Slater has been with Seven since it took over the cricket rights in 2018. But Seven insiders have told Diary that the network bosses are “keenly observing the appropriateness of Michael’s behaviour” on Twitter this week, after he posted a series of sledges at Prime Minister Scott Morrison over his border bans on travellers from India until May 15.
If our Government cared for the safety of Aussies they would allow us to get home. It's a disgrace!! Blood on your hands PM. How dare you treat us like this. How about you sort out quarantine system. I had government permission to work on the IPL but I now have government neglect
— Michael Slater (@mj_slats) May 3, 2021
We’re told the word that best sums up Seven’s attitude to Slater’s tweets from his temporary home in the Maldives is “concern”.
The ex-Australian opener’s tweets have come as he waits to get home from his role as a commentator for the cancelled Indian Premier League.
Amazing to smoke out the PM on a matter that is a human crisis. The panic, the fear of every Australian in India is real!! How about you take your private jet and come and witness dead bodies on the street!
— Michael Slater (@mj_slats) May 5, 2021
Slater’s Twitter outbursts over the past week, of course, have been nothing short of spectacular. They started on Monday with “Blood on your hands PM. How dare you treat us like this”, going on to observe that it was “amazing to smoke out the PM on a matter that is a human crisis”, and dared ScoMo to “take your private jet and come and witness dead bodies on the street!” By Wednesday, they had escalated to: “I challenge you to a debate anytime PM.”
I challenge you to a debate anytime PM.
— Michael Slater (@mj_slats) May 5, 2021
And admittedly, Slater’s feisty opinions have provided plenty of good content for Seven, as the cricket broadcaster, on its news sites.
But Diary hears the big concern for Seven at a corporate level is avoiding, at all costs, any damage to its relations with the government.
Serena cartoonist quits ‘woke’ union
The Herald-Sun’s award-winning cartoonist Mark Knight is so cranky with the journalists’ union, the MEAA, that he’s making the momentous decision to cancel his lifetime membership. And it’s all down to his viral 2018 cartoon featuring Serena Williams.
Knight says he will be “shutting down my direct debit” with the MEAA on Monday.
The reason? He believes his union has moved from protecting its members — allegedly its core function — into outright “political activism”, following a Nine newspaper article a fortnight ago that specifically dealt with the MEAA’s attitude to his Serena cartoon, which went viral around the world.
The cartoon depicted a headline-making tantrum thrown by tennis legend Williams during her loss in the 2018 US Open tennis final. As the tantrum rages, the cartoon depicts the umpire asking Williams’s opponent in the final, Naomi Osaka: “Can you just let her win?”
In the wake of the MEAA announcing it was withdrawing from the Press Council, the Nine story purported to reveal the real reasons. One was “specific concerns … related to a controversial cartoon which appeared in The Herald Sun depicting Serena Williams”.
In the Nine story the MEAA’s media federal president Marcus Strom is quoted lashing out at Press Council decisions “inconsistent with public expectations”.
It was noted that “several people familiar with the union’s decision” had cited the Press Council’s “refusal to review or update standards on issues such as cartoons and racism”.
In 2019, the Press Council had dismissed claims that Knight’s Serena cartoon was racist.
Strom told Nine he wanted a “serious discussion” about “out of touch” Press Council arbitrations. But today, it’s Knight who’s having a ‘‘serious discussion’’ about his future with the union.
“If our union doesn’t stand up for journalists who are fully paid-up members and have been loyal members all their working life, who does it stand up for?” he asks Diary. “I’ve given speeches on their behalf, won Walkley Awards from them, and I’ve even done free clinics for them on cartoon and caricature.”
Knight received no message of support from the union body after the cartoon was published in 2018, despite a global pile-on. “I was on the receiving end of an avalanche of this — and I hate to use the word — woke new form of social media activism where if people don’t agree with you, they want to destroy you. I had people like JK Rowling saying the cartoon was a racist trope.”
He said the union’s job was supporting paid-up members, not virtue-signalling. “I would have thought the job of the union was to support its workers in times of need like this — that’s why I was a member of the union for all these years.”
