The reverberations of last October’s headline-making late-night foray by Laura Tingle on to Twitter, in which she personally trolled Scott Morrison for “government ideological bastardry”, are still being felt.
On Friday afternoon, ABC managing director David Anderson sent out an all-staff email, and his point couldn’t be clearer: from now on, he will be enforcing social media rules against staff who bring the public broadcaster into “disrepute” with rogue Twitter posts.
Unfortunately for Tingle, her now-deleted October tweet — in which she famously trolled ScoMo by saying that she hoped he was “feeling smug” about ABC job cuts — couldn’t have come at a worse time from Anderson’s perspective.
Tingle’s post came a few days before Anderson’s October appearance before Senate Estimates and just days after the BBC introduced new rules allowing it to discipline staff if they weren’t “impartial” on Twitter.
A few weeks earlier in September, the ABC had also completed work on a new code of conduct for acceptable behaviour in various mediums, incorporating social media guidelines.
Aunty has now indicated that those guidelines on use of Twitter and other forums are soon to be reviewed and updated.
So no surprise, then, after Tingle’s ScoMo tweet that Anderson was forced to cop the brunt of fiery government questions about the 7.30 chief political correspondent, and about perceived ABC anti-government bias, during his October Senate Estimates appearance.
By late last week, it became clear internally that recent political tweets by journalists, most notably Tingle — regarded as one of Aunty’s two pillars of political reporting along with Andrew Probyn — hadn’t been forgotten.
Anderson’s email to all ABC staff on Friday pointedly noted: “Any breach of ABC policies, guidelines and procedures, including the ABC Code of Conduct and the Guidelines for Personal Use of Social Media … may lead to disciplinary action, including possible termination of employment.”
He also noted that one of the ABC’s existing rules about social media was: “Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute.”
Seems like common sense: if you wouldn’t say it on TV or radio, don’t say it on Twitter.
As one internal source tells Diary: “They’ve had enough.”
But that lesson could still take some learning. Other ABC journos made the same mistake as Tingle last week, with similar trolling after Michael Rowland’s exchange with Greg Hunt on Wednesday on the use of Liberal Party logos. Hunt, of course, reacted robustly to Rowland’s questioning on the use of the Liberal logo on government medical announcements.
That exchange prompted Belinda Hawkins, senior journalist at the ABC’s Australian Story, to describe Hunt on Twitter as an “utter embarrassment”. She also took the liberty of attaching the Liberal logo to four unflattering photos: three confronting scenes of devastation from last year’s bushfires (including one of a charred kangaroo), along with a separate photo of the NSW government’s big COVID fail, the Ruby Princess.
In case anyone was in any doubt about the point she was making, Hawkins tweeted: “Yep, the (Liberal) logo’s gone viral.”
But it was Hawkins herself who also went viral, with her post retweeted by other ABC staff that Diary is told was noted at the highest levels of the public broadcaster.
But by the time Anderson’s email appeared, Hawkins’ two tweets had mysteriously been deleted. The ABC’s unwritten message was unmistakeable: from now on, zero tolerance for rogue tweets.
Rowland affronted by Hunt’s ‘leftie’ tag
While we’re on the testy subject of political partisanship, Michael Rowland wants to make one thing clear: he is no left-wing stooge.
Health Minister Greg Hunt, of course, accused Rowland of “identifying with the left”, in a now-viral exchange after the ABC News Breakfast host on Wednesday asked Hunt why he had attached the Liberal Party logo to his Twitter message trumpeting the government’s securing of 10 million more doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
“We predicted that you seem to be the most exercised of any person in the Australian media about this,” Hunt said.
But when Diary reached Rowland late last week, he underlined his professional reputation as being impartial. “In more than 30 years as a journalist, many of those covering politics, I have never been accused of partisanship by either side of politics,” he said.
Dan Bingo: Victoria’s newest drinking game
With Victoria’s long-running daytime soap opera, Dan TV, returning to the state’s screens with a vengeance recently, new merchandise is springing up to entertain the state’s bored residents enduring yet another lockdown.
