New ABC News Breakfast host says voice loss was shattering
In comments seemingly at odds with ABC chair Kim Williams’ direction that journalists should remain neutral, Bridget Brennan described last year’s referendum as similar to experiencing ‘whiplash’.
ABC News Breakfast’s newly installed co-host Bridget Brennan, a Dja Dja Wurrung and Yorta Yorta woman, has described last year’s voice referendum defeat as similar to experiencing “whiplash”.
Interviewing activist and Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo on the breakfast program last week to promote his new book – Always Was Always Will Be – Brennan told audiences that the pain was real.
“The last time you were here was in the final weeks before the referendum which was, as an Indigenous person, an insane time,” Brennan said.
“I reflect on it and it feels like we’ve had whiplash since then.”
Mayo told viewers he tried to convince Australians this was “the right thing to do simply to have an advisory voice for Indigenous people and it was devastating when the referendum failed”.
Brennan and co-host Michael Rowland discussed Mayo’s book, with Brennan then telling viewers: “Anyone would have forgiven you for just kind of deciding I’m not talking about this anymore, I’m not going to try and find hope after what was a pretty devastating process.”
Brennan’s stance on the voice, and her view that the referendum loss was shattering, appears to be at odds with ABC chair Kim Williams’ directions this year, when he made it clear news journalists should be neutral at the taxpayer-funded broadcaster. “If you don’t want to reflect a view that aspires to impartiality don’t work at the ABC,” he said in March.
Brennan finished by telling viewers Mayo’s latest piece of work was a “wonderful book”.
Guardian scribe’s dads attack catches The Project off guard
When The Guardian’s political reporter Amy Remeikis fronted up to Ten’s The Project recently to vent her personal frustrations as a renter and to reaffirm her long-running disgust at “capitalism”, little did the show’s brains trust know that her rant about housing affordability would somehow segue into an attack on “crap dads”.
Remeikis, who’s busy running multiple Instagram accounts including “pyjamapolitics” – which as the moniker aptly describes features videos of her discussing politics while donning her jarmies – told The Project’s co-hosts Hamish Macdonald and Sarah Harris that renters in Australia are collectively furious about the way they are being treated.
Of course, during her tirade, Remeikis managed to find time to give a shout out to the Greens.
“There are seven million of us and most of us are pretty angry at the way that we’ve been treated, there’s a real rental crisis in this country,” Remeikis thundered.
“The Greens, a lot of them are renters, they are across this.
“The government, the opposition, a lot of them have multiple properties, they are less across it and it hasn’t really been something that has been top of mind for politicians before.”
But as the conversation was wrapping up, things took a bizarre turn.
Remeikis suddenly pivoted from talking about the rental crisis to dodgy dads.
Relevant, because it was Fathers Day!
“Happy dad’s day to all the non-crap dads and for all the mums and everyone else who had to stood up for the crap dads (sic),’ she said.
Diary has been reliably informed that the entire Project team was caught completely off guard by Remeikis’s “observation” on the state of Australian dads. Macdonald and Harris both looked shocked by the random on-air diversion by Remeikis, and Macdonald tried to quickly move on by refusing to add fuel to the fire and awkwardly saying: “OK, in other news tonight.”
Spies told Diary while Remeikis’s rogue comments won’t see her sidelined from further appearances on The Project, certain people on the show were less than impressed that the Guardian scribe opted to end her most recent slot in an “unexpected way”.
Curiously, social media posts featuring the awkward interview, which were initially shared by The Project, were later deleted from online. A Ten spokeswoman was contacted about the whole kerfuffle but would not comment.
The Age shall not weary him
There’s certainly no love lost between trouble-plagued Nine Entertainment when it comes to its radio and print arms.
3AW mornings broadcaster Tom Elliott made it abundantly clear he has little interest in Nine’s Melbourne masthead, The Age, when he confessed to listeners last week he rarely reads it.