The Australian’s cartoonist Johannes Leak, not a union member, backs his cartooning colleague. “Surely the journalists’ union should be there to represent members doing their jobs. Mark Knight would never set out to draw a demeaning or racist cartoon. The Serena cartoon was simply about a sporting tantrum. But fuelled by social media, there’s a growing group aggressively searching for any evidence of racism, who think nothing of ruining somebody’s career.”
Knight says he feels thrown under the bus by his own union, and will take appropriate action.
“Now there is a political divide, and obviously I’m not the right fit for the union any more. They have happily taken my money each month. But when this article is published, I’ll be shutting down my direct debit.”
When Diary reached Strom on Sunday for his reaction, he said: “We’re not commenting on individual adjudications by the Press Council.”
The man in Victoria’s quarantine hot seat
First, Dan Andrews’ Victorian government couldn’t plug the leaks in its hotel quarantine system last year, sending the state into a four-month lockdown. But in recent days, it has even been struggling to stop the leaks in its information systems about its handling of COVID-19.
Last week’s series of remarkable scoops by The Australian’s Ewin Hannan and Damon Johnston — who obtained dozens of daily confidential reports documenting an array of quarantine breaches — shows that the information at COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria is about as secure as a Holiday Inn Melbourne Airport hotel room with a dodgy nebuliser.
The man in the hot seat at COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria, James Talia, its head of strategic communications, is very familiar to many Melburnians because of his time on the airwaves as a high-profile Nine and 3AW state political reporter for several years.
What is not as widely known, but has certainly raised eyebrows around Spring Street following Talia’s appointment to perhaps the Andrews government’s most sensitive media role, was that he also spent years spinning for the Victorian Coalition.
At the time of his appointment in March, government insiders were asking whether a former senior Liberal staffer with Denis Napthine’s government was the right fit for such a politically sensitive role in COVID-era Victoria.
The pressure is now on to quarantine the news leaks. Diary reckons Talia will be earning every cent of his circa $249,000 package in the next few days trying to do just that.
Ita: ABC privatisation would be ‘folly’
Ita Buttrose was not amused when a reporter dared to ask whether she had considered the prospect of the ABC operating “on a commercial basis”.
The ABC chair disliked the query during her National Press Club speech so much that she briefly returned to her journalism days and started firing back with questions.
Fixing her interrogator, Press Club member Michael Keating, with a steely gaze last Wednesday, Buttrose asked: “What do you mean, commercial basis? You mean take advertising?”
Keating continued: “Without, er, government funding.”
A visibly unimpressed Buttrose repeated: “Are you suggesting we take advertising?”
Keating tried again: “Um, I’m not suggesting. I’m just saying what the MPs were offering.”
Buttrose then took it up a level. “In those countries that do not have a securely funded public broadcaster, democracy is not as robust as it is in Australia …. (They) often have examples of extreme right-wing extremism, as we saw in America when the mob stormed the Capitol. And what country in the world puts the least money into public broadcasting? The United States of America.”
She turned to Four Corners — the show that has caused such tensions with the Morison government in recent months after its Christian Porter allegations — to illustrate her case for why the ABC should never be commercialised.
“It’s folly to suggest that we be sold off, that we be privatised, that we go commercial and we take advertising,” she said.
“Those Four Corners investigations, of which there have been many: there would have been no banking royal commission without the ABC, there would have been no investigation into child sexual abuse.
“There’s so many things we have unearthed, you have to think what you wouldn’t know if there wasn’t an ABC. (But) fortunately, there is an ABC.”
Hamish’s The Project moonlighting gets Aunty’s tick
At a time when there has been plenty of media discussion about how his current gig at the ABC’s Q+A is going, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that Hamish Macdonald has suddenly become very visible again at his old hunting ground on Ten’s The Project.
Macdonald has twice co-hosted the Ten show in the last three weeks alongside Lisa Wilkinson and Sarah Harris, and Diary is told he will return to The Project for yet another appearance later this month.
But this stands in stark contrast to the ABC’s stance, until recently, about Macdonald moonlighting elsewhere. This column previously reported that the ABC believed Macdonald would be too occupied with his Q+A and Radio National hosting duties to be anything more than an occasional panellist for The Project. For nearly 18 months, Aunty has stuck to that stance.
What has changed now? According to insiders at The Project, in recent weeks there has been a marked relaxation in the ABC’s attitude to Macdonald’s extra-curricular activities.
