during his seven years in charge of Labor’s climate policies.
The Coalition sources say Butler’s environment policies helped Bill Shorten to lose the unlosable election in 2019, with the then Labor leader continually slipping up on policy costings during the campaign.
Even a Labor MP had a similar view on Sunday: “Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison want to thank him too — on behalf of the Coalition.”
Courier changes on-court chats
The product that Nine presents to viewers when the Australian Open starts next week will have some subtle differences to the one that has been on offer in previous years. And, naturally, it’s all down to COVID-19.
Diary is told perhaps the most noticeable impact will be in the post-match interviews at night matches by two-time Australian Open champion Jim Courier.
The high-profile interviews look set to lose a little of their intimacy. The matey handing over of microphones to players like Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams will be a thing of the past. Courier, who emerged from two weeks of quarantine late last week, will instead have his own microphone while the players will speak into a mic on a stand.
That may cramp Courier’s style, as he is known for his ability to get candid answers to very personal questions from the major players.
AO: no ‘fake noise’
Still on the Australian Open, Diary has been wondering whether are any plans for Nine to artificially amp up the crowd noise to compensate for reduced crowd sizes for the tournament.
Nine, of course, brought fake crowd noise at the start of the pandemic for rugby league games to bring atmosphere when there were few or no fans attending NRL matches. Seven and Foxtel made similar moves for their sports coverage.
With the stadiums for the open to be around 50 per cent capacity, and few international visitors, the sometimes raucous Davis Cup-like atmosphere of Melbourne Park — particularly for home players like Ash Barty and Nick Kyrgios, and Greek star Stefanos Tsitsipas — is likely to be more muted than normal.
But Diary is now assured there won’t be artificial applause for the tennis. Nine sources claim they won’t need “fake noise”, because Rod Laver Arena is an amphitheatre that will naturally enhance the sound of cheering despite reduced crowds.
Sammy J self-trolls
ABC Radio Melbourne breakfast host Sammy J has taken trolling to a new level.
The comedian made the unusual move the week before last to test whether he could sneak through a letter into the The Age’s TV section, the Green Guide, on the special subject of himself. And surprising even himself, he succeeded!
To keep his anonymity, Sammy J avoided using his stage name, instead opting for his real moniker, Sam McMillan. And this was no fawning letter either, with the comedian adopting the guise of a concerted ABC critic.
“Really,” Sam McMillan of Southbank began. “Another year of Sammy J for Breakfast on ABC Radio Melbourne? The last thing I want to hear in the morning is a neurotic, so-called ‘comedian’ bumbling his way through on my taxpayer dollar. He mispronounces words; he constantly gets the time wrong; and he doesn’t even have the courage to use his real name. Bring back Red.”
The ‘‘Red’’ he refers to is, of course, 15-year ABC Radio Melbourne breakfast host Red Symons who departed back in 2017.
Sammy J later proudly took to Instagram to promote the coup: “I wrote my own letter of complaint about myself and it got published.”
Race to become the new Hugh
The suspense continues to build about who will replace Hugh Marks as Nine boss after the shock announcement of his imminent departure late last year.
Diary is reliably informed that in recent weeks, headhunter Spencer Stuart performed a “capability assessment” on a number of the internal candidates for the job, including publishing and digital boss Chris Janz, Stan chief Mike Sneesby, Nine Radio chief Tom Malone and marketing head Lizzie Young.
There were apparently no major slip-ups, but that hasn’t stopped Janz and Sneesby firming as the bookies’ favourites intern ally for the gig. Meanwhile, Malone apparently aced the assessment and is seen as very much a future leader — but the word is he’ll first be given some further experience running a balance sheet at Nine Radio.
The main game on the appointment of Marks’ replacement is still to come. Janz, Sneesby and some other mystery external candidates are expected to have their final interviews for the job either this week or next week.
But we’re told Nine’s half-yearly results briefing on February 24 will be delivered by none other than Marks himself. That suggests an announcement on a new Nine CEO will be waiting a bit longer.
Tonagh quits ABC board early
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland and an independent panel will now need to find a replacement for the ABC’s deputy chairman just months out from a federal election.
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