Elliott invited the newspaper’s legendary cartoonist, Michael Leunig, on to his program after it was revealed the media veteran had been sacked by The Age.
Leunig spoke at length to Elliott about his unfavourable treatment at the masthead after he told Diary last week that his axing was simply a “throat-cutting exercise”.
Elliott took the opportunity to reveal his own disinterest in the Melbourne newspaper, edited by Patrick Elligett.
“Look Michael, I am sad to see you go from the pages of The Age, I don’t read it super regularly,” Elliott said.
“But I always enjoyed your cartoons. I was shocked when I read on the weekend that you’d been let go.”
It certainly isn’t the first time a 3AW broadcaster has revealed they don’t take much notice of other parts of the Nine media stable.
The station’s breakfast host Russel Howcroft said back in July he hadn’t bothered to watch Age investigative reporter Nick McKenzie’s “must-see major investigation” 60 Minutes program on the CFMEU scandal, and instead “found myself in bed”.
That aside, Elliott has been dominating in the mornings slot since taking over from Neil Mitchell at the beginning of year, but there may be good reason why listeners are turning off drive host and freebie queen Jacqui Felgate’sprogram, which has fallen from second to sixth spot since she became Elliott’s successor.
During a recent interview with Victorian opposition leader John Pesutto she praised former premier Daniel Andrews to the station’s listeners, who are largely in the anti-Dan fan club.
The praise came as Felgate accused the media of “doing a lot of navel gazing” and criticised Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan for not giving journos enough time to meet her in Bendigo, a two-hour drive from Melbourne, to ask her tough questions about the interim report into CFMEU corruption.
“One thing I would say about the former premier Dan Andrews is, love him or hate him, he stood there and he answered every single question every single day,” she said.
Hmmm. That warrants a fact check.
Diary recalls that across the horrid Covid years of 2020 and 2021, 3AW’s most prominent presenter, Mitchell, repeatedly criticised Andrews for failing to answer the tough questions about the handling of the pandemic.
Mitchell once said that there was a “Covid cone of silence” around Andrews, adding: “We’re not getting any answers, we’re not getting any answers on masks, he dodges around it, we’re not getting answers on the modelling, we’re not getting answers on anything really.”
Given Mitchell is a weekly regular on Felgate programs, perhaps this is a topic that the pair could thrash out on air.
Rearview scoop
The Australian Financial Review’s freshly minted editor-in-chief James Chessell adopted the “never wrong for long” approach in his latest newsletter to the masthead’s subscribers last Friday.
Referencing the biggest business story of the week – Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ tough talking on the Reserve Bank – Chessell said it “is interesting to recap the firestorm Chalmers sparked on Sunday when he said the RBA’s decisions to keep interest rates on hold since November were ‘smashing the economy’.”
Odd, then, that the firestorm which erupted last Sunday didn’t rate a mention in the printed edition of the AFR the following day! Or did the AFR only identify it as a firestorm when The Australian led its printed edition last Monday with a page one headline that screamed: ‘RBA rates ‘smashing’ nation’?!
Anyway, back to Chessell’s revisionist history of the week. In his Friday note, he observed: “There is no more important story right now than government spending and its impact on all corners of the economy. We ran news and analysis at the top of our website and on the front page every day this week. It’s a story that has huge political implications, particularly when the cost of living is front of mind for most voters.”
Hmmm, yep, the AFR was all over it, except on the day when the actual story broke! Oops! Tell that to your paying subscribers, James!
But of course, the beauty of the digital age is that you can address oversights almost immediately, unlike the pre-internet age when mistakes by editors and reporters lingered, excruciatingly, for 24 hours.
By Monday morning, the AFR had scrambled and managed to reference Chalmers’ jaw-dropping attack on the RBA on its website. There you go! Never wrong for long!
But to be fair to the AFR, its Nine-owned stablemates, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, also failed to pick up the week’s “most important” story, with both metro mastheads carrying no mention of Chalmers’ “smashing” comments in their Monday print editions.