One insider tells Diary: “Over the last month or so, Hamish has been more available and the ABC has been happy for him to appear on the show.
“The team are delighted to have him back on the desk, particularly Lisa Wilkinson.”
Core to the ABC’s new approach seems to be that it is now happy for Macdonald to cross-pollinate with The Project to help spruik Q+A.
Aunty is insisting The Project acknowledges Q+A in every Hamish appearance.
After Macdonald’s Project appearance eight days ago, last week’s Q+A saw a 27,000 viewer bump in the five-city ratings.
With Waleed Aly already a regular on ABC sports show Offsiders, expect more ABC/Ten cross-pollination ahead.
Turnbull and Kelly have ‘civilised’ reunion
Before last week, the last public exchange between former PM Malcolm Turnbull and The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly came at the end of 2019 on the ABC’s Q+A, with the pair memorably swapping brutal character assessments even as host Hamish Macdonald closed the show.
If you recall, Turnbull accused Kelly of being a “propagandist”, while Kelly returned fire by telling Turnbull he was “transferring your own political failures and wishing to blame our company for them”.
So imagine Diary’s surprise to see the pair reunited for a lengthy and civilised catch-up at the high-powered opening of the Judith Neilson Institute’s headquarters in Sydney’s Chippendale.
Kelly confirms to us that it was the pair’s “longest catch-up” since the heated on-air exchange.
But apparently, Q+A didn’t even rate a mention this time.
“We talked about a range of things: the media, politics and Julian Assange,” Kelly confides.
The conversation was in one corner of a room teeming with big names, including ABC managing director David Anderson, its news and current affairs boss Gaven Morris, ex-Fairfax boss Greg Hywood, Sydney Opera House CEO Louise Herron, former NSW premier Bob Carr, Australian Community Media owner Antony Catalano, and a host of prominent journalists.
Tonagh the tonic with announcement imminent
The government is unlikely to try to compete with Tuesday’s budget by announcing the three new directors of the ABC board in the next few days.
But we hear that an announcement can be expected once the budget has been given a few days of clear air.
The three names are being held very tightly, but Diary is told ex-Foxtel chief Peter Tonagh has a lock on one of the roles.
Not only will the imminent appointments add numbers to a board looking rather empty at the moment, but Tonagh would bring Aunty badly-needed media experience at the highest levels.
Marks’s blunt final goodbye: six weeks late
“Don’t f..k it up!” With those words, departed Nine CEO Hugh Marks said his final sayonara to Nine, at the end of his official farewell at Matt Moran’s Aria Restaurant at Sydney’s Circular Quay on Thursday night, Diary hears.
There were no Karl Stefanovics or Allison Langdons present, but a who’s who of Nine’s executive leadership and board teams did show up to finally see Marks off, a whole six weeks after Mike Sneesby took over as the company’s CEO.
Since then, Marks has been tied up with trips to hospital, Byron Bay and to his parents’ farm near Crookwell in NSW’s south.
Nine chair Peter Costello and Sneesby led the speeches, listing Marks’s achievements in charge of the group.
Interestingly, Nine deputy chair Nick Falloon — whose relationship with Marks and Costello is best described as prickly — was a notable absentee.
But Nine’s newest director Andrew Lancaster, representing its largest shareholder, Bruce Gordon’s WIN Corporation, did show, along with fellow director Samantha Lewis.
Turns out “Don’t f..k it up!” was Marks’s signature feedback to his executive team through his five years as CEO.
It even emerged that a single edition “Don’t f..k it up” T-shirt exists, with Nine Radio boss Tom Malone its proud owner after copping the frank advice twice during Marks’s reign — first when he stewarded Nine’s shock shift from cricket to tennis, and later when he took charge of radio.
Clemenger Group CEO steps down as buyout deal looms
Clemenger Group CEO Les Timar is the latest executive to depart the business as it prepares to be bought out by BBDO Worldwide and Omnicom.
Failed experiment: Kyle and Jackie ‘O’ hit rock bottom in Melbourne
The parachuting of controversial Sydney radio duo Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson into the Melbourne appears doomed.
We’d love to be a fly on the wall when negotiations begin on renewing Michael Slater’s contract as a cricket commentator with Seven for the upcoming Ashes summer later this year.