In the latest spin-off offering, there is even a Dan TV drinking game to accompany the soapie, starring Daniel Andrews in a once-in-a-lifetime role playing the rescuing hero. The drinking game is called Dan Andrews Bingo, and features some of Dan’s favourite phrases in his daily updates.
The drinking game, a godsend for Victorians who otherwise have only crowd-less tennis matches to get them through lockdown, features some of the Premier’s old chestnuts from his 120 consecutive days fronting Dan TV during Victoria’s four-month work-from-home nightmare last year.
There’s phrases like: “I make no apologies for”, “any symptoms, no matter how mild”, “COVID normal”, “guided by the data”, “trigger points”, “safe and steady”, “experts”, “stage 4”, “14-day average” and “false hope”. More than enough material to get you sozzled.
But Diary would like to add in some new, much more dramatic adjectives and other terms that popped up in the Andrews vernacular — largely in reference to the UK strain of the virus — in the last week, and are being lapped up by a hungry media. They include: “wicked”, “silent”, “gold standard”, “huge viral load”, “rapid velocity”, “wildly infectious”, and another remark he made several times on Friday: “We’ve built such a precious thing.”
Diary’s Melbourne spies tell us that Dan’s more dramatic terms appear to be focus group-worked, and have all the hallmarks of Dan’s crafty new spinner-in-chief, Sabina Husic, who of course until this year worked for Anthony Albanese.
Diary can testify that the just-released Dan Andrews Bingo is indeed truly “gold standard” — right up there with Victoria’s hotel quarantine system!
Albo, Fordo, Richo - and the fortune cookie
While Melbourne is in the middle of yet another lockdown, Sydney restaurants are fully back into the swing of things after the silly season. And what a combination of diners from both sides of politics on the one table, as dialled in by Diary’s spies on Friday (Chinese New Year’s Day) at Sydney’s most famous Chinese restaurant, Golden Century.
There was Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, flanked by ex-Labor powerbroker Graham “Whatever It Takes” Richardson and former federal Liberal treasurer Joe Hockey. And in the midst of it all was Sydney’s top-rating breakfast announcer, 2GB’s Ben Fordham.
Our spies say that there was quiet, conspiratorial chat — whispers even — for large parts of the lunch.
But the real highlight? A roar of laughter, we’re told, when Albo opened his fortune cookie for the year ahead. So what was in the cookie, we asked Fordham over the weekend? A rehabilitation of Albo’s sagging ratings as preferred PM in Newspoll, perhaps?
“That’s between Albo and the fortune cookie,” Fordham coyly replied.
Two spots now free at Fitzy and Lisa’s bash
There’s good news for anyone who has ever wanted to go to the Australia Day/Invasion Day/Independence Day bash hosted by Peter FitzSimons and Lisa Wilkinson. A couple of spots on the guest list are up for grabs.
Stan Grant’s satire of the bash in his chapter of The Australian’s serialised summer novel — Oh Matilda: Who Bloody Killed Her? — has put Grant and his partner, fellow ABC presenter Tracey Holmes, without a golden ticket.
The Bandanna Man himself has publicly confirmed this on Sunday, revealing the tight guest list for their annual Sydney harbourside party will be revised next year.
“As to those people who have contacted me asking why they weren’t invited to the annual party, fear not. A couple of vacancies have recently opened up,” he wrote in column on Sunday.
If you recall from this column last year, Fitzy moved his 2020 version of the party from Sunday, January 26, to the day before, and renamed it “Independence Day”, in a nod to the push to change the date of Australia Day.
This year, potential attendees were surprised when Fitzy’s regular January RSVP rev-up didn’t happen, because the full version of the party was shelved — presumably because of COVID-19 — in favour of a much smaller gathering.
Fitzy also used a column in Sunday’s Sun-Herald to take a shot at Grant’s fictional take on the party. “His contention that it was all just fun fiction, all satire, seemed odd as the piece ran complete with real names and a photo of my wife and I, with a comments section where punters in turn sneered at my approach to Indigenous matters.
