Earlier this month, Weekend Sunrise host Matt Doran put out a tweet from London about a mystery interview he was about to conduct halfway around the world. “This one is going to be pretty special,” he cryptically posted.
Little did he know how “special” it would be. Turns out it was a face-to-face interview with global pop megastar Adele. But as Doran now readily admits, things didn’t quite go to plan.
Her record label Sony is now refusing to release the interview, after Doran revealed to Adele he had only heard one track from the album, its first single, Easy On Me – after he accidentally overlooked a copy that had been sent to him.
Now, through Diary, Doran has issued a mea culpa to Adele, adding that he is “mortified and unequivocally apologetic” to the star.
“When I sat down to interview Adele, I was totally unaware that I’d been emailed a preview of her unreleased album,” Doran says. “I have since discovered it was sent to me as an ‘e card’ link, which I somehow missed upon landing in London. It was an oversight but NOT a deliberate snub. This is the most important email I have ever missed.”
But Doran adamantly denies one story that emerged on the weekend: that Adele walked out on the interview (which was filmed by Sony rather than a Seven crew that flew to London).
“Adele didn’t storm out. In fact, it was the polar opposite. What was meant to be 20 minutes was extended to 29 minutes. The majority of the chat was about the album. I told her: ‘I’ve only had the privilege of hearing Easy on Me, but not the other tracks’. As part of a long discussion about the new album, I remark that it would be reductive to say it’s about heartbreak and divorce; instead, it’s about empowerment and hope.”
Doran said at the end of the interview, he went up to the two Sony reps, and asked: “ ‘Is there anything you want struck out?’ I’m utterly confounded. I’ve implored Sony to release the interview.”
Upon returning from London, he was absent from Sunrise for one weekend, but says he wasn’t formally “suspended”.
–
Alberici, Probyn and Turnbull’s ‘tentacles’
Has Malcolm Turnbull developed a case of selective amnesia about his unforgiving attitude towards the ABC while PM?
It was a question being asked in media circles last week, after Malcolm’s other half, Lucy Turnbull, tweeted passionately in favour of ABC chair Ita Buttrose, claiming the public broadcaster “must be treasured and protected, not interfered with or destroyed (by) governments of the day”.
It was an unmistakeable shot at the Morrison government’s recent salvos at the ABC. But news.com.au’s Sam Maiden, quickly asked: hadn’t Malcolm himself regularly gone “off his brain” at the ABC when he was PM?
The ex-PM quickly tweeted in response to her query his “only complaints about the ABC related to basic journalistic failures – not checking stories, easily avoided factual errors etc”.
But some very different recollections about Turnbull’s attitude to the ABC while PM quickly emerged.
Enter the ABC’s soon-to-depart head of news, Gaven Morris, who opened the bowling with some frank comments about how dire things were for Aunty between 2016 and 2018, when Turnbull was PM.
Most strikingly, Morris told independent publication Inside Story that during Turnbull’s prime ministership, it was “a dangerous time in terms of the editorial independence of the ABC”.
Senior executives contacted by Diary last week, who were at the ABC at the time, privately agree. One told us the belief at Aunty while Turnbull was PM was he saw himself as a “media mogul who wanted to run the ABC”.
Morris now claims that pressure reached a flashpoint in 2018, when the Turnbull-led government became highly exercised about the reporting of the ABC’s then-chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici and ABC political editor Andrew Probyn.
While Turnbull repeatedly played down his interventions on Twitter last week, Morris outlined a very different version of events. He claimed in Inside Story that he felt the ABC was “most at risk” during just over two years from mid-2016, when Turnbull was PM, his close friend Justin Milne was ABC chair and Michelle Guthrie was managing director.
Morris has been careful to note Turnbull himself never voiced the government’s complaints about Alberici and Probyn directly to him. “When Turnbull came out and said, ‘Well, I’ve never phoned Gaven Morris’, he’s right about that,” he told Inside Story. “I didn’t get phone calls from Turnbull, but what I would notice is that other people would get phone calls that were very similar to the ones I was getting from other quarters.
“So the (Canberra) bureau would get a phone call from somebody. I would get a phone call from somebody else. Michelle (Guthrie) would get a phone call from somebody else …. The people involved would all be able to say that they never talked to so-and-so. But on a number of occasions, it was clear to me what was happening.”