The ABC TV news on Sunday also missed the Chalmers story – an oversight which would have left Aunty’s supremo Kim Williams most upset.
Williams reckons ABC News carries too much froth and bubble and not enough cement, so dropping the ball on a massive economic/political story isn’t what the former clarinetist ordered.
Ball up
One of sport’s most sought-after TV gigs could soon be up for grabs in Melbourne. Diary understands that former Essendon champion turned Channel 7 sports presenter Tim Watson’s contract is up at the end of the year and word is he’s already started telling people he’s ready to hang up his boots.
The 63-year-old has been reading Seven’s 6pm sports news on weeknights since 2013 but insiders say he is well and truly ready to pass the baton on to someone else.
And there’s no shortage of ex-footy folks who will be vying for the plum job.
Seven recently signed Kane Cornes to join the network from next year. The former Port Power star is hot property in media circles right now, but Diary has been told he won’t be put forward as a potential replacement for Watson. Yet.
Instead, the station wants to play to Cornes’s strengths – which includes dishing out harsh but fair commentary that splits the room – and the thinking is that to have him reading the nightly sports news would be a waste of a versatile talent.
It’s expected that once Watson does depart, another former AFL champion will take over. Names being bandied about at Seven include Geelong legend Joel Selwood and former Richmond star Trent Cotchin.
Cotchin made headlines for all the wrong reasons earlier in the year when Cornes compiled a humorous take-down of the commentary newcomer’s mundane and emotionless analysis of footy matches.
Rival sports presenter, Nine’s Tony Jones, laid into Watson on the AFL Sunday Footy Show at the weekend, attacking him for spruiking Seven News’s “exclusive, unrestricted access” to the AFL. He highlighted that claim by airing grabs featuring Seven chief football writer Mitch Cleary and journalist Blake Johnson both reporting from outside the MCG, showing that the station had no “exclusive” access at all.
“What is going on here, is Tim misreading the screen or are reporters not following the game plan?” Jones said in his swipe on Sunday.
Fellow panellist Nathan Brown accused Jones of “using this platform to bring your personal hatred towards Tim Watson.” Cornes chimed in: “This is not Media Watch.”
Mistaken identity
Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald is facing an expensive lawsuit after mistakenly publishing a photo on its front page last Wednesday of the wrong “Michael Ibrahim”.
The front page story, under the headline “Kingpin’s CFMEU links”, was published across Nine’s mastheads including the SMH, The Age and Australian Financial Review, but the SMH was the sole outlet to publish a photo on page 1 of the wrong man.
The newspaper, edited by Bevan Shields, ran four images on the front page, and the one image of Ibrahim was the wrong Michael Ibrahim.
By lunchtime on Wednesday, the SMH had published an apology online and later edited its PDF digital version to insert the correct photo of the right Ibrahim on to the page 1 story, with the explanation that the amended image was that of a “jailed Sydney crime boss”.
The apology said: “Wednesday’s front page of The Sydney Morning Herald print edition made serious allegations of criminality about a number of persons.
“That article contained a serious error, being the inclusion of a photograph of businessman Michael Ibrahim. Businessman Michael Ibrahim, pictured below, had nothing whatsoever to do with the people or allegations in that front page article.
“The Herald apologises to Mr Ibrahim and his family for the shock and hurt that this caused.”
The wrongly identified Michael Ibrahim, a Sydney-based businessman, has engaged defamation lawyer Rebekah Giles and is seeking significant damages – as in six figures – for the stuff-up.
Giles has fired off a concerns notice about the matter to the SMH as of Sunday night was yet to hear back.
Giles was also the solicitor who oversaw the hefty payout in another case of mistaken identity. In April, Seven settled with Sydney university student Benjamin Cohen who was wrongly identified as the Bondi Junction mass murderer live on air by Sunrise co-host Matt Shirvington.
It’s understood Seven wrote Cohen a six-digit cheque for the hurt caused.
Nick Tabakoff is on leave.
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