“For the record, and contrary to what Stan wrote, I don’t have a framed Redfern speech on my wall, nor a photo of me hugging Cathy Freeman, nor Indigenous paintings.”
When we asked Grant on Sunday about Fitzy’s latest claim, he simply replied: “Of course not — that’s why it’s called fiction.”
Nine’s ‘fake noise’ for crowd-free AO
What to do if you’re the exclusive broadcast partner of a normally packed grand slam tennis tournament that now has no crowd?
Simple, you create a fake crowd of your own.
With the public banned from the Australian Open until Thursday at the earliest, it took Nine just one day to realise that the sounds of silence in prime time were a bit of a buzzkill for one of our biggest sporting events.
On the last day before Dan Andrews’s lockdowns, Nick Kyrgios’s match against Dominic Thiem before a raucous crowd at Melbourne Park had given Nine its biggest ratings of the tournament.
But on Saturday night, not even the potent combination of local heroes Ash Barty and Alex de Minaur could go close to achieving the same ratings, hampered by the eerie atmosphere of no crowds. Nine tried to alleviate the silence with music at the end of every game but, to be honest, it jarred.
By Sunday, Nine had called in the experts. Diary is told it recruited aFX, the very same company who helped create noise for Nine’s coverage of the NRL, when rugby league was forced to go crowd-less after last year’s first lockdowns.
The fake noise was generally subtle, but there was cheering and even crowd murmurs we detected on big points.
International opinion on the fake noise was generally positive, with New York Times tennis correspondent Ben Rothenberg conceding the Open was doing it “very nicely”.
Google gives Labor a plug
Google is having such a tough time with the government, it’s spruiking for the Labor opposition.
With the Coalition about to put up legislation compelling the tech giants to compensate major Australian media companies, Google’s local government affairs manager Hannah Frank last week publicly gave Labor some love.
After Ed Husic, shadow minister for industry and innovation, put out a call on LinkedIn searching for a media adviser, the Google executive promoted the Labor job.
“Great opportunity to shape the nation’s technology policy,” she posted to LinkedIn.
What makes Frank’s Labor plug more interesting is her own job history. For five years before heading to Google, Frank was adviser to current Labor leader Anthony Albanese.
The Google executive was probably just doing her old mates in the ALP a favour. But Diary hears Frank’s promotion of Husic’s job vacancy didn’t go unnoticed in government circles.
New Daily pays ABC $70K
How much money does the ABC make out of Greg Combet’s Industry Super?
More than you’d think.
Off the back of a truck, Diary has obtained a copy of some correspondence from the ABC managing director David Anderson to federal Liberal senator Andrew Bragg. And it turns out Industry Super is making a pretty penny out of its fully-funded progressive media outlet, the New Daily.
The canny Anderson has managed to get the New Daily to agree to pay the ABC for a daily video segment called “News in 90 Seconds”, as part of a push by Aunty to, as Mr Anderson has put it, “find revenue for our news services”.
Turns out it’s a nice little earner for the ABC. Anderson has told Bragg that “while the commercial value of the (ABC/New Daily) agreement is commercial in confidence”, revenue for the 2019-20 financial year was somewhere just south of “$70,000”.
The New Daily was founded back in 2013 by a collective of Industry Super funds, including Australian Super and Cbus, who provided an initial $6m in funding.
But after Australian Super burned through significant cash on the New Daily, it sold its initial $2m investment in the New Daily to Industry Super for nothing in 2016.
Bragg has been a vocal critic of industry super funds investing in the media, after Australian Super boss Ian Silk at one point revealed during the banking royal commission in 2018 that his fund’s New Daily investment was “principally about retaining members”.
Bragg’s view? “This argument fails the government’s sole purpose test for super funds, which mandates that their focus needs to be solely on making money for investors. But it also fails the pub test.”
Still, full marks to the ABC boss for taking the initiative to earn a bit of pocket money. After all, $70,000 is 14 Cartier watches worth of workers’ super.
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