Morris’s version was borne out by Guthrie herself, who revealed in her own account of events in 2018 that after a meeting with Turnbull, Milne had told her of Probyn “you have to shoot him”, because Turnbull “hates” him.
Meanwhile, it has also been separately alleged by both Morris’s current No.2 in ABC news and current affairs, John Lyons, and 2GB breakfast host Ben Fordham, that Turnbull has told journalists of his “tentacles” when he hasn’t been happy with the direction stories are taking.
In a piece for the Nine papers’ Good Weekend Magazine in 1991, Lyons memorably claimed he had received a warning from Turnbull as he interviewed him for his feature: “ ‘My tentacles spread to New York,’ Turnbull says, smiling, when he finds out I am moving to New York.”
Last week, Fordham claimed Turnbull had issued a strikingly similar warning to a young member of Nine’s Canberra bureau in 2008 about a potentially negative story: “My tentacles reach far and wide.” But Turnbull later strenuously denied Fordham’s claim, tweeting: “Ben Fordham’s account is fantasy – right down to the tentacles.”
–
The Project’s Lisa-free ratings jump
Eight days ago, it was the first night of Lisa Wilkinson’s extended break from The Project. And surprisingly for Ten and its network star, Ten’s flagship panel show’s ratings went up. Not only that, but the show actually had its highest Sunday night numbers for six weeks.
The first Lisa-free instalment of The Sunday Project, this time hosted by Wednesday night panellist Rachel Corbett along with Hamish Macdonald, recorded 381,000 capital city viewers in its premium 7pm timeslot. It may still be nowhere near the 500,000-plus viewers The Sunday Project was drawing on some nights earlier in the year, but it was up about 70,000 on the previous two Sundays.
There has been private commentary within Ten in recent weeks that Wilkinson’s book tour may have damaged The Project’s ratings, because of a series of negative headlines questioning the accuracy of some of her claims about her alleged pay gap with Karl Stefanovic. Wilkinson voiced those claims on The Project a few weeks ago, in an interview with Macdonald from her harbourside mansion.
But not to be silenced, Wilkinson popped up yet again with Anh Do on the ABC last Tuesday, once more bringing up the alleged “gender pay gap” that caused her bust-up with Nine. But with just 318,000 capital city viewers, that episode of Anh’s Brush With Fame drew eerily similar numbers to Wilkinson’s last Sunday night appearance on The Project.
As Diary revealed last week, there is “optimism” among some Ten insiders that Wilkinson’s extended break from The Project could be just the circuit-breaker its flagging ratings need before her return to the show on December 5
–
Greta Thunberg joins the Pauline show
The early success of Pauline Hanson’s South Park-style Please Explain animation series has emboldened the One Nation camp to broaden the cast to international identities.
Diary is reliably informed that Hanson will introduce Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg to her classroom full of unruly politicians such as the Hawaiian-shirted Scott Morrison, Anthony Albanese, Peter Dutton, a beetroot-headed Barnaby Joyce and, shortly, a certain pair of “miserable ghosts” from the prime ministerial past.
Thunberg’s plotline in Please Explain is still being finalised by Melbourne animation house Stepmates, but it sounds like it will be a star turn. From what we gather, the 18-year old joins the unruly classroom as an exchange student, but quickly objects when she sees the room is using a climate change-inducing air conditioner. She storms out of the classroom in protest, running off with Greens leader Adam Bandt.
Hanson’s cartoon series has been trying to win a new breed of potential One Nation voter on social media, and that strategy appears to have been a success. The cartoon has attracted half a million hits a week across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok among others.
The One Nation leader is so happy with the response that we’re told a second series is already planned. Hanson has started discussions with Stepmates over releasing new episodes to coincide with the new parliamentary term some time after May next year.
–
SMH lashes Keating’s ‘censorship’ claim
Paul Keating was never going to take some heavy criticism by Peter Hartcher of his first National Press Club speech since 1995 – in which he offered a passionate defence of China’s recent belligerence – lying down.
In a column nine days ago, The Sydney Morning Herald’s political and international editor accused Keating of being like King Canute, “sitting on the beach and ordering the tide to stop rising”. That came after Keating’s headline-making speech to the Press Club a few days earlier, in which he lashed out at what he described as the “ning-nongs of The Sydney Morning Herald”, and oddly claimed: “China is not going to be attacking people.”
After Hartcher’s piece ran, Keating contacted the SMH’s opinion editor, Julie Lewis, urgently seeking a 1200-word right of reply to be published in the Herald last Monday. We’re told Lewis told Keating she was interested in a piece expanding on his views about Taiwan. However, when the ex-PM’s piece was submitted, Lewis declined to run it because she saw it as a simple “regurgitation” of his Press Club speech.
That rejection prompted Keating to issue a furious statement last Monday, in which he accused the SMH of an “egregious exercise in censorship of a former prime minister speaking about central strategic issues for the country in a once-in-26-years address”.
But the executive editor of the Nine papers, Tory Maguire, defended their right not to publish. “It’s literally called editing,” she tells Diary. “It’s not censorship. His response was very, very personal. Paul played the man, not the issue, and the issue was meant to be Taiwan.”
Maguire says the SMH still “offered to publish a shortened version of the piece as a letter to the editor”, but Keating declined.
The Industry Super-backed New Daily subsequently offered to publish the piece instead, and Keating consented. In the published version, Keating unleashed his personal fury on Hartcher, with the Nine papers’ political and international editor name-checked no less than 19 times.
Keating went on to accuse the SMH and The Age of “years of unprincipled and obsessive writing and misreporting” of the China issue, which he said would leave “Australia to face the wrath of the Chinese state and its military”. He concluded: “Peter Hartcher and his mate Chris Uhlmann have a lot to answer for.”
–
Selling Houses host trolls Palaszczuk
One of Foxtel’s biggest stars, Andrew Winter, has unloaded on the Queensland government as he finally flew in to his home state on Friday – after an enforced five-month separation from his family.
Annastacia Palaszczuk’s tough border policies have meant Winter, who lives on the Gold Coast, has been prohibited from returning home to his wife and teenage kids by the Premier’s lockout, forcing him to stay south of the border along with thousands of other Queenslanders.
Even now he is back in Queensland, he still cannot see his family until December 3, when he finally emerges from two weeks of quarantine.
Winter, who hosts two of Foxtel’s highest-rating shows, Selling Houses Australia and Love It or List It, variously describes Palaszczuk’s policies as “very strange” and “beyond belief”.
When Diary asked him what he thought of Palaszczuk, he simply replied: “I don’t call her that,” hinting his real name for her was unprintable.
“I’ve got teenagers and a capable wife, so I’m very lucky,” he tells Diary. “But watching this terrible thing go on, I am very, very anti the Queensland government’s legislation. We’ve watched so many Queenslanders sat in their caravans in NSW. A lot of people just don’t have the money to be sitting around for months and months while they pay rates on their houses they can’t get to.”
Winter said he had always expected to be away from home for some time to film the 2022 series of Selling Houses. “But we weren’t remotely prepared for the length of time we stayed away. The rules didn’t seem to make sense. I was someone fully vaccinated, prepared to take a test before and a test after I returned. We even offered to come back and do two weeks of hotel quarantine in October, but it was never even acknowledged. It is quite an appalling system.”
Now he is back, Winter suggests a warning sign outside the Gold Coast house where he’s quarantining, stating: “Virus-riddled, filthy people who’ve just come from Sydney are in this house.”
–
Ferguson leaves Melbourne for good
After 17 years in Melbourne, The Age’s investigative journalist Adele Ferguson has switched cities.
The Ferguson caravan burst out of Victoria and arrived in Sydney for good on Tuesday.
When Diary reached her on Friday, the returned Sydneysider said: “We’ve been in lockdown for nearly two years, and we just decided we want to come home. It’s been a tough two years, and my husband and I wanted to do something different.”
And what was Ferguson’s first excursion back in Sydney after 17 years away and a 12-hour drive? Why, a visit to her own personal coiffeur, and hairdresser to the stars, Joh Bailey in Double Bay: “I hadn’t had my hair cut for months because of Melbourne’s lockdown,” Ferguson confides.
Now that’s called getting your priorities right.
–
Making the news
More Coverage
BBC apologises to staff over Russell Brand sex complaints
Some employees had stayed silent about the behaviour of the comedian and actor because they believed he ‘would always get his way’, a BBC director said.
Questions about ABC platforming ‘radical fringe Jewish voice’
Jewish groups have questioned why the national broadcaster has chosen to platform and ‘mainstream’ a Jewish ‘radical fringe voice’, in its coverage of anti-Semitic events in Sydney.